Kiwi companies' efforts recognised

By PAUL BRISLEN


They're small, they're agile, they're Kiwi companies and they're taking the world by storm. But most are hardly household names here.

Four local tech companies have received Foundation for Research, Science and Technology awards in part for their efforts to expand their export markets.

Electronic Navigation is selling its underwater mapping device, Wide Angle Sonar Seafloor Profiler (WASSP) at a fraction of the cost of competing units in the yachting and fishing markets, says managing director Mike Hodson.

"Competing products retail for hundreds of thousands of US dollars but ours retails for around $30,000." A combination of good design, Kiwi know-how and knowing when to use off-the-shelf components instead of building your own help keep costs down, said Hodson. His company, with a staff of around 40, is heavily skewed towards the technical. Around half have a technology background and Anderson counts that as a major benefit. It is involved with trials with the Navy to outfit the proposed patrol vessels and is also working with the University of New Hampshire and the US Coast Guard.

A far cry from the underwater world is Interactive Technologies and its Serko travel agent software. Rather than just supplying software to agents, although it does that as well, Serko is targeting the corporate market with software that allows companies to book their own travel directly, says managing director Bob Shaw.

"It's got some smarts built in as well so if you change your appointment time the system knows to rebook your accommodation, return flight and even your taxi."

By giving corporates more control over their travel bookings, Shaw said companies could reduce costs while increasing their productivity. The software integrates not only with the travel agents' systems but also with in-house software, like SAP's enterprise resource planning software.

Interactive is already selling the software in New Zealand and Australia and Shaw is soon off to an expo in Singapore. From there, Shaw plans to expand into the UK and eventually the US market. Not bad for a company with 25 staff.

Meanwhile in Wellington, Tekron International has only eight staff but is well placed to corner a vitally important part of the energy market: time synchronisation. The huge blackouts in North America last year took place in less than a minute but, according to co-founder Brian Smellie, the lack of accurate timing information means the true cause of the outage could be lost.

"Because different plants ran on different clocks the sequence of events is more difficult to determine."

Smellie said one of the recommendations following the blackout was to install better time synchronisation equipment, which is where Tekron comes in.

"We can get accuracy down to under a millisecond in the field but in the lab we achieve 20 nanoseconds." There are a billion nanoseconds in every second so that's pretty accurate.