KEY POINTS:
The star of New Zealand's pavilion at this month's giant CeBIT trade show in Hanover, Germany, was born in Texas but its brain was beamed in from Middle Earth.
Zeno is a 42cm robot from Hanson Robotics which uses artificial intelligence software from Massive Software to navigate around and respond emotionally to what it "sees".
Massive was first developed by Stephen Regelous for the animated crowd scenes in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy and has since become a film industry standard.
Diane Holland, Massive's chief executive, said the company's participation at CeBIT was a soft launch for its move beyond the entertainment industry into other areas that needed smart animation, such as engineering, architecture, planning - and now robotics.
It also provided the "wow" factor New Zealand Trade and Enterprise looked for when putting together the list of companies it was helping to exhibit at the world's largest trade show for information and communications technology.
"Zeno got a lot of press into the booth and then the NZTE people leveraged that to get them talking to the other guys," Holland says.
That may have helped other products, such as NextWindow's giant touch screens that make some of the widely read online "best of show" lists.
The pavilion went under the "New Zealand, new thinking" tag.
"It was a stunning booth on an amazing place on the floor and the 15 companies from New Zealand all had interesting innovative ideas," Holland says.
"There was a real esprit de corps, with people sharing contacts and leveraging the high-level contacts put together by NZTE.
"Exhibiting together gave us a larger presence.
"All the companies are actually quite small."
Hans Frauenlob, NZTE's sector director of ICT, said the budget for the New Zealand effort was about $460,000, with a third of that needed for hiring the space.
Companies pay a participation fee and their own travel and accommodation costs.
It is the fourth year NZTE has been represented. Frauenlob says CeBIT's business-to-business focus suits this country's software sector, which is often looking for distribution channels and industry partnerships rather than direct consumer sales.
Participation in such events can bring companies closer together and lead to more opportunities and directions.
When companies spend time together they get "the opportunity to understand each other and how they can work together", Frauenlob says. "We see it every time we take companies away.
"At the first CeBIT we did in 2005, companies were cross-selling for each other within five minutes.
"People from other countries say this is unusual and ask: 'Why do New Zealanders do this?'
"We say it's in the DNA."
As well as sending staff from New Zealand, NZTE uses its people in London and Europe to match participating companies with prospective customers or partners.
It also wheels out the big guns. Pete Hodgson, the Minister for Economic Development and Research, Science and Technology, went to open doors, including a New Zealand Day event put on by the governor of Saxony. "CeBIT is unusual in that the diplomatic and ministerial angle is a feature not seen at other trade events," Frauenlob says.
Recruitment firm Hudson was one of the companies taking a booth.
"The first couple of years we had a lot of people stopping by who were interested in New Zealand as a place, so three years ago we started bringing representatives from New Zealand Immigration, and we've combined that now with recruitment companies," Frauenlob says.
"A lot of engineering talent in eastern Europe in particular is intrigued with the idea of working in a place like New Zealand, and they have talent and skills."
Taking companies to events like CeBIT exposes them to the way business is done in different markets.
"Newer companies can see if their ideas stack up. They get the chance to walk the floor and do real live market research."
In technology markets, which can change month by month, the right trade show can make a big difference to a company's growth.
Mobile banking software company Fronde Anywhere was back for a second look. Chief executive Caroline Dewe said it went last year to dip its toe, before it had even assessed the European market. "We had a doozy of a time.
"Out of the 37 trade halls, we were the only company in our space.
"Most of the competition had gone to specialist telecommunications events about the same time in Barcelona and Florida.
"The 450,000 people coming through CeBIT included banks looking for innovation in the mobile space, and we were all they could find."
Dewe says that led to pilots for its two-factor authentication system which sends a one-time password to the user's mobile phone when they are doing internet banking, cutting the need for a separate token widget.
"We also got lots of leads, including two potential partners in the Middle East and a significant global technology vendor in the financial services sector who is interested in partnering with us for mobile banking products," Dewe says.
"Our big focus for the year was partners, pilots, profile and pipeline. We have achieved all of that."
* cebit2008.newzealand.com
