futurein otago dunedin home to new zealand s t … · the national business review / october 9,...
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SPECIAL REPORT: SPOTLIGHT ON DUNEDIN 21The National Business Review / October 9, 2015
Chris Keall
I have to admit Chorus’ Gigatown competition drove me a little crazy as various towns, small cities and suburbs competed for attention on social media. And in the final rounds, as more substantial pro-posals were put together by com-munities, I felt for Porirua whose council spent $100,000 in its pres-entation only to miss out.
Still, moving right along, Dunedin was eventually named the winning Gigatown.
What does that mean in practice?
First off, it means Dunedin homes and businesses can get “Gigatown” internet plans, or superfast 1000 Megabit per second
or 1 Gigabit per second Ultrafast Broadband (UFB) fibre connec-tions for the same cost that most of us pay for a mid to high-end UFB plan that offers a tenth of that speed (many Gigatown home plans are in the $79 to $99 range).
The UFB is designed for a top speed of 1Gbit/s, but at the moment, and for some time to come, residents in most areas are restricted to a top speed of 100Mbit/s or 200Mbit/s.
Some see a 1Gbit/s connec-tion as a little over-the-top for a household connection. Even if you have one family member main-lining Netflix, another internet gaming and a third high-def video conferencing, you’ll still be under 100Mbit/s. And here at NBR Tow-
ers in Auckland, we happily share a 100Mbit/s fibre connection among 30 staff. It’s mind-blowing stuff. Dunedin homes can now get the kind of internet speeds and band-width that only a couple of years ago were only available to the likes of Fonterra and other large com-panies.
Still, the Gigatown competition helped focus attention on what fibre can do for a community, and its advantages over older cop-per (or DSL) connections. Those include that fibre can run at full speed in both directions (copper plans are typically very slow for uploads), doesn’t degrade with dis-tance (a major problem with cop-per), is more reliable and doesn’t suffer anything like the peak-time
congestion of copper.
Rebranding as GigCityJohn Christie, who heads the council-owned Enterprise Dunedin, is driving the city’s Gigatown initiatives.
He says the council spent $100,000 on its Gigatown bid. It’s also chipping in $250,000 of its own money on Gigatown-related projects this year. To that pot, you can add the $500,000 the council received for a Gigatown Devel-opment fund from Chorus, and $200,000 for a Gigatown commu-nity grants fund from Chorus and Alcatel-Lucent.
It’s still very early days for Mr Christie’s Gigatown plans but the first major initiative went live on Wednesday: the GigCity Gigabit Wi-Fi public network, initially available around the Octagon,but slated for expansion. It’s a joint venture between the non-profit Digital Community Trust, Chorus, Dunedin City Council and Uni-fone, a Dunedin-based ISP.
It’s the first venture under the city’s new GigCity branding.
Public wi-fi networks are noth-ing new but often speed is lousy, or you have to pay for decent bandwidth. Often there’s a poor “backbone” or landline connection between different wi-fi hotspots.
Dunedin’s GigCity network, on
the other hand, is free and offers 1 gigabit/s wireless internet. It’s billed as the fastest free wi-fi net-work in the southern hemisphere. And it can probably take planet-wide honours in terms of the fast-est free wi-fi network.
Funds for business and community A second major development is the establishment of the GigCity Community Fund. Applications for grants of up to $20,000 open on October 10 (if you’re a local, check out www.gigcitydunedin.co.nz for details).
Wicked Networks’ Stu Flemming is already eying the funding. The local ISP owner says even at a knockdown Gigatown price, many homes can’t afford a UFB connection.
His plan is that if broadband can’t be taken to the people, then bring the people to the broadband. He’s planning a series of communi-ty centres that will have 1 Gigabit/s broadband on tap but also teach coding and other computer and internet-related skills, along with fun stuff like robotics and drones.
Timely: Gigatown poster kidsMr Christie says even during these early months it has helped firms
What does it mean to win Gigatown?
Duncan Bridgeman
Dunedin has taken some hard knocks over the years but the city and surrounding region has a soul that will never be punched out.And while some of the old student lifestyles may have changed in recent years, the uni-versity is still the centerpiece of Dunedin and remains a breeding ground for business ideas, innovation and technology.But economic growth and creating new jobs remains a challenge for its city council, busi-ness groups and commercial interests.
It is now two years since the city’s eco-nomic development strategy was unveiled in partnership with the University of Otago, the polytechnic, Ngai Tahu, Chamber of Com-merce, Employers Association and the coun-cil. The target is to create 10,000 extra jobs in Dunedin and increase average per capita income by $10,000 in 10 years.
The strategy was released after a rash of job losses, starting with Fisher & Paykel Appli-ances’ closure of its Mosgiel manufacturing plant in 2008 and then further shocks such as the downsizing of Dunedin’s Invermay research centre.
The spin from the council is there has been significant progress over the past two years, something it backs up with the lat-est figures from Business and Economic Research Ltd (Berl], which showed Dunedin’s economy and employment grew in the year to March 2014.
The figures show tourism and the crea-tive sectors are driving growth. Gross domes-tic product grew by 2.2% in the year to March 2014, which was a higher rate of growth than over the past decade.
According to Berl, there were an addi-tional 1221 fulltime equivalent jobs in the year to March 2014, compared with a year earlier.
The next report for 2015 is due out later this month and sentiment is improving ahead of that.
This week the council released the results of its residents’ opinion survey, showing a boost in resident satisfaction with economic growth and promotion this year.
“This is an area where the council has been putting in a concerted effort,” says mayor Dave Cull. “While there is still work to be done, we’re delivering a little bit more on that each year.”
If there’s one thing Dunedin councillors are good at, it’s coming up with catchphrases for initiatives.
These include the council’s “red carpet not red tape” project, designed to support busi-
nesses through the regulatory process, Dun-edin’s ‘’Night Sky City’’ concept supporting its energy plan, and the Sexy Summer Jobs busi-ness internship programme, which featured a speed-dating event between businesses and students.
All these initiatives add to the strategy, says Otago Chamber of Commerce chief executive Dougal McGowan, who joined the chamber in March.
“What we are trying to do is lead from the front by being part of the decisionmaking process. So we’re in all the subcommittees.
“It’s really about doing a little a lot rather than a lot a little, so we are getting incremen-tal change the whole time rather than just once a year.”
Mr McGowan says the next Berl report coming out later this month should see some traction from the economic development strategy. “We are hoping some of the data will really highlight what’s coming out of the
Grow Dunedin Partnership, which is one of the mechanisms to try to build that economic development within the city.
“Dunedin has a vibrant technology area but is still strong in the traditional stuff as well with the university and hospital.”
He cites local companies such as agribusi-ness consulting company AbacusBio as lead-ers in their field.
“There is lots of really good research and projects that come out of the university sec-tor and into the incubator and the Audacious business challenge.
“A lot of them take off really quickly and do really well. And I think there’s more belief now that they can get it done in Dunedin.”
Mr McGowan says the Sexy Summer Jobs internship programme has been incred-ibly successful, with people ending up with fulltime jobs and staying in Dunedin.
“They may move on, go on OE, but they also come back, which is great.”
Has Dunedin made progress in attract-ing people? “I think there’s a lot of good new leadership within the city. That has emphasis and a drive and is creating a new vibe. Things are definitely moving faster than they were, but people have got to keep looking at the positive.”
An emphasis on strengthening ties with China is also starting to pay off, he says.
“One of the things about Dunedin is that people don’t like to shout from the treetops. What we do know is yes, there are contracts that are gained out of it and there are benefi-cial relationships. The council plays a role in opening doors.”
The next project the council is working on is a new branding and marketing initiative, with much of the focus work expected to be completed by the end of the year.
Mr McGowan says the first step is working out the “smell, taste and sound” of Dunedin that will entice people to the city.
20 / The National Business ReviewOctober 9, 2015
Dunedin is still regarded as one of New Zealand’s most business friendly cities. It has important global connections making it a confident commercial centre with strengths in education, health, design technology, food and natural products. But no city is an island. Dunedin is the nerve centre of Central Otago, and the surrounding region boasts quality horticulture, agriculture, vineyards and much more. There’s plenty of reasons for Dunedin to remain a strong and important business city.
Special Report
Spotlight on Dunedin
One of the things about Dunedin
is people don’t like to shout from the treetops
– Dougal McGowan
HOME TO NEW ZEALAND'SDUNEDIN:
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Little by little, Dunedin is starting to grow again
DOUGAL MCGOWAN: ‘It’s really about doing a little a lot rather than a lot a little, so we are getting incremental change the whole time rather than just once a year’
POSTER KIDS: A rare shot of the Timely Team, or at least many of them, in one room (co-founder and chief executive Ryan Baker is standing at rear). The staff is usually spread around 25 different home offices, constantly using video conferencing over gigabit fibre to keep in touch
GIGATOWN WRANGLER: John Christie, head of the Dunedin City Council-owned Enterprise Dunedin is driving Gigatown-related initiatives
Continued P26
Emerson Howitt
A frustration for many Dunedin residents has always been its air connectiv-ity (or lack thereof).
Although the city is ser-viced by Jetstar and Air New Zealand to the other main centres, it’s severely lacking in regional connections with any smaller destinations only available through stopovers in other cities.
Most airlines have strug-gled to justify routes to a city whose population has fallen to below Tauranga and Hamilton sizes. This has been shown by the city losing much of its Australia services bar a few Brisbane flights.
However, the city’s defi-ciency in regional services could change when a new air service launches at the end of the month.
Dunedin hedquartersKiwi Regional Airlines is the brain child of Hamilton councillor and entrepre-neur Ewan Wilson, former owner of the ill-fated Kiwi Air in the mid-1990s.
The new airline will run services between Dunedin, Queenstown, Nelson and Hamilton.
The airline has only one
plane, a Turboprop SAAB 340 with 34 seats but it has plans to add a second plane within a year of service.
The plane will be stored in a facility at Dunedin Airport.
The plane will start from Dunedin in the morning and fly to Queenstown and back in the morning before fly-ing from Dunedin to Nelson and then on to Hamilton before turning around and going back along the same route and doing another Queenstown service in the evening.
Fares are as low as $79 one-way to Queenstown and Nelson, trips that would nor-mally cost closer to $300 and would involve a stopover in Christchurch.
Mr Wilson says he’s made a significant investment in Dunedin and is adding about 50,000 new seats going into the airport.
“Most people would agree that, when you put that kind of capacity into a city, it’s a great enabler of economic growth.”
“We’ve leased a building down there for storing our maintenance supplies. We’ve put in place a lot of ground
handling equipment in all our airports.”
He hopes to take advantage of
the growing cruise ship market by being able to fly people to
Queenstown on day trips from the
city.“There are some-
thing like 70 odd cruise ships going into Dunedin over the next summer period and there’s never really been an ability for those getting off the cruise ship to go see our premier tourist destination.”
Faster to resort townHe says a lot of businesses will also take advantage of a much shorter route between the two towns.
“Dunedin to Queenstown is one of the longest drivea-ble routes without an air ser-vice at just under three hours in each direction” he says, “A lot of corporates have offices in both Queenstown and Dunedin, so we felt that there was a real niche market.”
Dunedin International Airport chief executive Rich-ard Roberts agrees, saying opening up Dunedin as a
gateway for passengers from cruise ships wanting to visit Queenstown would benefit the city greatly.
“Our most iconic scenery is landlocked and making it accessible to the cruise ship market would be fantastic.”
He also hopes this sparks further regional links to Dunedin.
“Why can’t we start con-nections from Invercargill into our network, so we connect people to Dunedin and to the rest of the world,”
he says. “If there’s a service there and it’s robust and got a good business case, then any airline would want to listen to that.”
The new air service is set to launch on October 27.
SPECIAL REPORT: SPOTLIGHT ON DUNEDIN 23The National Business Review / October 9, 2015
New airline set to bring regions to the south
Chelsea Armitage
Once home to the man who penned New Zealand’s national anthem, Dunedin is experiencing its largest creative sector revival in more than a decade.
Host to the world-renowned iD Fashion Week, a thriving music scene, and plenty of printers, pub-lishers and artists, Dunedin is fast becoming a go-to place for creatives to live and work. The city’s creative sector is showing signs of growth in employment and GDP numbers, after more than 10 years of steady decline.
The South Island city was also recently awarded the title of Unesco City of Literature. It’s the first city in New Zealand to win any of the Unit-
ed Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s creative accolades.
Tertiary study keyThe creation of tertiary qualifica-tions in the creative and arts space is contributing to the overall number of jobs in the sector, according to some of the city’s top artists.
Dunedin School of Art lecturer Bridie Lonie says the country had five art schools in 1995 and now has 25 but the country hasn’t grown at the same rate.
Ms Lonie says new jobs won’t just appear in the creative sector to cater to the number of graduates, but the alumni are more likely to create their own. “The arts is an unusual sector. It’s atypical because it doesn’t obey the usual rules of supply and demand. You’d think this country was oversupplied with artists, but that doesn’t stop people wanting to study creative arts. In fact, more people seem to want to do that,” Ms Lonie says.
Dunedin Music strategic direc-tor Scott Muir says before a tertiary degree in music came about in the early 2000s, students were studying to become doctors and lawyers and dabbling in music on the side. “Once the first cohorts graduated from the music degree, people were choosing to stay in Dunedin, running music venues, music retail stores, and cafés.”
iD Fashion Week co-chairwoman
and Otago Polytechnic lecturer Margo Barton agrees Dunedin has an abundance of “knowledge-hungry students” heading to the city to study their passions. “They’re the sorts of people who are interested in ideas, and obviously creativity is all about ideas. A lot of people who study in Dunedin will return after a few years and start their own thing, or work for somebody here. Even when they’re not living here, they’ll always be proud of their connection to the quirky, romantic place that Dunedin is,” she says.
Arts and culture strategyThe city’s creative sector could spur further growth with the impending release of a newly-developed arts and culture strategy. The plan, developed and implemented by Dunedin City Council (DCC) and advocacy group Transforming Dunedin, provides a framework for leveraging the various forms of arts and creativity in the city.
“The council consulted for about five weeks last year right across Dunedin on a draft version, and
received a huge volume of responses and lots of great ideas. The aim is to foster collaborations locally, nationally and internationally,” DCC manager of arts and culture Bernie Hawke says.
The finalised strategy is due to launch on October 27, and will feature four main themes: identity pride, access and inclusion, creative economy, and inspired connec-tions. Mr Hawke wouldn’t reveal much more ahead of the official launch but seems confident it will unify creative sector resources and encourage collaboration and growth in the city
Ms Lonie says Dunedin’s crea-tive sector isn’t as connected as it
could be, and she hopes the strategy will encourage more collaboration between different creative projects.
“It’s such a small city but five really interesting things might be going on at the same time, which could lead to an awful lot of clashes,” she says.
Creative breeding groundIn the year ended March 2014, Dun-edin’s creative sector experienced an 8% growth in fulltime employment figures from the year before, and a 2.2% rise in GDP. Arts and culture’s contribution to Dunedin’s GDP totalled $86 million, employing 1389 full time staff last year.
But why are these creative people increasingly choosing Dunedin as their stomping ground? Mr Muir says his city of 130,000 is easier to navi-gate – in more ways than one – than some of its more populated counter-parts.
“It’s really easy to pick up a guitar and go around to your friend’s house when they’re only two blocks away. Try doing that from Green Bay to the North Shore in Auckland. The barri-ers are a lot harder in larger city, and just the fact that Dunedin’s a liveable, walkable city, makes creativity really easy,” he says.
The city’s population also actively involved itself in live music events, and has a “much stronger” apprecia-tion for talent than the rest of the country, Mr Muir says. “I don’t know how we can transfer that specifically to dollars but people here are more willing to spend money on creativ-ity because that’s what drives us.” This willingness to spend on cultural events has encouraged some big-name artists to head to the chilly city in recent years, with Fleetwood Mac and Neil Diamond among the ranks.
Dr Barton says the relaxed Dunedin lifestyle gives people more time to be creative as they “don’t have really busy lives doing other things.
“We can take time to be creative. We’re not siloed either, so everyone mixes in together which means there’s a lot of collaboration. When international emerging designers come into Dunedin, they revitalise the industry, and keep it vibrant.”
Dunedin’s creative sector back on the rise
22 SPECIAL REPORT: SPOTLIGHT ON DUNEDIN / The National Business ReviewOctober 9, 2015
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CONNECTING THE REGIONS: A look at the routes being flown by Kiwi Regional Airlines
FASHION WEEK: Renowned iD Fashion Week is held in Dunedin annually
MARGO BARTON: Dunedinites can take time to be creative
We can take time to be creative. Everyone mixes in together which means there’s a lot of collaboration Margo Barton
SPECIAL REPORT: SPOTLIGHT ON DUNEDIN 25The National Business Review / October 9, 2015
country from here. “Advertising agencies
started leaving this town 15-20 years ago and went to Christchurch, now they’re leaving there. Soon they’ll be moving out of Auckland and going to Sydney. The trend was there to see here 20 years ago.
“You don’t sit here and say, ‘How do we stop them from going?’ because you can’t. You say, ‘If that’s going to happen, what’s around the corner that we can use that will enable us to stay here?’
“If people decide they want to live in New Zealand, they have to start looking at this kind of technology to shorten the world, to just knock that distance down.”
Future focusedIn 1998 the technology he was talking about – the internet – was just hitting the mainstream but he and the ARL team had already been embracing the opportunities it offered for years.
The gigabit connectiv-ity that’s one of the prizes Dunedin has received thanks to winning Chorus’ Giga-town competition [see p21] will be another huge assist in alleviating the tyranny of dis-tance the southern city must constantly battle.
Despite playing a key role in helping galvanise Dunedin to get in behind the contest, however, Mr Taylor believes the significant thing about the win “isn’t about the infrastructure, isn’t about the power it gives – even though it’s just phenomenal.
“It’s actually more about what it said about our future,” Mr Taylor says. “It’s about changing the way we think.
“It’s the chance to stop shrugging our shoulders and complaining about what we’ve lost, and start thinking about the really cool things we have and how we have to fight for them.”
A case in point is Duned-
in’s stadium. It is frequently characterised as a financially catastrophic white elephant but Mr Taylor takes a signifi-cantly different view.
“It’s not a secret it’s hard to make it work,” he acknowledges. “But when it does, it flies; it lifts the city in ways that nothing else can. We just have to stop whinging about how it’s going financially and go, ‘It’s here, so what can we do with it that makes it a real asset?’”
Not surprisingly, Mr Tay-lor has some ideas.
“It’s early stages but we’re trying to get people to think around this idea of a city driven by technology. That stadium is one of the assets we can accelerate. It sits in the middle of a university, with a phys ed school, sports institute and polytech.
“Imagine if we ‘Gigged’ it up and started to use it, for example, for designing sports analysis tools and as a facility for a world class R&D centre for things related to sport, fitness, health and wellbeing.
“How cool would it be with the advent of ‘Gig-data’ to take an amazing but underperforming asset like the stadium and turn it into something world class?”
Whole of country approachThe future, Mr Taylor insists, is “about how we create high-value jobs for young people” – and not just in Dunedin.
“Dunedin’s like a whole bunch of other places and there are people who are as passionate about those places as I’ve been about Dunedin.
“I think it’s really impor-tant that we don’t run these regional campaigns where we are trying to take jobs away from Gisborne or Hamilton or trying to outdo Tauranga or Napier,” he says.
“The country’s too small; we need to be work-ing together and we need an overview from central
government. “There needs to be a
really well thought out plan for the regions, otherwise they’re just going to fizzle away and die and everyone will be crammed into Auckland.”
Mr Taylor notes that at the same time there has been an apparently inexo-rable northward drift of companies and citizens, “technology has shifted us in a whole other direction so that theoretically we should be able to live and work where we choose.”
His proof of concept is the America’s Cup mobile app that ARL won an Emmy for last year.
“It was the first app we ever built and we didn’t have
all the skills internally that we needed,” Mr Taylor says. “So we had people working on it in Dunedin, we found a guy with a company in Queenstown who was really good at the IOS stuff, we had two guys from Timaru, and then we had our team in San Francisco.
“Now, we never, ever, all sat in the same room once but we built an app that went on to win an Emmy award. So there’s an example of how you can live and work where you want.
“We should be focused on this idea of being a coun-try where people have the opportunity to live in really cool cities or towns that aren’t dying.”
Nick Grant
Ask Ian Taylor why Dunedin is a great place to live and work and he’s got an appo-site anecdote at the ready.
“The other day I had a problem with my wi-fi at home. I finally got a guy from Vodafone to ring me here at work and he said, ‘I need you to be at home by your computer, can we arrange a time?’
“I said, ‘Okay, sure, I’ve got a couple of things to do here, give me 10 minutes and then call me back.’ And he said, ‘What, it’s only going to take you 10 minutes to get home?’ ‘Yeah, easily.’
“So he rang me again 10 minutes later: ‘Are you at home?’ ‘Yes, I am.’ ‘That’s incredible!’
“I said, ‘No, what’s incred-ible is I drove home, realised I’d forgotten something, drove back to work, picked it up and drove home again.’”
Mr Taylor chuckles at the memory before driving his point home.
“So here’s the thing, here’s the vision – this guy from Auckland going, ‘I don’t believe it, you’ve just driven home twice in 10 minutes and the problem you have is that your wi-fi is only deliv-ering 250mb per second and not 500mb, when my fastest speed is 25mb?’
“Tied up in that little moment is the future of our country.”
Civic salesmanMr Taylor – best known as the founder and front man
of Animation Research Lim-ited (ARL) – has long been an energetic booster for Dunedin.
When I first interviewed him in 1998 , eight years after ARL’s establishment, he was keen to frame its Dunedin location as an advantage.
He insisted, for example, that where the company was based greatly contrib-uted to the response to its groundbreaking real-time animation of America’s Cup regattas (technology inspired, he says, by him saying to ARL’s boffins, “New Zealand’s racing in this really boring event. Do you think you can develop something to tell us who is in front?”).
“I think if someone liv-ing in Auckland had done it, they wouldn’t have got
the same sort of reaction,” he said, “because people in Auckland are expected to do that stuff.”
“It’s really neat, people love it – they don’t know we’re called Animation Research, they just know we’re those computer guys from Dunedin. That’s how they talk about it – ‘You’re those guys from Dunedin’ – so it’s a real plus from a mar-keting perspective.”
Back then Mr Taylor was also keen to promote the idea of Dunedin as the coun-try’s coalmine canary.
“Look,” he said, “we’re at the bottom end of the New Zealand; New Zealand is at the bottom end of the world. It rolls up the
24 SPECIAL REPORT: SPOTLIGHT ON DUNEDIN / The National Business ReviewOctober 9, 2015
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Creating high-value jobs for young people is crucial, Ian Taylor says
TAILORED SOLUTIONS: Animation Research’s Ian Taylor
GETTING SHIPSHAPE: During the Gigatown campaign ARL produced a video drawing a parallel between the “refrigerated highway to Britain” opened by the ship Dunedin in 1882 and the opportunity winning the contest represented to its city namesake
Continued on facing page
From P24
Nevil Gibson
The University of Otago has been ranked 10th of all Australasian universi-ties for the quality of its research in a new interna-tional league table.
US News & World Report’s Best Global Uni-versities Rankings also confirms Otago’s second placing in New Zealand in three other international lists.
This year, US News expanded its ratings to 750 tertiary institutions, up from 500 last year.
Unlike its US-specific
Best Colleges list, which takes account of gradua-tion rates and entry scores, US News’ global version is based purely on research metrics as indexed by Thomson Reuters.
The only other uni-versity in the top 10 Aus-tralasian grouping was Auckland, in eighth place.
Overall, Auckland was 134th in the world and Otago 270th equal.
Otago rated in the world’s top 200 in six of the 22 profiled disciplines – biology and biochemis-try (185), clinical medicine (197), environment/ecolo-
gy (150), plant and animal science (188), psychiatry/psychology (109) and social sciences and public health (147).
Otago was top in New Zealand in two of these, environment/ecology and social sciences and public health.
Otago also moved up in the 2015 Times Higher Education World Univer-sity Rankings from the 251-275 band last year to the 201-250 band.
This followed a placing of 173rd in the 2015 QS Rankings and a placing in the 201-300 band in
the 2015 ARWU Shanghai Rankings.
“This year we have been one of only two New Zealand universities to feature in all three of these key international rankings,” deputy vice-chancellor (academic) Professor Vernon Squire says.
Dentistry at Otago ranked eighth in the world – the only subject area at a New Zealand university to make an international top-10 – and psychology ranked 31st in the QS sub-ject-specific ranking.
Otago rates second in NZ universities
26 SPECIAL REPORT: SPOTLIGHT ON DUNEDIN / The National Business ReviewOctober 9, 2015
By Julia Chambers, Callaghan Innovation business innovation adviser
Pharmaceutical start-up Breathe Easy Therapeutics is one of those companies whose goal is so profoundly worthy, it’s impossible not to wish them success.
The company is trialing medicine which it hopes will radically improve the longevity and life quality for sufferers of cystic fibrosis (CF).
Breathe Easy CEO Andrea Miller says the company “imagines a day when those with CF can just be busy living, and not worrying about losing the battle to CF”.
The company is embarking on a critical phase in the drug’s development, and Miller credits Callaghan Innovation with helping get it to this point.
“We’ve recently started a clinical trial of our inhaled medicine - Citramel™.
“Citramel is a complete NZ story. It was invented here, made here and is being trialed here.”
The drug has already been used in compassionate circumstances on patients in New Zealand, with extremely encouraging results.
Miller explains Callaghan Innovation’s technology and product development team helped get over a key hurdle.
“We were circling around an in-vitro testing issue for some time. The Callaghan Innovation Protein Science and Engineering team helped us grip this area up and move forward. We now believe that we are maximizing our in-vitro testing program which should provide more in depth data and results for our trial. That’s gold!”
As well as supporting the science behind Citramel, and providing a Project Grant to assist the development, Callaghan Innovation also helped the business develop through making strategic connections and building networks.
“Having access to experts like our dedicated business innovation adviser has effectively given us an extra pair of eyes looking across a range of strategic areas. Their experience and advice means we’re linking to support, networks and contacts that we need as we move through our project steps.”
“This outside technical support really matters and their experts are experienced and world-class.”
Breathe Easy Therapeutics has plans to expand, and has utilised Callaghan Innovation’s Innovation IP course to help the start-up manage intellectual property issues.
“We’re also evaluating a range of other potential CF formulations and medical devices to provide better tools for clinicians and patients dealing with this chronic genetic illness.
“With the assistance of Callaghan Innovation we now have access to a much wider team of skilled professionals supporting all areas of our business, not only in the usual business development areas, but also in the harder to access technical areas.”
If high-quality, specialised technology and product development would help your innovation take hold, call
Callaghan Innovation on 0800 422 552
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Callaghan support helps cystic fibrosis
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already in Dunedin recruit and retain staff.
One of the poster companies for talking full advantage of Gigatown is Ian Taylor’s Animation Research (see P24).
Another is Timely, a maker of cloud-based appointment-scheduling software for hair salons, clinics, gyms and the like. It’s also used by everyone from music tutors to personal trainers to (whisper it) members of the oldest profession.
Chief executive and co-founder Ryan Baker says his company now has 4000 customers in 70 countries. He wants hundreds of thousands in quick-time, worldwide.
Timely was founded in Dunedin and has 15 staff in the city, as well as nine in Wellington and one in London.
The company has a very 21st cen-tury setup: all 25 staff work from home. There is a central office but Mr Baker says it’s more of a boardroom for occa-sional meetings. A lot of communica-tion is done by video conferencing, which Timely uses intensively, day in and day out.
While you don’t need a fast fibre connection to videoconference, the Timely boss says quality was frequently lousy. The advent of the UFB and giga-bit connections means not just video chat but all kinds of remote collabora-tion is now seamless.
Not perfectMr Baker notes only some of his staff are covered by Gigatown so far, and international connections can be a bottleneck at times (an oddity of the current government’s $2 billion spend-up on fast internet infrastructure is that only $15 million was made immediate-ly available for bolstering international connectivity).
Chorus is 53% of the way through its UFB rollout in Dunedin (vs 54% of the way through the project nationwide). That’s ahead of most metro areas. Crown Fibre Holdings figures released earlier this week put Auckland at 39% and Wellington at 35%). But it still means for just under half the city, fibre isn’t in reach yet. And among those who can connect, only a modest 2300 homes and businesses have taken a 1 gigabit plan so far, close to a year since
the city won Gigatown.
Rollout will be accelerated“We expect to see that figure really grow in the next 12 months as we continue our UFB build work in Dunedin,” Cho-rus chief commercial officer Tim Harris says.
The UFB rollout is scheduled to be completed in the city by 2019 but NBR understands that deadline will soon be brought forward.
“Otago now has the fastest aver-age broadband speeds in the country – almost double that of other centres – which is a consequence of Dunedin winning Gigatown and end users opt-ing for the Gig. Our latest data shows that the average sync speed in Dunedin is 41Mbit/s, compared to the national average of 18Mbit/s, Mr Harris says.
“And overall, UFB uptake in Dunedin overall is amongst the highest in New Zealand. In fact, UFB uptake has more than doubled in Dunedin during the last 12 months [21% as of September].”
He adds, “We’ve handed out more than $50,000 in grants for the Gig-Start Fund for some really exciting initiatives over UFB, with even more money to be made available through the fund in the coming months. It’s exciting to see so many great ideas coming out of
Dunedin making use of gigabit ultra-fast broadband.”
As an example he gives a local branch of Cycle World, which has a system for capturing a 3D image of a customer on a test cycle to optimise their setup. A 1Gigabit/s connection is used to share the intensive app’s data with the chain’s head office.
Mr Christie says the education and health sectors are another point of focus. The WellSouth Primary Health
Network is using a 1Gibt/s connection to securely network 85 practices.
Expect to hear a lot from the GigCity in the months ahead.
“We’ve been careful not to let the cat out of the bag too early,” Mr Chris-tie says. Enterprise Dunedin and other parties involved have been careful to get a coherent plan in place and eve-rything working before making a lot of noise.
But soon his agency will be spread-ing the word about his town’s low-cost, superfast broadband, and how it can help industries that are very depend-ent on the speed of internet, from gaming to movie post-production. He says he’s already aware of people relocating to Dunedin simply because it’s the Gigatown. He’s expecting that to accelerate.
TIM HARRIS: The Chorus chief commercial officer says the average sync speed in Dunedin is 41Mbit/s, compared to the national average of 18Mbit/s
From P21
What does it mean to win Gigatown?