Andrew Nimick Point Concept twitter.com/andrewnim

Yesterday was the first full day of the 50th anniversary of the New Zealand Computer Society Innovation conference.
The day was opened by Steven Joyce, Minister for ICT. He talked about the history of ICT in NZ and the future plans of the government to roll out the high speed network at a cost of $1.5 billion.

The government may be able to save some of that money if the Ministry for ICT and the Minister responsible for TV get together and sell some of the bandwidth which digital TV will make available in three years. Actually why wait three years to change to digital?

Next up was Sam Morgan. Sam was informative and entertaining, admitting to some naughty innovation in his youth and then talking about TradeMe. But what he really wanted to talk about was the new Pacific fibre cable project he is part of and why he is. As he said, it does not matter how fast our national network is if we are still constrained by the telcos when it comes to overseas bandwidth and data coming into this country. This country needs unlimited broadband to play on the world field and engage its business and people in the future. I managed to catch up with Sam and ask him about Vendhq. I was interested if it fit in with comments he had made regarding the way payments are made in Africa, where financial transactions are being done by mobile phone and the web is mobile.

Just before lunch, Craig Neville-Manning of Google spoke to us about the work engineers at Google have done to help relief agencies in places such as Haiti. And how they have worked fast and put tools up then worked with the user base and changed to make them better. True agile development.
He went on to talk about the increasing opportunities for people to create things of value without the long tails of planning and resources. In a nutshell: if you have an idea, make it. If it does not work move to the next one. Do not spend months working out if it will work, just build it and see.

After Lunch we heard from Rod Drury on how Xero has changed the face of accounting for small business. Xero has created the situation where the small business owner is requiring the accountant to use it, not using the package preferred by the accountant.
Xero was built for the end user not for the systems and organisations they use. So it becomes an interface to the bank, and the accountant.
Rod also talked about how to go after the money once you know your idea does work and secure the funds to really push it out.

Next came Ian McCrae of Orion health. Ian built on something which came across from all the speakers today. The technology is great, but it will only get you so far. It's the people you work with and the ways you work which will make the difference. Given space to think and encouraged to be engaged, your people will innovate and create solutions.

Throughout the day were other smaller sessions and the "working" day ended with a panel made up of Rod Drury, Ian McCrae, Craig Neville manning and opposition spokesperson on ICT Clare Curran. It was chaired by Designertech CEO Ray Delany.
One of the biggest issues which came out of this was the shortage of developers in New Zealand.
Rod Drury summed it up as "There are no developers knocking on Xero's door."
"I need ten."
Ian MaCrae agreed with this saying he needed QA testers. This led to discussions about education and developing pathways into ICT.
How do we make it attractive, sexy even?
It was also suggested that all the dot net developers were too busy making sharepoint sites!
When asked how you get a job at Google, Craig replied that you could try working on open source projects. That tends to make you visible to other Google engineers.
Possibly because it is not often a day job!

Through the day, the Twitter stream was buzzing with non attendees grateful for the updates. You can follow along by searching for #nzcs50.
This social component was missing from the planning of the event, which in some ways reflects the NZCS. On its 50 birthday I would suggest it needs to ask questions around how it intends to innovate and go forward for the next 50 years.