8 December 2003
There's a good reason that the annual Tuanz Interactive Awards is held in Wellington. It means hardly anyone has to travel to the ceremony.
New Zealand's interactive development industry is largely clustered in Wellington. Auckland has plenty of web developers, but none of the inner-city concentration or collegiate atmosphere of the Wellington scene. And it tends to be the Wellington firms that win both the big jobs and the awards (12 out of 14 categories in this year's Tuanz Awards went to companies from the capital).
Why so? There's the proximity of big, public-sector clients, lashings of inner-city bandwidth, relatively affordable office space and a cafe lifestyle that appeals to creative talent. But there's also a notable sense of community.
At the awards party I received a number of unsolicited testimonials as to what a great place to be Wellington is - and not all of them came from born-and-bred Wellingtonians, or even New Zealanders. It is not unusual to find Americans working, by choice, for small Wellington companies. "People used to be somewhat in thrall of us," one said to me. "What they didn’t realise was that we were excited to be here."
The local interactive industry has come a long way since the early '90s, when a handful of CD-Roms crept onto the shelves, and the first few local websites appeared. It is now more integrated into New Zealand’s economic and cultural life than most people realise.
Among the entries in this year's awards (declaration of interest - I helped to judge them) were an online operations manual and extranet for StarMart franchisees, which recently replaced the huge folder of printed rules and practices for shopholders. The new system not only can be updated daily, but allows online ordering.
Another system, Zeus Sport, has been specifically developed to be used by National Olympic Committee administrators and athletes at, and leading up to, a games event, hauling together all relevant information, from venue details to clothes fittings and to-do lists. Registered users can even use the site to handle email. It was built to be multilingual, and is now being used by half a dozen other countries and 12% of the world’s Olympic athletes.
Both of those use the same client software: the good old web browser, which was born as a window on the Internet - effectively a media and entertainment device - but is now also the front end of most business applications.
One of last year’s Tuanz winners, a two-man Wellington company called Spikefin, took web technology even further when it built an online ordering system for the Hell Pizza chain.
The system included point-of-sale (POS) terminals that were actually PCs running Macromedia Flash, a tool almost exclusively associated with web-based animations and presentation effects. It wasn't that it was impossible to use Flash as a POS interface - just that no one had dreamed of doing so. And, it works.
This year Spikefin is in the process of reprising the Hell work for a Japanese sandwich chain. So how did the new client react when it heard that the system used Flash at the point of sale? "We didn’t tell them."
Common technology was also key to one of this year's winning Tuanz entries. The interactive brief was wide enough to encompass a remote milk vat monitoring system for farmers, which, believe me, is better than it sounds.
Bay City, a small development, internet service and "e-farming" company in Timaru, had the simple, smart idea of adding a communications chipset to an existing device that monitors milk production onsite.
The farmer, whether he is at another site or on holiday, can be notified of problems with storage (milk cooling too slowly, for instance) or instantly check volume and temperature, via SMS text on a Telecom CDMA phone.
The system can also display 24-hour graphs on a web page and has the bonus of providing an audit trail that can be presented to Fonterra as proof that the milk has been handled correctly. And because it uses existing on-farm technology and the familiar, ubiquitous, mobile phone system, it's cheap.
It's an idea with many applications and obvious international potential. All Bay City needs to do is come up with a rather more catchy name than Remote Milk Vat -Monitoring.
You may recall mention of Sidhe Interactive's rugby league game for PlayStation, Xbox and PC in a recent column. The game is now completed, and it won the Wellington company both the games category at the awards, and the special "Craft" award, which goes to the entry that took one or more elements of the industry’s technology somewhere new.
It's hard to believe what Rugby League achieved before it was even released: its 30,000 pre-sales into the Australian market were the highest for any console game ever. It has won better reviews than its nearest direct competitor, Rugby 2003, produced by sports gaming giant EA Sports. And it is already certain that it will be an ongoing franchise. Back in the days of Mayor Mark Blumsky, it was customary to grizzle about the "smart city" hype that flowed from his office. But when companies like Sidhe can do what they've done, you have to conclude that there is truth behind the capital hype.