Tauranga firm aims to wow Silicon Valley

A fortnight from now Tauranga-based software developer Pingar LP will be presenting at the home of computer technology, Silicon Valley.
It will signal the moment that sales start rolling for Pingar's next-generation internet search engine, after local investors poured $5 million into research and development in the past two-and-a-half years.
Co-founders and directors Peter and Jacqui Wren-Hilton were leaving on June 5 for three months to set up their North American office in northern California, and hire sales and technical staff. Their plans were advanced when they were told Pingar had been selected as one of 30 "hot" emerging tech companies from among 300 applicants around the world in the fields of information technology, security, digital media, clean energy and others.
After they step off the plane at San Francisco, the Wren-Hiltons - with chief research officer Alyona Medelyan and chief financial officer Tarun Knaji - will head straight for Sunnyvale, the heart of Silicon Valley.
They will be presenting the next day in Microsoft's Mountain View campus at the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs (SVASE) annual showcase in front of 350 influential and wealthy venture capitalists and angel investors.
Pingar, a finalist in the New Zealand Hi-Tech Awards last month, is the first company from this country to present at the event.
SVASE treats it as the most visible platform for emerging technology companies to springboard their products into the market. Pingar intends to do better than that.
"'It's like the Oscars for start-up companies and the whole event is being televised," said Mr Wren-Hilton. "To get the invitation (to present) is surreal."
Before the invitation, they were looking at a moderated market entry into the US and now could improve that.
"For 10 minutes that audience (in Silicon Valley) will be focused on Pingar. In that audience is potential business partners of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs," he said.
The audience will select the most promising product within each category. "But, best of all, we can walk away with a handful of business cards and make appointments," said Mr Wren-Hilton.
"Within 48 hours of getting off the plane (from New Zealand) we could have 30 valuable business cards that take a long time to access."
Pingar will be unveiling its first four major customers - all well-known international companies - on the day of the presentation in Silicon Valley.
Mr Wren-Hilton will be using one of them, a big global brand, during the presentation as an example of how companies can make use of Pingar's new application programming interface (API).
Through the API, found on Pingar's website, the company's software developers can access a series of 18 components to build products that extract and analyse key information from masses of documents, including emails and PDFs. Key coding is supplied on the website for the developers.
Pingar, with offices in Tauranga, Auckland, Hong Kong, London and soon Silicon Valley, launched its API in March and Mr Wren-Hilton has been surprised at the speed of the take-up.
"The market response has been significant. We are signing up customers, we have generated sales and we are post-revenue," he said.
The API saves time and money for companies to find information within its own operations.
"The amount of unstructured data within companies is growing at 40 per cent a year. I was talking with one of South Africa's biggest companies and it has 400 billion internal documents," said Mr Wren-Hilton.
The API will instantly extract data such as names, addresses, credit card and IRD numbers, bank accounts - banks and financial-services institutions can track consumer behaviour. Or the addresses could be used by Yellow Pages for geo-mapping.
Pingar clients can choose different components to build their search technology - such as the Sanitising tool to change names and protect their privacy, the Profanity tool to eliminate poor terminology, and the Automatic Intelligent Document Summary which reduces a 40-page pdf document to three paragraphs of relevant information.
In the US, any citizen can view information the Federal and State authorities hold on them. But a black felt pen is used to hide the information they are not entitled to view.
Pingar's Sanitising component can replace the manual black pen. "We can do it dynamically on the fly," Mr Wren Hilton said.
Once the clients' search application is set up, it talks with Pingar's API, which sends back the results - and the clients are charged on the amount of use or "pay as you go".
Pingar is establishing its latest office in Sunnyvale, halfway along Silicon Valley, at the Plug and Play Tech Centre, a community of 280 technology start-up companies.
Started in 2006, the innovation centre has helped raise more than US$750 million in venture funding for the emerging companies.
Pingar will initially recruit a team of four in Silicon Valley - vice-president sales, another sales person and two in technical support.
The company is also hiring in Britain and Hong Kong, and by the end of the year will have 42 staff, up from 25.
In Sunnyvale, Pingar will be operating close to the head offices of Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Bing.
"We are in the heart of very large technology companies. If Pingar is going to develop strong global partnerships, then we have to be in this market (Silicon Valley) and talk to these companies," Mr Wren-Hilton said.
"We can then drive sales through through London, Hong Kong, Auckland and Tauranga."
HOT TECHNOLOGY
Tauranga-based Pingar was selected to present in the next-generation internet category at Launch: Silicon Valley 2011, on June 7.
A third of the emerging online technology companies selected from around the world fall into this category. They are:
andi, document interface browsing.
Humuch, global price comparisons.
Pingar, unstructured data search tools.
Signifyd, anti-virus for abusive behaviour on the web.
Steelhouse, behaviour business platform for marketers.
Take The Interview, automated video response platform for employers and candidates.
Thuuz, sports discovery viewing platform.
Waba, digital object trading platform for social networks and mobile games.
Warranty Life, automatic warranty tracking.
yaM Labs, maximising meetings efficiency.