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Pakuranga is not usually associated with covert military operations. But for the past two years, "smart" fabric born in the suburb has been helping the United States special forces make strategic decisions.
Zephyr Technology chief Brian Russell can't give details about how the US military uses his BioHarness - a wireless chest strap that tells you whether the wearer is alive or dead, stressed, moving, injured or well. But his five-year-old company is now on the shortlist to supply Nasa's Mission to Mars.
It's been a rapid journey for the former engineer. Russell came back to New Zealand after 10 years away with a plan to make a "smart" fabric that could transmit bodily information more comfortably than sticky patches and plastic monitors.
Something of an extreme sportsman himself (his decade away began as a hang-gliding holiday and ended with him sailing a yacht across the world to New Zealand), Russell hired a team and made a fabric that could monitor temperature, heart rate and breathing, and register force and impact. Then he found partner companies around the world who could use the fabric to make money.
Zephyr now makes two core products with its Hong Kong manufacturer - the BioHarness and a temperature-reading "smart" shoe insole called a ShoePod.
Marketing has so far focused on professional sports people, healthcare and defence, but the consumer market is next on the agenda. Zephyr expects to supply about 100,000 heart rate monitors to the German market and Russell wants to take that success into other countries.
Working with Stanford University and AUT, Zephyr has made a kind of virtual personal trainer, which adapts in response to bodily information sent to an internet program, via a cellphone or watch. The team has also developed a consumer-targeted "stress measure" which can tell you the equivalent age of your heart - an incentive to train if ever there was one.
Russell says his equivalent heart age is some years older than it should be, a fact that is less surprising once he describes Zephyr's early funding arrangements.
Russell skipped the "FFF" (friends, fools and family) funding traditional among start-up businesses and funded the research from savings, his consultancy business and a "few" mortgages.
"I didn't want my relations being owed money and asking every Sunday around the lunch table whether they were going to get paid back or not," he says.
"It did get up to a few mortgages at one stage. [But] me and the team really felt that we had something and we needed to press ahead with it."
Luckily, Zephyr's fabric found favour with established brands and, in 2006, Russell got venture capital funding to move to the next stage. He publicly unveiled the BioHarness and the ShoePod at Europe's biggest hi-tech trade show, CeBIT, last year.
They're high-value products; the professional BioHarness starter pack with its various accessories retails for US$1995 ($2570), though products aimed at the consumer market will be cheaper.
Outside the consumer market, opportunities abound for less secretive users than the US special forces.
A European partner is running field trials to use the BioHarness as a home health monitor for patients with chronic conditions. In the US health market, the ShoePod has been developed to help diabetes patients monitor for signs of ulceration or pressure on their feet - potentially a huge market, given that there are 20 million diabetics in the US alone.
Russell says if Zephyr can get medical insurers to pay for the Shoepod, it will be the first preventative product to be funded by the US insurance system.
He hopes New Zealand will become a world leader in this kind of technology, but says the commercial bent of local researchers can make it cheaper to go overseas.
"The [New Zealand] universities and the government research organisations have got commercially measurable outcomes, so they're all trying to make money from licensing.
"We ended up using people like Nasa and Stanford, which know what they do and are more than happy to assist. We help them with world-class products and they help us with know-how. No cash has to change hands."
When it comes to exporting a finished product, though, Russell has nothing but praise for the Kiwi approach. New Zealand Trade and Enterprise helped Zephyr get many contacts overseas.
"We'd say we were interested in these types of people and they would look at their Rolodex or would actually cold call people for us on behalf of the New Zealand Government. It took us a while to get their attention, but when we did they were a huge help."
Of Zephyr's 20 Auckland staff, only four are Kiwis, a result of Russell's determination to take his products outside the small New Zealand market.
Testing an early version of the ShoePod in New Zealand showed him there was little point in testing here for other markets and employees with overseas experience help him keep a global focus.
"We found the American market had completely different drivers and motivators. That was a pretty hard knock to us. Now we only ever focus on the particular market we're going to sell it into and it has to be a big market to give our investors a return."
Russell says the secret to competing in big markets is making high-tech products from cheap components. Many years working with consumer electronics (first at Fisher and Paykel and then Nokia UK) taught him to design for high volume and low cost right from the start.
"It needs a high level of innovation. It's easy to throw a supercomputer at a problem but it's a lot harder to throw a one dollar micro-processor at it and solve the same problem."
Russell will move to the west coast of the United States in the next few months to concentrate on building the brand there. But he says he'll be the first to fire himself as CEO if Zephyr outgrows him.
"It's my first time doing this and, if I can't develop as fast as the company needs me to, I'll find someone else," he says. "If I don't, the venture capitalists will."
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Pakuranga-based Zephyr Technology uses "smart" fabrics to monitor the body's performance.
* Its BioHarness product is a lightweight strap that can monitor things such as heart rate, breathing and temperature, and transmit the information wirelessly to a computer or store it for later analysis.
* The company also works with manufacturers who incorporate its technology into products made for the consumer market.
* Main markets are health and fitness, military and medical.
QuoteBox1: It's easy to throw a supercomputer at a problem but it's a lot harder to throw a one dollar micro-processor at it and solve the same problem.
- Brian Russell, Zephyr Technology
