KEY POINTS:
Bright and early on Tuesday morning, cellist Davina Shum and double bass player Darija Andjelic Andzakovic turned up in Auckland's CBD to audition for spots with Britain's Southbank Sinfonia orchestral academy.
The interesting thing about their auditions was that while they were in New Zealand, the listening judging
panel was in Britain.
The auditions were carried out using high-definition Cisco TelePresence videoconferencing suites - one in Cisco's Auckland office beside Victoria Park, and the other at BT Centre in London.
The high-fidelity acoustics and life-size images thrown up on the three 65-inch screens that make up a TelePresence suite enabled the musical experts to judge the students' performances from half a world away. They repeated the virtual auditioning process via link-ups to Glasgow, Madrid and New York.
Aspiring sinfonia members from around the world who may not have otherwise got the change were given the opportunity to impress the judges. Time, money and carbon emissions were saved.
What was not being spared was internet bandwidth. The TelePresence system pumped 8 megabits of data a second in each direction during the Auckland auditions. This was both an example of how New Zealand can use technology to connect effectively with the rest of the world, and a reminded that we need a powerful broadband infrastructure to do so.
The newly elected National Administration preached the power of ubiquitous broadband before the election. Now let's hope they can deliver on that promise.
While National's campaign pledge was focused on delivering high-speed broadband to three-quarters of homes, the business community's interest is in ensuring we have the best connections back out to the rest of the world.
At the risk of boring John Key et al with a lesson in what they - hopefully - already appreciate, I'd like to recap some thoughts on the subject shared in Auckland last week.
To launch BizSpark, its new initiative to provide free software to qualifying start-up businesses, Microsoft put together a roundtable discussion on enhancing New Zealand's global competitiveness.
New Zealand Institute chief executive David Skilling was there, saying what he has said many times, but sharing a message that is perhaps too logical to get dull.
To paraphrase Skilling: we have a lousy record for competing internationally, and our efforts are concentrated in a few major exporter drives. It is not good enough and we need a steep change in our economic performance if we want to attain the standard of living we aspire to.
You can see the challenge simply by looking at a map of the world.
"New Zealand is the small remote country on the bottom," Skilling noted. "If Antarctica was a growth market perhaps we'd be okay but unfortunately last time I checked it wasn't.
"Despite claims by Thomas Friedman and others that the world is flat, the world actually remains pretty lumpy. Distance still matters, supply chain length and cost still matters."
We need to bolt on more high-value "weightless economy" exports from sectors such as the creative arts, financial services, biotech and software to our existing exports.
Why? Because, as Skilling says, "you just need some smart people, a business model and then a pipe to shift this stuff across to customers".
That "pipe" is the global internet link that will make international virtual sinfonia auditions a daily occurrence, rather than an oddity.
Xero boss and serial technology entrepreneur Rod Drury was also on the Microsoft stage last week. He said the lack of affordable international broadband connectivity was the biggest barrier to New Zealand's entrepreneurial growth.
"IT has become mainstream. It's not just for geeks any more. People are looking at some of the big consumer models that are happening overseas and trying to factor those into their business plans," Drury said.
"That's why this broadband thing is so important. Because it's not just geeks trying to export their technology, basically anybody in New Zealand should be able to do a high-resolution video conference or presentation to their market, which you just can't even consider doing now."
The third speaker, Jonathan Kirkpatrick, chairman of Incubators New Zealand and chief executive of AUT Technology Park, agreed with Drury's assertion that broadband was the major issue we need to overcome to enable entrepreneurial growth.
"We're deliberately disempowering ourselves in this country by not taking advantage of what we could. It's just ridiculous. If it was your own domestic situation you wouldn't tolerate still having a gas light in your house, would you? So why are we still doing that with broadband?"
A good question. Over to you, Mr Key.
