KEY POINTS:
It's 9 o'clock on a balmy Friday evening in Paris and four New Zealanders in their early 20s find themselves in the heart of one of the world's great cities.
But rather than hitting the streets for some fun and sightseeing, this quartet of Canterbury University technology
students are working up a nervous sweat in a windowless room in a hotel convention centre.
Louis Sayers, Stephen Fitchett, Janina Voigt and Yugan Yugaraja - collectively known as Team Phoenix - are slugging it out as New Zealand's representatives in a geek version of the Olympics: an international technology development competition run by Microsoft called the Imagine Cup.
The lure of US$240,000 ($349,360) in prize money has drawn 370 students from 61 countries to Paris. Their mission: to use Microsoft's technologies to develop an innovative high-tech solution to one of the world's environmental problems.
In the room with the New Zealand team is a table groaning with computer equipment, two large display monitors and four attentive IT industry judges, here to assess whether Team Phoenix does indeed have a revolutionary tech concept to bring to the world. Their brief has been to develop a software solution to solve a real-world environmental issue.
Team captain Sayers kicks off the presentation. "Imagine if you could be picked up from your doorstep and dropped off anywhere you want for less than it would cost you if you took your car," he tells the judging panel.
"Now imagine you could do this while reducing your carbon footprint and enabling a more sustainable environment."
Over the next 20 minutes the team explain and demonstrate their invention: a system they've called Taxibus which dispatches and co-ordinates a fleet of urban minibuses.
The aim is to offer a super-fast, cheap, appealing and environmentally friendly form of public transport. Using the complex computer algorithm the students have developed to power the simulation, they say they have the foundation for a system that would allow minibus users to call up a ride - over the internet or via text message - and have a vehicle arrive at their doorstep literally within a couple of minutes.
"Our big goal for the Taxibus system is for thousands of people to be using the system and for hundreds of taxibuses to be driving about," Sayers tells the judges as a graphical simulation of the algorithm in action blinks away on the screen behind him.
Fitchett pitches in: "Just a small change to the way people travel makes a huge difference to the environment. We strongly believe that we can transform highly polluted, highly congested cities into clean, green, sustainable areas."
Taxibus is no overnight nerd concoction. Team Phoenix spent months developing the program and the business case needed to make it a reality. They fine-tuned the concept through numerous meetings with business people, transport experts, local body executives, politicians and technologists.
The idea was robust enough to fend off Team Phoenix's competitors from across New Zealand's student software development community and win them the right to compete in the global finals of the Imagine Cup.
With many of the world's sharpest young IT minds fighting it our for geek glory in Paris, competition is tough and ultimately the Taxibus concept fails to carry the Kiwi team through to a spot in the finals of the Dragon's Den-style contest.
But despite missing out on the software development equivalent of a gold medal - and the $US25,000 top prize Microsoft stumps up to go with it - Sayers, Fitchett, Voigt and Yugaraja return to Christchurch with little reason to feel dejected.
The Imagine Cup has been an invaluable learning and networking experience. They have developed a piece of intellectual property that has already attracted interest from a local transport operator. And whether or not the technology is eventually commercialised, the team has demonstrated that each member has a rounded set of skills which should take them far in an IT career.
The bad news is that this tale of taking youthful enthusiasm and technological innovation on to the world stage falls into the exception category rather than the norm.
New Zealand has a serious shortage of young people with Team Phoenix's fervour for world-leading IT development.
Our teenage population's general lack of interest in pursuing careers in the technology sector is highlighted a few weeks later, back in Auckland, when IT infrastructure company Cisco gathers industry leaders together to discuss the problems New Zealand faces developing a vibrant high-tech economy.
Participants in the Cisco roundtable discussion include several senior high school students who say there is "no incentive" for them to pursue careers in IT.
One student says his impression is that technology means engineering, and the general perception is that engineers build bridges.
His summation: "It's not as exciting as it used to be to spend your life building a way to get over a river."
Another student says the top career choices school leavers think about are medicine or law because lawyers are seen as people who make a lot of money and doctors make decent money and save lives.
"Those, to people my age, are the attractive options. So what we need to do is change what people think of engineers."
What about IT entrepreneurship as a path to serious wealth? (Microsoft's Bill Gates or Oracle's Larry Ellison are IT entrepreneurs who rank amongst the world's richest men.) Asked if he is interested in becoming a successful businessman, one student replies: "I'd like to, but don't feel like putting in the work."
So it seems a comfortable career in law or medicine has more appeal for school leavers than plunging into the possibly lucrative but rather nebulous world of IT.
When the issue of building the country's knowledge workforce was tackled at this year's Telecommunications and ICT Summit, Garry Roberton had a sobering set of PowerPoint slides to share with the conference's audience - some figures that appear to back up the Cisco event anecdote.
The statistics flashed on the screen by Roberton, who is education manager at the Waikato Institute of Technology's School of IT, and executive committee chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Computing Qualifications, showed IT enrolments at New Zealand universities had roughly halved between 2001 and 2006.
Sharing the stage with Roberton at the summit was Microsoft's country manager Kevin Ackhurst, who said one of the problems was that there was confusion when it came to defining the ICT industry, and this did not help young people who might be considering embarking on a technology career.
"Our industry does not have the greatest image," Ackhurst said. "Over time that image has got worse - particularly the image of the computer programmer who spends very little time interacting with human beings and a large proportion of time interacting with the screen."
Ackhurst, a former academic, takes a keen interest in IT training issues and has worked to pull together an industry-wide taskforce to tackle the skills shortage issue since taking up Microsoft New Zealand's top position last year. He believes the industry needs to collaborate more if it wants to improve its image with jobseekers.
"There is a great opportunity to better communicate the elements that are associated with the success within our industry - people, personalities that have been successful - and showing those people and personalities to be something that others may want to aspire to," he told the summit.
Roberton agreed, saying the IT sector needed to spend more time engaging with high school and tertiary students, selling itself and the passion those in IT careers have for working in the industry.
"It's getting into the secondary schools that's really key to selling the industry to those students so they get a heads-up about what an exciting and well-paid career it can be, and then hopefully we can get them into the tertiary sector and on to a career in the industry," he said.
New Zealand is not alone in struggling to entice students into IT careers. In the US the drop-off in tertiary enrolments for technology-related courses this decade has been even steeper than in New Zealand.
The bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 is considered a major influence in ambivalence towards IT careers. For today's school leavers - and their parents, who help guide their career decisions - the dot-com bust still casts a shadow over an industry many parents see as unstable.
Yet the reverse perception is taking hold in many of the world's emerging economies - including India, China, and the Philippines - where students are clamouring to get IT educations.
Joe Wilson, a Microsoft director of academic initiatives and the man in charge of the Imagine Cup, agrees the IT industry in the Western world needs to do a better job of promoting itself.
"[Prior to the bubble bursting] it was the greatest thing in the world to be a coder, but today technology's a little more commonplace, so they have to find newer, different ways to change the world."
Wilson says one of the reasons Microsoft runs the Imagine Cup is to spread a "look at all the cool things you can do with technology" message to students.
The event is not a Microsoft recruitment drive, he insists, although he openly admits that, because students were required to build their inventions on Microsoft technology platforms, there are benefits for the company.
"We get the opportunity to be a part of whatever they [the students] are going to do," he says.
And there was no doubt the competition honed the business skills of the next generation of technologists, many of whom would end up working for large corporations, including Microsoft, he says.
"It [the Imagine Cup] is not necessarily a business plan contest. It's a technology contest, but what happens is that to make technology valid there has to be some sense of how it will be used from everyone behind it, and that drives people to put the whole package together," Wilson adds.
"When you see their presentations it's not as if they're just telling you how the ones and zeros work, they're explaining the concept of what it would do, how it would help people.
"We're at a time in the world when the world needs great things to happen. We need new breakthroughs, and I think if not these folks then who's going to do it?"
The judges may not have rated it high enough on their list of world-changing technological ideas to send it through to the Imagine Cup finals, but how does Wilson rate New Zealand's own Taxibus idea?
"I think it's a valid, strong concept that has to prove itself out in the real world at the end of the day," he says.
Indeed, as do all the other clever ideas generated through the competition. In that regard, while the New Zealand team may not have walked away with a cash prize, the competition has given four young technologists an invaluable exposure to IT entrepreneurship.
Simon Hendery travelled to the Imagine Cup finals in Paris as a guest of Microsoft.
