Novel NZ winner on cloud nine

The winner of the supreme and ICT awards at the 2011 New Zealand Innovators Awards was the Vend team.

Since launching Vend late last year, founder Vaughan Rowsell has seen sales of his Cloud-based point-of-sale payment system expand at an amazing rate.

Vend has thousands of users in more than 80 countries and has recently opened an office in San Francisco as part of a strategy to "take the US by storm".

Vend is aimed at small to medium-sized businesses, and integrates with other world leading, New Zealand developed, Cloud-based applications such as Xero accounting and Unleashed inventory. This enables businesses to run their entire retail operation in the Cloud, and on any hardware - such as a PC or Mac, or even an iPad or Android tablet, and for less than $100 a month.

While Vend is web-based, it will still operate when the internet connection goes down, and is yet another example of Kiwi innovation. Unfortunately, many innovative Kiwi ideas remain just that - ideas, or are exploited by overseas-based companies. However, in Vend's case, it is exciting to see its innovation increasing New Zealand's exports.

Last year's TIN Report confirmed New Zealand's IT exports had reached almost $5 billion - almost half the value of dairy exports. However, in strong contrast to dairying exports, Vend's and many other IT exports are "weightless", and do not damage our environment.

With many innovative, tech-savvy Kiwis having access to ultrafast broadband (UFB), as a result of Government's $1.3 billion UFB fibre deployment now taking place, it is conceivable that the value of New Zealand's "weightless" exports, like Vend, could increase to $20 billion by 2020.

The recent, successful UFB get-together was organised by the Wanganui Employers Chamber of Commerce's business strategy group, which is also responsible for preparing these weekly UFB columns. The members of the group are very keen to obtain suggestions from Wanganui and district organisations on initiatives they believe should next be undertaken in order to significantly increase awareness of the opportunities access to UFB fibre makes possible. Implementation of the best suggestions received will ensure Wanganui organisations will be in a position to take maximum advantage of the opportunity early access to UFB provides, and thereby "steal a march" on their competitors.

Please email your suggestions to the group

c/- john.patty@xtra.co.nz

More information on Vend: (www.vendhq.com )