3D and geospatial technologies encompass fascinating sciences that open up exciting new worlds for us all. Some of the hottest new companies in these areas are to be found on our own doorstep.

This week Wellington’s premier information and communication technology network Unlimited Potential hosts the UP3D event featuring presentations from Nextspace and Geospatial Research Centre NZ . Both industry bodies are looking to share their technology and engage with developer and entrepreneur communities.

Event manager and Unlimited Potential Executive Committee member Paul Spence says “anyone interested in 3D graphics and geospatial applications should attend UP3D to see tech demos and learn how cutting edge technology research translates into commercial products and services.”

*EVENT DETAILS:*
When: 5.30pm, Friday 24th April
Where: Wellington Chamber of Commerce.
RSVP essential: http://up.org.nz/up3d-2009/

Confirmed speakers:
Gavin Lennox (CEO, Nextspace)
Dr. Steven Mills Geospatial Research Centre NZ

Tony Seba is speaking in Wellington later this month on “Building a winner in uncertain times: the 9 fundamental rules of high-tech strategy”.

His book, Winners Take All, is available for free download from his web site.

WHEN:  4:00-6:00 Thursday 26th March 2008
WHERE: Paramount Theatre, 25 Courtney Place, Wellington.
COST:   $225

Drinks and nibbles will be served for half an hour after the session to stimulate networking discussions.

You can book directly on PayPal.

The New Zealand Venture Capital Association in partnership with Investment New Zealand will be hosting networking events next month in Auckland and Wellington on the development of the Venture Capital Industry in Israel.

Israel has one of the most successful Venture Capital industries in the world, and the speakers will discuss the Israeli experience in achieving that success.

Speakers

Ami Samuels
Senior Director, Private Equity at Poalim Capital Markets, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bank Hapoalim.

From 2004 to 2006, Mr. Samuels was a Partner at Star Ventures, an international venture capital fund. From 2001 to 2003, he served as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Satlynx, a company specializing in two-way satellite broadband services. From 1998 to 2001, he was Vice President for broadband networks at Gilat Satellite Networks, and from 1989 to 1998, he worked as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers. He holds a BA degree from Haifa University and a MA degree in Management from Yale University.

Oren Monhite Yahav
Senior Vice President, Private Equity & Alternative Investments Hapoalim Securities, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bank Hapoalim.

Mr. Monhite Yahav has an impressive private equity and general business background. Prior to joining Hapoalim Securities, Mr. Monhite Yahav was a Vice President of Pacific Corporate Group (PCG), one of the world’s leading private equity investment advisors. At Pacific Corporate Group, he helped manage the relationships with and develops private equity strategies for the most sophisticated public pension plans in the world. While at PCG, Oren headed the Small/Middle US Corporate Finance (Buyouts) and Secondaries investment groups and led the identification, selection and due diligence of private equity investments. Previously, he was an attorney with Weksler, Bregman & Co., where he advised clients on mergers and acquisitions, private equity investments, and securities issues. Mr. Monhite Yahav is Chairman and Co-Founder of Dbursa Capital Ltd. Mr. Monhite Yahav holds an LL.B from the Radziner Law School in Israel. He received his MBA in Finance from the Yale School of Management.

Date and Times
Tuesday 24th March, Auckland from 5.30pm to 7.30pm, and
Thursday 26th March, Wellington from 5.30pm to 7.30pm

Both functions will be held at the offices of Chapman Tripp.

Cost

$25 (including GST) Members of NZVCA or INZ
$40 (including GST) Non-members

For more information, contact Linda Taylor, NZVCA on 09 309 1090 or support@nzvca.co.nz

TV and print may be oh-so-last-century, but it still feels pretty good when one of your investments gets positive traditional media coverage.  One of the companies that WebFund has invested in, DIYFather.com, has just published its first book: Call Me Dad.

Here’s TVNZ’s Close Up story on the book:

TVNZ Close Up story on DIYFather.com Call Me Dad

We’re having a book launch party at Dymocks Books in Lambton Quay in Wellington on Wednesday 18 February at 6pm.  Consider this an invitation to come along and help us celebrate the success of a book, a company, the startup ecosystem, and … fatherhood!

An evening seminar on “Demystifying Angel Investment” will be run in Wellington next week.

Date: Tues 10 Feb
Time: 5:30 to 7:30pm
Location: PWC, 113-119 The Terrace

Similar to the seminar run in Auckland last year, this evening is aimed at people interested in becoming angel investors, and is part of NZVIF’s grand plan to recruit 1000 new angels.

The session will cover:

• What angel investment is
• Who Angel investors are and why they choose to be Angels
• The types of high growth companies that angels invest in
• How to make smart angel investments in an uncertain environment

… and will include a Q&A and mix-and-mingle afterwards over a glass of wine.

For more info, download the invite (PDF), and if you’re interested in attending, please contact Anna Hamilton-Manns.

The Angel Association (in conjunction with NZTE Escalator) is a running a basic training course called “The Power of Angel Investing” in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin in February and March (see the course schedule for details). Based on the Angel Capital Education Foundation’s course of the same name, it promises to provide an overview of the angel investment process. The course is aimed at:

• Successful entrepreneurs who have exited from their businesses and have an interest in staying involved in early stage companies.
• High net-worth individuals with senior business experience who now have the time and interest in investing in early stage companies.
• Angel investors who have done from one to three deals.
• Community leaders and entrepreneurial support professionals who are interested in promoting angel investing in their communities.

It’s an all day course, and the cost is between $300-$400 depending on whether or not you’re a member of an associated angel club.  It will be interesting to see whether the penny gap or time elasticity of demand (a whole day is a lot of time to be sitting in front of an instructor) effect attendance.

They’re also running free courses for entrepreneurs on Power Pitching and An Essential Guide to Capital Raising.

Unlimited Potential are running an event called “Wellington to the World: local innovation going global” at the Wellington Town Hall this coming Friday, 7 November, at 3:45pm, featuring presentations by Victoria Link (Victoria University’s research commercialisation arm), seven-minute pitches by local entrepreneurs, and lots of opportunity to network.  The event will be webcast courtesy KEA and NZTE.

The entrepreneurs include:

• Matt Burgess, iPredict
• Ben Wilde, Fingertapps
• Clare Howden, Futrix
• Ed Robinson, Aptimize

Proceedings will be MC’d by Unlimited magazine’s Ben Kepes.

You can download the full PDF Blurb, and if you’re interested in going, be sure to register.

Harvard University’s Samuel Arbesman recently submitted a paper to Physical Review E entitled “An Explanation of Superlinear Scaling for Innovation in Cities” (HT: New Scientist).  The major thrust of the paper (embedded among the erudite scientific analysis) is that larger cities have dispproportionally more innovation, because they allow for richer interconnection between different communities.

My initial reaction to this from my favourite hometown of merely 250,000 souls (counted on a fine day going downhill with a southerly tailwind) was “oh no, we’re fux0r3d!”  All this talk of the Innovation Capital and Business Innovation Strategies will come to naught, because we just aren’t big enough to compete with the larger locations overseas.

Rereading Arbesman’s article however, size is only one factor enabling innovation.  Sure, given a sample of a large number of cities puts Wellington in the same league as cities such as Birmingham Alabama, Czestochowa Poland, and Pau France – none of which are particularly well known for their innovation policies.  But Wellington and Auckland are very culturally diverse cities, and I would argue that their relatively small size enables rich interconnection between communities, precisely because the interconnected communities themselves are so small.

In Wellington we joke that we’re a “village with skyscrapers”, and that there’s only a degree-and-a-half of separation. The number of people from different walks of life that I’d talk to on any given day is staggering.  I can have a breakfast meeting with Pākehā colleages, meet with Māori clients in the morning, lunch with Asian colleagues, afternoon meetings with constellations of immigrants from Europe, North America, the Indian subcontinent and Southern Africa that define the local IT scene, dinner with my own family (between us we have rellies living on six continents) and then go to an evening Interfaith meeting with people from all over the world.  There are no ethnic neighbourhoods here; the ethnic groups are just to small to sustain whole geographic regions.

So far from being a hindrance, our small size combined with the diversity of modern New Zealand can be a real advantage for breaking down barriers that are common elsewhere.

Superlinear scaling breaks down here, and long may we remain an outlier in Arbesman’s data set.

Update: In a personal communication from Arbesman, he says

… you’re definitely right that the variations and exceptions to the patterns observed are the ones that can give us the most insight into the innovation process in cities. And it sounds like New Zealand is chock full of these exceptions.

Webfund’s Managing Director Stefan Korn visited Bootup Labs in Vancouver today, and was interviewed by Boris Mann on international incubation opportunities.

Boris writes a great blog on the Vancouver startup scene, and has been working to try to increase international cooperation and information sharing to help maximise the chances of success for startups.

Watch the interview:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJbkDr_-ND8]

Disclosure: I’m the Chairman of Webfund. Go Stefan!

The Pitch:
PlaceMate is a guide to find shops and services (like hairdressers, fitness centres, beauty salons etc), with an abundance of personal insights. It is informative, welcoming and fun. It enables users to find shops, services, night entertainment and restaurants using various search criteria, rated and ranked by real customers. PlaceMate also links users to users with a similar taste: “Users that rated this service high, also liked….”.

Business Model:
Based on selling low cost advertisement spots ($9.99/month), highly targeted by publishing them on the relevant pages. Unlike other websites, the advertisement spots are estatically integrated in the site; adding to the usability instead of anoying users.

Technical details:
Includes an extensive CRM system, making data import, editing and maintenance easy. It’s easy to expand to other cities by the import function, allowing databases bought from local yellow or white pages to be
imported. Currently it contains about 7000 restaurants covering all of NZ and 1200 shops (in Wellington). PlaceMate is still in the process of being developed, though in its final stages.

Next steps:
Due to family circumstances, the entrepreneurs are moving back to the Netherlands, where they will continue expanding the PlaceMate model. However, in NZ the site really needs to be brought to the next level. They have put the business on a TradeMe auction.

If you have a CEO who would like to take this on, it could make a nice investment with an interesting business model at a very low buy-in price.

Contact:
Debra Aurich
Tel: 021 1904605
Email: debraurich@gmail.com

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