Is there anywhere better than NZ’s South Island to develop satellite IoT hardware?
New Zealand’s South Island. The perfect place to develop satellite IoT systems.
A year into building ioSphere and I’ve come to the conclusion there’s probably nowhere better on earth to be launching a Swarm satellite IoT gateway business than Christchurch, NZ.
Satellite IoT, by its nature, is relevant to people doing stuff in very remote places. The South Island is a big, rugged, sparsely populated and geographically diverse place, with a highly developed first world economy and just about every type of business activity you could imagine.
We have very remote mussel farms, gold mines, factories and ski fields; trucking firms, campervans, airlines, and aerospace; dairy farms, solar arrays, holiday resorts and hydro lakes; oil companies, container ports, fishing fleets and power grids. And because there is only one large city, a huge number of those operations are headquartered right here in Christchurch, a stone's throw from our lab.
What’s more, because Kiwis are such a down to earth lot, the leadership of those organizations is generally keen to have a chat. You’re rarely more than a couple of degrees of separation from the person you need to talk to and often have friends in common. Kiwis love innovation and it's extremely easy to get a pilot of some sort under way in any industry.
Having been engaged in lots of tech businesses around the world, where customer meetings invariably involve long flights, I really appreciate how easy it is to connect and collaborate here in NZ. It allows the ioSphere team to move at great speed as we develop our Swarm satellite IoT gateways to serve the needs of a diverse range of industries around the world.
Notwithstanding the skill and tenacity of our Business Development Team, I am astonished how many organizations a small start up like ioSphere has already managed to collaborate with. Right now our gateway is being installed on a large earth mover and a large electricity grid transformer. Recently ioSphere gateways were installed on a large solar array and a vineyard weather station. As far as we know all of those were world firsts. In the new year our Swarm gateway is going on a fishing boat, a log hauler, a large road truck, a private plane and a water processing plant.
There are other advantages to being in Christchurch too. First of all there is the Callaghan Innovation team based here, who have been truly amazing in terms of grant funding and customer introductions. Also there’s the venerable Tait Communications who have been training radio frequency engineers, inside their company and at Canterbury University, since the 1960s. While in most cities around the world, finding good RF engineering talent is increasingly hard, in Christchurch we are surrounded by it. The depth of engineering talent here allows a small company like ioSphere to undertake some genuinely ground-breaking development around the connection of remote industrial machines to the new Swarm network.
Christchurch might not be silicon valley, but it is a stunningly beautiful part of the world to work in, full of immensely talented people and successful companies, surrounded by world class companies operating in every type of environment you could imagine. It feels like just the right place to be working on satellite IoT.