Business continue to benefit from Dunedin's Gigatown win, with $60,000 in start-up grants presented to three tech-savvy firms on Friday.
The grants are part of a $250,000 GigStart fund bankrolled by internet infrastructure companies Chorus and Alcatel Lucent as part of Dunedin's Gigatown win.
Friday's grants followed the $47,000 given to three Dunedin businesses in July's first GigStart funding round.
Each of this month's recipients had pitched their new-to-market ideas to a ''Dragon's Den''-style judging panel, and each received $20,000.
They were:
• Jack Pivac, from Blue Twist, for cloud-based systems for the medical sector.
• Derek Morrison, from Photo Toolbox Ltd, for a cloud-based digital asset management system.
• Greg Fahey, from Bison Group Ltd, for a cloud-based data management system for the logistics sector.
Bison Group chief executive Mr Fahey said the grant was a coup for his company and would ''kick-start'' its plans to take its software product to the world.
The harbour basin firm specialised in solutions for weighing shipping containers - something that would become mandatory in July next year.
To complement its present products it had developed a smartphone app for ''collecting, managing and communicating weight and other information from the packing point''.
But the app was basic and would benefit from being redeveloped, while the company had also wanted to build a cloud-based database the app and shipping companies could both connect to, Mr Fahey said.
If it could get the new app and cloud database right, there was a worldwide market the company could firmly lodge itself in, he said.
Any success the Dunedin-based Bison Group had on a global scale would have very real benefits for the city's own economy, he said.
It ''absolutely'' planned to employ more Dunedin people as the company grew, Mr Fahey said, and the grant would help it achieve that.
''This is a global opportunity. We're currently talking with dealers in over 20 countries about distributing our weighing hardware.''
The new software products were a natural extension of Bison's traditional products and could be sold through the same channels, providing considerable growth for the company, he said.
''We've already got a small Dunedin-based team and we're looking to grow that.''
Being in a city with gigabit internet facilities had helped those plans, Mr Fahey said.
''This is an internet-based platform that will sit online. So the ability to build it and then support it in a high-speed broadband environment gives us a real advantage.
''Having an ultra-fast and reliable broadband network to underpin the software, we think, gives us a big advantage. It does give us confidence.''
The third round of GigStart funding will open early next year.
