Nelson: The new Silicon Valley?
A group of Nelson entrepreneurs says the city has what it takes to become New Zealand’s answer to Silicon Valley.
Markus Erdmann said community group local.foundation was set up after last year’s StartUp School programme.
The group consists of people that have started businesses or are in some way affiliated or interested in the business world.
Erdmann said local.foundation had been meeting every Wednesday, hosting different events within the group.
‘‘We want to go a step further with our group and make Nelson the start-up hub of New Zealand, that’s really our aim.
‘‘Nelson is the centre of New Zealand. If you look at what’s driving people to places like Silicon Valley, it is actually what we have.’’
Erdmann said a lot of people that are entrepreneurial are adventurers and would benefit from the geological placing of Nelson.
‘‘Why not Nelson? If we start here and pull the interest to Nelson we can actually make it the new Silicon Valley.
‘‘We have a void to fill, there isn’t one business hub yet in New Zealand.’’
As part of the wider aim of the group, Erdmann said they were hosting the first of public events tomorrow.
He said they had run an event before where they invited a business person to talk about their organisation and their background.
‘‘So what we’ve done is we’ve invited more people to talk in a more structured way.’’
Erdmann said they invited Nelson business people to show others that anyone can start a business.
‘‘If we start with people that are local to the Nelson and Tasman region, who have businesses that everybody could grasp and can talk about how they go about it, that might actually encourage people.
‘‘They’ve all done it in Nelson and they have all started businesses that you and I can do too.’’
On the speakers list are, among others, Emma Saunders from the Green Collective and Paul Hampton from Victory Boxing.
Brett Jennings saw something similar in Nelson, and said the light was bright green in colour.
‘‘We saw it at low altitude between Grampians Hill and the hospital tracking south over Waimea Rd.’’
Dr Claire Bretherton from the Carter Observatory in Wellington said while they don’t monitor meteors, they do look into any reports they receive.
‘‘We do often get phone calls from people that have seen something, and we look at those reports and let people know if what they saw could be plausible,’’ she said.
A police spokeswoman said a call just before 8pm may have been related to the incident, when a Wainuiomata resident reported seeing what they thought was a flare.
The police boat, Lady Elizabeth, was deployed, but found no vessels in distress.
Christchurch residents were treated to a spectacle of their own on Tuesday afternoon, when a tow balloon, launched by Nasa earlier in the day from Wanaka, was spotted.