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Geoff Letcher, owner of Pukekohe-based Quadbeam Technologies, was a lonesome but successful salesman.

Quadbeam’s Suspended Solids Sensor is now sold in 14 countries – and Letcher’s hours of door-knocking in faraway places has paid off.

"The market has changed rapidly. Where people didn’t want to talk to us, we now have them calling us," says Letcher, whose family bought Quadbeam in late 2009.

"It’s been 'bloody' hard work. A lot of travelling and a lot of cold calling and finally we are a good news story.

"The business has grown three times since 2009 and I expect it to more than double by mid-2019,’" says Letcher.

Source:  AucklandNZ

Ambassador Scott P. Brown strongly welcomes President Trump signing the Knowledgeable Innovators and Worthy Investors Act, or KIWI Act, into law today in Washington, D.C. The KIWI Act will allow eligible New Zealand nationals to enter the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act as nonimmigrant traders and investors.

“This is a historic day for the United States and New Zealand partnership. Today’s announcement is a testament to the long-standing friendship and economic cooperation between the United States and New Zealand,” Ambassador Brown said. “With this addition of New Zealand to our eligible Treaty Traders and Investors visa program, we look forward to even greater bilateral commerce and entrepreneurship. The KIWI Act received overwhelming, bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress, showing the broad and unshakable support for the U.S.-New Zealand partnership. This legislation demonstrates the United States’ continuing recognition of the value of Kiwi investment and innovation.”

Source: U.S. Embassy & Consulate in New Zealand

Nintex, a leader in intelligent process automation (IPA) has acquired Promapp, a business process management software company.

Promapp, with headquarters in Auckland, is being used by more than 500 public and private sector organisations worldwide successfully map and manage their processes realising process improvements through intuitive, powerful tools used by teams every day.

Promapp customers include Coca Cola, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald’s and Toyota.

“Our acquisition of Promapp creates tremendous opportunities for companies to visually map and better manage every business process,” says Nintex CEO Eric Johnson, in a statement.

“By bringing together the power of the Nintex Platform with Promapp, our customers and partners can easily design, deploy and manage their business processes and address process automation scenarios that have been difficult or expensive to solve.”

Source: Computerworld

Endace, a world leader in high-speed network recording, playback and analytics hosting, and Ixia, a Keysight Business, announced today that they have jointly signed a technology partnership agreement. The partnership will focus on complementary and integrated solutions that enable joint customers to better manage the performance and security of their networks.

The discovery of data breaches continues to be problematic for organizations. According to Ponemon Research, it takes an average of 191 days to discover a data breach. In 60 percent of cases, according to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, the discovery is made by someone outside of the organization.

In order to combat the issues surrounding the discovery of network anomalies, the combined solutions from Ixia and Endace provide enterprises with greater visibility into network activity and give analysts the detailed, packet-level evidence they need to go back-in-time to investigate and resolve security and network or application performance issues quickly and conclusively.

Source: Endace

The U.S. House unanimously passed the Knowledgeable Innovators and Worthy Investors (KIWI) Act (S. 2245), a bipartisan bill authored by Senators Mazie K. Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) to extend trade and investor visas to New Zealand citizens to increase international business between the United States and New Zealand. The KIWI Act was passed by the Senate last month, and will now be sent to the President for his consideration.

“New Zealand visitors supported over 2,000 Hawaii jobs last year alone and continue to build on our strong cultural and economic ties to the Indo-Pacific region,” Senator Hirono said. “By extending trade and investment visas, the KIWI Act will help spur further job creation in Hawaii and across the United States, and reaffirm the importance of our close and longstanding relations with New Zealand.”

“We are delighted that Congress has passed the KIWI Act,” New Zealand’s Ambassador to the United States Tim Groser said. “Once signed into law by the President, the bill will make it easier for New Zealanders to grow and expand their businesses in the U.S., helping to strengthen our two economies and to deepen our bilateral relationship. We would like to thank all who supported the KIWI Act, and in particular to acknowledge the work of Senators Mazie Hirono and Mike Lee as well as Chairman Grassley in the Senate and Representatives Darrell Issa, Kevin Brady, and Rick Larsen as well as Chairman Goodlatte in the House for their collective effort to advance this important piece of legislation.”

“The Chamber of Commerce Hawaii welcomes the passage of the KIWI Act to extend E-1 and E-2 temporary visas to New Zealand to promote trade and investment in the United States,” Chamber of Commerce Hawaii President & CEO Sherry Menor-McNamara said. “Increasing access to E-1 and E-2 visas will increase the ability of New Zealand businesses to grow, trade with, and work and invest in the United States, which will have a reciprocal benefit to our nation and Hawaii’s economy.”

“Americans and New Zealanders collaborate closely in business, technology, research, security and entertainment, yet the lack of access to trader and investor visas has been a serious impediment to increased economic growth and greater bilateral cooperation,” said United States| New Zealand Council Chairman Edward Farrell. “The United States| New Zealand Council applauds the passage of the KIWI Act by Congress to resolve this issue. Extending E-1 and E-2 visas to New Zealanders would significantly increase bilateral business activity, encourage greater investment and economic growth in the United States, create more American jobs and related benefits, and strengthen US-NZ bilateral relationship.”

The passage of the KIWI ACT comes as the United States and New Zealand marked a milestone 75 years of diplomatic relations last year. The bill would allow New Zealand citizens to apply for trade (E-1) and investor (E-2) temporary entry visas.

New Zealand is one of our nation’s important strategic and economic partners. New Zealand is a member of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance together with the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada and Australia and is the only member of the alliance whose citizens are not eligible to apply for E-1 and E-2 visas. Total foreign direct investment from New Zealand to the United States is valued at over half a billion dollars. However, New Zealand businesses have found that the lack of access to E-1 and E-2 visas has hampered their ability to increase trade and investment in the United States. By allowing New Zealanders to apply for these visas, the KIWI Act aims to expand business and investment opportunities between the two nations.

The KIWI Act is also cosponsored by Senators Tim Kaine (D-Va.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), and Patty Murray (D-Wash.). Representatives Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) sponsored the House companion legislation, H.R. 3324.

Accounting software company Xero has inked a deal with US payroll platform Gusto and has pulled the pin on the development of its own payroll product.

As a consequence of stopping its own US payroll product, Xero will incur a NZ$16.2 million non-cash impairment of assets. The adjustment would be recognised in the first half of the 2019 financial year.

Xero said the move would allow the company to redeploy resources in other markets and projects.

The company said the alliance allows Xero to better serve the US market with a full-service payroll offering that meets the needs of customers working across 50 US states, each with different payroll tax requirements.

Source: NZ Herald

The addition of two more US patents to ARANZ Medical’s portfolio of skin surface measurement products further strengthen and secure the company’s IP and product lines.

ARANZ Medical’s Silhouette solution uses innovative technology to drive better health outcomes for patients and provides considerable efficiencies over other common skin assessment solutions for clinical practice and research organizations alike.

The latest patents (9,955,910 and 10,013,527) help to secure the company’s market-leading position in automatically assessing an anatomical surface feature and securely managing information related to this.

ARANZ Medical CEO, Bruce Davey says, “Our growing portfolio of patents is testament to the unique position we hold in the area of wound and skin surface measurement. The growing awareness of the benefits of our systems, customer acceptance of our easy to use products, and the growing strength of our IP portfolio provides us with confidence to continue investing in new innovations for our product lines.”

Source: ARANZ Medical

Orbica's Kurt Janssen, one of the Supersize SME businesses, updates Larry Williams on his company's progress.

Kurt is in San Francisco with his mentor, John Holt from Kiwi Landing Pad, which is a company dedicated to getting Kiwi tech businesses to connect with like-minded businesses in the US.

Listen to Kurt Janssen's interview with Larry Williams.

New Zealand’s Promapp Solutions – an industry-leading provider of cloud-based business process management (BPM) software for creating and managing business processes online – is expanding its U.S. presence, opening its second U.S. office in Austin, Texas.

Promapp already has seven employees in the new Austin office, with plans to add other sales and marketing positions in the near future. The company is currently recruiting for several positions, including a Marketing Operations Manager, and additional Account Executives and Sales Development Representatives.

Source: Business Wire

Auckland-based Skellerup wants to take the technical expertise of the liquid silicone rubber maker to a wider market, saying the product is ideal for "sterile environments and use in high-precision medical and consumer products". The shares dipped 0.5 percent to $1.93, and are near the $2.07 record reached last month.

Source: Scoop