High dollar, natural disasters blamed for international visitors spending less

International visitor spending dropped to $5.6 billion for the year to June, but the government says the fall is not as large as might have been feared after the Christchurch earthquake and Chilean ash cloud. And as Western tourists shun New Zealand, the Asian market continues to go from strength to strength.

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Telly industry touts big growth as sign of things to come

Telly executives are touting healthy growth figures in the year to date and they’re counting on revenues to rise further with key events such as Rugby World Cup and the election still to come. Free-to-air television industry body ThinkTV says annual revenue of $613 million translated into growth of 5.1 percent and is a “strong indicator of the confidence advertisers place on the medium as the economic recovery begins to take hold”.

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Massey’s ecentre chalks up 10 years in the commercialisation biz

Massey University business incubator ecentre celebrated its 10th anniversary last week, with chief executive Steve Corbett setting an ambitious five-year goal of tripling its revenue from alumni companies to $100 million. We also caught up with one of its biggest export success stories, Unleashed Software.

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Petone will do just fine for IRL, thanks

When your greatest assets are human, you don’t force high-performing, collaborative teams to uproot their lives and move to somewhere else in New Zealand. So, writes Patrick Smellie, while neither Auckland nor Canterbury can be faulted as venues for scientific collaboration, there’s no justification for uprooting Industrial Research Limited from Wellington.

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Innovation of the day: The toaster

Prior to the advent of the pop-up toaster, people toasted bread by placing it in a metal frame and holding it over a fire. How archaic.

Do you have an innovation to share? Enter the Innovator Awards and you could be up in lights.

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