Tech Summit 2024 – It’s a Wrap!

Our 21st Tech Summit was hosted at Te Pae Convention Centre on Friday 27th September. It was so wonderful to celebrate our 21st Tech Summit with just under 700 members of the tech community. We hope you had as much fun as we did!

We explored our founding stories and unveiled our new brand look and feel. It looks like you guys were pretty stoked too!

Check out the Media Wall gallery

Thanks to Dark Matter for the media wall this year!

Check out our photo gallery

Thanks to Jonny from Peanut Productions for the gorgeous photos!

Our Exhibitor space

Thanks to Cyber CX for their support of our Exhibition Space

Our three stages this year were Middleware Auditorium MCed by Kiwi Icon Jeremy Corbett, Digital Futures Technical Stage MCed by business consultant Vaughan Luckman and Crew Technology Networking and Interactive Stage, MCed by Lisa Donning, Deloitte senior business analyst and facilitated by James Pearson from OK How?.

The Networking and Interactive Stage was a new addition this year and was designed to help our community make more important connections by taking part in discussions and activities about technology at tables.

Also new to this year was the Startup Zone thanks to Platinum Sponsor ASX – Australian Securities Exchange. Five lucky startups got to join ASX in the foyer area. Congratulations again to V-Quest, Payroll Intelligence, Grid Share Ltd, Contented and oVRcome.

We were able to take local MP for Christchurch East Reuben Davidson on a tour  to meet these innovative businesses and wow our futurist keynote speaker Melissa Reynolds-Clark too.

The day started off with a welcome from Ngāi Tūāhuriri, opening addresses from Canterbury Tech GM Louisa Taylor who revealed the new Canterbury Tech brand and the CEO of NZ Tech Graeme Mueller who talked about the importance of advocacy for our industry. Opening Keynote speaker Melissa Clark-Reynolds helped us rethink the future of ownership challenging the audience whether a whale could own a patent and whether ice was artificial if it wasn’t created by a frozen pond and closing keynote Graham Grant, CEO of Seequent inspired us to think about the value and impact of connections and how a connection made by Canterbury Tech’s previous GM Neil Hamilton at the time  had lead to an amazing collaboration to develop Visible Geology, an  app made in collaboration with CerebralFix changing global education in earth sciences.

We had two speakers travel from around the globe to be at Tech Summit. Grant Patterson popped over from Australia to talk RAG with Eduard Liebenberger. Grant also ran a pre-summit workshop on Generative AI and Ruud van der Pas from Oracle flew from Holland to join us.

There was plenty of time for networking throughout the day from

• XO recruitment Morning tea included a networking session run by Publica’s Michelle Shirtcliffe and Kelsie Inglis
• TTC Global  Lunch was a lovely hour with plenty of time to just eat and connect
• Eagle Technology Afternoon tea included icecream to take us through the rest of the day

Elle Archer, Chair of the Māori Tech Association settled the mauri for the day and we all headed off to enjoy drinks and nibbles thanks to Enable Fibre Broadband.

Hope you had a great time!