Co-venturing Wellington and Auckland universities will rub collegiate shoulders with world’s major production engineer
General Motors subsidiary Holden’s arrival in Newsroom as founder-backer of the online information enterprise is GM’s second venture into the New Zealand information sector.
It was New Zealand’s major data processing proprietor when it owned Databank through another of its subsidiaries, Electronic Data Systems.
Databank at this time was considered the southern hemisphere’s pre-eminent non-governmental data processing operation in terms of capacity.
GM’s return this year to the New Zealand information sector carries value through the early involvement in it also of the University of Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington.
GM internationally is accelerating its recruitment of information technology graduates and its ground-floor involvement with the two universities will give it a special advantage in talent-spotting.
The auto manufacturer originally entered the information sector when it acquired Electronic Data Systems from Ross Perot of US presidential race fame.
With Electronic Data Systems now came New Zealand’s Databank at that time the world’s first and most successful nationwide cheque-clearing cooperative.
General Motors began to shed its non-core investments such as Electronic Data Systems and thus Databank as Asian manufacturers continued to pour on the competition.
Its new cat’s paw into the public dissemination sector of the information business in New Zealand through the Newsroom co-seeding also presents a valuable opportunity to the two universities involved, the ones in Auckland and Wellington.
This will be to take advantage of the commercial collegiate opportunity of rubbing shoulders as co-venturers with a research and development investing production engineer of this magnitude.
A constant problem for New Zealand universities has been to get on a working level with this category of production engineering multinational.
The indirect solution via the Newsroom joint involvement indicates a working opportunity that has consistently eluded New Zealand universities in the co-development sphere.
If the association looks a fruitful creative mix in automotive/academic terms then the news venture promoters could well find themselves with sufficient additional investment allowing them to take their foot off the paywall accelerator.
New Zealand browsers continue to exhibit a reluctance to pay for a service that they consider part of the free model.
| From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk | Fidy 17 March 2017 ||
