Ep.61 – From Caravan To Global Impact

Andre Rowell

In 1998, you’d be at the cutting edge of things if you had a 56kb dial up connection. To download a song via Napster might take an hour all going well and, if you were one of those progressive companies to have a website, it might take you 6 months to get it manually listed on the dominant search engine of the time, Yahoo. It was in this year and out of a caravan in Hamilton that Damon Kelly formed the tech company Enlighten Designs which today is NZ’s largest website design, systems design and software development companies – employing over 70 staff.

They work for Microsoft around the world, not just in NZ – specifically on its data journalism project for Associated Press to bring interactive data graphics about the US-election to American news outlets. We talk to Damon about his “overnight success” and how companies in New Zealand are about to help shape the world of innovation from anywhere.