New Zealand has long struggled with a geographic weakness, namely a position on the globe so remote that Tasmania features almost as prominently on a world map as the Land of the Long White Cloud.

The isolation extends beyond just the geographical, with the country and its nearest neighbour, Australia, sticking out like an anglophile sore thumb amid the diaspora of Asian nations, all of which have more in common with each other than New Zealand.

But while technology has the potential to bridge this geographic gap, with submarine internet cables and the like, in a somewhat ironic twist it is technology firms turning this splendid isolation into lemonade.

Well, not an actual sugary citrus drink (which is bad for you, don’t you know!), but a Petri dish for software testing, according to a recent article in the Economist.

The appeal of New Zealand is that it allows software makers to launch new products or features in a small isolated market to see how they will fare before opening them up to a wider audience in the United States and farther afield.

New Zealand’s advantages also include a broad cultural overlap with these markets, a relatively high level of technology adoption, and a populace that speaks English -- though it depends on whom you ask.

Start-up app developers are obvious users of New Zealand as a test bed, but many of the bigger tech players do too. According to the article, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo have all launched products in New Zealand and tweaked them before rolling them out to the wider international market.

For New Zealand, there are some juicy spill-over benefits from being a digital guinea pig that extend beyond being the first to test features like disappearing messages on Facebook à la Snapchat. It has created a high paying industry in our own backyard, albeit a small one, with test analysts raking in $85 an hour. On a full-time employment basis that adds up to just under $180,000 a year.

This is a timely reminder about how factors that were once thought to be a disadvantage can be turned into strategic advantages with the application of human ingenuity and markets. Now, if only some smart people would apply their minds to other parts of the economy to turn the useless into the useful, say, bovine effluent for example.