IN MEDICINE, trials are conducted on guinea pigs, rats, mice and rabbits. In digital businesses, tests are performed on New Zealanders. Their country is proving the perfect location for software firms, social networks and app developers discreetly to try out and refine their products. Take Microsoft, which last year made New Zealand its first test market for Sway, a new app that helps users create websites, and which has since been released into other markets. Other big technology firms, including Facebook and Yahoo, also use New Zealand as a development lab, as do games companies and small startups.

Firms preparing to launch new products need to discover and fix any bugs before releasing them, and to see whether their servers can support lots of users at the same time. It could prove fatal to a young firm if problems emerge only after the products are up for sale on the Apple and Google app stores. Developers could concentrate their testing on, say, one American state or city, but customers for digital products are so prone to sharing things among their social-media contacts that it would be hard to keep the trial under wraps for long, says Ivan Kirigin, a software entrepreneur.

New Zealand’s relative isolation means that if a product needs to be modified significantly to fix faults or make it more appealing to consumers, word of its teething troubles is less likely to spread, thereby discouraging customers elsewhere from trying the improved version. If a firm finds that a particular product, or a new feature added to an existing one, is a resounding flop in New Zealand, it can quietly be dropped without having much effect on the company’s overall reputation. Facebook tried offering Kiwis disappearing messages (in the vein of Snapchat) and a tool that let users pay a small fee to promote their status updates to friends. It abandoned plans to roll these out elsewhere after New Zealanders nixed them. “If you mess up and burn that market, it’s not that big of a deal,” says David Stewart of Fade, a photo-sharing firm.

Apart from being technophiles, and always up for a challenge, New Zealanders speak English and enjoy similar levels of affluence, and similar tastes, to Westerners in larger markets. The population of 4.5m is also large enough to provide decent enough sample sizes for product trials, says Mr Stewart.

Digital firms have other preferred locations for discreet trials. Chile is a popular test market for apps in Latin America: it is small and relatively affluent, and speaks Spanish, another world language. But few tech firms like having their test markets publicised. It is in no scientist’s interest for the guinea pigs to realise they are being experimented on.