Tech Chomp

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner

2011-12-13T15:22:00.000+11:00

There is a new federal government agency in town called the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC). The OAIC was established as part of major changes to Australia's freedom of information law, and brings together, for the first time, functions relating to freedom of information (FOI), privacy, and information policy. The OAIC's tag line "protecting information rights – advancing information policy" encapsulates those three functions, which is also represented symbolically in the three intertwined swirls in the OAIC's logo (shown above).

I have the privilege of being one of 10 members of the newly-formed OAIC Industry Advisory Committee (IAC), which met for the first time last week in Canberra. The purpose of the IAC is to advise, Prof John McMillan AO, the Australian Information Commissioner, in the area information policy.

I'm very excited about this opportunity. I see it as a natural outgrowth of my work on public sector information (PSI), which started with my involvement with the Government 2.0 taskforce two years ago. As we concluded in the Engage Report (2MB PDF), government-held information is a national asset. Like any other valuable resource, especially one that taxpayers have funded, we need to optimize its economic and social value. This is where good information policy matters.

I'm looking forward to working with the OAIC on shaping policies that unleash the value in our national information assets.

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

2011-11-12T09:23:00.001+11:00

In amongst all the technical workshops at yesterday’s Google Developer Day in Sydney was a panel discussion on venture capital and entrepreneurialism. Getting an idea off the ground takes as much business judgment as it does technical know-how, so we brought in a few experts that have been around the block with a start-up or five.

Rebekah Campbell, founder of Posse told us how it took one-and-a-half years and “more than 1000 meetings” to raise enough money to get her idea off the ground. She talked about the various forms of funding sources, such as government grants.

Many in the audience asked Mick Liubinskas, co-founder of Australian angel investor group Pollenizer, about the do’s and don’ts of attracting investment. His advice? Do be stubborn about sticking to your vision. But don’t wait forever to launch. A fast launch is essential to testing your idea or concept. And don’t be so inflexible to not consider a different approach.

Scott Farquhar from Atlassian told us about the importance of keeping focus and how making lots of mistakes are okay (such as opening up, and then quickly closing, a New York office after realising it was in the wrong place). Just make sure the mistakes aren’t fatal ones, he says.

What came out strongly in the session is that you need to take the leap and not be afraid of failure. While Australians celebrate success, we do not do so well at embracing those who tried and failed. Business people who lead failed companies are too often tainted with innuendo of wrongdoing, when we should look to them as pioneers who can bring wisdom to their next venture. At Google we say: “fail fast and iterate.” We cultivate an environment where failure is fine, as long as you do it quickly and learn from it.

Behind most people’s stories of commercial success are often a history of start-ups which didn’t go the way they intended. Just ask Pollenizer’s Mick, who has worked on 150 businesses - not all of them hitting the mark.

At the event I asked how many people in the room wanted to do a start-up one day. Three-quarters of the 100+ crowd put up their hands. So the good news is that there’s certainly no shortage of budding Aussie entrepreneurs wanting to give it a go.

Originally posted on the Google Australia blog

You cannot innovate without failure

2011-11-08T14:11:00.003+11:00

Australia has had mixed success when it comes to being a nation of innovators. A recent federal government report concludes that while Aussies are great at incremental innovation - which primarily means adapting overseas innovations - we fall behind when it comes to creating our own opportunities and bringing new things to an international marketplace.

Our bias towards incremental innovation is nothing to be ashamed of. Australia's resource and agricultural industries are some of the most competitive in the world due to our ability to improve existing technologies. And despite our country's size, we are blessed with the people, education and capital to foster success. So if it is not resources that are holding us back, is there something about our culture that discourages that big-picture thinking?

From my experience, what may be holding us back from innovation is our attitude towards failure. It might sound counterintuitive, but big innovation and failure are intimately intertwined. Any innovation is essentially a market experiment and as with any experiment, it carries considerable risk and high failure rates. Innovators in America, and particularly Silicon Valley, understand this only too well.

“A distinguishing characteristic of the US economy, of US culture, if you like, is failure is never permanent. You're not kicked out of the game,” said Harvard professor and an expert on entrepreneurialism, Bill Sahlman.

“As a matter of fact, if you are part of a failed venture, as long as you didn't lie, cheat or steal, you're considered 'experienced'.”

While Australians are comfortable with success, we do not do so well at embracing failure. Australians can be harsh on entrepreneurs who try and fail. For example, business people who lead failed companies are too often tainted with innuendo of wrongdoing, even if there is no proof of doing so. The moral taint of trying and failing in Australia is high, and because you cannot innovate without failure, many great ideas do not even get off the ground.

Recently, I was asked to fill a questionnaire in order to join an Australian advisory board. Of the 10 questions I was asked, there were multiple ones about whether I was involved with any companies that had gone into bankruptcy or receivership. Having spent years in America where being part of a dot-com bust was worn as a badge of honour, the contrast in having to disclose bankruptcy or receivership like a criminal record, rather than as an opportunity to talk about experience, was stark.

In that environment, why would would any Australian university graduate want to pursue a start-up and risk a career that has not yet even begun? As a culture we need to embrace failure as much as we embrace success.

The publication of Steve Jobs' biography revisits the time when he was pushed out of Apple - a company he co-founded. It was no doubt a difficult time for the entrepreneur, but instead of being tainted by this perceived failure, he was able to use that experience to move on and eventually rejoin the company, building it into the success it is today.

If you look into the history of many innovators - past and present - you will often find similarly rich examples of failure being a pit stop on the way to great success.

At Google, an appetite for failure is built by the way we do things. We are in an incredibly competitive industry and you need to keep innovating or you will become irrelevant to users and the market. How we deal with that it is through our culture of innovation, staying agile, taking risks, tolerating failure and learning from every mistake.

Google Wave, a product that tried to reinvent the way we collaborate, was developed by the Australian engineering team. While it didn't work out as a standalone product, the experience gave us a new understanding of how people use technology to collaborate. Many of the features we developed for Wave can be found in other Google products today.

Failure doesn't have to be expensive, it can be cheap and fast. At Google we have a saying: “Fail fast and iterate.” This is something we need to train all entrepreneurs to do. This creates an environment where people are encouraged to tackle large problems and take those big bets. If you have a work culture where bringing your mistakes to the table every week is a normal thing to do, it feels less like failing and more like learning.

The upside is that it has never been a better time to innovate. For Australians, the internet has made the tyranny of distance almost irrelevant and opened up a global market for our ideas.

Last month Julpan, a company founded in New York by an Australian-educated engineer, was bought by Twitter for an undisclosed sum. The fact that the company was only one-year-old shows how great ideas can quickly have enormous reach. While there are other reasons why start-ups like Julpan choose to head abroad rather than stick around and grow locally, they all point to a less than optimal culture on innovation.

Australia has the smarts to become a hotbed of innovation. We just need to create an environment where it is OK to take the risk.

Originally posted as an SMH opinion piece.

PS: I chose this image for this post because I think these words are good advice for any entrepreneur.

What's killing Australian innovation?

2011-10-07T17:41:00.000+11:00

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas held at the spectacular Sydney Opera House. My co-panelists were Martin Rogers, biomed entrepreneur and founder of Prima Biomed, and Prof Alec Cameron, Dean of the Australian School of Business. Our topic: “What's killing Australian innovation?”

My view is that the future of innovation in Australia is neither as dark as that topic suggests, nor is it all sunny. A recent Federal Government report concludes that we’re very good at incremental innovation, which essentially means adapting overseas innovations. Yet despite being blessed with ample talent and capital, plus a reasonably strong education system, Australia produces relatively few global innovations. Arguably, countries with much smaller populations, such as Finland, Switzerland, Israel, and Taiwan, have performed much better.

So what’s holding us back then?

From my experience, what may be holding us back from achieving our innovation potential is our attitude towards failure. It might sound counter-intuitive, but big innovation and failure are intimately intertwined. All innovations are essentially experiments which carry the prospect of failure. Innovators in the US, and particularly Silicon Valley, where I lived for 16 years, understand this only too well.

Sadly, Steve Jobs, one of the greatest innovators of our time, passed away yesterday. I watched his 2005 Stanford University commencement speech (well worth the time) in which he describes how “failure” has shaped his life for the better. In particular, his getting fired from Apple, the company he founded, liberated him to think afresh, and start, not one, but two new companies, Next and Pixar.

Australians love success, but we hate failure. As a result, we can be very harsh on entrepreneurs who try and fail. Yet if you look into the history of many innovators, just like Steve Jobs, you will find many examples of failure being a way point on the road to success.

It’s high time we started to embrace failure as much as we embrace success.

Broadband pays

2011-09-28T21:55:00.002+10:00

New research released by Ericsson, Arthur D. Little and Chalmers University of Technology today shows that doubling a country's broadband speed boosts its GDP by 0.3%, and that the benefits accrue with subsequent doublings.

What does with mean for Australia with its trillion dollar econonmy ($1039B in 2009, $925B in 2010)? According to Measurement Lab, the median download speed in Australia is a mere 4.23Mbps. This means that Australia could double its broadband speeds four times (4 -> 8 -> 16 -> 32 -> 64Mbps) and still be under the 100Mbps download speeds that the National Broadband Network (NBN) will deliver. Such a 16-fold increase in broadband speeds would amount to ~1.2% of GDP growth stimulus, or ~$12B per year. If so, the $43B NBN would pay for itself in under 4 years. Even a modest 0.5% increase in GDP (~$5B/year) would pay for it within a decade.

For those of you still wondering what we're going to do with all that bandwidth, take a look at this chart plotting TV image resolution by year.

This shows the evolution from the original 405 line system in 1936 to 1080p in 2004, a 10-fold increase in image size from 0.2 Megapixels to 2 Megapixels (data here). What's interesting is that the real action has happened in the last decade, with the advent of high definition (HD) TV, first 720p and more recently 1080p. Further, the TV/video industry is hardly about to stop innovating any time soon; the next standard, is likely to be so-called "4K" with whopping 12 Megapixel images!

And video will be just one of many applications that benefit from faster broadband.

Open Technology Foundation launched today

2011-09-14T22:11:00.003+10:00

In Canberra today, I attended the launch of the Open Technology Foundation (OTF), an organisation which is dedicated to advancing the uptake of open technologies in government across Australia and New Zealand.

The OTF will focus on researching open technologies and how they are adopted, with the goal of delivering practical programs that enable governments to confidently implement open solutions. One interesting trend from overseas is that governments are increasingly choosing open technologies to meet citizens' growing expectations for online services at significantly reduced costs. One of the first OTF projects will target local Aussie and Kiwi governments.

At Google we are really passionate about openness. Quite simply, open source software (like Android and Chrome) benefits the whole internet: it provides the platform upon which people can innovate further, and create new systems. This helps to build a really robust ecosystem of technological innovation and fosters an environment of information sharing.

I wish the Open Technology Foundation well and look forward to hearing their voice in debates around openness and innovation.

Why NOT study an MBA

2011-09-09T18:33:00.003+10:00

Image by Vela

Recently, a senior engineer at Google asked me for a reference to support his application to an MBA program. It was not the first time I’ve written such a reference, but it got me thinking about the pros and cons of engineers trundling off to business school. There’s certainly lots out there on why you should study for an MBA, but not much on why you should not study for an MBA. So, at the risk of offending my friends and colleagues with MBAs, let me give you some reasons.

I’ve never attended a business school, but this has not stopped me from starting and running companies. In my opinion, most smart, experienced engineers probably already possess the acumen they need to be successful in business. Further, there is the opportunity cost of pursuing an MBA, and finally there is the financial cost. After all, the time and money spent on an MBA could be spent building your business.

I asked my colleague why he wanted to pursue an MBA. First, he thought it would be valuable for the professional networks he would forge. He admitted that the business knowledge he thought we would gain was a secondary consideration. Second, the MBA would give him greater credibility with potential investors to secure funding to start a company.

There is no question that in business the old adage “it’s not what you know, but who you know” rings as true as ever. But is an MBA really the most efficient way to build your network? I would argue, “no”. For someone reasonably adept at plugging into social networks, both online and offline, there are countless networking alternatives to an MBA. From online social networking sites, such as LinkedIn and Google+, to offline networking events, such as your local Mobile Monday or the local Silicon Beach/Alley/Forest/etc. entrepreneurs group.

So what about credibility with investors? There’s a perception that one always needs to raise capital in order to start a company. In reality, chasing funding is often the last thing entrepreneurs should be worrying about. Capital-light businesses, such as online businesses, can often be bootstrapped using a credit card (or two).

If you’re an engineer, consider building a proof of concept to validate the idea first, and getting some real users or customers. Then, and only then, seek capital, by which time, with any luck, your business might even command a non-zero valuation. And if you're not an engineer, team up with an engineer.

Finally, ask yourself "why do you really want an MBA?" It might be because you feel that somehow you’re not ready to start a business and the MBA will prepare you. If so, my advice is, don’t procrastinate further, just do it! If you fail, just fail quickly, learn from your mistakes, and try again. The experience you gain will be worth a thousand lectures. And if you succeed, I look forward to hearing from you.

Innovation and the importance of failure

2011-08-25T13:14:00.000+10:00

Last night I was interviewed by Paul Barclay on Australia Talks on ABC Radio National on Google's culture of innovation and the importance of failure. I could write all day about why failure is actually a GOOD THING (perhaps a future blog post), but here is the 4-minute audio version. The full show can be found here.

And while on the subject of innovation, I'll be talking at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas on the controversial topic of what's killing Australian Innovation at the Sydney Opera House on October 2nd. Come along and join in the fun.

Net speed the key to transforming lives

2011-07-04T13:55:00.009+10:00

The web enables access and community at the touch of the keyboard: it's a radically democratic and inclusive technology. So what does unprecedented access to information and communications mean for Australia?

A BBC survey last year on attitudes towards Internet access found that Australians are among the most firmly convinced that Internet access should be a fundamental right, with 85 percent agreeing that this is the case. I believe that one of the key opportunities for Australia, now and in the future, is making smart and strategic investments in high-speed broadband. We need a world-class infrastructure to anchor our digital economy. Bringing super-fast broadband to people across Australia will open up huge opportunities for individuals, communities, and businesses.

One of the primary benefits of high-speed broadband is speed. But why does faster internet matter even more than the access we have already? The answer is this: speed drastically affects our experience of web sites and services. It turns out that we do much less online when internet speeds are slow. I know I get frustrated and leave, but even if you’re more zen than I am, traffic data shows that you will spend less time on websites when they’re slow.

According to Aberdeen Group, a one-second delay in website load time means that 11 percent more people leave a website than they would otherwise. Imagine how many leave after three or five or 10 seconds? This works in reverse, too; people spend more time on websites when they load quickly. We shrunk the Google Maps home page by 30 percent so it loaded faster; traffic was significantly more. All of these milliseconds and percentage points really add up to success or failure for businesses and website owners.

Access to broadband becomes all the more important as Australia’s companies move online and find new ways to do business and reach customers. Take, for example, livestock auction site Auctions Plus, which allows farmers to view, bid on, and transport livestock with the click of a mouse. This isn’t what usually springs to mind when we think of online shopping, but it’s a beautiful example of what the digital economy and high speed Internet access can mean.

In a country as big as this one, a site such as Auctions Plus makes a big difference to farmers, who can now buy stock from their smartphones in the back paddock and avoid a three or four day round trip to the stockyards. Or Sydney-based Freelancer.com, the world's largest outsourcing and crowdsourcing marketplace for small business, now with hundreds of thousands of customers around the world. These entrepreneurs have been turbo-charged by the Internet.

From health and education, to tourism and manufacturing, to resources and energy, companies who invest heavily in web technologies are statistically more successful. Small businesses who leverage the internet make up the digital economy: a platform for growth for the entire Australian economy.

There's yet another and arguably bigger opportunity where we can be pioneers and developers of this technology that will underpin future decades of economic prosperity. I believe that there's never been a better time to be in IT and to be an entrepreneur. Firstly, your audience is more connected than ever before. They are both looking for you, and are open to new opportunities to collaborate and connect.

We know that having a website, for instance, is as important as having a phone number in today's business landscape. Secondly, we now have unprecedented access to new platforms upon which to run businesses. Fifteen years ago when I founded NetMind, my first start-up company in Silicon Valley, we had to build everything. We developed almost all of our own software, built our own IT infrastructure, scaled our own servers and had no platforms upon which to monetise the business easily.

Now, in contrast you can re-use open-source components, outsource your infrastructure to a cloud provider and use online advertising tools with minimal time and money. Today, entrepreneurs can focus on the essence of their business and be very nimble: they can achieve global reach and really concentrate on the problems they're trying to solve.

I hope that budding entrepreneurs will be able to realise more and more great ideas enabled by technology. I'd like to see Australians in first place not to just take advantage of the products and services that stem from high-speed Internet, but also to be developing and commercialising them.

Fast broadband is a transformative and disruptive technology: in many ways, it's a lot like electricity. Many people didn't anticipate the myriad applications that would stem from its use until it was ubiquitous and connected to every home.

As Vint Cerf, my colleague at Google, likes to say, 99 percent of the applications of the Internet haven't yet been invented, so you can imagine the possibilities that are just around the corner. I believe that people in Australia are and will continue to be very enthusiastic about the potential of super-fast Internet connectivity.

I know firsthand that technology can change lives for the better, and faster broadband is a vital part of the technology mix to allow that to happen in Australia.

Originally posted as an opinion piece in The Australian.

What I like about Google+

2011-07-04T00:10:00.013+10:00

I've been using Google+ for a few days now and I'm really enjoying it. I admit that I might be a tad biased. I work for Google, but like 1/2 a billion other people I also use Facebook, albeit sparingly. I also Twitter for all of my other online "friends", as well as LinkedIn for professional contacts.

Here's the breakdown for me by social network:

I use these separate social networking sites to reflect my different social circles. In particular, unlike many people, I've strongly resisted the urge to add friends willy nilly to Facebook. People with 500 friends on Facebook are kidding themselves if they actually think that many people care about what they are doing. That said, I use Twitter for sharing with everyone, but at that scale it's typically more of a broadcast medium than a social medium, and I use it accordingly. Of course, Facebook lets you share publicly as well, but then conflates all posts into a single unmanageable stream. Finally, LinkedIn, is basically a rolodex in the cloud, but still useful for keeping track of acquaintances and colleagues.

Why have 3 social networking sites when you can have one? In the real world, we effortlessly communicate different messages to different social circles. In other words, we share information selectively. With Google+ you can now do the same thing when you're online. You can selectively share to social circles, and then keep those conversations confined to their respective circles. Family stuff for family, friend stuff for friends, work stuff for colleagues, etc., you get it.

I've just touched on one exciting feature in Google+. If you'd like to learn more about Google+, read the introductory blog post.

One last thing. If you follow me on twitter, and would like to try Google+, sign up here. I make absolutely no guarantee that you'll actually receive an invitation though.

And remember to +1 this blog.

The need for speed - and how it drives innovation

2011-06-03T00:10:00.011+10:00

The Internet has become an amazing platform for information and communications. The blogs you read (thanks!), the tweets you send and receive, the videos you watch and share, are all testimony to that fact.

The openness of the Internet has fueled an explosion in innovative online services. Basically anyone can access it, anyone can communicate and anyone can upload content. Nevertheless, online services are only as good the weakest link in the chain, which is typically the user's Internet connection, and sometimes a slow connection is simply not good enough.

Let me illustrate this point with a story about a start-up company. The company:
• started out as a web radio company in 1995.
• saw opportunities in using the Internet to make videos available online.
• was acquired in 1999 by a major search engine company for US$5.7 billion.

What’s the company?
If you guessed YouTube, you were wrong! The company was Broadcast.com, and today it simply doesn’t exist. If you search for Broadcast.com you get forwarded directly to Yahoo.com, who paid quite a bit of money for it at the height of the dot com boom

Broadcast.com had a very similar concept and business model to YouTube, but it failed because of an insufficient critical mass of high-speed broadband users to both upload and download content. Between 2000 and 2007 the number of broadband users in the US increased from 5M users averaging 500kbps to 50M users averaging 3Mbps, i.e., 10x the users, 6x the speed. So it has only been in the last few years that Internet speeds have been fast enough to support YouTube’s business model.

There are other examples. Can you remember the name of the first social-networking site? MySpace? Friendster? No, it was Six Degrees, also back in the mid 90s. Their biggest need was photo uploading which could not be done at the time. Imagine a social network without photos!

So there is a direct correlation between Internet speed and delivering on innovation. Simply put, higher speeds enable innovative new services; slow ones don't. Faster connections not only enable applications that require more bandwidth, but also enable users to run more of them at the same time. Best of all though, faster speeds enable applications to run that have not yet been invented. Bring it on!

This is an excerpt of a talk I gave at CeBIT Australia in Sydney earlier this week.

So, you wanna do business with Google?

2011-05-24T21:39:00.003+10:00

Once or twice a week, some budding entrepreneur emails me that they have "X", and that "X" has all manner of virtues, and that Google really needs "X", and can I please, pretty please introduce them to the right team at Google to work with them on bringing "X" to the world. After hundreds of such highly emphatic emails during my past 4 years at Google, I can safely say that regardless of "X", the chances of such emails achieving the intended results are slim. It’s not that I don’t care about “X”; “X” might be quite important but, for crying out loud, puleez do your homework.

Read this recent inquiry. I’ve made only a few deletions and obfuscations to protect the innocent.

Hi Alan,

I’ve recently been looking for contacts within Google to talk about "X".

So nice of you to choose me.

I came across your website and realized we’ve worked on projects together between blah. I can’t recall whether we’ve met, but your name was mentioned in a lot of my dealings with blah. I’m still in contact with blah, blah to name a few...

Nice try, but we never met.

My main focus after all this time is still "X", and the next big challenge is "X". Earlier this year we brought an "X" solution to market we are having great success, albeit rather stealthily. The focus of the product is blah. It is the only "X" solution that uses blah. We are the only platform to blah allowing blah. I have many roles within the organization and I am looking towards "X" using several lenses. As the blah for blah and I need to integrate "X" into the current roadmap. As blah and blah I need to focus on third party or Google solutions to support "X".

How nice that “X” is important to your roadmap, but what about our roadmap?

I know that Google has some "X" capabilities, but nothing has been officially disclosed. I would like to start at the top and arrange a meeting with you to discuss how we can work together… and maybe catch-up on some blah stories.

Nice ego-stroking attempt.

If that sounds harsh, tell me what would you do? In this case I replied to clarify what exactly the sender was proposing with “X” but after a couple of such exchanges it was clear it was going nowhere fast.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of people who approach me have simply not done their homework and usually expect me to figure out for them what they bring to Google. Keep in mind that Google has over 26,000 employees and thousands of projects. Google is moving a mile a minute. Poorly researched external requests are distractions at the best of times.

Here are some tips for improving your chances.

Know the answers to the following. Does Google really need “X”? Why does Google need "X"? Or what part of Google or Google users needs “X”?

Don’t simply ask to be introduced to“Y”. “Y” may be one of the busiest people at Google and even an internal introduction will go nowhere fast.

Read Google blogs (there are hundreds of them). Find relevant names or product managers and engineers and study them.

Requests for “let’s have coffee” are generally not realistic. I love coffee but I’d quickly overdose if I accepted every offer. Requests for information are more realistic, than requests for meetings.

Last but not least, if Google really needs "X", there is a good chance that one of Google's teams is already working on something like “X”.

In short, be prepared!

An Aussie's take on Google I/O

2011-05-17T12:17:00.003+10:00

I spent last week at Google I/O, Google’s annual conference for developers held in San Francisco. This conference is all about making the web a better place -- the nuts and bolts of software development that most folks don’t ever think about when they add apps to their Android phones or when they log into their Gmail. What’s interesting about all these developers getting stoked about building the apps of the future is that they take one thing for granted: high speed Internet connectivity. That’s not to say they don’t recognise that sometimes connectivity is slow or erratic -- they do, and we’re all trying to find ways to make sure our apps can work in those situations. What I mean is that their starting assumption is that high speed connectivity is fast becoming like electricity or running water -- never far away when you need it, and plenty of it. I love this optimism -- and it’s this optimism that is bringing the National Broadband Network to Australia.

Out of all the exciting announcements that came out of Google this week, every single one of them relies on high speed broadband. YouTube movie rentals -- tick. Syncing your music library and movies from Android Market across your PC and your Android tablet and phone -- tick. Using a Chromebook, where your apps, games, photos, music, movies and documents will be accessible wherever you are and you don't need to worry about losing your computer or forgetting to back up files -- tick. These products will run on the networks we we have now, but just imagine their potential -- and the potential of the ideas of all the developers in Moscone Center and those around the world watching Google I/O streamed over YouTube -- when we have high speed Internet everywhere.

Most of us in the Google Sydney office wish we had a dollar for every time someone asked us about the NBN, “Yeah, but what are you going to do with all that speed?” or “What’s Google’s vision for how to use all that bandwidth?” I think we saw a taste of it at Google I/O.

Originally posted on the Google Australia blog.

Team Trev finishes the Zero Race

2011-03-25T18:08:00.001+11:00

Last month saw the finish of the Zero Race, an 80-day race spanning 28,000km and 16 countries. Entrants drove from the starting point in Geneva to Shanghai, from Vancouver to Cancun, and from Casablanca back to Geneva. What is different about the Zero Race is that all the entrants produced zero emissions.

The Australian entrant was Team Trev from the University of South Australia, an innovative 3-wheeled electric car. There is a comprehensive web site called TREVipedia with all the info required to build a Trev. I was particularly fortunate in seeing Trev over a year ago when it was still in the prototype stage (photo above).

Team Trev has demonstrated that it is not just possible to design and build a low-cost vehicle powered by renewable energy, but that it is also possible to run it using a whole lot LESS energy. The energy cost of Trev's entire journey was less than A$400 worth of energy, incidentally electricity generated from a wind farm in South Australia.

In contrast, the best commercially available hybrid vehicles would consume over A$1,500 worth of fuel (28,000km @ 4 liters/100km = 1120 liters x A$1.40/liter = A$1,568).

Below is a photo of Trev successfully crossing the finish line in Geneva, at the United Nations Palais de Nations.

Trev's success is timely in that it reminds us of the potential of electric vehicles to transform the global transportation industry. Electric vehicles like Trev are more efficient and cheaper to operate. Imagine an entire transportation system dominated by electric vehicles. Clean; efficient; quiet.

Today in Australia there is a furious debate over the introduction of a carbon price. Instead of fixating on the short-term costs associated with a carbon price, we should be asking ourselves what we stand to lose if we don't invest in tomorrow's clean technologies. Countries that are early adopters of clean energy and electric vehicles will create substantial economic wealth.

Trev has shown that innovation in this area is alive and well in Australia. Let's embrace it!

The possibilities of an Australian Digital Economy

2011-02-25T12:02:00.004+11:00

I read an article recently about an Australian livestock auction site, AuctionsPlus, which allows farmers to view, bid on, and transport livestock with the click of a mouse.

It’s a unique kind of online shopping, but one that I can imagine in a country as big as this one, makes a big difference to farmers, who can now buy stock from their smartphones in the back paddock and avoid a three or four day round trip to the stockyards.

The digital economy can be a nebulous concept and while there’s lots of talk about it - much of this is in future tense. What makes the sheep auction site fascinating to me is that it epitomises beautifully the digital economy.

It’s using the Internet as a platform for industry. It’s innovating. And it’s happening now.

The digital economy is a platform for growth for the entire Australian economy. Industries old and new are moving online, and finding new ways to do business. This is true for tech companies -- Australian start-ups like Atlassian are growing up -- but it is equally true for companies working in more traditional industry sectors, too. From health and education, to tourism and manufacturing, to resources and energy, and for businesses large and small, companies who are moving into this space are statistically more successful: recent UK research reported that small businesses who leverage the internet report sales growth four times greater than those who don’t.

The digital economy connects Australia to the global movement online; but it’s also specifically valuable for Australia. It allows Australia to confront the challenges of the tyranny of distance by connecting us to the rest of the world in real-time. And it takes advantage of our strengths -- particularly our highly skilled, net-savvy and innovative population -- and keeps them at home, rather than shipping them overseas. Over twenty years ago I left Australia to work in Japan and then in Silicon Valley in the US: young engineers at Google can now work on global platforms while looking out the window at the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

If you’ll permit me to labour my agricultural analogy for a minute, consider the digital economy as the farm of the future. Generations of Australian farmers have worked the land to build an agricultural sector that more than a century on is still a significant economic contributor. The digital economy is a platform that can support this and other sectors of our economy to grow into the future -- it’s a platform for future-proofing our economy. But like the land, we can keep planting but we need all of the elements to work together for a bumper crop.

1. We need to improve the soil quality

If any country knows about the importance of soil quality, Australia does. You need healthy soil for a garden to grow, and we need world-class infrastructure to anchor our digital economy. The ubiquitous, high-speed broadband of the National Broadband Network will position Australia well to grow the digital economy and to enable a range of innovations and opportunities which would be limited by out-dated infrastructure.

2. We need to water the crop

In the same way that we fund scientists to research new medicines and treatments, we need to support new ideas and new innovations in the digital space with finance, in the form of venture capital and private sector investment. There’s an absence of ‘smart money’ in Australia to support new start-ups here -- ‘smart money’ is venture capital that comes with the added value of advice, experience and contacts. Funding isn’t the only thing a start-up needs to succeed, but it’s critical to getting a good idea off the ground.

3. We need to feed our crop

You can fund all the good ideas in the world, but you need people to have the good ideas in the first place. Strong universities capable of effectively partnering with industry are critical to a vibrant ecosystem. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has calculated that their alumni have founded more than 25,000 companies with a combined annual revenue of more than USD2 trillion. Australia has some excellent universities but we can do much more to develop the relationships between the university sector and industry to support the commercialisation of ideas developed in universities -- from classroom to customer -- and we must continue to support and inspire students pursuing education in the fields of science and maths.

4. We need to refresh our seed stock

The interchange of people and ideas stimulates innovation. Large companies need start-ups to partner with, and conversely small companies need larger companies to reach customers, and to grow with. Large international companies should also be encouraged to invest in the digital economy here, in skills and in research, to further seed new ideas and new collaborations.

5. It needs oxygen to grow

And we need keep the Internet open. The Internet thrived because it is open -- with engineers being able to build on each other's work, each iteration improving, and driving the web forward as a whole. To flourish, the web needs oxygen; online, oxygen is openness. As Tim Berners-Lee said recently, the whole idea behind the internet was that ‘any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere.’ Online, the fastest way to move things forward is to share and iterate -- again, and again. Closed systems are all or nothing bets -- but in contrast, an open web is constantly being improved upon by the entire community. It gives oxygen to innovation.

6. We need to tend the crop

The lines in the middle of the road weren’t necessary when we travelled on horseback, but when we started driving cars we adapted. We came up with a simple and practical solution which greatly improved road safety: the road line. Online, we need to adapt to the changed environment; we need to evolve the rules of the road. We need to ensure privacy, safety and security are respected in this new environment, but we should look for the best ways to do this that fit the environment. We need to empower people with the skills and knowledge to be safe, smart and responsible when they’re online, so everyone can navigate the information super-highway with safety.

Our digital economy crop is growing well, but it’s early in the season. If we create the right conditions for growth, Australia’s digital economy can look forward to many bumper crops to come."

Alan Noble, Director of Engineering, Google Australia & New Zealand.

Originally posted at ITNews. Cartoon courtesy of ITNews.

Puzzle-based learning

2011-02-20T10:47:00.012+11:00

Last time I wrote about making science and maths popular and I asserted that the best way to make a subject attractive to students is to make it fun. Of all the skills that students need to master, arguably learning to solve problems is the most important. So how to make problem solving fun? The answer may lie in puzzles.

Zbigniew and Matthew Michalewicz have published an excellent book entitled “Puzzle-based learning: An introduction to critical thinking, mathematics, and problem-solving.” Their idea is simple yet powerful: increase a student's mathematical awareness and problem solving skills by discussing and solving a variety of puzzles.
Disclaimer: I have nothing to gain financially from the publication of this book, although I did volunteer to write the foreword.

Allow me to quote myself:

Google is a company that is renowned for its love of puzzles. We solve puzzles to relax, we subject interview candidates to them, and we even run puzzle competitions. “Googlers” are not alone as people around the world have been fascinated by puzzles for thousands for years.

Solving puzzles is more that mental aerobics though. Like philosophers and mathematicians before them, Zbigniew and Matthew Michalewicz have recognized the pedagogical power that lies in solving puzzles. This book is chock-a-block with interesting puzzles and their solutions, lavishly and wittingly explained. Any reader with a basic knowledge of mathematics plus an ounce of curiosity will find this book enjoyable to read. But the Michalewiczs go further in presenting the problem-solving strategies and principles underlying puzzle solving, and in doing demonstrate the power of puzzle-based learning; that learning problem solving can be fun!

In doing so they have given us a tremendous book about problem solving that is both educational and entertaining at the same time, and one that I hope will be incorporated into problem-solving curricula around the world.

There is nothing new about solving puzzles. People have enjoyed them for centuries because of the joy that comes with finding a solution. This New York Times article relates how ancient Egyptians used mathematical puzzles 3,600 years ago to calculate everything from the slopes of pyramids to beer quantities.

While the Michalewicz's book is aimed at the first-year university level, high school students are likely to find it very enjoyable too. I look forward to seeing puzzle-based learning concepts incorporated not just into high-school curricula, but primary-school curricula as well.

Making science and maths popular

2011-02-17T23:42:00.003+11:00

Last week we launched the Google Online Science Fair in Australia. You can read more at my Google Australia blog post. I'm excited about the Online Science Fair because it is a great way to reach a broad audience of students interested in science.

This is important because unfortunately there is much evidence to suggest that students in many countries are getting turned off science and maths at an early age. For example, in Australia, according to Australian Social Trends, 2009, while 66% of grade 4 students declared a positive attitude towards maths (a percentage comparable to the international average), by grade 8 only about 33% per cent of Australian students retained a positive attitude (compared with an international average of 54%).

Maths is a bellwether for the related disciplines of science, technology and engineering, including information technology (IT). Clearly, more needs to be done to make science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) interesting to school students. While a few students naturally gravitiate to subjects such as maths and science and love the challenges they provide, they are relatively few in number. Reaching a broader audience of students, and then keeping them engaged is more difficult to do.

The best way to make a subject attractive is to make it fun, and the best way to make it interesting is to make it relevant. Most students become much more interested in a subject when they can see the real-world applications. STEM teaching needs to have this applied emphasis to make it compelling. However it needs to be applied in ways that are relevant to the younger generation. For example, mobile phones, social networking, online games, digital media, etc., are all areas that demonstrate the exciting possibilities of information technology (IT). In particular, App Inventor for Android is a great way to get young users interested in IT without actually requiring coding, since it uses an easy-to-use visual programming environment.

We also need to get the word out that, contrary to popular perception, the demand for graduates with STEM skills is very strong globally. Companies, such as Google, have an insatiable demand for software engineers. And Google is not alone. Engineers Australia is predicting a shortage of 20,000 scientists and engineers in Australia alone.

Last but not least, a STEM education prepares students for exciting careers in professions that make the world a better place or improve our understanding of it. And often it all starts when a young mind gets hooked on the thrill of solving a mathematical puzzle, or completing a science experiment. Or perhaps entering a science fair :-)

The Washminster system: Voting in Australia

2010-11-20T13:38:00.014+11:00

Next week Victorians go to the polls for their state election. I learned that the Victorian Legislative Council (Upper House) is composed of 8 regions with 5 legislative councilors per region, which got me thinking about Australia's political system in general.

Australia has one of the most complex political systems in the world. First, like the US, Australia has a so-called bicameral legislature or two houses of parliament, namely the lower house House of Representatives, or "the House", and the upper house Senate (the same terms the US uses). Many countries have 2 houses, but in some countries only the members of the lower house are directly elected and the members of the upper house are appointed. Australia and the US are in the former camp while Britain's House of Lords and Canada's Senate are in the latter camp. The Australian political system mimics the US, both in it's bicameral nature and also in its federal nature, i.e., state and Commonwealth governments. In fact, when Australians federated to form a country in 1901, we turned to the US for inspiration. Australia's political system is a hybrid of the Westminster system and the US system of government, and has been nicknamed the "the Washminster mutation". The Australian Senate, like the US Senate, is a directly-elected upper house with the power to “block supply”, i.e., block the passage of legislation coming up from the lower house. All Australian states and territories, except Queensland, have a bicameral parliament, with the upper house known as the Legislative Council (in NSW, Victoria, WA, SA and Tasmania) or Legislative Assembly (in the ACT and NT). Like the Senate at the federal level, upper houses at the state level are powerful with the ability to block supply.

So far, so good. The thing that really makes Australia's system complicated however is that candidates for the upper house (senators at the federal level or legislative councilors at the state level) are elected by a form of voting based on preferential voting and proportional representation known as single transferable vote (STV), invented by Thomas Wright Hill and first used in Adelaide in 1840. In STV, each voter ranks the list of candidates in order of preference, i.e., by placing a '1' beside their most preferred candidate, a '2' beside their second most preferred, and so on. Votes are first allocated to a voter's first choice and then, after candidates have been either elected or eliminated, any surplus votes are transferred according to the voter's next choice, etc., etc.

In Australia, because of the way upper house ballot sheets are printed, numbering each candidate from 1 to N is called “voting below the line” (see the sample ballot sheet below). Because it's time consuming to vote below the line, many voters choose to vote "above the line", by just voting '1' for a party and relying on the so-called "Group Voting Ticket" by which that party allocates its preferences. That's a shame because voters are giving up some of their democratic choice whenever they let a party allocate their preferences rather than doing it themselves.

Voting below the line gives voters complete flexibility to reflect personal preferences. Given the importance of the upper house to maintaining checks and balances in Australia's system of government, I think that's pretty important.

That's why I developed Cluey Voter, to make it easy to vote below the line.

So if you're going to the Victorian polls on 27 November 2010, try it out, and be a cluey voter!

The opportunities of the NBN

2010-10-19T13:22:00.005+11:00

Port Augusta, in my home state of South Australia, is staring down the detractors of rural and regional Australia.

It's a town with a fascinating history as a crossroads in our vast country, connecting West to East and back again. In 1917, Port Augusta was the beneficiary of the pre-Federation promise to the West Australians of a Trans-Australian Railway. The railway physically connected Perth, through Kalgoorlie, to Adelaide, providing new opportunities for businesses and individuals to prosper. This was a visionary project: a nation-building venture.

Nearly a century later, and Port Augusta is again the beneficiary of a nation-building venture. The town will again be linked to Australia and the world through inclusion in the National Broadband Network's fibre optic coverage plans.

Being a major hub for telecommunications networks has served Port Augusta, its people and its economy well; unlike many rural and regional towns across the country, Port Augusta's population has grown by almost 7 per cent since 2001. The impact of better services through the delivery of super-fast broadband to the town will cement Port Augusta's achievements. The National Broadband Network will provide towns across Australia with new opportunities to grow.

At present, there is a lot of discussion about the implementation and construction of this vital infrastructure. This is appropriate given the significant taxpayer dollars involved.

But to borrow the words of my colleague Ian Birks of the Australian Information Industry Association, it's "the trains and not the tracks" that present the exciting opportunities.

Just as the trains of the Trans-Australian Railway linked the wheatfields of the Spencer Gulf to the gold mines of Kalgoorlie, and brought passengers through Port Augusta to the east, so too will a super-fast broadband network bring a freight train of innovation to our shores.

The National Broadband Network will be the digital equivalent of the Trans-Australian Railway: linking towns small and large, bringing new life and new opportunities to our economy and our communities.

And these innovations will be driven by users - by the Australian people who are seizing the opportunities online with gusto. More than 80 per cent of Australian homes are already connected to the internet; the National Broadband Network will provide more people across the country with access, and with improved services.

Thirty-seven years after radio came into being, it reached the milestone of 50 million users. Fifteen years after the advent of television it reached the same milestone. The world-wide web reached 50 million regular users after only three years, and it's now estimated that more than 200 million people come online across the globe each year.

As more people get online, users' needs, behaviours and expectations evolve.

How would a new bank fare in Australia today if it didn't provide online banking services? Where ten years ago we would have spent our lunch hour in a queue, we now expect to be able to avoid that hassle, to bank without leaving our desks or our living rooms.

Yet in Australia today, of the nearly two million small businesses who make up a staggering 96 per cent of all businesses, 39 percent do not have a website.

Meanwhile, four out of five Australians research products online; 45 per cent of Australian internet users publish their opinions about products, services and brands and a staggering 86 per cent read other consumers' opinions online. This represents a huge missed opportunity for businesses to find new customers and to participate in the expanding digital economy.

These businesses - plumbers, B&Bs, hairdressers - rely on the Yellow Pages and word of mouth to find new customers and to establish their reputation. Yet today's word of mouth is transmitted as often through Facebook or Twitter, as it is over a cup of tea. Today's users find businesses as often on Google Maps from a mobile phone as from a street directory.

With new and faster technology, our expectations are changing. Now, I expect to be able to search the restaurant I read a review about, call them from that page, and be able to find them on Google Maps. If my expectations aren't met, I may still turn up for dinner, but each expectation not met is a hurdle. And in a growing market which is becoming more competitive, Australian businesses don't need hurdles.

Access to the Internet across Australia today can be expensive and unreliable, particularly in regional areas. Yet we have seen Australian companies take advantage of opportunities to reach new markets both at home and abroad. Australian start-up companies like Atlassian and PC Tools have thrived because of the power of the Internet to reach customers around the world.

If we can get rid of the barriers to business through a super-fast broadband network, Aussie businesses right across the country will not only have the same opportunities as the rest of the world - but potentially a leg up as well. The access provided by the National Broadband Network means that the world is now our marketplace.

The evolution of users' expectations - and the users themselves - are driving innovation.

For example, currently we are witnessing the convergence of mobile and social trends online. These media were quick in the adaptation of their sites to mobile and these days it's hard to find a new phone without Facebook, YouTube and Twitter apps.

We are witnessing this trend, absolutely - but we're also the lead actors in pushing its development forward. Users are driving this bus.

And developers are rising to the challenge.

They are making the most of new technologies - every time our technology improves new things become possible. The openness of the internet is an environment built for innovation, and environment best equipped to meet - and to exceed - users' needs and expectations.

When four engineers in a Sydney suburb came up with the idea that became Google Maps, they needed a printer for those maps to be useful on the go.

Today, rather than dog-earring tattered street directories or print outs, we're pulling up Google Maps on our mobile phones.

Our behaviours have changed: we have evolved with the technology. But we've also driven innovation for greater usability, for personalisation, for a product that works for us.

We're seeing hassle-free upgrades to cloud-based web applications - do you even know or care what version of web mail you are using now? And high-speed broadband promises even greater capacity and new possibilities.

When the user is driving the bus, developers and companies need to respond to what the user wants. And what users want is services and devices that work for them - that adapt easily into their lives, and which improve their quality of being.

The opportunity before us in Australia is the acceleration of this exciting phenomenon. It's mobile phone convenience now - but it will be health, education, small business tomorrow. But more than acceleration - this is an opportunity for innovations we can't yet conceive of. And with the technology to support innovation, users will be in the driver's seat.

Nationwide access and affordability are critical to this, and competition for retail services through the National Broadband Network will be the essential enabler of innovation. Transparency in the delivery of services and devices is also important so that users can make the choices that are best for them. And our regulatory and policy settings must continue to place users at the centre.

We need to empower users to take their rightful place at the centre of this new revolution. We need to educate people, young and old, country and city, to be digital citizens, in the same way that we teach our kids to swim. We need to empower users to be safe online, to act smartly and responsibly - to have the knowledge and skills to take advantage of the opportunities in the online world and the know-how to deal with any risks.

Australia has an opportunity to be ahead of the game, to be in the driver's seat when it comes to innovation, to communication, and to facing and adapting to the challenges of the future.

Super-fast broadband gives us a platform - like the Trans-Australia Railway did - to connect to a new generation of opportunities.

Let's think about the possibilities. And take the opportunity to innovate.

Alan Noble

Originally posted at ABC Technology.

Innovation in Indonesia

2010-10-13T11:16:00.000+11:00

Selamat datang! (Welcome in Indonesian.) Last week I spent 4 days in Jakarta, a sprawling metropolis of 13 million people. Jakarta's size is nothing compared to the country as a whole, with almost 240 million people spread across 17,000 islands, but the city is without doubt the heart of Indonesia's thriving software developer community. Naturally, it's where Google chose to hold it's first ever Dev Fest in Indonesia, on the Anggrek campus of our host, Binus University.

As part of Dev Fest, I was on a panel with three Indonesian entrepreneurs and one entrepreneur turned VC. What impressed me about the panel was not so much the differences, but the similarities. Indonesian entrepreneurs, and aspiring ones, are grappling with the same issues as their counterparts elsewhere. But first some background about the tech scene in Indonesia.

First, mobile phone growth is exploding in Indonesia. Indonesian mobile web search queries, i.e., searches performed from a web browser on a smart phone, are the 3rd highest in the world, after the US and Japan. Anecdotally, this is evident driving around Jakarta, with the majority of people everywhere holding mobile phones, many of them Blackberrys. And I'm not just talking about the so-called "elite" district around the Hotel Indonesia (the "Ha Ee" to the locals, a beautiful hotel incidentally). Jakarta lacks high-speed mass transit and most of the driving around Jakarta is at walking speeds, so you've ample time to observe what's happening on the streets. I "squeezed" in 3 meetings over 7 hours on my first day in Jakarta, so I spent more time in the back of the car than in meeting rooms.

Second, the use of social media by Indonesians is equally impressive. Indonesia has the 3rd largest number of Facebook users (by country), after the US and the UK, and is rapidly catching up to 2nd place. Indonesians are also in love with Twitter, with ComScore reporting that 21% of the country’s internet population use Twitter. As a result, worldwide rising trends on Twitter often feature an Indonesian trend.

In short, Indonesian users are at the forefront of two exciting global technology trends that are converging, mobile and social.

Now back to the panel, introducing the panelists from left to right in the photo:

Selina Limman (@urbanesia), the founder of and CEO of Urbanesia, an online "lifestyle city directory" with a mission to make city living fun and convenient. Urbanesia blends mobile and social nicely, with business listings and user-generated content (UGC) for lifestyle and everyday needs, combined with location-based search for users to discover relevant content.

Willson Cuaca (@willsoncuaca), the co-founder of East Ventures, a new VC firm founded in Singapore, with a focus on early stage web/mobile startups in Indonesia and Singapore. EV has invested in Urbanesia and 3 other companies to date: Tokopedia, an e-commerce marketplace, Apps Foundry, a mobile apps producer for Blackberry, iPhone and Android, and Foound, a social mobile app to arrange hangouts, or is that a mobile social app?

Andrew Darwis, the co-founder and CTO of Kaskus, an online community with over over 2.1 million members, generating more than 600 million page views per month, the 6th most popular website in Indonesia and the most popular local website(source Alexa). Andrew describes Kaskus as "an info center where questions are asked and answered by the community members themselves.”

Fajar Budiprasetyo, the co-founder and CEO of Koprol, which he describes as a "geosocial network that focuses on conversation". Koprol was acquired by Yahoo back in May. Successful acquisitions like this are still relatively rare in Indonesia, but Fajar's US education and Silicon Valley experience no doubt gave him the edge.

And that guy on the right is me (@scruzin). I've done a few startups too; my last one being NetPriva which I sold to Expand Networks in 2007, the year I joined Google Australia.

See the trend? All three entrepreneurs and East Ventures are thoroughly embracing mobile and/or social opportunities.

Now for the similarities; the questions from the audience were pretty much the same as I would have expected from a similar crowd in Silicon Valley or Sydney. The following four questions are indicative.

* How do you choose between growing your company and selling it?
Answer: It depends, there's no right or wrong way.
* For web/mobile apps, what are the best monetization strategies?
Answer: there's lots of ways - ads, app marketplace sales, subscriptions, etc.
* How do you do you market your products?
Answer: good product market themselves, but failing that, use social media, build in social/viral features, such as refer-a-friend, rapid release cycles,strategic partnerships, etc.
* How can we ensure our startup succeeds?
Answer: have guts, go for it, don't worry about fear of failure, collaborate/network with your fellow entrepreneurs, never rest on your laurels, etc.

The main difference I observed is that in Indonesia today, there are relatively few local success stories; with role models in short supply, more people are still finding their entrepreneurial legs. If the enthusiasm of the participants at Dev Fest is anything to go by though, I fully expect to see some exciting innovations coming out of Indonesia in the near future. I'm already looking forward to my next trip.

Lihat nantil.

Learnings of an entrepreneur - Bangkok edition

2010-10-10T16:51:00.002+11:00

I'm in Bangkok for Google's first Dev Fest in Thailand. In a couple of hours I'll be on a panel discussing entrepreneurship so I'm jotting down ahead of time some of the things I'm going to talk about. (I lived in Japan early in my career where I worked in the Japanese language, so know how hard it can be to follow a speaker in a foreign language.) These are some of the most important things I've learned as an entrepreneur. One day I'll write the full version.

Caveat Emptor: The journey of an entrepreneur is a personal one. YMMV.

Learning 1: Do what you love

I fell in love with computers as a high school kid and never looked back. I give a lot of the credit to my maths teacher, Mr Ian Haines, who started the computer club.

Learning 2: Seek opportunities

I could hardly wait to see the world after graduating from Adelaide University and lived in Japan for several years. From Pachinko software (success!), to translation software (fail!), one thing led to another and I ended up in California.

Learning 3: Meet lots of people

Next I went to Stanford, I played with LISP machines and AI, but, much more importantly, I met lots of people; people who became future investors, fellow entrepreneurs, employees, and in some cases, lifelong friends.

Personal contacts are like innovation; you can never have enough.

Learning 4: Make sacrifices

Let's face it. It takes guts to be an entrepreneur and you're going to have to make sacrifices to succeed.

Learning 5: The 3 A's of entrepreneurship

Successful companies are constantly reviewing what is working and what is not, and adapting. My 3 As of entrepreneurship:

Audit - what you're doing, constantly
Admit - when things aren't working
Adapt - and survive

Learning 6: Get focused

Good technology and good people are not enough. You need to focus on the best opportunities.

Learning 7: Have fun

Life is too short for un-fun stuff. Having fun is the corollary to doing what you love, which completes the circle.

The promise of Government 2.0

2010-10-10T16:48:00.003+11:00

Orginally posted as What I know to be true for the Government 2.0 taskforce.

What I know to be true and what I hope for the taskforce

I’m Alan Noble, serial entrepreneur, technology junkie, and head of engineering at Google Australia/NZ. I’m delighted to be on the Gov2.0 taskforce in a personal capacity. After 25 years living and breathing technology, here’s what I know to be true and here’s what I hope to drive forward on the Gov2.0 taskforce.

Information is more powerful when it’s set free

Information is becoming a pervasive and free resource, driving the growth of the digital economy worldwide. And yet very useful, publicly funded, non-confidential public sector information, such as public transport data, is still locked up either behind Government firewalls or encumbered with onerous copyright restrictions, of little use to anyone. I want to see this PSI freely available to all. This will promote great social benefits, not least the immense potential for innovative new products and services to be developed here. Google’s Victorian bushfires map is a great example, and was only possible because the Victorian Country Fire Authority had the foresight to put an RSS feed on their site.

Transparency promotes democracy and demands accountability

Australians want answers to questions like “How are you spending my money?” Government can do much more to promote a culture of pro-disclosure and transparency. Making government information more accessible online has the power to make Government more accountable and to increase participation from Australian citizens. This will go a long way in restoring trust in Government.

Change begins at home

In promoting the digital economy and fostering a culture of transparency and information sharing, Government must walk the walk and get with the digital program. The vast majority of computing and information will be in the cloud and a younger generation will not know any differently. Our leaders today should embrace online communication and collaboration tools to be active participants in the community and open up a dialogue with citizens.

Why Tech Chomp?

2010-10-10T16:26:00.001+11:00

Welcome to Tech Chomp.

I've been guest blogging for several years now, but I've decided it's high time for me to bite the bullet and have my own blog. Over the next few months I'll cross post some of my favorite earlier blog posts to kick start things.

So what's with the name, Tech Chomp?

"Tech" because I'm a tech-loving geek, so I'll mainly blog about tech stuff. "Chomp" because a chomp is bigger than a bite. I already use Twitter @scruzin for "info bites", and I need something that supports more than 140 characters for "info chomps". Also, chomp means to "mash" or "grind", and I'll be mashing up interesting stuff and sharing it.

That's all for now.

Alan Noble