Creative Australia is online

Today, any Australian with a little motivation can create content and upload it for global distribution. For the first time in history, we all have a global broadcast platform at our fingertips: the internet.

The ability to broadcast ourselves, as individuals, was far, far out of reach for most of us for a long time. But today is a very different reality. So have you ever wondered what Aussies are doing, now that the tools of content production and distribution are in their hands? We have. So we got together with others in the digital space to take a look at just that.

Together with ninemsn, Yahoo!7, AIMIA, the Games Developers Association of Australia and the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association, we identified some examples of creative Australians producing great content for online distribution. This showreel includes just some of them like video blogger Natalie Tran, Christiaan Van Vuuren (better known to the YouTube audience as “The Fully Sick Rapper”) and like Keith Loutit’s time-lapse work.

Digital platforms are witnessing an incredible growth in the number of talented Australians producing content. Together, they are getting Australian stories out to Aussies and the world.

Posted by Ishtar Vij, Policy Counsel, Google Australia

Pure and proven cloud architecture

This is a cross-post from the Official Enterprise Blog.

Editor’s note: This post is part of a series that explores the top ten reasons why customers trust Google with their business data. A complete top ten list can be found here.

When users think of Google Apps, they often think of their Gmail inboxes or collaborating on documents in real time with others. They often don’t think of what’s going on behind the scenes. Our cloud computing data centers offer our customers scalability and reliability across all of our products and websites, supporting millions of businesses on Google Apps and over 1 billion Internet searches every day. Our pure and proven cloud offers Apps customers significant data protections that would be hard for those customers to achieve on their own. It’s also the infrastructure that we use to run our own business.

As we’ve grown, we’ve developed an expertise around building data centers and protecting the data stored in them. The machines in the data centers that run our applications are built to our own specifications, including ones focused on security. The hardware is limited to what is necessary for the applications to run, and eliminates unnecessary components such as peripheral connectors or video cards. Similarly, the software that we run on the machines is a specialized, stripped-down version of the Linux operating system leaving out any unnecessary software code such as device drivers. This approach helps provide a computing environment that is less prone to vulnerabilities, compared to typical on-premise, so called “private cloud” or hybrid IT environments.

The services we offer are first and foremost Internet-based applications and platforms. We were born on the Internet, not on a single computer or server. We have published some of our core underlying technologies such as BigTable, the SPDY protocol, Google FIle System (GFS) and MapReduce. The last two of which have gone on to inspire Hadoop, the Apache open source framework that underpins many leading cloud or big data applications. Googlers Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle even wrote a mini-book about some of Google’s approaches, entitled “The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines”.

Lots of users leads to lots of network traffic that allows us some significant advantages in terms of security. For instance, the spam filtering in Gmail gains rapid visibility into emerging and evolving spam and virus threats, which in turn helps us to block the vast majority of them. This kind of large scale Internet infrastructure also typically provides better protection from denial of service type attacks. It also puts us in a position to spot malicious traffic and help protect users from malware.

Unprecedented global scale would not matter without the ability to reliably deliver business critical services. That is another powerful feature of Google’s technology and process discipline. We’ve built our platform to withstand expected hardware failure, relying on software and highly automated processes in order to support a 99.9% uptime SLA that has no maintenance window. In 2010 Gmail uptime was 99.984% and we are over 99.99% for the first half of 2011. This is an approach you fundamentally can’t take with traditional on premise IT systems.

Running data centers at this kind of scale takes energy, but as a carbon-neutral company we strive to use as little as possible - in fact, our facilities use half the energy of a typical data center. You can read more about our efficiency efforts and our approach to purchasing renewable energy.

In just the 4.5 years I’ve been at Google, I’ve seen quite a few generational changes in the kit we run, be it “simple” things like sheet metal for servers to something more complex like our motherboards, or something even more fluid and complicated like our various software layers. Through all those upgrades, build outs, and migrations, the focus on reliability remains. This is something that keeps me coming back to work day after day, and drives me to help others understand the value we can add to protecting their data and powering their businesses.

Posted by John Collins, Senior Global Trust PM, Google Apps

The Internet and the future of work

When Deloitte Access Economics gave us the results of their research on the impact of the Internet on the Australian economy, I turned directly to the section on “The Impact of the Internet on Businesses”. In the Google Enterprise team, we see every day that the Internet has transformed the way businesses operate. But I was curious to see the numbers around how it’s transforming how people work.

I’d also heard the Australian Government’s goal of doubling the level of teleworking in the Australian economy by 2020 -- a call that was repeated this week at Telework Sydney by Minister Stephen Conroy. He said that the internet promises to transform “who is able to work, when you can work, where you can work and how you can work” -- with huge benefits to both employers and employees. This vision becomes a reality with the rollout of high speed broadband access to all Australians.

According to the Deloitte Access Economics report “The Connected Continent,” more than 40% of businesses surveyed report that the internet has already impacted the ability of their staff to work remotely and enables flexible working arrangements.

This is a good solid number and not a surprise. But that still means that well over half of businesses may not be taking advantage of the combination of high speed broadband access and cloud-based applications that can make a big difference to how their teams work -- and live.

If you want to give team members a day a week to work from home, you can still keep productivity high and hassle-free. You can sit down and collaborate on a document together easily, without the hassle of emailing attachments back and forth and forgetting who has the latest version. With Google Docs, you can see your teammate making changes right on the screen -- the words are literally appearing and changing before your eyes. Internet-based applications are also making the smartphones and tablets that many of us have much more useful; you can easily get to your mail, documents, and calendar even when you’re not at your desk.

And then there’s the fact that it’s hard to convince Aussies to move cities. If your dream employee lives in Melbourne and you can’t convince them to move to Sydney, you now have a lot more effective (and cost-effective) tools that make it easy to build team bonds across distance. Video technology keeps getting easier to use, so remote employees don’t have to miss the team bonding. We’ve built video chat right into Gmail so it’s always easily at hand. At Google we hop on and off video chats all day -- even with people in the same office -- to get that extra connection of face to face conversation.

At Google, we’re going to keep making our tools for team collaboration even better. And as high speed broadband access becomes a reality across more of Australia, these new ways of working are going to become the norm, not a nice to have. Are you ready to embrace this new way of working?

Posted by Stuart McLean, Enterprise Sales Lead, Australia and New Zealand

The Connected Continent: how big is the Internet in AUD?

The Internet’s always been easy to measure in terms of users, bandwidth or time. Working out how all those things add to the national bottom line is surprisingly hard. (Imagine trying to quantify the economic impact of the steam engine or electricity when those inventions were in their earliest days.) Given that the Internet is shifting every industry into a different gear, we decided to give it a shot. We asked Deloitte Access Economics to take an in-depth look at what the Internet is actually bringing to Australia in economic terms.



Deloitte’s report “The Connected Continent,” the first of its kind in Australia, finds that the Internet contributed 3.6% of Australia’s GDP in 2010. That’s the same as Australia’s iron-ore exports. The report digs into which businesses and industries use the Internet and tries to put a dollar figure on how much Australians get from the Internet. Here are some of the key findings:

• Australia’s Internet economy is likely to grow by $20 billion over the next five years, to roughly AUD$70 billion -- this is a 7% growth rate, which is twice as fast as the forecast for the rest of the economy.
• Productivity increases in businesses and government enabled by the Internet are estimated to boost GDP by around $27 billion in 2011.
• Households benefit from Internet use in the form of added convenience and a greater variety of goods and services; this is estimated to be worth an additional $53 billion, only some of which is reflected in GDP statistics.
• Every business in a small-business survey used the Internet to some extent, but only half had a website.

It’s clear from this research that Australia’s main industries are rewiring themselves around the Internet, and that a healthy digital economy is crucial to our future. But how did the Internet grow to be as large as our main commodity export? The answer is that the Internet boom is one that every business in Australia is contributing to. These days, every business in Australia is an Internet business. They might not realise it yet, but those that do are reporting huge benefits. Aussie Farmers Direct now generates over $100 million a year by selling fresh food online. Or take AuctionsPlus, which sold 2.2 million sheep via an online auction process to farmers at home and overseas last year.

The report is the latest in a series of reports sponsored by Google that try to measure the impact of the Internet. It also follows a research report from McKinsey that found that the Internet economies of the G-8 and Brazil, India, China, South Korea and Sweden accounted for 21% of GDP growth over the past 15 years.



The full report is available at www.connectedcontinent.com.au.



Posted by Nick Leeder, Managing Director, Google Australia & New Zealand

Want to win an Anita Borg Scholarship?

Dr. Anita Borg devoted her life to revolutionising the way we think about technology and dismantling the barriers that keep women and minorities from entering the computing and technology fields. In honour of Anita's vision, we established the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in 2004, awarding scholarships to women who share her passion for technology. Once again, Google is proud to announce the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in Australia and New Zealand.



Scholarships will be awarded based on the strength of candidates’ academic background and demonstrated leadership. A group of female undergraduate and graduate student finalists will be chosen from the applicant pool. Each scholar recipient will receive a $5,000 AUD scholarship towards the following academic year. In addition all finalists and scholarship recipients will be invited to an expenses-paid networking retreat to be held at Google’s Sydney Engineering centre.

Who can apply?

Applicants must satisfy all of the following criteria to be eligible:

• Be a female student at an Australian or New Zealand university who has completed one or more years of a Bachelors degree with at least one year of study remaining, whether as part of a Bachelors or postgraduate degree.
• Be enrolled in full-time undergraduate or postgraduate study at an university or equivalent tertiary institution (please see FAQ for details) in Australia or New Zealand for the following year.
• Be studying Computer Science, Software Engineering, Informatics, or a closely related technical field.

Citizens, permanent residents, and international students are eligible to apply. Past applicants and finalists are also encouraged to re-apply. If you have any questions, please email anitaborgscholarsanz@google.com.



For further information on this scholarship and how to apply, check out www.google.com.au/anitaborg .

Deadline to apply: July 31st, 2011.



Thank you for your support and good luck to applicants!