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

An Aussie’s Take on Google I/O

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 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.

Posted by Alan Noble, Engineering Director, Google Australia

YouTube Play Winners Announced

YouTube Play searched for the world’s most creative art videos and after 23,000 submissions and 125 finalists, we’re excited to announce that the 25 winners have been announced overnight in New York at a special celebratory event at the Guggenheim Museum. Two Australian entries were among the winning 25: Keith Loutit's tilt-shift/time-lapse piece entitled 'Bathtub IV' and Nick Bertke's 'Gardyn'. Australian singer Megan Washington, who features as the singer in 'Bathtub IV', also performed live at the event in New York.




The winning entries will have their videos projected onto the Guggenheim Museum, and the final videos will also be on display from 22nd-24th October in the Museum. You can see the entries at the Play website.

Posted by Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Team

Tools to visualise access to information

Editor's Note: This is a cross-post from the Official Google Blog.

When Google’s services are blocked or filtered, we can’t serve our users effectively. That’s why we act every day to maximise free expression and access to information. To promote transparency around this flow of information, we’ve built an interactive online Transparency Report with tools that allow people to see where governments are demanding that we remove content and where Google services are being blocked. We believe that this kind of transparency can be a deterrent to censorship.

Like all companies, Google’s services occasionally experience traffic disruptions. Our new traffic tracking tool helps us and others track whether these interruptions are related to mechanical outages or are government-induced. Each traffic graph shows historic traffic patterns for a given country and service. Graphs are updated as data is collected, then normalized and scaled in units of 0 to 100. This new tool—which is global and includes China—will replace the Mainland China service availability chart, which showed product access for China alone. By showing outages, the traffic graphs visualise disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it's a government blocking information or a cable being cut. For example, the graphs show that YouTube has been inaccessible in Iran since June 12, 2009, following the disputed presidential election.

In April we also created a website that shows the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests for Google to take down or censor content. Today we’re updating this interactive Government Requests map with data from the first six months of 2010. We’ve also updated our analysis of the trends we saw across the data over the past six months. The new data for 2010 now includes the number of individual items asked to be removed, per country (for example, there may be many URLs per a single request.) You can learn more about trends in the data here. We view this as a concrete step that, we hope, will encourage both companies and governments to be similarly transparent.

Free expression is one of our core values. We believe that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. Free expression is, of course, also at the heart of Google’s business. Our products are specifically designed to help people create, communicate, share opinions and find information across the globe. We hope this step toward greater transparency—and these tools—will help in ongoing discussions about the free flow of information.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

Four Australian finalists announced in YouTube Play

Back in June, YouTube and the Guggenheim Museum in New York organised a historic, international contest called YouTube Play searching for the world’s most creative art videos. We received more than 23,000 entries, and today, the YouTube Play channel will reopen featuring videos from the shortlisted artists, covering animation, motion graphics, documentary work and music videos.



We’re especially excited to showcase here the four Australian finalists, whose work is truly inspired, and ranges from Darcy Prendergast’s evocative stop motion glow sticks and Yanni Kronenberg & Lucinda Schreiber’s stunning chalkboard animation, to Keith Loutit’s time lapse film techniques and Nick Bertke’s feet-tapping electronica piece, ‘Gardyn’.



These finalists will have their videos on show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York on October 21, 2010 with simultaneous presentations at the Guggenheim museums in Berlin, Bilbao, and Venice.







“Autumn Story” by Yanni Kronenberg and Lucinda Schreiber.

Yanni Kronenberg is a freelance photographer and director and Lucinda Schreiber is an award-winning Sydney-based illustrator, animator and director.







“Bathtub IV”, Keith Loutit.

Known as the pioneer of the tilt-shift / time-lapse technique, Loutit is a Sydney-based photographer and short filmmaker who first recognised how time and focus combine to support the powerful illusion of miniaturisation in film.







“Gardyn”, Pogo (Nick Bertke)

Pogo is an electronic music artist living in Perth. He is known for his work recording small sounds from a film or a specific scene, and sequencing the sounds together to form a new piece of music. In “Gardyn”, Pogo uses syllables of his mother's voice and the sounds of her backyard to create a beautiful video and soundtrack.

“Lucky”, Darcy Prendergast

Darcy Prendergast is a director that founded Dee Pee Studios, an award-winning Melbourne-based clay animation house. Darcy utilises a glow stick or coloured torch to draw an image in the sky that is captured into a video frame. This film took over 6 months to shoot.



The next stage for these finalists is to have their work judged by YouTube Play’s jury — including iconic performance artist Laurie Anderson, Japanese fine artist Takashi Murakami, music group Animal Collective, and The Wrestler director Darren Aronofsky — who will pick the top 20 videos for the Guggenheim exhibit.



Posted by Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Team