New Zealand In My Eyes

I love New Zealand.

I’ve lived here for about half my life. I was born in Washington DC, but moved before I can remember (and I’m not entitled to US citizenship). Since then, I’ve also lived in the Cook Islands, the Philippines, and Spain. I’m lucky in that I’ve seen enough of the world to know what makes New Zealand so great, and also what holds us back.

Whenever I’m overseas, I’ve always felt as though I’m a representative of the entire country. At the schools I’ve been to in other countries, I’ve always been the sole New Zealander (and these have been big schools). Everyone has known me as “the Kiwi”, and I’ve always been proud when called that.

Growing up as a representative of New Zealand – and being lucky enough to know what that means – has given me a truly huge respect for this country. Most of what people say is correct. We are a bloody inventive bunch. We’ve got values and a heart. We are friendly and happy. We have a stable and uncorrupt government, no matter who’s in power and what anyone says. And we’re lucky enough to have an abundance of the colours blue and green – some of the best and most beautiful natural resources in the world.

Going forward, it is of utmost importance to me that New Zealand not only remain relevant in the world, but emerges as a clear leader in the world.

It should be clear to everyone by now that the world is in a rough spot at the moment. Both Europe and America – long the leaders of the world – are clearly on unsustainable courses. Power is shifting. New leaders will emerge over the next decade. China is clearly one, but there is room for others.

I’m writing this post right now because: 1. New Zealand is heading in entirely the wrong direction and will decline in power and wealth over the next decades, and 2. I want New Zealand to be a wealthy world leader.

There are people far more experienced than me talking about these things. Sir Paul Callaghan explains why we’re going to become poorer and more irrelevant on our current course. Derek Handley shows us an alternative path, and inspires us to take action. Andy Hamilton tells us about the role of smart enterprises in a brighter New Zealand future.

New Zealand currently has two key sources of value that give us our place in the world: tourism and dairy. Let’s examine these going forward, drawing on the insights and statistics of Sir Paul Callaghan.

New Zealand has 1.3 million FTE (full-time equivalents, essentially the number of jobs available). We also have a per capita GDP of approximately $40,000. In order to maintain our current GDP of approx. $125billion, we need a GDP of $120,000 per job. Tourism in New Zealand produces around $80,000 per job. That’s two-thirds of the per-job GDP we need to sustain our current GDP, which means the more tourism we export, the poorer we become. We are immediately doomed if we at all try to increase tourism, which is what a large majority of people currently seem intent on doing.

Dairy, in contrast, produces $350,000 per job. Sir Paul Callaghan says it succinctly – “Without dairy, we would be desperately poor”. However, dairy is finite in capacity. We only have so much land to farm on, and we’re not too far off its capacity.

I’ll repeat: the current course that New Zealand is on will not allow us to even sustain our current GDP, let alone grow.

Countries like Singapore and Hong Kong didn’t grow through their natural resources (they don’t have any). And remember, thirty years ago New Zealand was providing aid to Singapore. Now they both have GDPs twice as large as ours. New Zealand will never become relevant in the world, as Singapore and Hong Kong are, if we continue to focus on growth through our natural resources.

Throughout New Zealand’s history, our key weakness has been our physical distance from the rest of the world. It costs huge amounts and takes a long time to export to other countries. It takes ages to travel anywhere. We’ve actually done remarkably well exporting dairy and tourism, considering this.

In the twenty-first century, New Zealand’s physical distance from the rest of the world became a competitive advantage. Well, it would have, if we’d pursued other sources of growth.

The Internet. You’ve heard it before. It breaks down physical barriers. That’s what it does best. No longer do we write physical letters, or need to travel across the world to see people. No longer do books and newspapers need to be printed and sent here. No longer is New Zealand restricted to growth through bringing people to the country or sending goods out.

The Internet is the biggest opportunity New Zealand has ever had, and ever will have. It allows us to achieve growth and sell products at absolutely no additional cost to what it costs other countries to produce. We can reach the rest of the world in milliseconds, compared to the previous days. Furthermore, our physical distance from the rest of the world becomes a competitive advantage to us because the smartest people in the world will want to come and live and work in a beautiful, pristine island.

And here New Zealand is building a national cycling track to encourage tourism, destroying areas of forestry to turn it into farming land, and then selling great chunks of our land to the Chinese.

The stars are aligned for us. Global power is shifting at the same time that the Internet gives us another path to growth. I refuse to let my country miss the biggest opportunity it will ever have. I refuse to let New Zealand become poor and irrelevant, when it could become a rich world leader.

This post marks my commitment to doing whatever I possibly can to create a rich and powerful New Zealand. This will be a core tenet of my life.

Watch Sir Paul Callaghan and Derek Handley’s talks. Follow Derek’s advice on what you can do right now. Think about the New Zealand that you want and how we might get there.

To finish, I’ll quote Derek, as he says it best:

“As we continue through the twenty-first century, New Zealand can choose to be an idle bystander, or it can choose to be a shaper of this century. The former path is a path to failure and irrelevance as a country – and those failures as a collective will cast a long black shadow over the Land of the Long White Cloud for many, many years to come”.

The Google+ Launch and the Future of Social Networks

If you’ve read many of my posts on the future of social networks, you’ll know that my view is based around social networks being an extension of our interactions and networks in our real lives. To me, the introduction of Google+ has been very interesting to watch, and I feel it has confirmed my views in a lot of ways.

On Facebook as contacts I have real friends, family, and contacts I know through business/tech. Of these three groups, the one that I communicate by far the most with is my real friends. Facebook is a perfect platform for communicating with them – everything about it makes it a great way to communicate. It’s also a great place for me to communicate with family, especially since my family is spread over the globe. But although I have contacts in the technology and business world, I don’t communicate with them much on Facebook at all.

Why is that? There is no technical reason behind it. It’s to do with the mindset, perception, and value of the network. For some reason, my perception of Facebook means I am inclined to use it to interact mainly just with real friends and family. To me, it seems slightly weird to communicate with people in my professional life in the same place as I communicate with my close friends.

I would bet that a lot of other people feel the same as me in that respect.

On Google+ as contacts I have real friends, family, and contacts I know through business/tech. Sound familiar? It’s mostly the same contacts that I have on Facebook. However, the people that I communicate with through Google+ is entirely different to who I communicate with through Facebook. On Google+ I’ve been communicating almost exclusively with tech/business people. I haven’t posted a single status update or photo or link that isn’t in some way to do with the tech world.

This is what I mean by how the mindset, perception, and value of the network shapes the groups that I communicate with through it. There isn’t a real reason for me to communicate with these different groups on different networks, when I’m connected to them both on both networks. But because Google+ was pitched initially to tech early adopters, it immediately gained value to other people involved in the technology industry because you could find everyone else in that network on it. But also, because it’s an existing large tech company who has created it, it has a mindset and perception targeted to the technology industry. Also, as I wrote about the other day, the 18+ age limit has contributed to this perception people get of Google+.

My view on social networks is that in a few years time we may have ten networks, each with 100million users. The networks are defined by people’s interests, location, values, beliefs, and preferences. Your network will be a representation of who you are as a person, and what kind of networks you are a member of in real life. I’ve written extensively on this in the past. And to me, the launch of Google+ has shown that people are responsive to this concept. A lot of people whose lives are dedicated to the tech industry are now solely using Google+, because it better represents who they are, and all the people they want to communicate with are on it. On the other hand, Joe Average Facebook User may never use Google+ because it doesn’t fit with his mindset, and it doesn’t give him any value over Facebook.

I’m extremely interested to hear others’ thoughts on this topic. I’ve got my thesis, but again, the reason I blog is to get feedback and hear others’ opinions. So, please do leave your thoughts in the comments or flick me an email.

An Argument For Apps Over HTML5

Tell me: what do the http:// and www written in my browser address bar actually do? For years I’ve learned to type them in without understanding why or what they do. Now browsers are getting smart and I don’t actually need to type them in any more – but even when I don’t type them, my browser will automatically insert them.

Doesn’t it seem a little bit weird to you that we still need to use that syntax? Websites are becoming so advanced – they’re becoming experiences. And yet we are still shown some of that information which I believe should really be hidden from the user. In fact, it’s not just the http:// and www which I think needs to be removed. It’s the entire address bar.

This relates to the whole app vs. website debate. Some people think that in the future we will browse websites through app-style mechanisms, while others feel that the browser will live and we will continue to browse websites in the same way, albeit with better technology like HTML5. My bets are definitely on the prior of those two. And the address bar is one fundamental reason.

I believe that everything that goes on behind a website (ie. whatever isn’t displayed or isn’t useful to the user) should simply not be shown. Now, a massive address bar that runs the whole length of your browser window is just silly. It doesn’t help you, and in fact it just detracts from what I feel should be the experience of a website.

That is part of why I believe the future of websites is apps. It’s because apps don’t do or show anything that the user doesn’t need to see. They’re entirely user-oriented, and I believe the same can’t be said for websites in their form today.

The whole “apps vs HTML5″ argument needs to take this into account. If HTML5 is just shoved into existing browsers that do things that the user doesn’t need to see, then I don’t think HTML5 will win because it doesn’t offer the same experience to the user.

I think the future is looking bright for apps, and this is just one reason why.

Why & How TDTYTIS Aims To Be The Other Side To Education

There are really two reasons why I started TDTYTIS. One is quite well known and easy to understand: TDTYTIS aims to pass on knowledge between generations in an effective way. It’s about taking all the experiences of the adult generation, bundling them up into one minute videos, and making them accessible to young people worldwide so that they can get ahead faster.

But there is another reason. It’s a larger focus, that could play a major role in the progressing education sector.

I’ve written a lot about how I think services like Khan Academy are the future of education, and how I believe in the near future all education will be done online. Schools will simply be a place you go to get help with things you don’t understand. However, we have to remember that school also serve a different purpose entirely. They give a social, and an emotional education, that young people cannot easily gain elsewhere. It’s about interacting with different people, being exposed to different world views, and hearing different ideas and opinions. Currently there is no online service that could replace this aspect to a physical education.

But TDTYTIS aims to change that. If you think about it, a lot of the experiences and knowledge that the adult generation will be passing on actually covers a lot of the social and emotional education that young people need. It’s life lessons, ideas, opinions, regrets. All the things that young people need to be exposed to.

Over the long-term, we plan to develop TDTYTIS into a platform that allows people to record their own videos straight from the website. This will allow for a much greater quantity of videos to be created. Also included will be a voting feature, that allows the community to decide what the most interesting and useful videos are.

It is my hope that eventually young people will also upload videos with lessons they learn on a daily basis. Sharing information, ideas, and knowledge isn’t really a one-way thing. One of the key bits of feedback we’ve received since the launch of the initial TDTYTIS version is that adults are learning a lot from the videos too. That’s why we’re building out the website in stages, to make sure that each subsequent version is better suited to our users. We’ll just have to build out the feature in time, and see if young people actually take to recording videos.

Eventually I see TDTYTIS as “the other side to education”. Khan Academy, or whatever video education service goes fully mainstream, will provide the intellectual education. TDTYTIS will provide a part of the social and emotional education that young people need.

I’m super excited – in my opinion this is the kind of technology that helps to progress societies and make people’s lives better. But we’ll be listening to feedback from users and will see whether my hypothesis is correct!

The Future of the Internet: Year 2020 [Essay]

I was recently encouraged to enter a competition where I had to write an essay on what the Internet will look like in 2020. The task was a lot harder than it appears, because hindsight shows us just how bad we are at predicting technological advancements. I took the line of thinking of things that would be fantastic to use, and make our lives easier.

This isn’t meant as a factual account with evidence — it’s just a bit of fun to get thinking, and it’ll be interesting in 2020 to see if I got anything right!

The Internet in 2020

The Future of Social Networks: Societal Structure

So Facebook has 600 million users. Many people are saying that Facebook will now be here for ever, and the entire planet will eventually be on Facebook. The same people are saying it will grow to be the biggest company in history, and that it’ll make a killing for investors. I disagree. This article explains why I disagree, and discusses what social networks should look like to succeed.Social networks are still in early days. I don’t think they’ve really matured in any way, because they are still built on false assumptions that were made beginning with the first few mainstream social networks. The system of “friending” is completely broken, and yet many people don’t realize it because they don’t stop to ask why it is that way.

Facebook says that all my friends and contacts are of equal importance to me. They know this isn’t true, but there is no way for me to distinguish between friends I am truly close with or contacts that I met at a conference and felt obliged to accept on Facebook. In real life, we rank our connections in order of how important they are to us and how close we are with them. But on Facebook, this system has gone out the window because that functionality is not built into the social network.

But there is more about Facebook that is broken. Facebook is a “one-size-fits-all” social network. In other words, it thinks that everyone will find use in Facebook as long as they are on it with their friends. They believe that the higher the number of users they have, the more likely it is that people will keep joining. But this view goes against societal laws.

We live in societies in real life because we surround ourselves with people who share similar values, beliefs, and interests. Sure, the fact that I support one political party over another says that I have slightly different values to the person next to me, but fundamentally our values and beliefs are very similar. And living in a society allows me to know that anybody I meet will have fundamentally the same mindset as me. People who share similar religions live in the same societies, because they understand each other. This means that I can meet new people, and be social with a group outside of my existing close friends, with the knowledge that anybody I meet will be essentially similar to me.

Think about the term social network for a moment. When we hear it, we think of online social networks, like Facebook, with a system of “friending” and where we only communicate with our existing contacts. But social network is a broad term. Actually, it kind of describes how we relate to our contacts in real life. We have our own social network in real life, and you know what? It works. It’s called our society, and it’s been around for decades, if not centuries.

My question is: why aren’t online social networks built like physical societies?

Imagine this model as three circles, one inside of the other. The inner circle has your core group of friends and family – you share everything with them. There may only be 25 people in there, but these are the people who you would call to tell them something important that has just happened. They mean a lot to you. You’ll connect with these people by “friending” them – ie. mutual designation.

The next circle, which is quite a few times larger than the inner circle, is made up of your connections. These are the people who you’ve met at conferences, or know from school – you’re not close with them, but you’d talk to them if you saw them on the street. To connect with these people, you just have to specify them as a connection. It’s more like “following” them, only they will see that you have specified them as a connection and they can specify you back.

The third and final circle is made up of outer society. People you don’t know, but who you may meet someday. You cross paths with these people every day, but just haven’t yet taken the time to stop and talk to them. This final circle is huge – many, many times bigger than the previous two – and you have no direct link to them unless you choose to.

What this model allows is for us to differentiate between true “friends”, and mere “connections”. You can have a clear distinction between the two, allowing you to know more clearly who what you are sharing will reach. It gives you the ability to share more with those you really care about, without annoying connections. And, likewise, it allows you to share things with connections that you wouldn’t share with your family. And what about “outer society”? Well, you can interact with them as much or as little as you want.

The beauty of this model is that it allows us to choose how we want to use our social network. If we want to use it like Facebook, we can do that – the choice is entirely up to us.

But there will not be just one social network that looks like this. There will be tens, if not hundreds of them – each with millions of users. The social network that you are a part of will be a representation of who you are as a person. It will signify your values, beliefs, and interests.

When will this shift in model of social networks occur? I believe it will start in a year and a half, and reach the mainstream in about three years from now. That’s time for these new social networks to be built and perfected.

In any case, the battle of the social networks is far from over. Facebook hasn’t won, and there are plenty of genius programmers at colleges around the world. Good luck.