3 posts tagged “brisbane”

I spent my final day in Sydney wandering around aimlessly. I love walking around cities looking at people and the things they do. Ok, I'm mostly looking at the girls. I must confess that I have a particular affection for aussie girls. I think it's a function of the weather ;)

I had time to kill before my flight to Brisbane so I visited the Sydney Aquarium. My favorite animal was the platypus. It's such a wacky little creature that leaves me in awe of evolution. The aborigines have a cool legend about the platypus which they consider special. The readers digest version is that all the animals kept trying to invite the platypus to their meetings. The land animals, the birds, the water animals all wanted the platypus be part of their group. The platypus would always reply with "even though I share similar characteristics to you , I must decline". Eventually the platypus gathered all the animals together and explained that because she was like all the animals she was friends to them all and they should all be friends without regard to their differences. She was a unifying force. I thought it was a cool story. The sharks are really cool too and you can see them from all angles when you walk into the tank. I highly recommend it if you want to get a taste of aussie sea life.

I bought 8 cds (superjesus, spiderbait, hunter and collectors, jebediah, killing heidi, superheist, hilltop hoods, the living end) of Australian bands which I can't find on itunes or in American music shops (ok I wasn't trying that hard). CDs are horrendously expensive in Australia ~$20-25(US). I guess I'm doing my little bit for the Australian economy. I wish itunes would import more Australian bands instead of crap like Jet and Kylie Minogue. Please, Mr itunes sign a deal with Australian artists to get their music out there.

Oh, I saw blood diamond with my cousin. It's actually surprisingly good even with Di Caprio in it ;)

There's nothing more beautiful than when your plane approaches the coast of Australia and and descends into Sydney. The flight from San Francisco to Sydney was mostly painless except for the guy sitting next to me (oh cruel fate, see my previous post). He started to take up space on my side of the seat which was annoying. What's worse is that he thought I couldn't see him picking his nose every 5 minutes. There really isn't a stealthy way to pick your nose when the person is seated right next to you and yes I can see you trying to place your treasures under your seat, yuck.

Enough of that negativity. I then caught a plane up to Brisbane and got a home cooked meal. Mums are great :). There was a slight  mix up in my schedule so it turned out I had a bunch of meeting in Sydney (where I had just come from ;)). So early the next morning I was back at the airport on a flight down to Sydney. On monday and tuesday I managed to meet all but one of the tech oriented VCs (venture capitalists) in Australia.  It was a pretty interesting experience contrasting the difference between how Amercian VCs tend to perceive opportunity and the conservative nature of Australian VCs. It's understandble since the Australian market is so small and the available capital is equally small (YouTube,Skype,MySpace would never have been funded in Australia). It'd be nice to attract at least one top tier VC from the Valley into Australia because there is some great technology. I'm helping a local university pitch their idea to VCs and doing their pitch for the university business competition. I'm not exactly sure how interesting people will find my talk (I'm woefully under qualified for doing this kind of thing) but the technology is quite cool. I want to see more Australian technology out there in the world instead of being stuck in labs and never seeing the light of day due to the conservative nature of Australian business culture. I love the American sense of risk taking and just giving things a go.

The core technology is around image similiarity search. Think of being able to find pictures based on other example pictures. This sort of thing is known as CBIR (content based image retrieval). What the technology brings to the plate is ease of use and speed. They also have some cutting edge face recognition technology. Most of you will immediatly think of Riya and they are probably the best example of very similar technology. I admire Riya a great deal for pushing the boundaries of search in the consumer space. I also believe there is room for other players to enter the market and exploit different techniques. There are quite a few different verticals that people can attack but only a key few will be monetizable relatively quickly. I suspect Riya will get picked up by Yahoo (in response to the Neven acquisition) or EBay in the next 6months to a year. They just need get their visual search engine (Riya 2.0) out there.

When the team has an open web based API for people to play with I'll let you guys know so those coders out there who think they have ideas that can be built around visual search can play around. I think some pretty interesting mashups can be done with this technology. Could even be kinda cool on Vox *hint hint*.