Google hot for tech talent

Chris Jenkins MAY 16, 2006

GOOGLE has opened its new Sydney office with a plan to snap up the top tech graduates from Australia's universities.

The company announced an internship program with universities due to start in summer, as well as a full-time campus recruitment scheme.

A handful of selected students would work with Google on projects over the summer break. As well as giving students experience, the program would help Google identify talent, Google Australia head of engineering Lars Rasmussen said.

"We are hiring as fast as we can find suitable candidates," he said.

The company now had a fully-fledged engineering centre in Sydney, which was well positioned to tap into a dormant pool of development talent in Australia.

Much of the work being done in Australia was original R&D, he said.

"We are not just here to localise Google's many services."

Sydney offers Google access to an English-speaking base in an Asian time zone, he said.

"There is a tremendous amount of talent in computing and related fields here in Sydney, around Australia and the entire region, but frankly very little exciting opportunity for those people. That makes Sydney a smart place to build such a centre," Mr Rasmussen said.

Skills useful to Google Australia at present include geospatial systems, data mining and search, he said.

The Australian team was now an integral part of Google's mapping operations, he said.

Mr Rasmussen, who joined Google when his own mapping development outfit was bought by Google, said it was also part of his brief to keep an eye out for interesting Australian start-ups.

Finding suitable candidates was one factor limiting Google's potential growth, Google principal engineer Rob Pike said.

Mr Pike will travel between Google's California headquarters and the Sydney office to help establish the engineering base in Sydney.

Google employs about 40 staff in Australia, but refuses to say exactly how many local employees are on its books.

However, it new office takes an entire floor in the Darling Park complex, giving it room for hundreds of employees. Seventy-five per cent of local staff were in sales, Google Australia head of sales Kate Vale said.

Also announced was a new scholarship program for women in IT, providing travel grants to attend Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in California.

Opening the new office, federal IT Minister Senator Helen Coonan welcomed Google's move, saying Google was a "company of boundless innovation and ambition".

Mr Rasmussen said the competition for top-level graduates was "getting hotter".

"I think it's true that the over past few years since the tech-wreck the top talent was primarily hired by banks, with just a small number of research institutes in Australia," he said.

"But my sense is that we are not the only ones noticing this and that the competition for that talent will increase."

Bogan may soon be PC

The Daily Telegraph May 16, 2006

GREAT Aussie slang like bogan, sheila, bonza and sickie could soon be recognised by computers as software developers work to make their products more Australian.

Microsoft's Australian subsidiary is putting forward a list of quintessential Aussie words, including rough and tumble slang, for inclusion in its next version of productivity software products known as the 2007 Microsoft Office System.

Words such as g'day, sickie, jackaroo, dag, dinky-di, ute, sanga, wuss and cooee were among the list of words selected by a panel of experts, who considered them to be most relevant to everyday Aussies, Microsoft said.

Sporting icons such as cricket legend Don Bradman and champion horse Phar Lap have also made the short list, as did ugg boots and hair regrowth treatment Rogaine.

Chinese 'Wikipedia' launched

Herald Sun 11 May 2006

CHINA'S biggest internet search engine has launched an online encyclopedia modelled on the US-based website Wikipedia, which is blocked by Beijing.

However, entries on Baidupedia, the service from Nasdaq-listed Baidu.com launched last month, are censored by the Chinese Government.
Searches conducted today for the banned spiritual movement "Falungong" or for "Dalai Lama" – in both Chinese and English – yielded no results, but generated the message: "The page cannot be displayed."

Baidu's chairman and chief executive Robin Li told Britain's Financial Times newspaper his online encyclopedia was modelled on Wikipedia.

But he said he was unaware Beijing had banned the Florida-based reference website.

"I certainly hope our encyclopedia will be the most authoritative one for any Chinese users," Mr Li was quoted as saying.

"The initial reaction has been very positive, so we are quite confident that we will quickly become the number one in this area."

The Chinese-language version of Wikipedia, which relies on voluntary users and contributors to ensure its neutrality and objectivity, was enjoying soaring popularity until Beijing blocked access to the site late last year.

Beijing bans many portals to eliminate "harmful" content, including pornography and violence from their websites.

But it also categorises politically sensitive material and some religious content, such as those from Falungong, as "harmful" and regularly shuts down websites containing such information.

Baidupedia barred users from including any "malicious evaluation of the current national system", any "attack on government institutions" or even "promotion of a dispirited or negative view of life", the FT said.

Company officials at Baidu could not be immediately reached for comment.

China has about 111 million internet users, with the majority being youngsters.

Baidu.com holds a leading share of China's search market at 37.4 per cent.

Its stock sale in August on Nasdaq was one of the year's hottest initial public offerings – with its shares surging 354 per cent in one day, prompting some analysts to nickname it the "Chinese Google".

Google launches Google Trends

11 May 2006

Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results -- our search-volume graph.

Located just beneath our search-volume graph is our news-volume graph. This graph shows you the number of times your topic appeared in Google News stories. When Google Trends detects a spike in the volume of news stories for a particular term, it labels the graph and displays the headline of an automatically selected Google News story written near the time of that spike. Currently, only English-language headlines are displayed, but we hope to support non-English headlines in the future.

Below the search and news volume graphs, Google Trends displays the top cities, regions, and languages for the first term you entered. [READ MORE]

Miners' domain names removed

11 May 2006

INTERNET domain names brantwebb.com.au and toddrussell.com.au have been deregistered after the web watchdog moved to quash attempts to "cash in" on the freed miners' story.

The Australian domain name administrator auDA today said the two domain names were registered on Tuesday night, hours after the pair walked free from the Beaconsfield Gold Mine in Tasmania.

auDA chief executive Chris Disspain said the administrator was aware of the registrations by 9am the next morning and quickly moved to delete the names.

While it was possible the registrations were legitimate, the body believed it was likely to have been an attempt at opportunism, Mr Disspain said.

"Our immediate reaction was that it was more likely to be an attempt by the registrant to cash in (on the story)," he said.

The administrator sent the registrant a notice asking them to explain within 24 hours why they were eligible for the names but no response was received.

"No satisfactory eligibility has been received so we deleted the domain names this morning," Mr Disspain said.

He said com.au names were reserved for registered Australian businesses, and the name must be "closely and substantially connected" to the business. [READ MORE]