It was an interesting day as 12 of San Francisco’s old brigade of expats assembled at the inaugural “The Aussie Club” lunch arranged by the Australian American Chamber of Commerce. Held in the Fountain Room at The Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, we discussed the top issues impacting Australia. Hosted by The Honourable Nigel Warren – Consul General and Senior Trade Commissioner for Australia, the eloquent and very experienced Mr. Jack Ritch, Chairman of Asia Pacific Airport Corporation (the owner of Melbourne Airport) gave a comprehensive and insightful summary of the Australian political and business landscape.

Top issues were the lack of political leadership and for me, the issues surrounding the long term immigration and detention of what the Americans call “illegal aliens”. Particularly, I am concerned about how our international friends and business partners see our mistreatment of people who are refugees. Despite being in dialogue with our neighbours in the Asia Pacific area, there is no clear plan on how to manage this in the longer term. Politicians need to realize this is of critical importance.

Mining tax, Carbon tax and other internal political manifestations are domestic affairs that will be debated and finalized. The big issue is the modernity of the Australian brand in the international community and how to ensure that it is advanced with the fast pace of economic growth our wonderful country is achieving.

SearchForecast has launched Skumatic  – a software-as-a-service publishing solution design to help publish ‘Where to Buy’ webpages that feature both local retailers information together with which products and services they stock.

View at video demo of Skumatic video demo and get a 30 day free trial.

The Skumatic solution is ideal for manufacturers or wholesales of consumer goods who sell their products through local retailers over a wide area or franchisors with a franchisee network dispersed over a wide area. Skumatic provide superior pages for ‘Find a Store’ or ‘Store Locations’ pages on existing websites as products that individual stores have can be managed efficiently.

View how Melrose Health (who sell to over 5,000 pharmacies and health stores) use http://melrosehealth.skumatic.com

Skumatic solves the problem of local search engine optimization and management by manufacturers and wholesalers of their network dealerships and franchises having brand consistency, search engine optimization and advertising campaign management tools so various promotions can be simultaneously be run across many different local sites.

Last week, I was speaking at a conference at Stanford University where Marissa Mayer (employee #20 at Google) gave an account of the Google’s first usability test. You can watch the video I filmed here at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AH-Vd6uNUU

I watched Hugh Jackman perform at the Curran Theatre last night in San Francisco. He is a superstar! The 2 hour show featured songs he’d performed in musicals such as Oklahoma, The Music Man, Carousel, The Boy from Oz and some of his other favourites. He told stories and showed pictures about his career.  For Australians in America, it was also special as Hugh celebrated our Aboriginal Australia and the Nomad Two Worlds initiative.

Sitting with my wife and two daughters as Hugh told stories of being in the outback near Uluru (Ayers Rock) whilst he was filming “Australia” and singing the Peter Allen song “Tenterfield Saddler“, Hugh gave a very patriotic insight to the American audience of our wonderful country. I had not heard that song since I was a small boy growing up in Melbourne. He wasn’t the only person missing Australia last night.

My wife and Anneliese waited for Hugh Jackman after the show amidst 150 others in light rain. He walked out and saw Anneliese and bent down and gave her a hug and thanked her for waiting for him. Thank you Hugh. You  connected all of us back to Australia and sung Tenterfield Saddler brilliantly. Hugh showed those 2,000 people last night what a wonderful Australian ambassador he is and gave my daughter, who has lived in America most of her life, a big Australian hug that she’ll cherish for the rest of life.

You can listen to Tenterfield Saddler at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C70vT-ktUw&NR=1

I recently moderated a session for the Australian Chamber of Commerce on Australians in Venture Capital, together with Warren Hogarth, Tristan Langley and Spencer Maughan.

One of the interesting discussion topics was how important it is for software to be designed with aesthetic interfaces. Whilst driving home from the session held at the San Francisco Fairmont Hotel, I began to think about how software entrepreneurs today must build interfaces that are slick, polished, frictionless and all things you’d expect to see as a default application experience on any Apple device.

In the 1990s, Jürgen Schmidhuber described an algorithmic theory of beauty where aesthetically the most pleasing one is the one with the shortest description. Are we saying Twitter is beautiful or the simplicity is elegance. What is important is that VCs today expect applications to be not only disruptive in technology but the interface to be touchy, feely and beautiful in design.

In the past 6 months, I’ve been helping the folks at Stanford University to put together BiblioTech. From the humble beginnings during coffee conversations and lunches at the Faculty Club, the conference has gained momentum. I read articles about their being “too much tech” in the world and their is a concerned quorum who are keen on balancing our techno-terrific lives with creativity from the humanities departments.

Innovation is not only binary in computer code but comes from the meshing of arts, literature, philosophy and languages. Perhaps Biblio-Tech is a reflection on the true meaning of the global village. That said, I will be giving my views on May 11th at Stanford along with some learned and distinguished colleagues.

Learn more about the program at http://humanexperience.stanford.edu/bibliotech/program

If you don’t know, Google is monetizing their organic (left hand side) listings with the introduction of Place Pages. We are undertaken a lot of place page optimization and you’re welcome to download the briefs we’ve published on “Google Place Pages – Tips & Advanced Features“.

Whilst the pages are listings of information (name, address, phone, google map, opening hours, photo/youtube video upload, street view, etc), the implications for review websites can be seen in the battle Google is having with TripAdvisor. It’s clear that Google is driving revenue now. The results we see from many clients is that the Place Pages are generating more traffic than the individual website. That has massive impacts on the smaller end of the website development market.

SearchForecast continues to build out exciting technology for optimizing content on search engines. One of the key players on our technical team for the past three years has been Sham Haramalker who last year was married and has been instrumental in converting much of the architecture plans into code that drives our internal and client websites.

Sham is an expert in LAMP technologies and consistently innovative in open source code implementations. Now that he’s grown a moustache, he’s come of age and we hope he continues with his great work in 2011.

In 1997, I wrote a book called “Successful E-Commerce”. The title was the promise of tomorrow. I had no idea then that e-commerce would be so huge. Today I read that Macy’s are putting on an extra 700 staff to deal with online orders. The compound growth rates of the Internet Retail Top 500 is stupendous.

Here at SearchForecast we’re investing in a new technology publishing platform to help clients produce local pages with control of how their brands and products are displayed.

Tomorrow is about Mobile and the bus going down Townsend Street in San Francisco this morning says it all. Whether you like it or not, you do have a mall in your pocket!