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!

As all software developers will tell you, getting in the zone is critical to execution. When I caught up with Jay McKinsey recently, we discussed the cloud and the requirements for helping clients manage product catalogs and dealer databases in the age of hyper growth e-commerce sales.

Like the sun shining off Half Dome at Yosemite National Park, the light only needs to shine on the software built at the right time to make it seem so perfect.

Over pasta and Tiramisu in Palo Alto last week I met up with Aayush Phambhra, founder of Chegg. Having both had the problem of overly priced University textbooks, we discussed the mission of Chegg – which I fully endorse.

Firstly, it’s a noble profession to help the world in education and with Google Books making it an open environment where any device can (not like Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle ) access books, I like what Chegg are doing.

At some point, mankind needed to invent a distribution system that would take in real time the knowledge contained in books to those who afford to buy a book or find a library who could lend them a book. Having a library to last forever is a noble cause and I hope others around the world help Chegg make books accessible to their people. Education is the key to a better world. Aayush, Chegg and Google Books are doing that. Keep up the good work.

Recently, I had a conversation with Anaïs Saint-Jude, a PhD in French Literature at Stanford University about the lack of emotional fibre and humanity in Facebook’s commoditized version of connectedness (which I don’t fundamentally agree with).

When I studied Economics at the University of Melbourne, we learned about subsistence economies drove people to live in towns and communities so they could barter as there was a lack of liquidity and divisibility in exchangeable goods and services. Along comes money and currency and solves that problem.

So Facebook doesn’t make sense as the whole word does not want to be open (need to live so close together like in pre-currency days to trade goods and services). There is no economic requirement to do so.

Yesterday I was reading an article on Google’s + 1 project and I thought about what my friend and I discussedand it occured that from a math perspective (Google is all math – a play on the name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol) and so I find it amusing that software guys are creating technologies that go against with the laws of economics.

So I was thinking of the lack of privacy and the fact that I’m sure one person on every persons Facebook account is not really connected….. hence the math is “minus 1”.

So whilst the project being pursued by Google and other is more, more, more, social, social, social – I think there are lots of people (or atleast a segment) which are thinking less, less, less, privacy, privacy, privacy – which leads me to the economic rationale that we are in a social bubble and the laws of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns will prevail and people will find that they get less value from adding more Facebook members.

Hence, I do believe in an economic (and might I say humanities) solution is “prive-1” (“prive” is French for private” less one). That is an economic truism I feel will result from the overproduction of friends on Facebook and feel a business will result from this theory.