Ok i don’t often talk about my own business here but time to throw a story out for comment.

As some of you know I am a director of VortexDNA, a technology company based here in Christchurch. Now a while ago we were told we could get a grant from New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, which is our economic development agency for developer resources. Great we thought because we were short handed in that department and had plenty of work available.

We applied and were fortunate enough to receive $20,000 for a developer. I’ll state now that I am not a fan of government grants at all but if it’s available then I guess you have to take it.

The developer did some work for us and was very good. We decided to reward him with some stock in the company as we do with pretty much anyone who does anything worthwhile for us. It’s a measure of our gratitude and a desire to make people part of what they help create. Sounds good?

Well no not according to NZTE who have told us we were in breach of some clause in the agreement which states there can be no financial arrangement between the company and the developer. Stone the crows!

The audit people from NZTE have played firm with the rules and told us we have to repay the money and to add insult to injury we have been placed on a high risk register for any future application.

Needless to say the directors are fuming.

And I am even more convinced that government should stay well out of business.

Meanwhile we continue to expand into the US, UK and even Russia.

Under our own steam no doubt!

For those who haven’t read it yet here is link to the complete report on the future of search. It’s an eye opening read and hopefully will give rise to new ideas, new research and even new businesses.

For me it is the democratic nature of the web that excites me. For now i’ve just focused on the delivery of the architecture that will make us form the web around us rather than having to shop through designated ports.

I think that is well on the way to happening.

I’m also thinking about the impact on governance. By this i mean the way we allow ourselves to be governed: our electoral processes, our engagement and involvement in political systems and how we make ourselves heard.

The coming versions of the web will not just make business more efficient, or general life but our political systems, our governments who eat up 30-50% of our GDP depending where you live.

The ultimate political feedback and citizen engagement system is going to rise up from the web. The powers that be are not likely to embrace this as many of them will be out of a job.

E-government is a web 1.0 framework. Imagine what it could look like in future versions. Maybe we can set up a  dream team for that?

Thanks to Kaila i’ve been considering the future of search in 2010 or more to the point the future of search itself.

It didn’t take me long to realise that search is going to replaced by receive. How annoying is that to all those businesses involved in SEO

But seriously if we are still searching in 2010 i will be surprised because by then the web should be evolving into a living and breathing system. This system will not be a library which we dip into hoping that we will find what we are looking for but will be part of us.

Simply put we will become the system.

We won’t need to search anymore as we will be the filter through which information, that we both want and may be interested in, will flow.

Search is an external process: Receive is an internal process.

Relevance technologies will be key to this evolution as will as filtering systems. Receive will be an intelligent learning system. I’m looking forward to this.

Which is the best receive engine?…..that will be the question.

What a wonderful word efficiency is. As an economist (we all are by the way) one almost salivates over the word, knowing deep down that it exists in 2 dimensions usually in a textbook where one line meets another.

Alongside “ceteris paribus” it ranks as one of those words or phrases which we extol, use a lot but know to be shrouded in a cloak of misinformation.

One approach to dealing with climate change has been the technological one….increasing efficiency (output per input etc). One problem with this is that sometimes efficiency, in money terms, can actually encourage an increase in demand.

Witness air travel, i pods, computers, LCD tvs and the like. Craig at Celsias has an interesting post on this conundrum quoting the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate which investigates whether energy efficiency actually saves energy.

The premise being that when we perceive an improvement in something we have been told not to use we all rush to use more of it. That makes sense. We’ve seen that with almost all new technological developments, air travel being the most obvious. See how the airlines that have cut fares have prospered by creating greater demand than expected.

The point of all this is that improving efficiency may not be the answer if demand is simply going to absorb it all. It reminds me of the Red Queen effect where we keep running just to keep up.

This has been noted in the area of organ donation and other medical advances. So once we can fly from Christchurch to London in a few hours for the same energy output we use now you can be sure a few million people will be commuting daily