BONWAG: Perth's Getting All Techy

April 5, 2008

Perth seems to want to shake its image as a 'career limiting destination' (and the 'unhappiest place on earth'). A couple of announcements in the recent press have my techie-sense all tingly:

Perth is the first Australian city to hook up Google Transit to the bus and rail timetables. We may not have the best or busiest public transport infrastructure on the planet, but it's pretty easy to exactly how crap it is at any given point. I like having the ability to map out driving directions between two locations, and clicking a button to see how long the same trip would take by bus and rail.
To be honest, though, the Transperth Journey Planner, on which the Google engine is based, is one of my favourite 'where-you-live' internet applications, along with good old TrafficCam, PerthCam, and the Perth Rain Radar (seldom used these days).
They're trying to brand Bentley as 'Australia's Silicon Valley' because someone installed some fat pipes to the internet (or, at least, promised to). Sounds like a good move, and I'm glad Fran Logan got to announce it - he shouted Ainslie and me Lunch at Parliament House a while back. Still, I don't know that Perth is ready for it: we are still somewhere between 2 hours/4 hours/2 weeks behind the eastern seaboard at any given point. OK for miners, not so good for bitjockeys. And, to steal a comment from Anonymous:
Silicon Valley has 6 universities, consists of some 15 odd towns and is home to thousands of ITC companies - large and small.Comparing it to Tech Park (42 hectares + 1 average university) is highly amusing.