Sam Morgan address to NZCS Conference

Sam Morgan introduced as the person most NZers think of, when they think innovation.

Sam talking about how he had an early Internet – posting floppy disks to friends. Discovered you could wash postmarks off stamps and re-use them!

Then he continued with his criminal exploits, of splicing into his neighbour’s phone lines to dial all over the world – stopped when they got the phone bill. Also a way you could get free calls through 018.

Sam had so many youthful criminal exploits, he could be a law and order spokesman for ACT 🙂

Then talked about Trade Me. Importance of making it a fun place to work. Focused on the trust model – how that was crucial to strangers selling and buying to and from each other.

Also spoke on how speed is crucial to usability.

Sam is now on board of Fairfax Media – said he has gone from spending 10 years trying to kill newspapers to now trying to work out how they survive in the digital world.

Now talking about Pacific Fibre. Said idea came over a breakfast with David Cunliffe when he and Rod were saying that fibre to the home will just move the bottleneck to the overseas links, and Cunliffe challenged them to do something about it themselves – so they did!

They want a world with no data caps (yay!). Showed a nice graphic of how video has grown from 1% to over 50% of international bandwidth. You Tube alone is responsible for 10% of global traffic!

Showed off a video cam you can place over your ear, and you can talk and show your caller what you are seeing. This will all be part of what drives future bandwidth.