May 10, 2007 | Filed under: Stuff I'm Working On

Phil 3.0 is coming out of beta as the new Chief Technology Officer for Omnidrive.

What is Omnidrive?

Omnidrive makes a terrific online storage solution. Here's some info:

Omnidrive’s development began almost three years ago by one person with the goal of building an application that would make it incredibly easy to get content on and off the web. Since then, Omnidrive has grown to become a full-scale web aggregation solution that can be accessed from a web browser, Windows or Mac desktop and in the near future, a mobile devices.

Currently headquartered in Menlo Park, CA, Omnidrive has development offices in Wollongong, Australia and Trivandrum, India.

Why I Made This Decision?

There is a secret sauce to companies which needs the right blend of ingredients to taste yummy. I'm always hunting for a balanced concoction of solid technology, dilligent work ethic, inspiring people, big vision and healthy sense of reality. Omnidrive has that.

One idea really caught my attention and the vision is huge and important. When I met Nik Cubrilovic (Omnidrive's CEO) in the Darling Harbour Starbucks he told me about his idea for WebFS - a standard for exchanging files on the web. Sounds a bit dull at first doesn't it?  But when you start to think about it for a little while it comes alive because it is one of those big ideas that has a profound effect on things.

I see WebFS as an important missing link in the software-as-services concept. As soon as services can start moving files around as easy as they do data today, some interesting new things will become possible and I am excited about being a part of that.

I am particularly interested in the idea that the user in a WebFS world owns their own files again. So if I sign up for the latest online document editing service, I am not having to lock myself in by storing my files with them also. Future apps like Google Docs and Flickr will become interfaces to our files and data, not the repository itself for our stuff.

Why Not My Own Startup?

Many of you may be wondering why I chose not to launch my own startup. Well, I'm an ideas man, not so much a business man. I like to have an idea and then start building business models around it. I'm quite good at that.  I struggle a bit when I try to do it the other way round and 'think of something' that I can build a business around.  When I left Kazaa, I had an idea for a video content business that I called Chatabox. But investment to make it happen took soooo looong that its time came and went.  Other ideas will come and there's no rush.

Time to Begin

Watch this space.

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February 27, 2007 | Filed under: Stuff I'm Working On

Yoick was in the Sydney Morning Herald with an early glimpse of Outback Online. The first of many headlines to begin with "Yoicks!" me thinks.

Yoicks! It's another virtual world

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February 20, 2007 | Filed under: Stuff I'm Working On

These days I  am having lots of fun with some very talented people at a startup called Yoick. We are developing a new 3D product called Outback. It's a huge engineering task, but it is something completely new and that's exciting. Scoble has the goss.

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| Filed under: Stuff I'm Working On

I'm finding myself designing more and more tiny UIs to deliver quite rich functionality to widgets and mobile phones. It's all part of sending the functionality to the edge of the network and freeing it from monolithic portals. 

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