Ozapp - Four questions for bill tai

Hi I'm Bill Tai I'm a venture capitalist based in Silicone Valley and also a sponsored athlete in kiteboarding with Cabrinha Kiteboarding. I'm an Adjunct Professor of Innovation working in the Commercialisation and IP department. And I have helped pioneer a contest that Curtins a big part of called the oZAPP - which invites developers from all over Australia to submit their ideas and products for some prize money and free hosting and a shot at getting it big. I'm here to run the oZAPP contest and to participate with some of the folks at Curtin University on spreading the word about innovation and how to use some of the newer technologies to create some economic development and value beyond some of the traditional industries that dominate Western Australia. I'd say the wave that is forming now is what we call Big Data and its the back end to what we've seen fuelling the creation of today's companies most of the big hits in recent years have been effectively users interface to data coming off the cloud. Those have been companies like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and Zynga and to the extent that they're really just good interfaces to data the companies that break out in whatever category they're in are the ones that have a better understanding through analytics and other things of what their data means and that wave is gonna spread from the web to all kinds of brick and mortar companies over time. You know Kiting for what ever reason has sort of infected part of Silicon Valley and I'd say this generation of Entrepreneurs tends to be kinda of a little younger, a little free-er thinking, a little more risk taking than Entrepreneurs of the past - not that in the past they weren't but I think these day because the Entrepreneur set is a little younger and little more prone to doing sports like this somehow they've mingled into something that is just exciting. And I think that Entrepreneurs share a lot of the same interests and passion and personality types as the kiting crowd because they're willing to take risks and willing to fail a lot and they keep doing it and waiting for that one moment where it all comes together and works. And so I think the two have tied together in a way that I would never have predicted but its awfully fun.