The Story of New Zealand's Internet

Transcription

John Eyles – johneyles.com

“In 1998 four people, myself included, co-founded a business called English to Go. This (points to picture of a caravan) was the international headquarters of the business. It’s on Waiheke Island. It had a satellite dish on its roof. For a number of years we just ran it with a copper wire and within two years, we had customers in 120 countries. The day before 9/11 we ran the world’s largest lesson where we had 400,000 kids from 110 countries do the lesson on the same day. I suppose I brought this along really to say that this is an example of the early days of the Internet. I keep hearing, ‘broadband, broadband, broadband, we need broadband’. Yes we do – and I hope we’ve actually got there now. But what do we do with this? I really don’t believe that people are doing all that they can do with what we’ve got right now. I suppose it’s a little bit like with not-for-profits or funding – it’s much easier to get funding for a school or some infrastructure than it is to have to do the thinking behind actually creating new stuff – which is around that knowledge economy and moving now towards the wisdom economy which is the next new, new thing...”