'Old dog' outstays pups with new technology tricks

Wellington production company Gibson Group invented, produced and installed the latest interactive display at Te Papa, a user-controlled media wall as part of the Our Space exhibit.

After more than 30 years in media production, Mr Gibson does not mind being called an old dog, and Gibson Group is one of the more respected in the game.

"We've also got some young pups around the kennel. You do have to reinvent yourself in this business," he says. "There are an awful lot of people my age that have vanished."

With 20 full-timers and at least 100 freelancers in the wings, Gibson Group has grown from Mr Gibson's first projects in the early 1970s. Since then, the competition has at least quadrupled, growing more than the amount of available work, he says.

"The company has changed quite a lot. We have always been pretty good at picking where it [technology trend] is going to go."

Gibson Group turns over about $10 million a year, but the work can fluctuate, with some projects worth up to $5 million, and constantly updating and reinventing can be expensive in a technology-intensive business. Mr Gibson cites a year-old $100,000 piece of kit that is all but gathering dust now.

Rumours of the demise of TV have been around for a while, but new media such as the Web are still working out how to make money to pay for high-quality productions, he says. For all the new tricks, it is basically the same game, he says.

Google attempts to produce renewable energy cheaper than coal

Search giant Google on Tuesday pledged to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make renewable energy cheaper than coal.

The push to mitigate the effects of climate change through clean energy falls squarely into Google.org's missions to improve human health and alleviate poverty, said Larry Brilliant, the executive director of Google.org.

The effort, dubbed RE Technologies created by Google will likely be used by Google, whose data centers are voracious consumers of electricity. The company envisions either selling electricity from renewable sources or licensing technology on terms that would promote broad adoption, according to company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Its overarching goal is to produce 1 gigawatt of electricity from renewable sources--enough to power the city of San Francisco--faster than the current pace of green-technology development.

"The main crux of this is that we believe that you can do it cheaper than coal...and we want to make it happen now," said Page, Google's president of products. "Most people who are doing this now are trying to do it less expensive than people before, but they are not trying for that goal which will have a significant effect on the world."

Investments in other companies will be funded by Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org, which has about $2 billion worth of Google stock available to it.

In particular, Google will be investing in solar-thermal technology, wind power, and geothermal systems. Its target is to fall below the price of coal power generation, which can be as low as 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, said Bill Weihl, Google's green-energy czar.

Google said it's already working with eSolar, a solar-thermal company building systems for utilities to generate electricity from heat. It has invested in Makani Power, which is pursuing electricity generation by harnessing wind at high altitudes.

As part of the effort, Google will be hiring experts in the energy field. It expects to hire 20 to 30 people into its clean-energy division in the next year. More substantial investments will come as energy projects come online, Weihl said.

Although an ambitious plan, Google's impact on the clean-tech market segment in the near term is likely to be more psychological than financial, said Paul Clegg, a senior equity analyst who follows clean tech at Jefferies.

"Tens of millions of dollars is not a small number, obviously, but you're spreading that over things that a lot of other companies are attacking on an individual basis with more money going at it," Clegg said. "I think they'd have to invest a lot more money to get the next Manhattan Project going."

However, Google's initiative is significant in that it could indicate how corporations will start addressing their energy needs and climate change going forward, he said.