Google Australia gets new engineering chief

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 06 February 2007 10:45

Your IT - Home IT

Google has named Alan Noble as engineering director, Google Australia. He replaces Lars Rasmussen as manager of Google's engineering and R&D centre in Sydney

The centre was launched in May 2005, as the result of Google acquiring Where 2 Technologies, a mapping company founded by Rasmussen, his brother and two Australian friends.

Rasmussen told iTWire in May 2006: "We [Where 2 Technologies] formed about half of the team that put out Google Maps...and once we had done that we started lobbying to have a fully-fledged engineering centre in Sydney. The Sydney engineers still form a very significant part of the team that is working on Google Maps and I think that fact is going to make Google Australia an extremely attractive place for the top programmers and computer scientists to seek employment."

Google has just announced Google Maps Australia and named  Rasmussen as head of engineering for Google Australia in that announcement. When queried about Noble's appointment a company spokesman told iTWire: "Alan is the first official engineering director for Australia. Previously, Lars was temporarily filling this role. Lars continues to work for Google in Australia as a senior engineer and will now be focusing his efforts on product development."

Rasmussen told iTWire last May that Google was looking to expand its R&D team in Australia. The spokesman said this week that "The Google R&D team in Australia continues to grow and is hiring as fast as it can find qualified candidates."

Noble joins Google from NetPriva, a software company he co-founded and where he has been CEO and CTO for the past two years for nearly two years. In 1996 he founded NetMind in California which was acquired in 2000 by Intellisync, subsequently acquired by Nokia. He remained at Intellisync as VP of engineering until 2002. He then joined Australian company, Foursticks as CTO and was instrumental in bringing Foursticks' technology to market. The Foursticks technology was acquired by NetPriva in 2005.

 He has been granted seven US patents and has several others pending.