A few weeks ago we ran a story on the Australian beta launch of Vodafone’s Pocketlife - a mobile social networking app that combines telecommunications with online social networking and location-based GPS functionality.

For me, the most interesting part of the service, besides the fact that it’s incredibly cool, is that Vodafone opened the service up to more or less any phone on any network. The openness made me want to find out more about what they’re up to over at Vodafone, so I tracked down Hanno Blankenstein,  Vodafone Australia’s Head of Innovation, for a chat.

After speaking with him I was really pleased to hear what he, and his team, are doing in Australia.

First of all, Pocketlife is an Australian innovation that is being pushed out to the rest of the world. That’s something that’s pretty rare these days. Blankenstein explained that driving it out of Australia was a bit of a struggle at first, as you would expect, but that now they have business buy-in from the top. That’s really important as an example if we’re hoping for more global IT&T businesses to start looking at Australia as more than just a sales and marketing branch.

Locally they have a small cross-functional (marketing and tech) internal team but they also are highly outsourced, bringing innovative products and services from outside the organisation into the internal development environment where possible.

Many of you will know that I’m a huge fan of open innovation - where organisations leverage the skills and experience that exist outside of the corporate walls to create better offerings for their consumers. I’m even working on a related startup, so to see it in practice at Vodafone is really exciting.

Hanno’s goals aren’t small either. He wants Pocketlife to position Australia as the source of the world’s most popular mobile social network, not unlike Australia is widely renowned as the source of the world’s most popular mapping software - Google Maps.

Interestingly, it may very well be a Google Maps based service - Google Latitude - which proves to be the biggest competitor to Pocketlife. The service, which launched only a couple of weeks ago, was no doubt heavily reliant on the Australian Google Maps team to get it over the line, so we may very well be seeing the beginnings of an Aussie-focussed mobile social network war (throw in Mig33 and that comment looks even more accurate)

Either way, Blankenstein explained that Pocketlife is only the first of many world-leading innovations he plans to bring out of Vodafone Australia. The fact that you have a passionate leader willing to take Australian innovation and support it with the global marketing powerhouse that is Vodafone is extremely exciting. Marry that with the focus on openness, as opposed to the antiquated closed environments that most Telco’s still insist on trying to shove down our throats, and this could very well be the start of something special in Australia.

The only big uncertainty is the recent merger announcement between Vodafone Australia and Hutch 3. I guess we’ll soon see whether this development will stifle or drive further innovation.

So the Daily Telegraph “can reveal” that the NSW Government is going to be creating a Silicon Valley for the Western Suburbs of Sydney.

“A $500 million plan will go before a Cabinet budget committee tomorrow to declare 10,000ha of western Sydney a “special economic zone”.

It will be the largest in Australia and is expected to create employment for thousands of workers in new hi-tech, IT and bio-medical industries as well as blue collar manufacturing.”

The plan sees business “given payroll tax and land tax reductions to set up in the area” with supporting transport/infrastructure to be built connecting the centre to other areas (other areas where people actually live and work, that is…)

I haven’t seen the fine print so I don’t know if it’s the Government trying to spin this as a Silicon Valley, or the Daily Telegraph.

Either way, I can’t believe that a Government in Australia has missed the mark by so much, again.

I swear if you look closely the lion in the State coat of arms is poking its tongue out at us