I was worried when I returned that I might be booed or barracked. Nobody has waved fivers at me. I am touched by the reception since I have come back.

We've all got to get away from this idea that the big money's still around.

We've got to have a radical rethink of the way the sport is funded to help the young players develop.

People fell in love with Alex Higgins, a working-class fellow from the back streets of Belfast. That's what brought the game alive.

If you look at the fact that the best chance we have for a good economy is the private sector. The government cannot create jobs. If the government could create jobs, then Communism would have worked. But didn't work. So what we have to do is allow the private sector and the entrepreneurial spirit to lead us back to a job-filled recovery.

I guess I always had made some assumptions about what it would be like to work in a tech company, and some were right, and some were wrong. I had a lot of, looking back on it, now naive ideas about how companies build their brands, and a lot of those notions I ended up realizing were kind of wrong.

When I started my company in the U.S. I was always told by my mentors, 'If you want to start a tech company, you need a technical co-founder,' because outsourcing just doesn't work. It is too slow, it is too expensive, and the product is going to change a lot.

My scientific career has developed on three continents: Asia, Europe and North America.