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Congratulations once again to the Mick Liubinskas and and Martin Wells, organisers of last night's STIRR event in Sydney, for putting on another great event. The Half-Baked concepts were great fun, and once again it was another chance to catch up with many of the best and brightest in Sydney's Web 2.0 developer community. Before last night I had never thought I'd see my face on a $1 million dollar note ...
Caught up with Chris Kettle from the Australian internet company My247.com.au today. Chris' company is on the verge of launching one of the first sites in Australia to use a .mobi extension (apparently the property site buxton.mobi has beaten to the punch in terms of being the first). The .mobi extensions are designed specifically to be viewed on mobile phones, and come with some fairly onerous provisions to ensure that the mobile browsing experience is a pleasant one for consumers. The My247 site is an online entertainment guide that can be tailored for each user. The company is planning on launching the .mobi site at the forthcoming Mobile Monday event on April 2 in Sydney.
Congratulations to all of last night's winners from the Interactive Advertising Bureau Awards, held last night at Star City Casino in Sydney. Congrats specifically to the guys at the Australian mobile specialists TigerSpike for taking out the best-of-the-best award for its work on the Telstra Street Idol campaign in conjunction with the ad agency GPY&R. Brilliant to see a mobile company triumph against more established web-based companies. For a full list of award winners, click here.
Great to see Hutchison Australia's 3G network operator 3 getting serious about the mobile internet with the launch of its X-Series data pricing structure. There are plenty of stories up online now that go into the details (including this one by Asher Moses at the Sydney Morning Herald), but essentially the company is offering subscribers free access to its own Planet 3 data services, as well as up to 500 MB of mobile broadband access and up to 1000 minutes of free Skype calls through the handset, for $20 per month. Two other plans offering greater downlloads and Skype durations are also available.
With 3 now making it affordable for Australians to start surfing outside of its walled garden, the big question is whether they are actually going to. The new plans remove many of the barriers that have prevented the growth of the mobile internet - but will X-Series subscribers find that it is something of a wasteland outside of 3's portal? Mobile content companies such as Kukan Studio, bluepulse and Aura have built respectable mobile content businesses (you can read more about them in these stories at ZDNet's BuilderAU site here, here and here), but the high charges that were previously associated with surfing outside of a carrier's portal has clearly stifled development.
But as has been the case through the development of internet, the more bandwidth you give to people, the more they will do with it. Surely it can't be long then before we start seeing the mobile equivalents of high-bandwidth applications such as Flickr and YouTube?
At the very least, if the uptake of X-Series is strong it may prompt other carriers to revist their own pricing structures.
Last year I had the rare chance to meet a couple of who have truly done a great deal to reshape the industry that they work in. Husband-and-wife team Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum founded the US-based software company VMware in 1998, creating virtualisation software that would allow engineers to quickly set up test systems, and then tear them down when they were finished. The corporate applications soon became apparent, and today virtualisation is an accepted technology for server consolidation and disaster recovery. There company was subsequently acquired by the storage systems company EMC in early 2004, and today boasts more than 20,000 clients. VMware’s revenue for 2006 grew by 86 percent, to US$709 million. In February this year parent company EMC announced that it would be offering approximately 10 percent of VMware in an initial publication. As a guest of VMware at the VMworld conference in LA, I had the chance to talk to the couple about the early days, and whether they knew the impact that their fledgling technology would have. You can read about it as part of this larger feature on virtualisation in the Sydney Morning Herald and Age newspapers.
While I ponder the question of whether a PS3 is really worth the $1000 investment (and at times it is not a particularly logical line of reasoning), the more hard-core of the gamer friends of mine keep telling me how much they love their Nintendo Wii. Seems the sentiment is being reflected at a retail level, with the Wii heralded as a success around the world. Goes to show that a device does not need to have the most powerful processor with the sharpest graphics - if a device focuses on the core mission of providing fun, it's got a good chance of being a winner.
Anyway, for any Wii fanatics out there, entrepreneur Graeme Klass has set up a new website, with Wii news and a service whereby people can rate their online personas, known as their Mii. You can check it out here.
If anyone is looking for an ongoing source of information on Australians in Second Life, then check out SLOz. They guys behind it are doing a great job of keeping it updated - which I can only assume will become more and more difficult as Australian interest in Second Life grows.
Now that I have your attention ... thanks to Paul Ryan, editor at Australian Anthill magazine for pointing this one out - it's a group brainstorm blog of potential web start-up ideas. Called Tequila Shots, it's worth checking out if you are a budding entrepreneur but running short on ideas ....
For anyone who read about last December's Sydney STIRR event and wanted to get in on the action, the chance has come. Thursday, March 29 represents the return of STIRR to to Ivory bar at 620 Harris Street, Ultimo. The last event was both informative and great fun, and the next event promises no less. For more information, click here.
Great to see that Sydney-based creative director Chris Simon's concept for a user-generated band, the Bracket Boys, is gathering momentum. Chris tells me he has just signed a deal with the Malaysian developer Macera to create the world's first mobile phone game based on the concept of fighting global warming, using the character Bracket Girl, and called Bracket Girl's E-mission. Macera has a background in mobile games, and was behind the cult anime hit Fatal Chaos. You can read more about E-mission Download E-mission.doc
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