LagrangePoint - Brad Howarth

WebEx online collaboration seminar

If anyone is interested in listening in to the WebEx seminar that I held on collaboration technologies last week, here is a link to a recording of the event. Some of you will know already that I am a huge fan of presence technologies, and have been using instant messenger for work purposes since the mid 1990s.I've also written a few articles on the topic over the years, such as this one for The Age. Anyway, if you want to hear the whole 45 minute presentation, just click here.

BuilderAU: : Taking the Smartpath with Flex

I first ran into Owen Batt and the company SmartPath about six months ago when I was looking around for new Aussie tech exporters. Not only have these guys built a facilities management system that is being picked up and used throughout Asia, they built the whole thing in what was effectively beta software from Adobe. You can check out their story at BuilderAU here.

BusinessWeek - Aussies vote, boom continues

It's been a long time since I last wrote for BusinessWeek, so when the chance came to write a summary of the Australian economic landscape in the lead-up to the election, I was happy to raise my hand. You can read my assessment (posted before Saturday's result) on the website here.

Farewell 2007

Just a quick note to say that I am now effectively on leave until January 7. While I'm still hoping to throw in the odd blog post (and still have a couple of projects hanging over that I should have finished by now) I won't be taking on anything new between now and the New Year ...

Next - Hype is just a virtualised belief system

I've been paying attention to data centre computing for the last few years not because I'm a sucker for punishment, but rather because in recent times technologies such as virtualisation and grid computing have pumped some life back into the segment again. This year I was lucky enough to speak to the CEOs of two companies that are at the head of the game - Diane Greene from VMware and Mark Templeton from Citrix. My latest effort on the topic ran in the technology section of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers last week, and you can read it here. Thanks also to Travers Nicholas from Corporate Express for his views on the topic. The virtualisation battle looks set to get interesting (read nasty) next year as Microsoft enters the fray in a more determined fashion. Already Citrix is attacking VMware on price, while both Sun Microsystems and Oracle are showing stronger involvement. With only a small percent of the marketplace currently touched by virtualisation, there are rich spoils still to be had, especially as VMware and Citrix push the technology out to desktop computing.

Today's webinar - The Future of Workforce Collaboration

I've been interested in online collaborative computing technologies for a while now, so am excited to have the chance to talk about this topic in a webinar being run by online meeting technology company WebEx.The session, titled The Future of Workforce Collaboration, starts at 10.00AM AEST (November 20), will cover online meeting software, presence technologies, web 2.0 tools and even take a look at the future of immersive collaboration technologies. For full details click here: Download AUWorkforceCollab_bhassoc.html

Inside Film #103 - Gabriel

The latest edition of Inside Film is out now, with Andrew Dominik on the cover and my feature on the new Australian fantasy genre flick Gabriel inside. The content isn't available online, but if you want to read about how director Shane Abbess and producer Kristy Vernon put together a slick-looking production on next to no budget, you can read the uncorrected draft version here: Download gabriel_draft.rtf

Upcoming conference - Interesting South

Stig Richards at Thought By Them alerted me to this one .. I can't make it along, but if you want to hear from a bunch of interesting speakers, then Interesting South may interest a few of you who are going to be in Sydney later this month.

SmartCompany: The Digital Dozen - Our next wave of entrepreneurs

Every so often you write a story that you know is probably going to upset more people than it pleases ... A couple of weeks ago SmartCompany commissioned me to compile a list of the best up and coming digital entrepreneurs in Australia who have yet to hit the headlines. The criteria were that they had to be 40 or under (which just sneaks in Steven Goh) and not have hit the headlines in a major way (so apologies to Dominic Carosa and the Atlassian guys). It wasn't an easy task, and in compiling the list of 12 I've no doubt left off some worthy contenders ... but thankfully this is not a democracy and I've grown used to hate mail. Even so, I'd love to hear your feedback. You can check out the full story here.

Story in development – The new new media jobs

The rise of web 2.0 technologies and services such as search marketing are leading to the creation of a range of new job descriptions that never existed five years ago. Search engine optimisers in particular are a good example, but if anyone knows of any others that are genuine new job descriptions (as opposed to traditional roles that have simply gone online), please let me know off-list.