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A general call-out here for anyone who has had experience with using more than one or two on-demand software applications within a business environment - especially if you've tried to link them together into some form of office automation system. There are plenty of on-demand tools out there, but not a lot of experience in integrating them and making them work together .... Please contact me by e-mail with any suggestions.
While I was in Moscow (see post below) I was also able to catch up with an old journalist mate, Dan Tebbutt, who is now the senior trade commissioner for the Australian Trade Commission in Moscow (there really is life after journalism ...). While chatting over a coffee Dan told me about a small Brisbane-based company, Red Oxygen, which was remarkable for having sold an SMS messaging system to Russia's second largest mobile carrier, Beeline. As it turns out, Red Oxygen has sold SMS messaging systems to some of the world's largest companies too. You can check out that story here.
Late last year I spent some time in Moscow with Kaspersky Lab, a little-known anti-virus company that is hoping to make a much bigger noise in the global market this year. While there I had a good chat to the founder and CEO, Eugene Kaspersky, about everything from policing international online crime through to the current Number One on his list of least-favourite movies ... You can check out the story in The Age business section here.
Am currently working on an article looking at the good, bad and ugly sides of working with web hosting companies. If anyone's got a story to share - good, bad or indifferent - please drop me an e-mail.
A general shout-out to all and sundry ... is there a device in the market now that might be called a true internet-enabled TV? What I'm talking about here is a TV with enough processing power that it can at least run a web browser, while having an Ethernet or wireless connection to hook up to a router and draw content down from the internet. I realise you can do this using various solutions such as Windows Media Center or a networked games console, but that is a two-stage process ... If anyone knows of an all-in-one device that is designed for the loungeroom rather than the desktop, please let me know.
Chris Saad has become something of a web 2.0 rock star of late, popping up in a range of news stories, blog posts and discussion forums, including the main story in the tech section of today's Australian Financial Review. Chris and the guys at Faraday Media have been working for some time on solving a problem that the rest of us are only just realising that we have ... that we don't have control over our personal information online. While myself and many others have been pumping info into social sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, once that information is in there it can't be easily moved or shared. A recent attempt by prominent blogger Robert Scoble to download his own data from Facebook by using a beta-release tool from Plaxo saw his account closed (and then subsequently reopened) and shot the debate about information ownership and data portability into greater prominence. You can learn a lot more about the issue and Saad's (and now the world's) solution at APML.org, and the broader data portability movement at dataportability.org. You can also check out my story on the subject at ZDNet's BuilderAU website.
Great to see three Aussie web 2.0 start-ups - Tangler, Tinfinger and WasabiTV - getting on with business in 2008 with a product release, service launch and website update, respectively. Last week Tangler announced that its forum technology has now been released in the wild for integration into third-party websites, with quick customisation, direct sign-in and speed improvements. Tinfinger has launched its online omnibus of notable people, which has already been said to be doing for the off-line Who's Who guide what Wikipedia did for Encyclopedia Britannica (check out this write-up on TechCrunch). And finally, Australian online video portal WasabiTV has launched version 2.0 of its website, which is a lot easier to use and feature-packed than the old one. Check them out for a slice of Australian tech creativity ...
Property underpins the wealth of a great number of individuals on the BRW Rich 200 list, but many of those fortunes would have taken a battering recently as a result of the woes of Australia's second-largest shopping centre owner and manager, Centro. That company's over-exposure to US creditors saw it sucked up in the subprime mortgage crisis that has gripped, shaken and thrashed financial markets around the world. While many Australian companies thought they had escaped the worst of the crisis, catastrophes such as that befalling Centro serve to remind you that it only takes one bad egg to spoil the lot - listed property trusts have lost 20 percent of their value since Centro raised the white flag. Now the company's CEO has chosen to fall on his sword. Luckily for him he landed on a cushion of $1.5 million ... Anyway, for more information, check out my report for the BusinessWeek website here.
With the recent farce of the Golden Globe Awards' cancellation, and the possible same fate possibly to befall the Oscars, it's good to see that Australian digital and interactive media industries are still getting well into the spirit of Awards Season. Tickets go on sale for the 14th Annual AIMIA Awards go on sale shortly, but in the meantime, the Interactive Advertising Bureau has announced that entries for its annual Interactive Advertising Awards are now open. Go on, dare to be a winner ...
Just as the first web boom created a plethora of new roles (web developer, online producer, webmaster, etc), so too the current boom is starting to define a new set of job descriptions. 'Search engine optimiser', 'community administrator' and 'snipers' may not yet have their own university degrees and union representation, but they are becoming increasingly common within the online marketing departments of many organisations. You can check out the story at SmartCompany by clicking here.
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