LagrangePoint - Brad Howarth

The Diplomat - Geek valley high

The latest edition of The Diplomat carries the second of my recent projects looking at the evolution of Silicon Valley, following-up on this feature that I had previously had published in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers on the lure of Silicon Valley for Australian tech entrepreneurs. This feature looks more at the changes that have occurred in the Valley as a result of the rise of high-tech centres in emerging markets such as India and China. My verdict - Silicon Valley is still pumping, and shows no signs of losing its mantle as the centre of entrepreneurial innovation. The full story is locked behind a pay-wall, but you can read the draft copy here: 

Download silicon_valley_edit_3.rtf

There is plenty of other great stuff in The Diplomat, so I'd urge you to wander down to your local newsagent and pick up a copy, or take my word for it and subscribe online.

The Domain returns to Melbourne

 If you're going to be in Melbourne next Thursday (June 26) evening then you might want to pop along to the latest Domain event at Port 1010 in the Docklands. This time I'll be interviewing AIMIA's CEO and its president - John Butterworth and Guy Gadney. For more details, click here, or click here to register. Hope to see you all there.

Next - Partners in grime

Not quite sure where the sub-editor got the idea for this headline, but ... Anyway, this one is a pretty straightforward case study that goes to show that once in a while two companies working together (a software developer and a client) can actually work together to produce a mutually-beneficial outcome. You can check out the full story by clicking here.

Next - On time, every time

A few weeks back I went over to San Francisco as a guest of the enterprise software company TIBCO. Enterprise software - especially the sort of infrastructure software that TIBCO makes - doesn't sound all that exciting, until you realise it is essentially the 'glue' that holds a lot of our major corporations and government bodies together. While there I had a good chat to the company's CEO, Vivek Ranadive, who got his start in the US many years earlier linking together the massive transaction systems of Wall Street. He made his fortune developing software that helps companies quickly respond to information - now he wants them to see into the future. You can read all about it in this story for Next here.

Next - Expats' excellent Valley ventures

I've been writing for years now about the path taken by Australian entrepreneurs as they seek to sell their goods and services into foreign markets (I even wrote a book on the topics once ...). Hence it was great to explore the topic once for for this feature in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald technology section. Companies featured this time around were Business Catalyst, VoiceMap, and Broadcaster Media, along with service providers including Austrade, the ANZA Technology Network, Traction-USA/The Hot House and BSI. There is also a sidebar on Australian anti-fraud company ThreatMETRIX. Anyway, you can check out the whole article by clicking here.

B&T - Which mobile technologies will deliver for advertisers?

Sorry for the long gap between posts - experiencing a very busy period in the lead-up to the end of the financial year. So time to catch up on some older published articles ...

First is this feature for B&T looking at the evolution of mobile phone marketing. While mobile phones undoubtedly hold great promise as a marketing medium, few companies have yet to take a plunge in a meaningful way. Many are still coming to grips with the various attributes and capabilities that mobile handsets offer, and have particular difficulty determining where and when to use them. This article was an attempt to put some clarity around what a phone can offer to an advertisers, and you can check it out by clicking here.