LagrangePoint - Brad Howarth

New site for Australian mobile industry info

There are few people more embedded in Australia's mobile marketing and advertising community than Emily Freeman, and she's been a great source of ideas and comment for me when writing about the sector. So it is great to see that she is also turning a little of her time into keeping others informed about what is going on in the industry. Freeman describes her new-look Mobilista site as "an online meeting place for the Australian mobile web & mobile content industry, with a particular focus on advertising & marketing ...In the coming months I hope to publish more case studies, white papers, opinions, rate cards and any other resources I can source or produce". Guest writers are more than welcome.

MEGA intake now open

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Orange Dot, a company that is developing a mobile phone for the visually and intellectually disabled, which was a graduate of the MEGA program for aspiring mobile projects. You can read all about them here. MEGA is currently finalising its intake, with information nights coming up in both Sydney and Melbourne on July 9th. Organiser Justin Brow tells me that the topic is along the lines of "Get your mobile idea to market - hear from three folk how they took their ideas from the ether to the market".

"One of the best aspects of mega - really - is the connections participants get with heaps of dead-set legends in the Australian industry."

If you want to know more, contact Justin here: justin@mega.org.au This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Pathfinder Business - A sea-change in the world's IT

The latest edition of Pathfinder Business is now available, both online and in print, to registered subscribers. You can see the whole edition via the website, but you'll need to register to get the password. This edition includes a feature from me on the evolution of the world's software industry, with a particular focus on the opportunities that cloud computing is presenting for software developers from anywhere in the world to compete on a more equal footing in any market:

"As a result, the balance of power in the world's software industry is slowly shifting away from Western Europe and North America and towards a larger group of countries who will be playing a key role in the industry's next incarnation."

This interview called upon data and opinions from a plethora of sources around the world, including Gartner, Google, NEC, SmartPath, Salesforce.com, Ovum, GoGrid, as well as a bunch of folk whose comments I wasn't able to include - so I've included one of the emailed responses in this post. If you want to know more about the scaling hosting environment Scalr, click here, , the enterprise open source cloud platform abiquo, click here, or about the open source cloud project Eucalyptus Systems, click here (for comments from its CEO, Woody Rollins).

The second of my recent studies on cloud computing will soon be appearing as the cover story for CIO Australia.

There are also stories in the latest edition on the fate of the Indian outsourcer Satyam and Australia's infrastructure investments.

Punchcard: 3D modelling for the rest of us

I love the idea of a 3D web - one where the real world is represented virtually, and where environments such as Google Earth contain software representations of their real world counterparts. While the idea of virtual tourism is probably a little corny, it would be great to go for a 'walk' around the neighborhood of the hotel you are staying at before you even get there, clicking on the front doors of various buildings to see what's inside.

So I've written quite a few stories over the past three years on the emergence of online tools for creating virtual environments and objects, including this one for The Guardian last year. Australia has a strong cadre of emerging 3D specialists, such as VastPark, ExitReality and Mycosm, so it was good to be able to add another one to the list this week - Adelaide-based Punchcard, and its VideoTrace modelling tool.

What sets VideoTrace aside from other tools is its ease of use - you can create models by simply tracing the outline of an object from one of more frames of video - and its level of detail when creating models. It's also my latest entry on the ZDNet Bootstrappr blog, and you can read about it by clicking here.

Men's Style - Wireless hi-fi, saving the planet, and Tim of the silver Gunn

When I was in New York earlier this year on AIMIA and Austrade's digital media trade mission I took the opportunity to set up a few interviews with folk who I thought might be interesting. One of them was Tim Gunn, former head of the Parson's Design School and mentor on the US reality TV series Project Runway. Tim's a lovely guy, and probably knows more about style as it applies to fashion than most other people on earth. Well, more than me anyway. He did however pass on a number of tips, and they can be found in the article 10 Gunn salute on page 59 of the winter edition of Men's Style Australia.

In the same edition is my column on options for hooking up your home hi-fi wirelessly. It's still nowhere near as easy as it needs to be, but there are finally hopes that maybe oneday the tangle of cables behind your DVD player will finally be no more.

But my biggest contribution to the winter edition is series on a bunch of companies that have shown a little leadership when it comes to thinking about the environment. The article talks to companies including Intrepid Travel, Ausra, The Green Pages, Fosters, Liption, Hewlett-Packard, Scouts Australia and even the law firm Minter Ellison, along with a couple of others. The goal was to find companies that had made some positive steps and shine a little light on them. You can check out what they had to say in The Innovators from page 65.

Unfortunately none of the content is up on a website, so if you're interested, you'll just have to wander into a newsagent (in Australia) and pick one up.

ZDNet Bootstrappr: Memory Box splits up backup headaches

When I first heard about Memory Box Backup I struggled to see how a splitting your files up and storing them on a hundred different machines could:
    a - Be practical
    b - Be secure, or
    c - Be more reliable than traditional forms of off-site back up.

It took a long conversation with managing director Trevor Glen to nut it all out, and even now I have to take it on faith that wiping out dozens of nodes in their network won't noticeably impact the integrity of the data it stores. Anyway, you can read my interpretation of the Memory Box technology in this Bootstrappr blog entry for ZDNet by clicking here.

Spreading the truth on swine flu - 2and2

Australia’s reaction to swine flu can be rated as anywhere between over-the-top and tragically blasé. But while this over-hyped addition to the influenza family is being alternately treated as both a joke and a genuine medical threat, for business the potential remains for it to become a very serious issue very suddenly, especially when people start failing to show up for work.

Many businesses have taken on the responsibility of educating their workforces, and this has created an opportunity for Sydney-based e-learning company 2and2. The company began developing a training module for pandemic situations during the Avain flu outbreak earlier this decade. While that particular scare ultimately did little damage to the Australian economy, it and its predecessor SARS highlighted the impact that a genuine pandemic could have on business.

The result is Pandemic Ready, a 50 page hosted e-learning and video package designed to take employees through practical measures on how to protect themselves and others in the event of a widespread outbreak.

2and2 managing director Leon Young says Pandemic Ready has been designed so that companies can integrate their own pandemic plans, with links to their intranet or other corporate resources. The modules are pushed out online to all staff so that everyone understands what the organisation's plan is and what they need to do, from information on hygiene habits to how to use pandemic kits in the event of an emergency.

The package was developed with assistance from the Federal Department of Health and Aging, including the donation of video content. It was also shaped by the package’s first client back in 2007, News Limited, but has since been significantly and expanded adopted by large organisations including the NSW State Emergency Service of and Catholic schools in NSW. In the case of Catholic Schools, the organisation was able to put 1000 staff members through training when swine flu first hit the headlines, and puts more through each day.

Pandemics aren’t 2and2’s bread and butter. The company has been developing e-learning packages for different clients for years, and more recently built its own online community for corporate sustainability managers, called Change2 .

The service combines elements of social networking with e-learning on environmental issues relating to corporations. The social networking component contains new and blogs on relevant topics, with regular updates, and provides a forum for interested individuals to communicate. You can also join groups and install applications in a similar fashion to Facebook.

2and2 may never make huge amounts of money out of Change2, but it does provide it with a channel for its e-learning modules, and may also help a few companies with their environmental programs along the way.

B&T - Top 50 Marketing Blogs 2009

B&T has just published its list of the Top 50 marketing blogs in Australia, as compiled by my peers at the magazine. I have to say i didn't actually have anything to do with the compilation of the list itself, but most of the feature that follows (barring the introductory paragraphs) are all mine.I'm happy to say however that I agree with almost all of the inclusion. Congrats to the lads at BannerBlog for coming in at number one.

In terms of the feature, it was great to explore the issues around how social media is developing as a marketing discipline in Australia. The notion of social media 'expert' has gone out the window as experience shows that there really is a long way to go with this before anyone can truly call themselves an expert, but it is great to see a steady maturing of thought and discussion around the topic and a movement away from some of the less useful arguments that were prevalent a year ago. There are still plenty of answers that are unknown - even basic question of whether social media should be considered a vertical discipline or a horizontal capability are still to be answered conclusively. And the bigger problem for brands of course is who to turn to.

Thanks to Stephen Collins, Iain McDonald, Paull Young, Adam Ferrier, Nic Hodges, Katie Chatfield, Con Frantzeskos, and Tony Thomas, as well as the folk from Fosters and Xbox, who all contributed their wisdom and insights.

#xmedialab "Serious Games" - panel discussion

The final session was a panel discussion and Q&A amongst various writers, publishers and other people associated with the serious games industry.

Writer/director Stephen Sewell delivered a fairly odd opening address asking whether the internet and serious games would be the mechanism of our destruction ...

Mandy Salomon from the Smart Services CRC talked about the walled-off approach to games development that permeated the discussion, and called for a greater focus on environments within open virtual worlds (although aren't these ultimately walled off anyway?) and more user-generated content within the games, or cahracters that can move from one game or world into another.

Playright Alana Valentine, writer of Run Rabbit Run, talked about facts and levels of authenticity, and voraciuty being akin to levels of power. She talked about the presentation of opposing forces, but also talked about the need for communities to contribute back into environments such as games, as well as the constant need for surprise.

UTS academic Dr Yusef Pisan stressed the need to get away from thinking about a hard devide between serious games and entertainment. David Vadiveloo from Community Prophets encouraged people to look to markets beyond that represented on free to air television, to that beyond the cultural divide of Austalia of people from non-English speaking backgrounds.

David Hewitt from traditional games developer Tantalus Interactive. He talked about play as being the way that we learn things as children, such as games in the playground, and it is hardwired into all creatures. We have sublimated that into something pointless and escapist, but it can be turned back into something useful and meaningful. Games can teach facts, and to teach people about beating systems, as they try different combinations over and over again. Modelling those things from the real world would be a powerful and natural fit.

Robert Spencer from Interzone Entertainment talked about how he got into games due to his interest in persecptive - the ability to create a position and present it to an audience.With a game you can have an argument with the end user, by presenting a dilemma and then presenting the consequences of that action.

Finally Cath Godfrey from McGraw Hill talked about the insatiable desire of students to create and consume content onilne, and talked about the challenge of engaging with them. She discussed the gap between thinking about how to deliver material, and how students want to receive it. She says they want immediate response, and want to be drawn back.

#xmedialab "Serious Games" - Josh Harris, We Live In Public & Lee Sheldon, Indiana University

The first session back was presented by the subject of Ondi Timoner's film, and the creator of the project We Live In Public, Josh Harris, In a somewhat disjointed, forthright and eclectic presentation he discussed topics around tearing down the barriers of privacy and intimacy, and the possibilities generated under such circumstances for fantasy and reality to coexist in the plane of one person's life. He talked about his own version for World of Warcraft in real life, by creating a capsule hotel on a soundstage, housing celebtrities and bands, and with people in the world spending time in constant communication with the outside world. Until they burn out at least and get churned. Whether it happens or not, who knows. But Harris won't - or can't - let go of the idea. And he may just on to something important ...

Games designer, author and television producer Lee Sheldon gave a presentation titles 10 Verbs. He worked on shows including Star Trek: The Next Generation before moving on to interactive games, including one designed to teach Iraqi Arabic to US soldiers, and another recreating Oakland jazz clubs of the 40s and 50s. He is now developing a naaritive driven virtual world called London Town.

His discussion of Alternate Reality Games covered both games that can be run in both the virtual world and the real world, and it is not always possible to know that you are in the game or that the game has already begun, somewhat like the Michael Douglas film The Game. Sheldon says there are plenty of people in the real world willing to pay for such an experience. He aslo talked about The Skeleton Chase, a real-world game intended to make people fitter and healthier, and a bunch of other projects that he is involved in.

Amongst many topics, he talked about the fact that imagination and vocabulary do not equal storytelling, and that writers are chrnoically unrecognised and misunderstood. Hence people don't think they need a writer - or can be a writer themselves.

His presentation was full of advice for games designers, from making sure you employ the right people with the right skills, to getting the processes right, to taking sufficient care - all somewhat obvious, but beautifully presented by Sheldon, and peppered with examples.

"Games are reality with the boring bits removed."

"We get enough real life, games must be better than that."

"Why is there so much shooting in games? Because the feedback is instant. No one has found a way to do diplomacy that hits like a bullet."