Category Archives: General

Steve Jobs has 46 Chromosomes too…

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I’m in the anti-mac-fanboy-club, but you’ve got to feel for Steve Jobs. Rumors about his health hits the company’s stock price like a profit warning, and now Corporate Governance experts are openly questioning whether the reporting on one man’s health in a company of 32,000 staff was adequate for a public company.

Like Erick at Techcrunch, I wish the man a speedy recovery – while I generally despise the myopic nature of the disciples that make up the global Mac-Fan-Boy-Club, there’s no doubting that Jobs has contributed at least as much to technology as the top handful of humans, ever. I’m glad they’ve found whatever’s wrong, I’m doubly glad it isn’t cancer, and for his sake, hopefully eating meat won’t need to be part of the necessary therapy.

I wish I was a funny as this guy...

I wish I was a funny as XKCD...

Telstra's Letter to Shareholders – a lot of talk, no real explaination

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Last week, Telstra got booted from the National Broadband Network process, where the Australian Federal Government will be spending about half the amount of money they (wasted) on the bogan bonus to fund/subsidise an improvement in Australia’s broadband capacity down to the last mile.

Telstra, the largest telco in the country, apparently didn’t like the concept that some Govt money in the process might mean the new network actually involves competition between the network, wholesale and retail divisions of the value chain: one network with cost recovery, then a number of wholesalers, and then lots of retailers. You know, competition on a utility.

Anyway, they submitted an incomplete report, and the Govt kicked them out of the process for non-compliance. Their share price then copped a hiding, double digit losses even in a rising market, since it is pretty clear this new network is going to be “where its at” for the next generation of Australian fixed-line internet access. The government will need to legislate to ensure the successful builder gets access to the copper and other Telstra infrastructure, and it would have been much better for them to have been in the game. But they had a dummy spit, and now the pressure has been on for them to explain their incompetence to their shareholders, including yours truly.

Here’s the letter. A lot of talk, but no explaination. What a disappointment.

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The Perils of Credit (cards)

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On a recent trip that included China, half a dozen stops in Europe, and some time in New York and San Francisco, someone skimmed my corporate credit card. My bank, Bankwest, has a pretty impressive fraud detection system, and when someone (I think based in China) made a $1 transaction (so as to test whether the number was valid, before either selling the details on or coming back to try and clean me out), the bank’s team caught it and gave me a call.

Unfortunately, I was in the US at the time, and for some reason they didn’t see fit to leave a message, so all of a sudden, my card stopped working, but it was at the tail end of the trip, and I decided I’d look into it when I got back, thinking it might have just been a normal effect of running out of credit limit or something.

After getting home and calling the bank, I was told all about the fraud, that the card had been deactivated, and that they’d send me a new one.

With a number of automatic transactions with suppliers now rejecting, there was only a little bit of hassle involved with telling them the new number. Everyone except TPG internet.

With the new number in hand, I dutifully logged into their web control panel and updated the details. The system accepted them, but a short time later sent me an email and told me that the card wasn’t valid. I logged in again, thinking I must have mistyped a number or two, but again, after a while, an email came through rejecting things.

Not I thought they might have had something wrong on their end, as I’d been buying fuel for the car and paying other vendors successfully with it, and I made a note to come back in a day or two to try again.

This went on for a little while, until I got a call from the bank after I’d made a number of large transactions internationally in a short period of time. While confirming the transactions were legitimate, I happened to ask the caller from the bank whether she could see if there was anything wrong with the card that would explain why TPG’s transactions were failing.

She looked back through the records, only to see that TPG was trying to process my card with an expiry date of 20/22, ie, a month much greater than 12 in the year 2022.

When I got my email reminder from TPG accounts the next day, I replied and explained in some detail what I’d discovered, and asked if someone could give me a call or reply via email with an update on what’s happening at their end.

Later that day, upon getting to my home office, I tried to log on, only to find I’d been disconnected. I called through to their phone number on the bottom of their accounts email, and selected accounts, only to find I’d called 10 mins after they’d closed for the day. Of course, they then hung up on me. So I rang again pressed 2 for tech support, thinking I’d play dumb about my connection not working, and hope they’d take my credit card over the phone and reactivate or unblock the account. Instead of being placed in the support queue, however, I was just told they couldn’t help me right now (presumably too many people in the queue, but the system didn’t say that) and promptly hung up on me. Customer service: FAIL.

Giving up, I called the next morning, and after 15 mins on hold for accounts, I told my story to an outsourced phone support person. I tried to explain my situation with some difficulty because of language issues, and she tried to take the CC payment over the phone. Again, it failed. She put me on hold, and then 10 minutes later, hung up on me. Repeating the process, and now getting having been at it for almost an hour by this time, I am finally asked some details about the card, like the bank it is with. “Oh, we’re sorry, we’re having problems with some Bankwest cards”.

So, while on one hand I’m frustrated by the scammers who nicked my details and made this all necessary, I’m actually more frustrated with TPG. Their system had a problem, and they then disconnected me and made me jump through hoops to try and diagnose and solve it, and even with the accurate information, it still took an hour to have someone recognise it.

They’ve now demanded I give them a different credit card, or access to draw money out of my bank account, but I’ve told them to get stuffed – they should fix their system, and email me when they’ve done it. No one else I’m working with is having any problems, and given the quality of their website – design last touched in 1997 or something I think – and their poor quality customer service, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were massively cutting corners on their payment processing gateway: there’s some things you just shouldn’t scrimp on.

If they do this again, I’m off to Internode, who I heard nothing but great stories about while at OSDC last week.

1800 and 1300 Numbers in Australia

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I’ve been doing a bit of research lately on phone setup for my new startup, Hiive Systems. Part of the establishment work is around phone numbers, and I’ve learned a few things I thought might be worth sharing.

Firstly, I’ve learned that – in Australia anyway – VoIP services haven’t yet come of age. Even after iPrimus came and gave a presentation at the Australian Telecommunication Users Group about their new VoIP services (and how their roll-out for Rebel Sport saved a lot of money and made them much more efficient), the presenter admitted that it is really about point to point type services where you’ve got multiple offices.

Secondly, I’ve learned a bit more about the 1300 and 1800 phone number system. We’ve had a 1800 number with Internetrix for a while, and we got it as part of a long distance plan through AAPT some time ago. In setting things up with Hiive, I wanted to have another look at how it all works.

Turns out, there are lots of companies out there that specialise in these sorts of services. Generally, you pay a monthly fee, usually with no committment, and then you pay a price per minute to receive calls. The prices of two companies, AllTel and Telcoworx are included in the attached spreadsheet, which you can see by clicking here.

These companies will route your call to any landline – or, for a higher cost, mobile – number you like, which makes sense. What surprised me the most, however, is that the difference between 1300 (cheaper, because the caller pays something) and 1800 (free to the caller) is bugger all. So, given 1800 numbers look a bit better/more professional/generous, we’ll be getting one of those.

The other thing that was new info is how the numbers are allocated. Since this is a national namespace, it works a bit like domain names, and some numbers – which can spell your company name on the handset – cost more than others. There’s a Federal body responsible for auctioning off numbers that are more in-demand, usually because they use a lot of repetition – called SmartNumbers which appear to be a part of the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

What surprised me was how they price these numbers. By going to the search form on the SmartNumbers website, you can do a search for the phone number you want, and they’ll tell you if it is a premium number, which they’ve determined will have a reserve price at an auction; the more repeating numbers, the higher the reserve it would appear.

As a result, changing the leading digit at the beginning of the number I’m looking for – I’ll keep it a secret for the moment until I’ve won the auction – changes the price from being a reserve of $500 to, in one case, a reserve of $12,500 – that’s a 25x increase in reserve!

Also like domain names, it would appear that once you’ve got one of these numbers, you become the “Rights of Use” holder; I think this is a bit like a lease on a domain name; you never own the domain, but you have the rights to it exclusively.

I remember a Fourth Estate Domain presentation some time ago with the (younger) Jack Singleton, who runs/ran Phone Names, and was trying to tap into this gold rush aspect. While it looks like the Feds have wised up with an auction system to stop companies “claiming” the rights to thousands of names, just to on-sell them like domain squatters, the more open nature of the process now should make people in business think about reserving a number that matches their business name.

… after the jump

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I’ve been around blogging for over 3 years, but I’ve always been too busy to contribute actively to the discourse online. I’ve made a few posts here, the most recent getting close to three years ago, and while I’m busier than ever, putting the time aside to collect my thoughts enough to share them – even if it only with the Googlebot – is a discipline I’m hoping to stick to.

So, if you’re reading my blog for the first time, and wonder what the hell happened between early 2006 and now, a couple of weeks from the end of 2008, that’s it: no coma, no abduction by North Korea – just busy and priorities.

Hopefully you enjoy browsing, and feel free to contribute to the discussion: my twitter handle is @geoffmcqueen or you can catch me on Skype (chat preferred to phone calls) at geoffmcqueen.

national filtering scheme – can anyone say 'china'?

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many of our international breathern would be moritifed at a plan where a national goverment tried to enforce a nation-wide internet filter to block specific content.

they do it in china – at what cost? – and the world cries foul. then they consider it seriously in a modern western democracy – with a lot of political pressure within the ruling party – and the mainstream media barely raise a whimper of concern about it.

ok, so snuff films, child pornography and many other ills to be found online are unquestionably bad news. with the ‘mandate’ of universal public distain for this content (the weirdos who are into it don’t speak up and acknowledge it for obvious reasons) the debate gets legitimacy it does not deserve.

the key question being asked at the moment is “who will pay for ISP level filtering”. the natural answer to this is government – they’ve got a fat war chest of a budget surplus and there’s nothing commercially compelling ISPs themselves to offer server level filtering. so the government pays for the filtering, and then presumably controls it as well (you’d have to be a mug to buy something designed to censor and control and then leave the control of it to someone else).

and all of a sudden you’re china.

bring on sia from sin

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a month or so ago, the federal government quietly announced that it would not be approving singapore airlines application for a licence to operate flights from sydney to the united states. given that australian government is in control of our airspace and responsible for our airports (even though they’re mostly now privately owned by companies like macquarie bank), singapore airlines has to get their permission to start flying another route. sensitive to qantas potentially moving a large part of their aircraft maintenance off-shore (as air new zealand and many other top-tier carriers have done) and sacking a lot of australian workers, and knowing that most australian’s aren’t big fans of singapore after the execution of van nugen, the federal government had a politically easy decision to make, and knocked singapore back.

this is a big betrayal for anyone in austalia who travels to the united states.

singapore airlines (or sia for short) could well be the best airline in the world. a long haul flight in economy is never an outrageously pleasant experience; it is squashy, you get all dried out from the air conditioning, and sitting anywhere for 8 hours or more isn’t much fun. but singapore airlines deliver a level of service for economy passengers that you generally only get in from other airlines in business class.

well, now qantas has announced that they’re going to send their heavy maintenance work to asia for at least one 747-400 check, negating one of the major reasons the federal government decided to continue protecting them from competition with sia even though we’ve got a free trade agreement with singapore. this sort of work is very big – as are 747’s – and using the cover of a shuffling of the deck chairs as the reason for the outsourcing (“just this once, we promise”) qantas has effectively used the (non-organised) travelling public as a pawn whose interests should be weighed against those of the aircraft maintenance union (highly organised).
it’s hard to decide who to loathe more here. should it be the government for ripping off the largest number of people without a voice (travelling public, and by association the tourism sector who badly need american tourists who shudder at the thought of a 12 hour flight even though that’s what it takes to get to europe from california)? should it be qantas for milking the sydney-usa route so mercilessly with high prices and poor service? should it be the unions, who’ve traditionally had a strong bargaining position with airlines (baggage handlers are about as valuable economically as hotel bell-hops, yet they recieve exceptionally good pay and conditions because they can bring an airline to its knees in a snap strike)?

either way, the travelling public is going to continue to get screwed any time the government creates an artificial barrier to competition, and hopefully qantas’ actions in going back on their word means the government comes under pressure from the unions and makes the government less likely to shelter qantas next time sia from sin comes knocking…

society and taboo of quality parenting

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ross gittins in the sydney morning herald has an excellent report on the benefits of early childhood intervention. code for better child raising, this report takes an economic, rather than a social or judgemental view of the benefits to society of better parenting, and discusses the role the government can play in reducing inequality and disadvantage in future generation by supporting programs that get involved before kids turn 8.

ross’ interest in the subject has been piqued by work from james heckman from the university of chigago (oh, and nobel prize winner in the field of economic sciences). basically, he has found that getting involved early with programs to support better parenting has massive oonsequences. using a case study of the perry preschool project from around 30 years ago in michigan (capital city detriot, home to eminem and subject of many negative social sterotypes played out in movies like 8 mile), heckman makes the case that early intevention into the development of children is much more effective in influencing lifetime outcomes than better schooling, etc.
if the study is true – and the first 5 years of a child’s life have profound influence on their intelligence, their likelihood to succeed in life and reduce their likelihood to commit crime and be subject of welfare – would society begin to accept that intervention in parenting – one of the few areas of society to still be treated as a social taboo – or would people continue to take the approach that you can’t tell them how to raise their family (but keep the welfare cheques now and in the future rolling in so we can raise the kids to be bogans the way we want to)?

additionally, what, from a macro or policy perspective, do these considerations have on the legitimacy of the indigenous partnerships programs of the australian government?

revenge is sweetest when it is inevidable

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there’s been a lot of talk in the press over recent weeks about the changes in australian cross-media ownership rules. considering that most places in the world don’t have laws like this to start with, much less reform, a bit of background is probably helpful.
as i’ve travelled, people from europe and the usa are routinely surprised to find that australia only has a population of around 20 million people. considering the economy of new south wales is roughly the same size as the whole of indonesia, the 4th most populous nation in the world, it is easy to see how we tend to punch about our weight as a country.
given the power of the 4th estate in any democratic nation the government decided a while ago to limit the amount of inflence any one media mogul could have in a given market, defined at the time to be a capital city. this level of government interaction was fairly justified, as the small australian market still managed to breed a number of media powerhouses, most notably rupert murdoch’s news corporation.
while ownership in the print media is quite concentrated, the behaviour of the television networks over the last 10 years or so has robbed australians of the services many other western nations take for granted.

around the year 2000, australia was deciding between competing standards for digital television. the government had announced the release of spectrum suitable for digital television, and it was up to the government, industry and consumer groups to decide which standard would be adopted. with only three commercial tv networks – and thus very oligopolistic control over the television advertising market – the incumbents had a significant incentive to stop others from joining the tv broadcasting club. through a mixture of successful lobbying, weak politics and the timing of a pending election (as well as the incumbents convincing the govt that they’d need to spend an absolute fortune on their broadcasting equipment to move to digital, so they needed to be protected to make it worth their while), the government announced australia would get the hdtv standard, or high definition television.

the promise of hdtv was that you’d be able to get crystal clear picture with 5.1 surround sound. unfortunately, however, very very few programmes were recorded in a quality that could suppoort hdtv, so the best a viewer would get from this new standard was a widescreen format of picture. honestly, i don’t think a lot of people would have cared too much anyway – who really wants to see who wants to be a millionare in 5.1 surround sound?

the reality – and certainly the intention – of hdtv is that it is very, very hungry for bandwidth. one channel of hdtv uses around 10 times more spectrum than a regular digital widescreen channel. this meant that the networks ensured that there wouldn’t be room for new digital services – including interactive tv and the delivery of a news channel or other content more closely resembling the internet, also known as datacasting – to compete with the incumbents. just in case there was a bit of room – and there still is – the government passed laws forbidding datacasting from looking at all like a tv service; ie, no full motion video for more than a certain length of time.

so, basically, australian consumers got screwed, particularly when you compare it to what the british got from their digital tv service (40+ channels free to air, interactive for things like polling and voting; essentially the innovation you’re never going to get from 3 fairly comfortable players in a market).
fast forward to 2006. a federal government enquiry in late 2005 found that digital tv takeup had been woeful – blind freddy could have told you this, since there isn’t much improvement at all between analogue and digital, with no new services from commercial networks. even the promise of perfect picture quality is false in most experiences, since the picture isn’t crystal clear without improving the infrastructure (read aerial) in their homes. the planned 2007 shut off of the analogue network will now be pushed back to 2012 – no surprise there; it would be a brave politician that took away tv from the masses in a country with compulsory voting – and the incumbents have had their monopoly extended too. thankfully, though, this is all becoming a little academic – the incumbents are in for a big change that the government can’t legislate out of the equation, because this time the media competition is international, it isn’t using broadcast spectrum the government regulates, and its fully interactive with almost millions of channels to choose from.

the answer is the internet.

at the turn of the centry, almost everyone was still connecting to the internet via a 56k modem, at least at home. now most houses in australia can get online 25 times faster. in some parts of the country where adsl 2+ has been rolled out, the speeds are more than 150 times faster than an old fashioned modem. these speeds are enabling full screen video to be sent straight to the home via the internet. and products like google video, and their deal with cbs to allow cheap paid downloads of programmes further drives this trend. in australia, where we get the top shows from the usa 3-6 months after their first air in the states, this model of paid subscription further errodes the australian media outlets, in this case channel nine, with their strong relationship with cbs for content. determined fans of csi will simply set aside $2/week to watch the show 3-6 months ahead of when channel nine gives it – and commercials – to them.
so after being loosing the battle for the best by the incumbents in collusion with the government, the australian consumer is standing to win the war, thanks to the internet. the convergence of tv, internet and telecommunications is going to change a lot of things, but it is hard to see the traditional commercial media business doing well in any scenario that doesn’t involve a time machine. as a consumer who’s missed out for so long, the desire for revenge is palpable – the sweetest thing about this revenge is that it is coming from the world at large, and it completely inevidable.
of course, this isn’t the only battle facing the commercial television sector – personal video recorders, or pvr units, are creating a similarly herculean challenge to the models the sector has been using for the last 50 years. but more on that another time…

mike has lunch with bill gates

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mike flew out for a microsoft event in las vegas last night as a journalist and because of the influence of techcrunch.com.nik just pointed out some photos on mike’s flickr account showing him @ lunch with bill gates. it didn’t seem like a very big lunch, ie, it was pretty exclusive.

i had lunch with mike yesterday, so I’m going to claim 1 degree of separation from the richest man in the world.

as for mike, i’ve got now idea how he pulled this off. i’ll be sure to ask him about it when he gets back to the crunchhouse.