Tonight I’m presenting a lightening talk at the ICT Illawarra event, our final event for 2009. Entitled “Plugging into the Startup Scene”, I try to capture in a 5 minute talk some steps that can help Australian technology entrepreneurs to get connected to the thriving and growing community of innovation and entrepreneurship happening in Australia. Presentation embedded below.
Join the conversation: the single best way is to join the Silicon Beach Australia group; with over 700 members and almost 4000 posts in just over 12 months, this is one thriving community (and one that is very generous with its advice, too)
Track events and activities: many who’ve experienced Silicon Valley will tell you it is the face to face, person to person conversations and connections that make the place so successful. There’s a surprising amount happening in Australia, particularly in Sydney. Join the Silicon Beach Drinks weekly, attend one of the many Open Coffee meetups if you’re looking for something more family friendly, and consider joining the Australian Technology Showcase: they do lots of great events.
Watch and listen from afar: there is a massive roster of tech events held in the US, and thankfully plummeting streaming costs combined with the egos of event organisers and speakers means you can now watch high quality, expensive and previously inaccessible events from your own desk. Find an event you rate – like the recent Web 2.0 Summit – and check to see if they’ll be streaming it. Also, make sure you subscribe to the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and their Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series, which you can watch or download a podcast of online.
If you’ve got some suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments.
I’ve been around the Analytics scene for a few years now, and one of the biggest hassles with tracking for really really big sites, or sites where security is a massive deal (online banking, etc), has been the need to tag all the pages (for javascript tracking), or to suffer with the limited info you get from web server logs.
The team from Coradiant, who include on their client list organisations like the FBI, have just pitched their new product, Analytics in a Box (AIB), which involves a box being installed on the inside of the Firewall (next to the web servers or load balancers). It then passively sniffs the network to see real time requests that clients make when loading web pages, submitting forms and the rest.
No pages need to be tagged with Javascript.
No access to the main web server logs is required.
You just drop it into the datacentre, turn it on, and configure the filters.
This solution is bloody incredible. It harnesses the power of Google’s Urchin product to manage the reporting and viewing of reports, but it extends the fields that Urchin can gather and report on, including anything in the headers. This gives them the power to do things like report on the number of visitors who go half way through a download of a white paper but have their download cancel, something that until now is impossible with either Javascript or Log File Analysis.
And so very much more.
One of the most impressive products I’ve seen in the Analytics – specifically the very high end enterprise stuff at US$35K a for the integrated server, Urchin, MySQL licence and the agents that control the whole process – since Woopra.
If you’re looking for an analytics solution with no javascript and more information than you can get out of log files, this could be the solution you’ve been looking. As an Urchin reseller, we’re one of the few ways to get this product around the world: contact me at Internetrix for more info.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few months doing marketing planning for Hiive Systems. Unfortunately, our product is targeted at the professional services sector – think consultants, creatives, advisors, and that sort of thing.
I’ve been really conscious in this marketing process NOT to just keep on doing what we’ve always been doing, so thinking about existing clients and then defining our target market based around them just isn’t good enough. I’ve been thinking through industries based on my experience and memory – almost brain-storming – but it is a pretty crap way to do things, and certainly isn’t an extensive data set.
One of the best ways to work would be to start with a big long list of industries, and then tick those sectors that look appealing for closer examination. Unfortunately, Google has completely failed me – asking for a “list of professional service industries” came up with a bunch of very poor listing websites.
Going to more official sources, the primary list I’m aware of, ANZIC, has always seemed to me to be pretty poor. There’s a special category for fur trappers, but anyone who does anything related to marketing – from consulting through to web development through and beyond to display advertising – is bundled into the same generic blob.
Today, however, I realised that the ANZSIC list was updated in 2006, to reflect the way that industries have changed and evolved since the list was last compiled in 1993. Now with a lot more detail in the service sector – the one that keeps growing in an advanced economy like Australia’s – this list is actually useful.
If you’re interested in seeing it for yourself, the ABS have a copy (publication number 1292.0) at their website. Hopefully if you’re trying to write a marketing plan, this will help you out too…
We’ve got some exciting plans cooking in the cauldron over at Hiive Systems, and one of them involves replacing our existing config management system for deployments – a couple of config files separated into always changes and rarely changed parts – with something more scalable, dynamic while still very fast to query and read.
While our back-end is running on MySQL, I’m concerned that there might be a faster way to do things. I’m looking for some insight from people who’ve “been there and done that” already, though, as this is going to be a lot of work to test and check – if someone has already got some experience with this, I’d love to hear it!
I’m looking at LDAP because our configs make use of a hierarchy already, and LDAP has a reputation of being very fast for reads. While writes are slower, this isn’t a very big deal (changing the default pagination or time zone for a deployment/user isn’t likely to be a very frequent thing), yet these configs are going to be hit up many times a second (our app servers are going to be working with a single tree of code that serves a very large number of deployments, and each “view” on the app server might be for a different deployment, database and user).
If you’ve got any suggestions or comments to make, feel free to add them to my question at StackOverflow.
The Princes Hwy, the major road from Sydney, down the south coast of Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales, ranges from suburban roads to freeways, and understandably, the speed limit along this road varies according to conditions.
Through most of the suburban sections, this multi-lane road is around 70KM/h, which is quite reasonable. Unfortunately, however, right at the edge of the suburban road system – right where the road transitions to and from 100KM/h – the Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) has decided to arbitrarily reduce the speed limit of this major road down to that of a side street, limiting the speed to 50Km/h.
This speed reduction – from its previous limit of 70KM/h – was instituted after the tragic death of Tim Deane in July 2006 after he crossed this busy highway against the lights. Suburbs to the north and south, Engadine and Waterfall, each have pedestrian under/over passes (respectively), but Heathcote does not.
Unfortunately, though, the focus of the RTA has been around positioning camera equipped highway patrol cars and collecting a lot of revenue from motorists, who have to halve their speed – coming into the city – in a few hundred metres.
But the thing that angers me the most – and if you drive this road regularly, it should piss you off too – is that the RTA is happy to unjustifiably drop the speed limit and organise some very lucrative enforcement, but they can’t be bothered to put up fences – that physically discourages the kind of J-walking that has caused pedestrian deaths – along the median strip that separates the train station from the park. If our government and its agencies really cared about pedestrian safety, they’d have a fence put along the line shown in red on the map below, instead of just dropping the speed and raking in the money through cameras and fines.
If you think this situation is just rotten, money grabbing and immoral behaviour from an agency that professes to act in the interests of road safety, yet missing out on some of the lowest impact and high value actions like putting up a fence, tell the RTA what you think by making a complaint. The complaint I made tonight is included below: perhaps if we draw some public attention to this situation, we might stand a chance of getting this immoral situation corrected.
I would like to make a formal complaint about the conduct of the RTA with relation to the speed limit changes introduced some time ago on the only arterial road connecting Wollongong and Sydney, specifically at Heathcote.
After the tragic death of a pedestrian around this intersection some time ago, a knee-jerk decision was made to reduce the speed – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – down to 50km/h. This is a 4 to 6 lane highway that links Sydney to the entire south coast.
The Police and the RTA have managed to create quite a strong revenue earner by putting regular police and radar patrols, however, it is very clear the RTA is completely disinterested in safety: while inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of motorists a year, the RTA has taken no steps to protect pedestrians, as there is no fence discouraging pedestrians from crossing south of the lights, between the station and the park.
This hypocrisy is an abomination, and is the source of a LOT of frustration, disdain and disrespect for the RTA’s policies, and leads many people to reject the legitimacy & authority of your agency.
Unfortunately, the next month or two are likely to result in some form of legislation passing the Senate that results in all Australia’s having their internet connections filtered using a mandatory, opaque system controlled by an agency of the Federal Government.
The people of Australia has been talking to the Minister too, trying to convince him that this is a truly, truly terrible idea, and that we don’t want it.
In late March 2009, the ABC’s Q&A featured Senator Conroy, and to welcome him were more than 2000 submissions – many times more than in any previous episode. You can watch the episode here.
The other high priority campaign against this filter – which goes well beyond what the government promised they were going to do during the 2007 election – comes from activist group, GetUp, with their Censordyne commercial.
If this wasn’t enough, the annual Internet Industry Awards held in London named our Minister the “Villian of the Year” for his policy. He shrugged off concerns and criticism by saying that people didn’t understand what he was doing, and trying to paint people who object to the compulsory filtering of the internet as people who support access to “pro-rape sites, bestiality sites, and child pornography promotion sites“.
The Situation
Unfortunately, it appears that one of the more rational and relevant arguments against a compulsory internet filter – that it would slow down the internet at the same time as the Federal Government are planning to spend billions making it faster with the NBN – has been diminished, with the ISPs participating in the pilot – the ones who will comment anyway – saying that the pilot was achieved without noticeably slowing down internet use.
I’ve got some pretty grave doubts about all of this – particularly with internet speeds increasing, making any delay on the pipe due to filtering resulting in a higher percentage slowdown as speeds go up – but even if these technical concerns disappear, there’s still the two really big issues that this filtering scheme is certain to fail on:
It won’t protect the children; getting around it will be fairly trivial – via proxies or VPN connections through the firewall – and most of the really scary stuff on the internet is found in the dark underbelly, of P2P networks, newsgroups, and other impossible to police locations. If parents are told this filter will protect their children, they’ll (further) hand over parenting responsibilities for the government, leaving to a much more dangerous situation than exists today.
It will put in place infrastructure that the this, or a future government, can use to control the internet in a much more draconian way into the future. Any bleating that the legislation will restrict the filter to controlling some 1300 sites which are already banned by ACMA holds absolutely no water with me: legislation can be changed (that’s why we have parliaments – to make and change laws) and who’s to say some future government on the skids but with a majority in both houses won’t try and use scare tactics or cries of national security to silence dissent.
Our Response
Our politicians – particularly in the Liberal Party – need to know, loud and clear, that this issue will cause thousands of us to change our votes. This is a touchstone issue that goes to the core of pretty fundamental issues of freedom and liberty in Australia, and with the internet still very very early in its history, putting these sorts of systems in place when we know they won’t solve the problem – and in fact could make it worse – is wrong, wrong, wrong.
While many of us thought that the Green’s opposition to this, combined with the Coalition’s increasingly strong stance against the planned filter, would leave this legislation dead and buried: Labor wouldn’t have the numbers to get it passed, even with the support of Senator Fielding.
After recent discussions with Canberra types, I’m now concerned that a deal will get done in the sitting periods remaining this year, and that the Coalition will join with Labor and vote this horrible thing (amended in some way) into law. With nut-job-nanna’s like Dana Vale from the Liberal Party coming out in support of the filter – without having a clue what she’s talking about and foolishly equating the evil found online with the filter as a practical way to combat it (not as a silver bullet, she says, but as one tool, which she supports regardless of the side-effects of this blunt and ineffective tool) – I’m really concerned that the Liberal party and their National colleagues might be ready to do a deal and see this thing installed.
So, what are you going to do to make sure the Opposition know they need to oppose this thing?
The third #publicsphere event was held in Wollongong yesterday (with nodes in Melbourne and Brisbane joining in). With all things that involve an open forum and public consultation, there will be some good bits, and some bits that don’t quite do it for you.
In terms of contributions to the debate in the form of a paper or submission, you really can’t go past the Silicon Beach Lifeguard paper, assembled by Elias Bizannes along with a small army of contributors and editors from the SiliconBeach community. Here’s a video of Elias introducing the paper:
In addition to the paper/submission approach of SBA’s Lifeguard paper, there were also a lot of other good presentations.
Silvia Pfeiffer from Vquence gave a fairly sobering analysis of the challenges and opportunities facing the Australia startup sector. While much of it wasn’t new information for those of us who do this stuff every day, Silvia’s presentation did a brilliant job of assembling a plethora of issues into cohesive lists and constructs, and while I knew about the pieces already, the way she put them together certainly had me coming away with a much clearer picture of our situation. Hopefully her slides will be up on her Slideshare account soon.
Another stand-out presentation in my mind came from @nambor (Rob Manson). After getting the undivided attention from everyone in the room in Wollongong thanks to the coolest set of chops in the room, he proceeded to share how the challenge of succeeding has less to do with “supply side” factors than the (neglected) “demand side” factors. He wasn’t talking about economics (specifically): he was talking about success in technology. The basic thesis is that tech types want to keep pushing supply side – concepts like ‘building a better mouse trap’, ‘build it and they will come’, ‘lets keep innovating’ – while the demand side – taking the time to show tech users how their productivity and lives can be improved by new stuff is really poorly done and needs more focus. This principle, which played then into his main thesis of Diffusion is the Innovation, was then expanded upon. Rather than me butchering it, I’ll just embed his presentation here.
The day itself wasn’t all geek, however. Towards the end, we had a great presentation from Tim Parsons present from a creative perspective. As you’d expect from a futurist in the creative space, the presentation was exquisite. The content itself was great for stimulating some ideas and discussion, and I really thought the sentiment that “Online Culture is the Mainstream”, and not something reserved for geeks anymore, was a great observation, and something I really agree with (since now I’ve got mum on Facebook, and my girlfriend blogging). Anyway, the slide deck is at embedded below (it still looks great, but Tim’s passion in delivering it made it 10x better)
There were many other excellent presentations through the course of yesterday that I haven’t got the time or enough good quotes to include here in this post, but the good news is that the Senator’s team will be uploading the video (which was already streamed, but probably needs to be cleaned up a little and spliced into talks) next week. I’ll update this post then with a few links (including a link to me own impromptu talk on Skills, Talent and Education).
I was lucky enough this week to be a guest of the team from Kells at a lecture they ran in Wollongong, featuring the acclaimed Simon Longstaff from the St James Ethics Centre. The morning lecture, which went for about an hour, with more than half an hour of questions and answers was an excellent and by far the most intellectually challenging way I’ve spent a Wednesday morning.
While the concepts of the values and principles framework surrounding ethics – defined, as attributed to Socrates, as “what ought one to do” – is something I’ve read about and studied before, it isn’t until you have someone present the crystalised examples and contexts, from Plato through to Madoff, covering issues from the Trojan Horse through to the Global Financial Crisis, that it really has the penny drop.
Given the event was hosted by a law firm, it was interesting that ABC’s Fora program had recently broadcast a speech from Geoffrey Cousins on moral courage, which started with the challenge that what is legal isn’t necessarily moral (or ethical). For the various people at the event I spoke to, I’ve made things a bit easier and embedded Geoffrey Cousin’s speech below.
But getting back to Simon’s speech from this week, which I had the pleasure of seeing in person and interacting with. Simon raised the issue of what’s “right”, and the challenged the audience to be a little more bold about standing up for what’s right.
Simon related a story of how an Australian organisation committed to tackling child abuse thought they would get a better response from politicians, the media and broader society by commissioning a study into the economic effects of child sexual abuse, measured in lost productivity and the costs of treatment. Simon challenged us to be bold enough to declare that stopping child sexual abuse doesn’t need any further justification than that it isn’t right.
So how do we know what’s right? Simon covered three different tests: two old, one relatively new.
The first old test is the golden rule: do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. A pretty simple test, but with a subtle change of “do unto others before they do unto you”, things change pretty significantly.
The other older rule comes from St Augustine(?) and basically says to just ask your conscience. Of course, this depends on your upbringing to an extent, and puts into relief the importance of bring great parents.
The third rule is known in some places – particularly the US – as the sunshine test, where you only do something if you’d be happy for it to be on the front page of the newspaper or if your mum was to know about it in full.
Most people are aware that traditional media is facing some pretty tough choices. The day before the Ethics lecture, one of Australia’s key media companies, Fairfax, reported a massive loss of A$380M for the 2008-09 financial year. With the transition of the high-margin classified business to online environments, and the GFC and digital advertising blowing away a lot of display advertising, there are serious threats to the media and its important role in public interest and discourse.
I’m generally a fan of the concepts behind more participative, citizen journalism and the ability of the online environment to give people a voice. However, thinking about the three guidelines that help people facing ethical and moral dilemmas to decide on what is the right thing to do, it is that third aspect that would appear to have the strongest effect on behaviour, particularly since we can’t rely on the Law to guide ethical decision making.
If in 20 years the media has been scattered and decentalised, will we loose an important decision making tool and ethical compass?
News broke over the weekend (Australian time) covering the formal responses to the FCC’s questions of Apple, AT&T and Google regarding the recent Google Voice debacle.
Michael Arrington has written a really good piece on the responses of Apple, and he makes a compelling case that Apple are lying.
While shining some light on the Evil Fruit and showing up how pathetic and biased many of the Apple apologists and Fan Bois really are is great to see, I’m concerned that there isn’t enough attention being paid to the real issue here: that Apple’s App Store shouldn’t be the only place you can legally install applications from.
Lets hope that the FCC and digerati focus on this issue when Apple back-flips and is forced to allow the Google Voice Application into the iTunes store. Allowing Apple to retain and control this walled garden is bad for consumers, bad for the industry and ecosystem, and shows Apple to be a much bigger threat to competition – particularly if they use the iPhone model for their tablet play – than Microsoft has ever been.
While it might be compelling political theatre for the hungry Canberra media gallery, a studio audience at Q&A last week made it clear – enough with Ozcar already.
Compared to the debate over the Emissions Trading Scheme, the (frankly separate, and first) debate over the targets we should be setting to reduce greenhouse gasses, the $300Bn of spending going into “stimulus” across our economy which my generation, and my children’s generation, and possibly more, will be paying off, this is a distraction.
geoffmcqueen.com 