Technology
Futuretainment
After nearly a decade of protest, Show Business has discovered the web. Whether it is Disney selling episodes of Desperate Housewives on iPods, Fox screening prime time TV shows on the web or Hollywood Studios selling full versions of their movies online, this year has seen a major turning point for the titans of Tinseltown. Now everyone is scrambling to unlock new networks and future fortunes.
Digital mache
On mention of the word “mashup”, approximately half of you will immediately and unselfconsciously think of boiled spuds. This is a given.
Now, mashups are the latest boom trend at the cutting edge of Web 2.0. In short, they are hybrid web-based applications combining taken from more than one source. In the brave new world of Web 2.0, linear is boring. Mono is tres uncool. You’re all invited to the mashup jamboree … as long as you know how to share.
Vid, vlog view
Lists. Endless lists. The latest curse of the web are those endless swimming pools of customer data – most popular, most active, most tagged or downloaded. Personally, I hate them. They tell me nothing, other than other people’s aggregated bad taste. Worse, they miss one of the internet’s most subtle and powerful features – the discovery power of networks.
Motorola’s market dilemma
Wandering through the halls of the enormous 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona in February, it was plainly evident that mobile communications is still in the very active stages of the innovation cycle. This event, which brings together most of the world’s top telecommunications technology and network companies, has come a long way from its humble beginnings last decade in the French seaside town of Cannes, when early attendances numbered in the hundreds.
Defence tech
In these pensive days, where a backpacker on a bus could pose more of a threat than a cave-dwelling Taliban, Governments and corporations are hungry for technology that will help secure their people and resources. It has fed a boom in the defence tech sector; a world of cutting-edge machinery and multi-million dollar contracts, and home to some of the world’s keenest strategic and technical minds. Several Australian companies are emerging as genuine players in this highly competitive space. Liz Heynes and Catherine Kerstjens take a look at six on this new front line.
Dot-com survivors downunder
Has it really been six years since the world’s first wave of internet entrepreneurs fell through that plump cloud they’d conjured in the sky, taking with them the turgid hopes of our fledgling new economy? It’s been six years peppered with hard luck stories, investor reluctance and, lately, cautious hope rekindled. Australian internet startups were in the thick of it back then. The survivors emerged with slightly bloodied noses and wisdom far beyond their years.
Batten down the hatches
Viruses, trojans, worms, spyware, adware, phishing, snarfing. The internet contains some pretty dark alleys and many of them intersect the most popular highways. You don’t need to be wandering through a strange neighbourhood looking for trouble to find it. If you’re unprotected, it will most certainly find you. Jamie M. Vachon looks at how you [...]
Website reviews
Ohmynews.com Oh Yeon Ho, president and founder of South Korean website OhmyNews.com, believes there is a journalist in every one of us. OhmyNews covers stories from around the world from the website’s evergrowing database of citizen reporters. That’s right . . . housewives, students, engineers and average people from just about every walk of life [...]
Let’s get smart about technology investment
It will soon be 20 years since the Federal Government launched its MIC Program to kick-start the Australian venture capital industry. So why is it that we still haven’t got it together when it comes to ICT? Why does this sector still bemoan a lack of venture capital? Unfortunately, the answer is not in either [...]
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