Tag: Great Reads

Interesting posts from elsewhere we just had to share. 12% of e-mail users have actually tried to buy stuff from spam Ars Technica According to a...

Interesting posts from elsewhere we just had to share. 12% of e-mail users have actually tried to buy stuff from spam Ars Technica According to a...

Here's an Idea - Bring Back the Suggestion Box The New York Times For all those small-business owners looking for additional sources of profitable revenue...

Interesting posts from elsewhere we just had to share. How we got China so wrong business.theage.com.au WHEN Rio Tinto holds press events in China, its public...

Interesting posts from elsewhere we just had to share. Why You Need to Fail HarvardBusiness.org According to Dr. Carol Dweck, professor at Stanford University, we have...

Interesting posts from elsewhere we just had to share. Qantas fined $167k in cargo price-fixing scam News.com.au QANTAS has pleaded guilty to price-fixing charges on air...

Ten unconventional wisdoms for funding startups | VentureBeat VentureBeat A summary of Naval Ravikant's thoughts about how entrepreneurs should approach funding. 10 Strangest Inventions - Oddee.com...

Sherry yields ground on employee share schemes Sydney Morning Herald The Federal Government has given up further ground in its battle to tighten tax rules...

A great post by regular Anthill contributor and Rentoid.com founder Steve Sammartino over on his Start Up Blog. A list of the 10 things...

James Tuckerman reviews THE GOOGLE STORY and HOW TO TURN YOUR MILLION-DOLLAR IDEA INTO A REALITY

Book Reviews

I recently had the good fortune to host the Commercialisation EXPO 2006 conference held in Melbourne. It covered all the right areas and was a great success, but it is clear that one troubling issue remains - the chasm between innovation and marketing is as wide today as it has ever been.

I recently had the good fortune to host the Commercialisation EXPO 2006 conference held in Melbourne. It covered all the right areas and was a great success, but it is clear that one troubling issue remains - the chasm between innovation and marketing is as wide today as it has ever been.

Direct marketing is a form of advertising that requires a direct response from the consumer. This includes mail, catalogues, advertising, telemarketing, direct selling and email initiatives that are delivered directly to the individual.

Being the first to react to changing customer needs and preferences is often the difference between business success and failure. Witness, for example, how quickly Sony lost its early dominance of the portable music device market to Apple, which responded faster and more innovatively to demand for digital audio devices.

It was an outrage. In March, celebrity US blogger Arrianna Huffington caused a squall of controversy when she cobbled together quotes criticising the Iraq war from various articles and interviews with George Clooney, gained approval from Clooney's publicist and ran the post on thehuffingtonpost.com under Clooney's name, with a few of her own words tossed in for good measure. It was perceived as an assault on the central tenets of journalistic professionalism and drew fire from many quarters (leading to her qualified apology when the great man arced up). But The Huffington Post is a blog, not a newspaper of record, and Ms Huffington had as many defenders as accusers during the affair.

It was an outrage. In March, celebrity US blogger Arrianna Huffington caused a squall of controversy when she cobbled together quotes criticising the Iraq war from various articles and interviews with George Clooney, gained approval from Clooney's publicist and ran the post on thehuffingtonpost.com under Clooney's name, with a few of her own words tossed in for good measure. It was perceived as an assault on the central tenets of journalistic professionalism and drew fire from many quarters (leading to her qualified apology when the great man arced up). But The Huffington Post is a blog, not a newspaper of record, and Ms Huffington had as many defenders as accusers during the affair.

Reminiscent of the Simpsons episode where Homer has a $1 billion note until it is stolen by Fidel Castro, US Federal authorities have seized 250 bogus $1 billion notes in a Los Angeles raid. The notes, which bore the portrait of President Grover Cleveland, were believed to be modelled on actual $1,000 notes from the 1930s. Rumour has it that the notes will be used to relaunch the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

If you ever feel under the pump at work, spare a thought for these three professionals. How would you have dealt with the pressure to win gold placed on Cathy Freeman at the Sydney Olympics? Perhaps the intensity that greets a police sniper at a siege would be more to your taste? Could you have surmounted your own vertigo to launch the Sydney Harbour BridgeClimb business? When it's your job to deal with fear, you'd better learn fast.

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.