IT News
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Travel Tech Q and A: Gartner's Warren Anderson
Gartner group vice president of Asia Pacific Warren Anderson is not only active in the IT industry in Australia, but also competes internationally in triathlons, so he needs to travel, and often. Here are his travel tips.
Warren Anderson
(Credit: Gartner)Gartner provides research and insights into the IT industry, delving into the nuts and bolts of business technology.
What tech do you travel with, and why?
I never go anywhere without my BlackBerry, and would be so lost without it. As I travel so much, I am either in planes or in meetings, and, so, I need to be in constant contact with the business across the region and with the mother ship in the US. I am still a "button" guy, so getting me to type on a touchscreen will take a lot of changing. I do take my laptop PC with me if I need to work on any documents, but have just added an iPad to my travel technology, and view documents and email on that. So, unless I need to work on documents on a plane and save them, I don't touch the PC. What's your favourite phone app for travelling and why?
My favourite app for travelling is FaceTime. It allows [me] to contact my kids and wife on their iPads by video, which makes travelling just a little more bearable. As it is video [on] a portable device, it feels just a little more real since you can move around with them, rather than having them tied to a PC using video. It is my job to read with my son at night; FaceTime means we still have that time together when I am away, and he can even show me how far he has progressed on Call of Duty or Halo. I have some family in New Zealand: their eldest son has just gone away to uni, but they still have dinner with him on FaceTime, each night. He sits at his normal spot at the dinner table, on his iPad.
Most memorable travel story/experience?
I was recently sitting on a plane to New Zealand, when a famous actor came and sat next to me. He had a very familiar face; I knew him from being in The Lord of The Rings and I knew my daughters would be very impressed. I couldn't remember his name, so I did a search on my phone as soon as I landed. He happened to lean over, saw what I was searching for and had a big laugh. I said it was for my daughters. I'm not sure he believed me, but they were still very impressed. It was Orlando Bloom.
Personal travel advice/tip?
I think that everyone is always willing to give advice on what the best things are to do, but I think that in all the years I have been travelling, I have never met someone with the same habits as myself. I think we all try different things, and then do what works best for ourselves. For me, I always leave home with the motto that as long as I have my passport, my BlackBerry and my credit card, there is no problem I can't solve.
How do you deal with jet lag?
I always arrange for my flights to arrive at the destination early evening and then I don't sleep on planes, other than a 30-minute nap. When I arrive, I go for a ride or a run in the gym, have a couple of beers, a big meal and then have a good eight or nine hours of sleep. This works even when I travel to the US. It is definitely something that you get better at, the more you travel, but I would rather be tired on a plane, than have to struggle with jet lag whilst I am trying to work.
What (if any) travel websites do you use?
I use Wotif and Qantas.
What was your biggest travel disaster?
My assistant books all my travel, but, on a recent trip to India, I decided to take my wife and daughters with me, so I booked the same flights for them online. On the return leg, we had a flight leaving at Mumbai at 10 minutes past midnight. To get into the airport, you needed to show your passport and itinerary to pretty heavily armed soldiers. They ushered me through, and then stopped my wife and daughters outside the airport, saying that they couldn't come into the airport, as their flights were only booked for the following day. They had to wait outside the airport for two hours whilst I tried, desperately, to get them onto flights. They finally found a flight with a business-class seat and three economy seats, and, so, I then went to tell a pretty irate wife how good I was. Guess who sat in economy with the kids?
Where is the best place you've been for duty-free tech shopping?
I used to say Singapore Airport, but, with the outlet shopping in the US now, being able to get special tax credits at the stores, the strength of the Aussie dollar and just the cheap price of tech and clothes, I would have to say the US.
What is your dream travel tech to have on planes/in airports/at hotels?
I would really like wireless electricity.
Favourite destination city to work/visit and why?
I would have to say home, in Brisbane, as it is always so nice to get home. Although, I am sure that one day, I will find out that there is a huge radiation cloud above my house, as my wife and three kids all have laptops, iPads, phones, iPods, etc, and most of our media is wireless. We have fantastic wireless access at home in every room, so I can work from my office or from bed at night, with the same device. One of my Gartner colleagues introduced me to Sonos speakers last year, so now we have them throughout the house and can stream music, legally, to all speakers separately or linked together - very, very cool.
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Facebook IPO goes off without a bang
One of the most celebrated IPOs in history, which raised US$16 billion dollars, ended the day below where it started. At Facebook, it's back to business.
After Zuckerberg rang the bell
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)After an all-night 'hackathon' at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, Founder Mark Zuckerberg rang the ceremonial Nasdaq bell from his home turf and the trading started. Almost. There were glitches that stalled things. Financial news anchors vamped breathlessly. And, ultimately, ticker symbol FB traded for a shortened day, just about five hours.
There was no 1999-style pop, but the stock did climb. In fact, it opened at just above US$42 dollars - 11 per cent above the offering price of US$38 a share. That's how much demand there was. In fact, the trading volume set an all-time record for the Nasdaq. But this demand didn't want to stick around. These weren't bets on Facebook's grand future. These were attempt to make a quick buck.
And when the shares started to fall towards their opening price, apparently the bankers worked like mad to try to "support the deal". In other words, the investment bankers, who have an agreement to make a market in the stock, likely began buying shares themselves to keep it afloat.
And it makes sense. The bankers don't want to see the price close below the offering price. At the close, the stock was priced at US$38.27 - below where it opened, and just above the offering price. For the bankers, this was not casual Friday.
It's too late now, of course, but you can bet the bankers are wishing they were able to get this deal done a few months back. Timing is everything, and in this case, theirs was not ideal. Think about it: in the last couple of months, the stock market overall has taken a sharp turn south amid continued worries about Europe and, in particular, Greece.
But the problems that have cast doubt on Facebook are closer to home as well. In April, two months after the company filed to go public, Facebook reported a slowdown in revenue and a drop in profits, highlighting that the days of hyper-growth are coming to and end. Zuckerberg then spent a surprising US$1 billion cash and stock to buy the photo-sharing app Instagram, drawing attention to Facebook's problem in mobile.
Mobile is where Facebook's growth is, and yet Facebook doesn't yet have a way to make money money from mobile users. The company last week amended its S-1 filing with the SEC to underscore the mobile challenge, and Zuckerberg reportedly told potential investors that mobile is his top priority for 2012.
Then there was General Motors, which earlier this week pulled US$10 million of ads from Facebook because, it said, they weren't working.
Throughout it all, however, the big investors wanted in, and on Wednesday the company upped the price range of the stock offering. Despite warnings, few fund managers wanted to miss out. But plenty seemingly also don't want to be left holding too much.
For the gang at Facebook, however, the party continued. Facebook posted back-slapping photos and videos for the celebrations from the sprawling campus that was once home to Sun Microsystems.
Now, the eight-year-old Facebook has a fat pile of cash and sports a market value that, at almost US$110 billion dollars, is more than US$15 billion higher than Amazon's. Google, which is in many ways Facebook's biggest competitor, has a market cap of US$196 billion. In short, Facebook is now among the big boys - in almost every sense.
The one place it's falling short is bottom line. Sure, Facebook makes money, and it's on track to do more than US$4 billion in revenue for 2012. But Google did 10 times that last year. So Zuck and team, now under Wall Street's watchful and sometimes distracting eye, need to buckle down and figure start figuring out how to make more money from its 900 million users. Zuckerberg's hardest test awaits.
Via CNET
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Automation key for time-poor security boffins
The way in which IT departments have been approaching information security is flawed, according to Juniper Networks senior director and security architect Christopher Hoff, who said that security departments need to adopt automation to free up their time to think outside the box.
Christopher Hoff
(Credit: Michael Lee/ZDNet Australia)Speaking to ZDNet Australia, and presenting at AusCERT 2012 earlier this week, Hoff said that security experts tend to only set up reactive plans on how they think systems might break, without taking into account the unpredictable ways in which complex systems of today actually do fail.
"Every once in a while, we test certain things, but we test them as though you hit the first domino and every other domino hits the other one, and there's this linear sequence of events that happens," he said.
"What normally happens is chaos ensures people don't respond the same way, technology doesn't respond the same way you expect it to and so what ends up happening in complex distributed systems is you end up with complex distributed outcomes that aren't always predictable."
Rather than being a reactive force, focusing on threats and vulnerabilities as they become public, security teams should be trying to break their own systems, so that they can manage their risk, he said.
But security experts haven't been able to do this, because they have been treading water for years, Hoff said. This is because it's difficult, if not impossible, to keep up with new technologies and their associated threats, which are being rolled out at an increasingly faster pace. The only way to be able to experiment with systems in that way is to use automation to do basic security jobs that steal the team's time.
Such automation measures can include setting up systems so that they automatically notify each other that they are under attack, even when they are on completely separate layers.
"It's amazing to me that infrastructure can be under attack, and the apps don't know about it and vice versa. We have the capabilities ... we know how to exchange information about vulnerability and threat. It's silly that we don't."
Although automation seems like quite a logical step, it isn't as simple to execute. Hoff said that many chief information security officers (CISOs) and CIOs are struggling with the "technical debt" that they have inherited, and are weighed down by the need to maintain what are now considered as being legacy platforms. Newer platforms running over the cloud are more suitable for automation, he said.
"Large enterprises with tons of applications and legacy infrastructure have a more difficult chore. [Enterprise customers] kind of get mad at me, or at least upset and grumpy about the fact that I keep pointing out [new infrastructure models]. What their frustration stems from is just being saddled with all of this stuff that in many cases, if they could, they would just move off their plate."
As someone who has worked on both sides of the fence, and also in start-ups and large enterprise environments, Hoff is sympathetic to the frustrated CISO. However, he promised that the benefit of taking the time to set up automated procedures is worth the pain.
"I've been in the trenches, I've been a CISO, I know what it's like. It took me three years to, across the entire company, establish a risk-management program that folded in IT and all of the business and audit, and it's a tremendous amount of work, but it moved us forward and to the point of really making a difference," he said.
"A lot of that was stopping doing simple routine tasks and automating as much as we possibly could, and testing the heck out of the domain and [other] areas [for] impacts that a failure would produce."
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Lightning round!
What's an IPO and why is Facebook doing it? How's this year's AusCERT? Where's our slice of Raspberry Pi? And where are Josh and Michael?
On this week's Piccolo-sized Technolatte:
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What's happening at AusCERT 2012
Subscribe to Technolatte on iTunes.
Running time: 14 minutes, 21 seconds
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Vic scraps HealthSMART system
The Victorian Government has made the decision to scrap its HealthSMART system, which was years overdue and had run hundreds of millions of dollars over budget.
HealthSMART was launched in 2003 and had been designed to run as a single electronic foundation for the state's public health service. The single platform would combine a finance system, as well as patient-management and clinical-applications services.
However, Health Minister David Davis today confirmed that the government had scrapped the continuation of the roll-out of HealthSMART, with the government to now work on a hospital-by-hospital basis, to set up individualised systems.
Davis said the government is determined not to "throw more good money, after bad" and would set up an expert panel to advise it on the best way to upgrade the hospital information and communication technology (ICT) systems.
"In those hospitals where it has been put in place or partially put in place, health services will make their decisions from that position, but going forward, beyond that, health services will be able to examine what is appropriate for their particular service," he said.
The new ICT projects would be payed for through the $100 million innovation fund, allocated in this month's Budget.
The road to the system's cancellation is one littered with blowouts and delays; $323 million was originally budgeted for the system and a deadline for completion was set for the end of 2007.
Administrative issues and bureaucratic headaches saw the system miss its initial deadline. The government laid out hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding, eventually taking the project's final bill to a total of $566 million, although the system is only operational in four health services.
When the Baillieu-led coalition government delivered its first state Budget, State Treasurer Kim Wells tore the delayed systems implementation to proverbial shreds, blaming it and the troubled Myki public transport ticketing project for heavily contributing to the state's $7 billion debt figures.
"Major projects inherited by this government - including Myki ... and HealthSMART - face significant cost overruns, which total around $2 billion, and have further contributed to the run-up of debt," the treasurer said in May, last year.
Despite the bashing, HealthSMART received an additional $6.7 million in funding in the most recent Budget.
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US, Australia team up on cybersecurity
Attorney-General Nicola Roxon today said that the US and Australia have agreed on a statement of intent to increase collaboration on cybersecurity.
"The new and emerging challenges of a digital economy were the subject of recent talks in Canberra between myself and secretary [of the US Department of Homeland Security, Janet] Napolitano. And yesterday, in Washington, we built upon those discussions," Roxon said in a statement.
Countries are ever more reliant on critical infrastructure, such as telecommunications, she said, which are the backbone of increasingly important online commerce. Because of this, Australia and the US have to increase their resilience to malicious activity, she said.
"This statement will lead to increased collaboration between the two countries on critical infrastructure, particularly digital control systems."
Australia will now share information on operational security between their national cyber-incident teams, exchange security best practices for IT and industrial-control systems, work together on cybersecurity exercises and encourage training and education on security.
Officials will meet to decide on a timetable of work, and to uncover issues that might arise. The governments have previously signed statements for increased intelligence sharing and easier travel between the countries.
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Woolies case poses procurement questions
Whether it's in a public or private organisation, IT procurement, and perhaps procurement of any kind, seems to be a black hole that if not watched, can suck money away into an abyss.
We've heard the stories of the government employees in Victoria who were receiving gift cards for buying printer toner that departments didn't need. We've heard the stories of the Sydney University IT manager who allegedly hired a company for IT work in which he and his wife held an interest. We've heard the rumblings about government agencies doing too much procurement outside of the tender process, with one example being a contract awarded by Synergy, which was picked up in an audit.
This week, Australian icon Woolworths has been forced onto the dodgy IT-procurement bandwagon, with a case on the matter being heard in the District Court.
It's alleged that a former general manager of information systems at Woolworths, David Wills, used his position to influence the awarding of contracts, netting himself $3.75 million. Crown prosecutor Sunil de Silva outlined one example, saying that on Wills' insistence, Woolworths had awarded a $20 million contract to Azben Technology.
Wills "used his position to influence the awarding of these contracts in a way that would prejudice the interests of Woolworths", De Silva said.
"If a company was awarding tenders without following procedures for tenders, it loses credibility in the financial market."
De Silva is exactly right. That company does. After all, if you're not managing your spending, then how is the business going to do well? And what about the service that the company was trying to obtain? Will it actually be delivered?
The trouble is, people often hate the procedures that are put in place to stop similar fraud from occurring. They make it difficult to buy anything, and cause problems if time is an issue with the purchase. We know the pain of a company slogging its way through a government tender process. On the other side of the fence, it's likely just as tedious for IT managers, who are waiting for the program that the business so desperately needs to get on track.
Given these issues, people will inevitably be tempted to try to cut corners. This helps those who really are intending to rort the system.
So, how do we make sure that procurement is kept honest, while not overburdening the IT department?
Perhaps big data has the answer. If we pull together data from inside and outside an organisation about individuals who work in procurement process and their procurements, it could be possible to follow the breadcrumbs to the realisation that something is wrong.
Remember the case of the former EDS employee who stole $3 million from the Bank of Queensland? His spending on wine and cars sparked the investigation that led to him being sentenced to jail. This sort of spending could probably have been picked up sooner, with data sucked from the social media sphere.
In the realm of procurement, a query might find a link between a person and a company's services that are being procured.
After all, wouldn't you brag on Twitter or Facebook if you bought a luxury car?
How do you keep an eye on procurement in your organisation?
AAP contributed to this article.
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Dynamics CRM saves email-drowned utility
Australian Power and Gas has implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM and other Microsoft software to handle a skyrocketing number of customer queries, but the company's CIO has said that he won't complete the ecosystem with Windows 8 tablets, as the iPad works just fine for a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) model.
(Power lines image by Charles Haynes, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Joseph Gullotta joined Australian Power and Gas in 2010 as the company's chief information officer. He said that at the time, the company could be likened to a start-up in terms of how it used technology.
As the company's customer base expanded, it became difficult to keep up with customers' needs by using basic email systems alone.
"We've got a number of different email screens coming from our website and other customer inquiries. [Handling] the sheer volume of that through Outlook and responding appropriately to all of them was tough; we didn't have a system for escalations in place," he said.
That was when the company decided to deploy Microsoft Dynamics CRM onsite, with staff up and running on the system within just over a month and a half.
Using Dynamics CRM, Australian Power and Gas staff members are now able to view customer-interaction data in one place, and track inquiries, cases, complaints and service escalations. Gullotta added that they are able to view the information on a single custom dashboard, and set up alerts to track and monitor the progress of different interactions.
Deploying the product has also shored up how the company handles data, he said.
"There's a lot of information in the energy industry. There's a lot of meter reading, billing information, et cetera. All of that is where we do our analysis. We look at where we're competitive and not competitive.
"Dynamics CRM centralises a lot of information on the one screen. It centralises all of our information about customers, and the data warehouse allows us to merge that info and do across-the-board analysis."
Gullotta added that the researchers also access detailed weather-forecasting information, and team it with data from the business to predict the workload wholesale electricity that traders will have to deal with.
Gullotta chose Dynamics out of a desire to stay within the Microsoft ecosystem. The company was already using Outlook and SQL Server products, and wouldn't have had to extensively train staff in the system's operation.
In terms of devices, however, Gullotta said that he's not hanging out for Windows 8-powered tablets to emerge later this year, as his fleet of door-knocking salespeople is doing just fine with the iPad platform.
"Truthfully, we're not looking at Windows 8 tablets. Within the space we're working in, a lot of us are using iPads, and we're happy with it. We can control [iPads] and we don't have any issues. It's simple and everyone knows how they work.
"We've introduced [iPads] for door knockers, and it gives customers [a] better experience. We can use them to control what [door knockers are] saying and give a ... real-time quote. That environment has really improved," he said.
The iPad is even making its way into the company's back-office environment, as the CIO shores up the company's security policies to encourage a BYOD model.
Gullotta said that he hopes Microsoft can challenge Apple for tablet supremacy soon.
"I've used the Windows environment in the past, and I'm hoping that they'll make improvements and it can challenge the iPad."
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Cybercrime golden age over in two years?
The golden age of cybercrime could come to a close as soon as 2014, according to Kaspersky Lab founder Eugene Kaspersky - as long as the world changes how it coordinates on creating laws to govern the internet.
Eugene Kaspersky
(Credit: Michael Lee/ZDNet Australia)Speaking to ZDNet Australia and presenting at AusCERT 2012 this week, Kaspersky slammed the traditional model of regulation for technology and cybercrime, criticising it of being slow and unsuitable.
"Traditional regulation - it's far, far, far behind reality," he said.
He compared it to writing a book on emerging security issues (which he had been approached to do, but deemed it as being impossible).
"Come on, it's not possible. When a book is printed or published in any other way, it's outdated. The history of IT security, yes, but not the present time, because it takes time. Same with regulation."
This doesn't mean that Kaspersky doesn't support regulation. Rather, he said that the world needs to do it in a smarter way. Instead of having governance for the internet fragmented across different geographies, which then causes chaos among different governments as they attempt to reconcile definitions and intents of individual pieces of legislation, Kaspersky said that moving the governance model to a unified body makes more sense.
According to Kaspersky, governments are already beginning to wake up and move to a global model, and he said that if it works as intended, it will result in a global internet government that would be responsible for the internet and its laws - laws that in turn would be approved and then adapted as necessary by national governments, in order to harmonise legislation.
"I think that finally we will have all these regulations and powers in place in 2014, [or] 2015 perhaps," he said.
His reasoning for this date is that Interpol will have completed its dedicated Command and Coordination Centre in Singapore by then.
"I think that will be [the] end of the cybercrime golden age," he said.
However, he acknowledged that there is an inherent danger involved in anyone having too much regulatory power, or responding to issues with disproportionate legislation.
"How [do we] stop governments when [they've gone] too far? When governments introduce too much regulation on the internet? When governments want to control everything? That's going on now in the UK, for example," he said.
"Their systems are connected, and police will have access to this data without any order, without any permission from a court or judge. Police will have so much power on the people, so I'm really afraid about that."
He emphasised that although speeding up regulation is necessary, it shouldn't be at the expense of privacy.
"Don't be too quick. Don't make it too strong. Just leave some space for our privacy," he said.
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When regulation goes too far
As a tech journalist, you soon learn the view of the "end users" who make up your publication's readership; typically, the IT manager or CIO.
Not only is that business reader likely a consumer of ICT, but they will also often be a shareholder in it. Given the fact that they probably own shares in the ICT businesses reported on, what happens to the share price also matters. And if regulators do something to affect this, you quickly realise that there are two sides to every story.
On one hand, regulators are consumer champions, protecting the masses from being exploited by greedy, fat-cat capitalists.
On the other hand, regulatory intervention destroys shareholder value, and damages companies, especially if businesses and entrepreneurs feel that they cannot make much of a buck anymore.
Thus, a recent New Zealand Commerce Commission (ComCom) recommendation that the government should force Telecom offshoot Chorus to slash its charges for copper access is big news from several angles.
First, it will affect demand for copper wire broadband access, and may even undermine the business case for fibre, and the government's own Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) initiative.
But also of concern now is the impact on share prices and the wider public investment in the markets.
The proposed intervention spooked the markets, especially with Chorus being a recently created spin-off from Telecom, driven by government. Since the government effectively created Chorus, it should be happy with it, but the fact that it apparently isn't came as a shock.
Financial experts warned that such regulatory uncertainty is economically damaging, and some blog writers were particularly angry about it.
But such criticism will not stop ComCom, which this week also announced an inquiry into Sky TV, something that also hit Sky's share price.
It may be that Sky is dominant, and does not always do what's best for the consumer, but consumer lobby groups need to look at the other impacts from regulatory intervention than merely the end effect for consumers.
They also need to consider the views of those economists who argue that monopoly profits attract entrants to a market and drive innovation.
Governments need to respect the property rights of shareholders, especially when larger companies like Chorus will have many shareholders.
When the last Labour government unbundled the local loop, the value of Telecom dropped by between $2 billion and $3 billion, hitting the savings and pensions of millions of ordinary "mum and dad" investors.
To paraphrase Maude Flanders on The Simpsons: "Won't somebody please think of the shareholders!"
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Nokia Lumia 800 revs up at Bridgestone
The rubber has hit the road on a smartphone refresh for Bridgestone Australia, with the company opting for a fleet of new Windows Phone 7-powered Nokia Lumia 800 devices.
The Lumia 800
(Credit: Nokia)After successful trials, Bridgestone has now purchased 140 Lumia 800 smartphones for its staff. According to the company, Nokia pipped rivals, including RIM and Apple, for the contract. The phone reportedly has better integration with Bridgestone's existing suite of Microsoft products, like Office and Outlook, which sealed the deal for Nokia.
"There was a strong business case for the Nokia Lumia 800. It gives us the best of both worlds - seamless integration with familiar business tools, such as Outlook, Internet Explorer, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as exceptional design and build quality," group IT manager for Bridgestone Australia, Scott Baxter, said in a statement today.
Baxter added that tools like free turn-by-turn navigation will allow the company to ditch its existing fleet of GPS units.
The company is handling the security of the fleet with Microsoft's ActiveSync product. Baxter said that it can enact device-lockdown and remote-wipe protocols as required.
The Nokia Lumia 800 rolled out to Australian stores in March, and the company's flagship Windows Phone 7 device, the Lumia 900, will hit Australia in June.
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Copper greenfield dominance irrelevant: Conroy
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy's office has said it means nothing that 35,000 Telstra copper connections have been made to houses in greenfield estates, even though it shows how many more premises it has reached than the government's National Broadband Network (NBN) fibre.
Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull yesterday seized on numbers reported by Communications Day from a submission made by Telstra to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), saying that it had laid 35,000 copper lines to greenfield estates over the last 12 months. In the meantime, it expects only 4000 premises to be passed by NBN Co's fibre by September, with 951 completed at the end of last year.
"Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the disastrous nature of the NBN Co's decision to take over the provision of fibre installations in greenfields sites," Turnbull said in a statement.
"That decision seriously undermined a thriving industry of private-sector fibre providers, and it has also resulted in 35,000 new Australian homes being installed with copper - so derided by Senator Conroy - instead of fibre."
Turnbull said that there is no argument between the government and the opposition about providing fibre to homes in greenfield developments, despite their differences over the cost of connecting all homes to a fibre-cable network.
"The failure to provide fibre to so many new homes is a direct consequence of Senator Conroy's blind prejudice against the private sector providing fibre connections in greenfields developments," he said.
Conroy said, however, that Turnbull is misleading Australians on the matter.
He pointed out that Telstra is responsible for estates where development approval was granted before 1 January 2011, as part of the definitive agreements signed in June last year. Given the lead time between approval and actually building, this is still a factor, according to his office.
The agreement also sees Telstra responsible for laying copper in new housing developments that have less than 100 premises.
"As Mr Turnbull well knows, responsibility for 35,000 greenfields lots was passed to Telstra as part of these agreements," he said.
"The provision of copper to these premises by Telstra is exactly how these agreements were meant to work.
"Under government policy, copper is an interim solution. All greenfields premises will receive fibre to the home as the NBN is progressively rolled out."
He said that NBN Co will provide connections to greenfields premises as they are needed.
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Nokia Lumia 900 for Optus in June, sans 4G
Nokia will soon release two new Lumia-branded Windows Phone models in Australia, with the Lumia 900 heading to Optus and the Lumia 610 to Boost Mobile and Vodafone.
The Nokia Lumia 900
(Credit: Nokia)Unlike the popular version of the 900 on the AT&T network in the US, the 900 will not be 4G capable in Australia, though it will benefit from dual-carriage HSPA+ data speeds, with a maximum theoretical download speed of 42Mbps.
Optus will offer the 900 in June on a range of plans, including $0 upfront for AU$60 per month. It will be also available through major electronics retailers for AU$699. The Lumia 610 will be available in June through Boost Mobile, and then on the Vodafone network in July. It carries a AU$329 asking price.
Both phones run on Windows Phone 7.5, the latest version of the Microsoft-developed operating system, but are powered by different hardware. The 900 uses a 1.4GHz Qualcomm processor and packs a 4.3-inch WVGA AMOLED display. The 610 also has a WVGA resolution, but its screen is a standard LCD panel. An 800MHz processor is employed in the budget-priced Lumia 610.
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Iran may sue Google
It's awkward to run afoul of anyone for culturally sensitive reasons. I'd imagine that it's even worse to run afoul of Iran for said reasons. Google is being accused of removing the Maps label from the oft fought-over Persian Gulf, an action that Iran's foreign minister says could lead to the search giant paying "serious damages".
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Facebook vs. Google: the epic battle
The Facebook initial public offering (IPO) will embolden the social network to up its fight with Google for the online advertising market. But don't expect Google to back down.
Mark Zuckerberg at the F8 developer's conference in 2011.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)How is Facebook ever going to justify the US$100 billion valuation that the public market is about to put on it? By making lots of money, of course. And where is it going to get that money? It's going to steal it from Google.
At least, it will try. While Facebook is a social network and Google is a search engine, both companies make money from advertising, and they're both battling for the same advertising dollars, for mindshare of the same users to view the ads and ultimately for ownership and control of the same raw ore that determines whether network companies work: information.
Facebook and Google represent different epochs in technology; Facebook is the present day, the social era, while Google is the rapidly receding past, the era of the web. In most major technology shifts, the leaders of one era do not lead the next. They may survive as valuable companies (Microsoft - leader of the PC era), but they don't drive people to the next big thing.
By that argument, Google is toast. It's the next Microsoft. It's valuable, in a here's-your-gold-watch kind of way, but it's not important to the future. Leave that to the new kids, with their energy and new ideas.
Except that knocking Google off its perch won't be so easy, historical parallels notwithstanding. Google is not stagnant. Its core business is still growing, and its leadership has been smart enough to see the Facebook freight train coming and actually do things about it. Google has launched major new social initiatives while improving its core products. It's also ruthlessly killed non-performing inventions. It has moved successfully into a completely new market (mobile operating systems), in a manoeuvre reminiscent of Apple's expansion from computers to music players and phones.
Google is going down swinging. Maybe it's not going down at all. Below, we've outlined five arenas where Facebook and Google are battling for the future of technology, and how they stack up.
Search
The web is the greatest mine of information the world has known, and Google has done the best job of figuring out how to extract what's stored on it. Google's trick is not just collecting its own copy of the web, but how it picks pieces of information to give to users, and how it ranks the results: the PageRank algorithm. But PageRank has its limits.
Facebook knows who is connected to whom. That's its core value. That social data can be used to build a more socially aware search, and Facebook is doing just that in partnership with Microsoft and Bing.
Google is working on keeping its search ahead of Facebook in both social and traditional areas. Its "Search Plus Your World" feature integrates social signals into search. Google doesn't have the depth of social data that Facebook does, but this product does show that the search company can incorporate highly personal social data into search. At the same time, Google continues to push hard on improving plain old keyword search.
Google is getting into social search. Facebook is getting its social network into general search. The companies are beginning to collide in this core business. Google has the upper hand. But for how long?
Social activity
As we've written before, Facebook completely nails it in sucking users into its services. The average US user spends seven hours and 45 minutes on Facebook per month. Google overall is under two hours per month. That's a lot of engagement, and a lot of time that can be used to generate ad views and revenue.
Google, to its credit, does clearly understand the value of social interactions. Google+ is, in many ways, a better-designed social system than Facebook itself. Especially in the way that it handles variable privacy through its Circles concept. But it does not have the global connected user base of Facebook, and it's not clear that Google will be able to wrest users' main social attentions away from the site where their friends are already active.
Google probably cannot unseat Facebook as the driver of the social web. But Google can chip away at Facebook's users, and the social network is not invulnerable.
Identity
To own the social index, running a website like Facebook or Google is just a piece of the solution. Both companies have identity solutions. Facebook Connect is the more popular solution. It lets users quickly authorise an account using their Facebook log-in. It's also being used quite a lot for mobile log-ins.
The value to Facebook is enormous. Facebook collects data on what systems users are signing up for, which of their friends are also signing up for them and how everyone connects.
Google also has identity solutions, but most of the time, for users, logging in with Facebook makes more sense. Facebook is where users go to interact and be themselves. Facebook is becoming the standard for signing in to new services. Google needs to step up its game here.
Advertising
Search, identity and social are the raw materials that form the money-making alloy of advertising. Google is a US$40 billion company built on innovation and execution in advertising. That business isn't going away soon.
As Facebook extends its reach and its advertising programs, and through Bing continues to pound on the search business, it could make a dent in Google's dominance in the market, or at least give it some margin pressure.
Not that it will be easy. Google has demonstrated that the way people use search compared to how they use social sites makes a substantial difference in how advertising on those sites works. When users perform Google searches, they are looking for information. Advertising, at its best, is seen as just more information. Advertising on Google works for that precise reason.
On Facebook, the intent of users is rarely to find a product to buy or a plane to book. Facebook is used to find friends to talk with or brag to. This social intent does not reinforce advertising to the same extent.
Still, Facebook can be very effective for building brands, and it's a good platform for running social campaigns. GM's recent defection from Facebook advertising doesn't show that there's something fundamentally wrong with Facebook; rather, it shows that Facebook's ad sales reps didn't manage their clients' expectations well. That's a fixable problem. "Facebook can be used well for awareness and brand building," said Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan. "People look at these two sites at different points of the purchase cycle."
Google's business also works because it has advertising products that any site owner can use. The entire internet feeds Google's main business model. Facebook doesn't offer external advertising yet. It may soon; it should.
Mobile
Users are getting off their computers and off traditional websites, and interacting more on the go, using their smartphones and tablets. Facebook of course has mobile apps, and mobile aspirations, including, perhaps, building its own hardware. But it's clear that Facebook is not a native of the mobile era.
Whereas Google has either the most or the second-most powerful mobile operating system there is, and, through it, control of many users' mobile experiences. Google also, finally, has begun making apps that seem native to the small screen. The new Google+ app for iOS is a beautiful app. It's a more integrated and thought-through experience than what Facebook offers.
Neither company has figured out how to make advertising work on mobiles, though, and that is the next big battleground. But until then, the companies are both smart to do whatever they can to encourage users to stick with their small-screen experiences. And the more mobile power they can hold on to, the less they'll end up under the thumb of Apple - the real leader in mobile innovation.
Upshot: advertising is everything
Facebook has to solve its problem with advertising, and most likely will do so by emulating and competing with Google. As a public company, Facebook will be driven by its investors to get this area sorted out.
Facebook's ownership of the social graph, and its success in identity services, is what it has to keep Google at bay. Google, meanwhile, needs to be sure that Google tools are what people continue to use to find things, do things and run their mobile experiences.
The infusion of IPO money will embolden Facebook to take on Google directly in areas where it's clearly weaker - primarily advertising, but also search and mobile. Google will defend its turf while simultaneously attacking Facebook in social (and hopefully in identity services). From completely different starting points, the two companies will meet head-on for users, mindshare and money.
Via CNET
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Santos' thin client starts big-data plans
After a successful implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and an open-source thin client, oil and gas exploration company Santos is looking towards deep analysis of big data.
Santos had been facing a problem where it had data stored in various places across the organisation, all around the globe. The amount of data continued to increase, making it difficult to ensure that everyone had the most up-to-date data, and backed up that data. Unfortunately, the distributed nature of the company's IT also resulted in multiple points of failure and poor performance for its geoscientists, responsible for finding oil and gas, using the enormous reams of data.
Finding oil and gas from data is art more than it is science, according to Santos IS subsurface manager Andy Moore. He said that the systems need to work as fast as his scientists think.
When its proprietary thin-client vendor upped its licensing costs two years ago, Santos decided to deal with its problems by moving to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. It also uses the TurnoVNC and Virtual GL open-source projects to enable its scientists to access 3D representations, generated by a program called Paradigm, from data housed on a central pool of servers.
The scientists were each able to see the same version of the data, collaborating over video conferencing. Not only did this end the data-consistency issues, but the combined memory of the server farm also enabled the company to analyse larger sets of data than it had previously been able to. This was due to the fact that scientists were previously likely to run analyses on chunks of data on their machines.
"You can run analytics on a dataset to reveal attributes of the data that you would not see if you were viewing individual pieces of the data," Moore said.
This enables unique insights, he said.
"What you might be working on one workstation is the left leg of the elephant. You might know that left leg really, really well, but you have no idea it's the left leg of an elephant."
Given the success of the implementation, Santos is currently testing whether it can virtualise the Windows environment on a Unix server, so that it can capture pockets of data from applications that it hasn't managed to suck into the server farm yet; for example, Petrel.
After working for about a year on some issues with 3D visualisation, due to faulty code in the virtual operating system, the company managed to make the virtualised environment work. The question is whether the virtualisation will now deliver the performance that scientists require.
"We don't know if it's production capable of supporting a wide number of users," Moore said.
The company is currently testing this, and hopes to decide by the end of June whether it's going to be viable.
"If it doesn't perform as quickly as the application does locally, we'll live with the data-management headache," he said.
With the company more easily able to access its data, it's now looking into how best to analyse it. It can do that analysis just by using its traditional techniques, according to Moore; however, Santos is also talking to "well-known companies like IBM" to see whether they could help it to perform analyses on the large sets of structured and unstructured data.
An example of what Moore hopes to achieve from data analysis is the ability to predict when compressors on an oil field will fail. As it currently stands, if a compressor fails, the company replaces it, but loses production time while the new compressor is arriving and being installed. Ideally, if data from all the compressors could be collected and compared, the company could start to predict when they might fail. This could lead to pre-emptive replacement of the compressors, avoiding a loss of production time.
"We're seriously looking at that at the moment," Moore said. "We're researching how we're going to do it."
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Yahoo facepalms in Facebook patent battle
Yahoo must be feeling really sorry for itself right now. It accused Facebook of filing patents fraudulently, which Facebook was not only able to disprove, but also showed that Yahoo's lawyers hadn't even looked at the records to check its claims. It's really not Yahoo's year.
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Simon and Schuster settles in ebook case
Simon & Schuster, one of the five major book publishers accused in multiple lawsuits of conspiring with Apple to fix ebook prices, has settled the complaint filed by numerous states' attorneys-general in the US.
(Stack of books image by Horia Varlan, CC2.0)
Denise Cote, the federal judge overseeing the three different antitrust complaints pending against Apple and the defendant publishers, granted a motion on Tuesday to dismiss Simon & Schuster (owned by ZDNet Australia's parent company, CBS) from the complaint. This suit was originally filed by the attorneys-general from Texas, as well as 15 other attorneys-general. More states have joined that suit as plaintiffs; 29 are now involved.
The terms of the settlement weren't provided in the court documents, and Simon & Schuster declined to comment. Apple and the Texas attorney-generals' office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last month, Simon & Schuster also settled a complaint by the US Department of Justice (DoJ), as did Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group and News Corp's HarperCollins. The defendants that refused to settle and deny wrongdoing are Apple, Macmillan Publishers (owned by Germany's Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck holding company) and Pearson PLC's Penguin Group.
The move by Simon & Schuster follows similar settlement deals that the attorneys-general reached with HarperCollins and Hachette.
In addition to the complaints filed by the many states' attorneys-general and the DoJ, a group of consumers is seeking to bring a class-action suit.
The plaintiffs in each of the three complaints allege that Apple and the five publishing houses worked together to wrongfully manipulate the prices of ebooks, while limiting Amazon's control over the ebook market. Amazon possessed an estimated 90 per cent share of the ebook market prior to 2010; that's since fallen to 60 per cent. The plaintiffs allege that the defendant publishers all moved in lockstep to jack up retail prices.
In the past, publishers sold books to merchants, such as Barnes & Noble, at a wholesale price; the retailers then got to set the price that consumers paid. But after numerous talks with Apple and each other, the defendant publishers all agreed to move to an agency model, the government claims. This strategy calls for a retailer to act as an agent of the publishers, which then becomes the one that sets the retail prices.
The states and the DoJ say that Apple helped to convince the publisher defendants to work together to move to an agency model in time for the launch of the iPad on 27 January 2010. From that day on, the publishers all began pressuring Amazon and other retailers to adopt the agency model, the plaintiffs say.
Soon after, ebooks that once went for US$9.99 were listed between US$12.99 and US$14.99.
Apple and the publishers tried to get the complaint filed by the consumer group tossed out on Tuesday, but Cote denied the request.
In her written ruling, Cote said: "It is presumed that the conduct by all parties would be unlawful under the rule of reason."
Via CNET
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HP's big layoffs will only go so far
HP is reportedly pondering a big restructure that may eliminate around 25,000 jobs, but analysts say that cuts will only go so far.
According to Bloomberg, HP is looking to cut 8 per cent of its workforce. Business Insider noted on Wednesday that HP's services unit may be a target.
In any case, HP is likely to restructure and cut jobs. Bloomberg noted that HP could either lay off workers or offer early retirement deals.
The problem?
HP's operating profit per employee trails rivals, according to a Morgan Stanley analysis.
For instance, IBM's operating profit per employee is US$49,000. Apple's is the same. EMC makes US$67,000 in operating profit per employee.
HP's tally: US$35,000.
The only way for HP to change that metric - assuming that the company can't suddenly boost growth - is to lay off workers.
Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty recently outlined the operating profit per employee picture for hardware vendors.
HP's move to consolidate business units was a step to improving the profit picture, but it only goes so far.
However, HP has a line to walk. The company can't merely cut workers. It has to take those savings and invest in more lucrative markets. Huberty said in a recent research note:
While we see opportunity for improvement, the road to restructuring HP will likely be a long one. The good news is that CEO Meg Whitman seems determined to improve profitability and management has already taken several steps (eg, merging the printing and PC businesses). We see the potential for HP to improve profit/employee to levels more in line with peers through restructuring but these savings need to be followed by investments in software and services top-line growth and mix improvements. Any pay-off from the latter will likely come in FY13 or FY14.
Via ZDNet US
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How government does BYOD
Allowing users to bring their own devices (BYOD) needn't be difficult, even for the government, according to the senior manager for the ACT Government's IT security, Peter Major.
Speaking at the 2012 AusCERT security conference this morning, Major highlighted up front that organisations have to establish a clear device-use policy.
Major said that due to the blurring of corporate and personal information on the device, it is possible for the organisation to be liable for the destruction of the user's personal information - if the organisation has to completely wipe the device for security purposes.
To help clarify what personal and corporate information can be placed on the device, Major advocated generating acceptable usage guidelines and further education for users to teach them what is right and wrong. He also recommended that organisations protect themselves by having users physically sign to waive their rights.
In the ACT Government's case, these forms of governance are, at times, the only measure against certain applications.
"Cloud storage scares me. I have not had a solution in place to stop it. I rely heavily on governance and education for our staff. Once I get a solution, I'll put it in place," he said.
Despite these concerns, Major has moved ahead with a BYOD pilot, which he feels has experienced a certain measure of success. The first thing he did in the pilot was to take his newly created policies and run them by the people in the office who could grease the skids of the project.
"The chief minister was actually on the pilot study. We had a deputy chief minister on the pilot study. We had most of the CEOs from the agencies on the pilot study. We had doctors, we had specialists, we had the bigwigs."
Major said that one of the key benefits of having the critical players involved was that he was able to push the policies, in pilot form, "through the gods first", so that they could assess whether they would be willing to sign off on them.
"We had senior buy-in," he said.
The next step was to select a mobile device-management solution, and, after trialling several from different vendors, they settled on Mobile Iron, since it has the best end-user experience.
"[The end experience is] what we're trying to get at. You can't degrade the user experience by rolling out this device. You have to give them what they deserve."
Delving deeper, Major looked at application control. Although there is the option to have a controlled whitelist of known, secure applications, a blacklist of bad, undesirable applications is used to control what can and can't be installed on the devices.
"You can have carte blanche, unless, of course, it undermines the security of the network. [Then] it gets blacklisted. Simplify management. If you haven't got simple management, you won't manage it, and it will fail."
This also doesn't mean that users have free rein of their devices, with other security constraints in place; for example, to prevent users from rooting or jailbreaking their phones.
"If you jailbreak ... or root the phone, we will serve a bullet. We will blow it away. We will not hesitate. We will blow your personal information away. We will do the whole lot. You will have a blank device; you will have to reload."
Finally, when it comes to the choice of devices itself, Major said that the government is trying to limit its exposure only to Android, Apple and Microsoft, in order to deliver them in a phased approach.
Major acknowledged the existence of Research In Motion (RIM) and Symbian, but said, "RIM's dying", and "Symbian is dead".
One of the end results is that the ACT Government can now use an approved iPad for its Cabinet meetings, which, according to Major, have essentially become paperless.
"They take an iPad in there with all their Cabinet documents they can annotate and do what they like with. All we did was we used a [Defence Signals Directorate] DSD-recommended solution to convert the iPad into a Kindle. But anyway, people are happy, and they can work with it."