iTnews: Australian telcos champion Voice over Broadband for SMBs

As a freelance journalist at Haymarket Media:

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is not a new term. Touted as a low cost alternative to traditional telephony, VoIP has a major role in a new wave of converged network solutions that are pervading the telecommunications market.

But while consumers and large enterprises have adopted the technology to some degree, Australian small to medium businesses (SMBs) have traditionally been deterred by VoIP's reputation for poor call quality at the cheaper end of the spectrum, and the large set-up costs of premium, business-grade services.

With the new introduction of Voice over Broadband offerings from telecommunications behemoths AAPT and Optus, however, VoIP adoption by SMBs is set to take a new turn.

Telecommunications solutions for businesses have been tiptoeing towards Internet telephony for some time. Although the copper wire still dominates a majority of outbound phone calls, traditional IP PBX systems that rout intra-office calls via a Wide Area Network have been utilised by large enterprises since the turn of the century.

"If you're using an IP PBX, and you set up your system so that you can call another office at another location through the Wide Area Network, phone calls that you make within the office are technically VoIP," explained David Cannon, senior analyst of telecommunications at IDC.

Cannon mentioned IDC's global telecommunications network as an example of a typical IP PBX set-up. When calling a counterpart in IDC's New Zealand or Singapore offices, Cannon makes an internal VoIP phone call. Meanwhile, other outbound calls to non-IDC phone numbers are still routed through the PSTN copper line.

But the reign of the copper line may not be long lived, as Internet telephony marches beyond IP PBX, and towards complete VoIP offerings that encompass all outbound communications.

Internet-based VoIP services such as Skype are fulfilling an increasing portion of small businesses' telephony needs – as well as those of the casual workplace instant message addict. And now, with the support of the likes of AAPT and Optus, as well as ISPs like iiNet and Primus, Voice over Broadband technology is expanding VoIP's reach to the SMB market.

"Voice over Broadband is probably the most interesting subject matter at this point in time, in terms of VoIP for SMBs, because it’s actually being championed by Telstra's primary competitors, being providers of other network infrastructure," Cannon said.

Cannon highlighted Optus and AAPT as the primary providers of Voice over Broadband services in Australia. The first SMB-centric VoIP service was launched by AAPT in 2006; however, Cannon is of the opinion that Voice over Broadband has only really become a viable telecommunications option for SMBs in the past six months.

Like the services that came before it in the Internet telephony space, Voice over Broadband relies on its low operating cost to attract users. Current offerings of Australian service providers involve packaged Internet and phone line deals, which cut down on line rental.

Such Voice over Broadband packages are estimated to save businesses around $15 per line per month on access fees alone, not to mention the added convenience that consolidated suite voice and data connections provides.

"Historically, what's going on is that the price of local, national and international phone calls have gone down," Cannon said. "The only part of the telephony bill that isn't coming down is the access price.

"The fee that you pay for access of phone lines, whether it be PSTN or ISDN, is sitting around about $33 per month. With a broadband connection at 512 kbps plus, telcos can deliver multiple phone lines on top of that.

"That means that over that one broadband line, you can literally replace the PSDN or the ISDN access component, and at the same time, you can consolidate your VPN connection, and you can also consolidate your Internet connection, all through that one pipe."

Current offerings

AAPT's Business Connect boasts to be the first fully managed and customised VoIP solution developed especially for Australian medium enterprises.

Launched in July 2006, the service was recognised at the 2007 Australian Telecommunications Users Group Awards as one of the most innovative products in the communications sector.

"Business Connect demonstrates AAPT's success in expanding our existing capability as a telecommunications service provider to a complete ICT provider in the business market" said Gregg Roy, general manager of AAPT Business Solutions.

"It is an innovative, market-first VoIP solution for medium business that represents true convergence of Information Communications Technology," he said.

To entice SMBs to make the jump to Voice over Broadband, AAPT's Business Connect advertises no set up costs and a service that is compatible with existing analogue phone equipment.

Other benefits include: the ability to rout a single incoming call to multiple phones – for example, an office line, home phone, as well as a mobile number – which increases the contactability of sales staff; the ability to forward voicemail to e-mail inboxes; low per-minute call rates and free inter-office phone calls.

One adopter of AAPT's Voice over Broadband technology is Global Insight Market Research. The Queensland-based full-service market research firm makes an estimated 2,000 calls per month, so cost was no small consideration in the search for a telecommunications service provider.

"We were interested in moving from our traditional telecommunications infrastructure to something that could streamline our operations and provide advanced functionality not available in standard services," said Murray Dempsey, managing director of Global Insight Market Research in an AAPT Business Connect case study.

"The AAPT Business Connect solution offered us great call rates and volume discounts, halving our communications spend by allowing us to use a DSL connection for all our communication needs. We no longer need to maintain and pay for separate access for voice and data needs."

While Business Connect primarily targets medium-sized businesses, Optus has opened its arms to the entire SMB sector with its ipPhone service. Launched in June 2007, the service bundles 12 cent flat local and national calls with a variety of traditional telephony features including call transfer, call hold and call wait, as well as newer Internet telephony features like the ability to rout incoming calls to multiple lines.

Available to Optus Business DSL customers, ipPhone comes in two flavours - Optus ipPhone Premier and Optus ipPhone Express. The former offers superior call quality at $19.95 per month excluding the set up costs of a professional installation. The latter is priced at $12 per month and comes as a simple, plug and play service.

According to Optus' estimates in its IP Index 2005, almost one half of its IP customers already utilise a VoIP solution, and a further 17 per cent are evaluating or trialling VOIP technology. Optus expects VoIP adoption to yield between 30 and 50 per cent in cost savings for a typical organisation.

"Broadband penetration has really accelerated in the SMB market over recent years and as a result customers are now looking at how they can better utilise their communications infrastructure," said Paul Kitchin, managing director of Optus SMB.

"Optus recognises that SMBs want and need more than the traditional core telecommunication products of fixed, mobile and internet to complete daily business operations," he said.

Shove over, Telstra?

Despite the benefits touted by its champions, the uptake of Voice over Broadband technologies has been slow. IDC's Cannon estimates VoIP to occupy no more than 300,000 phone lines in a six million line market, representing a mere five per cent of Australian phone lines.

"It's not [a large uptake]," Cannon said, "but then again, because the big, competitive telcos have only launched these products in the last six months, in reality, it's [VoIP] got a long way to go."

One major hurdle that VoIP currently faces is its reputation for poor, unreliable audio quality. And indeed there have been VoIP service providers for which the popular opinion holds true.

As network infrastructure improves, however, so does the quality of Internet telephony. Using the business-grade broadband connections of today, which advertise 99.95 to 99.99 per cent availability uptime, Cannon expects the call quality degradation associated with VoIP services to be negligible.

Recent guidelines developed by the Communications Alliance to regulate the quality of VoIP services and Internet Protocol (IP) networks are also expected to increase the uptake of the new wave of converged voice and data offerings.

"I think that a phone call going astray here and there isn't that huge of an issue," he said. "I think that that happens regardless [of if a company is using VoIP or PSTN], and people can accept that.

"It's just that a majority of the time, the audio quality in particular needs to be clean. You can achieve that now, certainly with the business-grade broadband infrastructure that's out there."

So, should Telstra be kissing its landline monopoly farewell?

Cannon is doubtful. The quality of IP infrastructure is still not as good as the traditional PSTN, and as he points out, current champions of Voice over Broadband also have large shares of the traditional telephony market.

"I would say that it [VoIP] doesn't at this point in time pose a threat [to Telstra]. Anything that is a competitive service is threatening, but I wouldn't suggest that Telstra are about to lose market share as a result of this product – not at this point in time,"
he said.

"Going forward, maybe five years from now, perhaps," he said.

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Linux.com: Online library reaches million book milestone

As a freelance contributor to Linux.com:

An international venture called the Universal Library Project has made more than one million books freely available in digitized format. The joint project of researchers from China, India, Egypt, and the US has the eventual aim of digitizing all published works of man, freeing the availability of information from geographic and socioeconomic boundaries, providing a basis for technological advancement, and preserving published works against time and tide.

One and a half million books in more than 20 languages, including Chinese, English, Arabic, and various Indian languages, are now accessible via a single Web portal. The online library includes rare and out-of-print books from private and public collections around the world.

"There are plenty of books that are no longer in copyright, and that have long been forgotten, but which would be useful to scholars, students, and just the general population," says Michael Shamos, a copyright lawyer, computer science professor, and co-director of the project at the Carnegie Mellon University in the US.

"There is a tremendous amount of knowledge that we thought would be lost to mankind if we didn't start digitizing," he says.

The project believes digital books on the Internet should be free to read, instantly available, easily accessible, printable on-demand, translatable to any language, and readable to both humans and machines. Additionally, with the advent of low-cost technology like the One Laptop Per Child project's XO laptop and ebook readers, digitized books are expected to reduce the cost of learning by replacing the repetitive cost of books with a one-off computer purchase and freely downloadable information.

According to the researchers' estimates, the Universal Library collection currently represents a mere one percent of the approximately 100 million books to ever have been published. Shamos expects only half of the published books in existence to be found in physical libraries around the world, so the task of physically locating a rare book can be a tedious process.

"The only way you can obtain an out-of-print book is to find a library that has one, and either travel to that library, or obtain that book through an interlibrary loan," he says. "It's a very slow process, especially considering that without seeing the book, you might not know if there's anything interesting in it for you."

When the project was initiated in 2002, members expected other research and commercial projects to digitize only around 50,000 books. Google Book Search is one such project that was started since that time; in recent years, it has come under fire for alleged breaches of copyright. While Shamos expressed a high regard for Google's efforts and the publicity it has attracted to book digitization, he said the Universal Library Project had "similar but different" goals.

"We want to digitize all published works of man; I don't think that anybody at Google would ever say that's what their goal is," he says. "Their goal is to sell advertising, and one of the ways that they find to sell advertising is to create a Web site that has such rich content that people want to visit it all the time. I don't think that Google has any interest in putting Sanskrit works up on their Web site."

Like Google, the Universal Library Project faces issues in publishing copyrighted books online. As such, books currently under copyright are only available in part via the Web portal, while books that are not bound by copyright restrictions are fully and freely available online.

Citing a need for information to be freely available, Shamos expects these copyright restrictions to become less of an issue in time, as publishers adapt to the low-cost business model that digital books offer.

"Copyright is going to become less and less significant [because] through digitization, the cost of publishing is vanishingly small," he says. "As the cost of copying goes down, the value of works goes down, and the ability to make profit from them goes down.

"There is a difference in reading for pleasure and reading for information; what is going to happen, I think, is that copyright is going to end up focusing on works of entertainment and not works of information."
High numbers

The Universal Library Project is the brainchild of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, and has received $3.5 million in seed funding from the National Science Foundation. The project has also received in-kind contributions from the Zhejiang University in China and the Indian Institute of Science in India that have been valued at $10 million each, and has more recently forged a partnership with the Library at Alexandria in Egypt.

With more than 1,000 workers in about 50 scanning and digitization centres around the world, the Universal Library collection is growing at an estimated 7,000 books per day. There is a fair way to go before the project reaches its lofty book digitization goals; even so, the researchers have set their sights on eventually including content like music, artwork, lectures, and newspapers in the library.

"We believe that by having a universal library with all published works of man, and having multiple sites all around the world that house the entire content, it will be impossible to destroy these works," Shamos says.

"There can never again be a destruction of the library of Alexandria. There could be a destruction of the building, but there can't be a destruction of the works, and so this makes the creation of man impervious to changes in political regime, culture, Moirai."

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iTnews: Sun's petabyte datacentre in a box makes its Aussie debut

As a freelance journalist at Haymarket Media:

In a bid to tackle the array of data storage issues facing today's IT industry, Sun Microsystems has unveiled a prototype of an eco-friendly, mobile virtualised datacentre in Sydney Harbour this week.

Dubbed "Project Blackbox", each datacentre packs more than three petabytes of storage in a 20-foot shipping container. Sun's new offering is expected to allow customers to quickly and easily add datacentre capacity that can be moved as their circumstances change.

"Everybody's either out of space, power, or capacity; one of the three," declared Cheryl Martin, Sun's senior director of business development for Project Blackbox.

Boasting a processing speed of 4.5 teraflops, Project Blackbox is designed to house computational, storage and network infrastructure. Each datacentre can handle up to 700 CPUs, and supports a range of operating systems and third-party equipment.

All storage equipment is contained within a standard-sized 20 x 8 foot shipping container to add to the datacentres' mobility. For safety, the shipping containers are also fitted with GPS devices and reinforced with steel bars, and all equipment is mounted on earthquake-worthy shock absorption springs.

The datacentre can be deployed anywhere there is AC power, water and a network connection. When connected to a portable power supply, such as a generator, Project Blackbox can even operate on the move; a capability that is expected to benefit mobile operations in the military, oil and energy industries.

Instead of requiring air-conditioning, which can require large amounts of power, Project Blackbox uses a water-cooled heat exchanger and a series of fans to keep the temperature low within the shipping container. Sun estimates its cooling technique to be 40 percent more efficient than a traditional datacentre.

Project Blackbox was said to have been inspired by customer feedback that indicated a demand for convenience, flexibility, and eco-friendliness when increasing datacentre capacity.

Martin highlighted four target markets for the datacentre: companies looking to augment their current storage capacity; companies in need of temporary storage solutions; specialised industries such as the military, oil or gas; and large scale network services that are undergoing rapid expansion.

Since the U.S. launch of its first prototype in October 2006, Project Blackbox has been deployed by select customers, including the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in the U.S., and Russian telecommunications provider, Mobile Telesystems.

One datacentre has also been deployed in Sun's High Performance Computing grid in Menlo Park, U.S. Martin said Sun expects to use more of its new datacentres in-house as soon as there are more available.

Contrary to its name, Project Blackbox is usually shipped in a white shipping container, but Martin said the container can also take on custom paint jobs. She noted a particularly strong demand for datacentres with a camouflage veneer.

The datacentre will be available to Australian customers in March 2008, costing upwards of $700,000.

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iTnews: Aussie company comes under fire for probing scandalous poker site

As a freelance journalist at Haymarket Media:

The engagement of Australian consultancy Gaming Associates to investigate an alleged $7 million scandal has raised more questions about the integrity of Absolute Poker and its parent companies.

Gaming Associates was commissioned last month to conduct an audit into a suspected security breach that gave one player full view of the cards held by his opponents.

The audit comes several months after the scam was first uncovered by a group of players on the Two Plus Two online discussion boards. Current investigations have, as yet, failed to placate users of the popular U.S.-based forum.

"This proposed investigation makes us uneasy for a few reasons," said Mason Malmuth of Two Plus Two Publishing. "First, according to its press release, Absolute Poker is funding the investigation directly, with no third party involved to ensure objectivity.

"Finally, Two Plus Two believes that a report from Gaming Associates, an Australian company apparently dealing primarily with Antigua and Barbados companies, may not maintain the same weight and reliability as the international law firm retained by Two Plus Two."

Earlier this month, Two Plus Two Publishing was approached by an Absolute Poker representative, who wanted Two Plus Two to release a statement supporting Absolute Poker on its forums, Malmuth said.

Malmuth responded with a fraud investigation proposal in which Two Plus Two would act as an unbiased, non-profiting arbitrator between Absolute Poker and the investigators. The offer was declined.

"Two Plus Two is essentially the only entity that would be considered unbiased in this matter. So anything done with our name on it would have much credibility," Malmuth told ITnews.com.au.

"We felt this problem was bigger than Absolute and that by doing this investigation it would be good for the whole industry.

"Absolute Poker has now told us that they have no interest in our proposal. So I expect nothing will come from it," he said.

Gaming Associates' audit report is not expected until 7 December. In the meantime, however, the online poker community has been handing out its own version of Citizens' arrests.

Fingers have been pointed at Absolute Poker's co-founder, Scott Tom, and former Operations Director, Alan 'AJ' Green, and punishments range from degradingly edited images, to accusations of drug abuse, and even to what might be perceived as threats to Tom's family.

"Is this Scott's first wife and child," asks one discussion board user. "What's her name? Any previous wives and/or children? Any other weak spots besides father? Mother, siblings, other family members?"

"Does anyone know AJ's educational background," another post reads. "Where did he go to college? What were his majors and/or minors?"

Official statements released by Absolute Poker to its users seem to confirm allegations that an employee had been involved in the alleged security breach.

"Based upon our preliminary findings, it appears that the integrity of our poker system was compromised by a high-ranking trusted consultant employed by AP whose position gave him extraordinary access to certain security systems," writes Joe Norton, owner of Tokwiro Enterprises ENRG, which holds 100 per cent interest in Absolute Poker.

"We consider this security breach to be a horrendous and inexcusable offence," he said.

Absolute Poker is currently in the process of reimbursing players who were affected by the cheating account. It is yet to be seen if the scandal leaves a permanent scar on online poker, which requires a great deal of trust between players, their opponents, and gaming platforms.

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iTnews: Petascale computers: the next supercomputing wave

As a freelance journalist at Haymarket Media:

Supercomputing has come a long way in the past half-century. Far from CDC's single-operation scalar processors in the 1960s, present day terascale computers in development by companies like Intel boast up to 100 processor cores and the ability to perform one trillion operations per second.

Now, academics have turned their attention to petascale computers that are said to be capable of performing one quadrillion – that's one million billion – operations per second. Running at nearly ten times the speed of today's fastest supercomputers, petascale computing is expected to open the doors to solving global challenges such as environmental sustainability, disease prevention, and disaster recovery.

"Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications" was launched this month as the world's first published collection on petascale techniques for computational science and engineering. Edited by David A. Bader, associate professor of computing and executive director of high-performance computing at Georgia Tech, the book is geared towards generating new discussion about the future of computing.

To gain a little insight into petascale technologies, iTnews spoke with Bader about high performance computing and the future.

What is petascale computing?

Petascale Computing is the present state-of-the-art in High Performance Computing that leverages the most cutting edge large-scale resources to solve grand challenge problems in science and engineering.

What will be the primary use of petascale computers?

Science has withstood centuries of challenges by building upon the community's collective wisdom and knowledge through theory and experiment. However, in the past half-century, the research community has implicitly accepted a fundamental change to the scientific method.

In addition to theory and experiment, computation is often cited as the third pillar as a means for scientific discovery.

Computational science enables us to investigate phenomena where economics or constraints preclude experimentation, evaluate complex models and manage massive data volumes, model processes across interdisciplinary boundaries, and transform business and engineering practices.

How significant will the development of Petascale Computing be to the advancement of science and technology?

Increasingly, cyber-infrastructure is required to address our national and global priorities, such as sustainability of our natural environment by reducing our carbon footprint and by decreasing our dependencies on fossil fuels, improving human health and living conditions, understanding the mechanisms of life from molecules and systems to organisms and populations, preventing the spread of disease, predicting and tracking severe weather, recovering from natural and human-caused disasters, maintaining national security, and mastering nanotechnologies.

Several of our most fundamental intellectual questions also require computation, such as the formation of the universe, the evolution of life, and the properties of matter.

What are the challenges faced by Petascale Computing?

While petascale architectures certainly will be held as magnificent feats of engineering skill, the community anticipates an even harder challenge in scaling up algorithms and applications for these leadership-class supercomputing systems.

Several areas are important for this task: scalable algorithm design for massive concurrency, computational science and engineering applications, petascale tools, programming methodologies, performance analyses, and scientific visualisation.

High end simulation is a tool for computational science and engineering applications. To be useful tools for science, such simulations must be based on accurate mathematical descriptions of the processes and thus they begin with mathematical formulations, such as partial differential equations, integral equations, graph-theoretic, or combinatorial optimisation.

Because of the ever-growing complexity of scientific and engineering problems, computational needs continue to increase rapidly. But most of the currently available hardware, software, systems, and algorithms are primarily focused on business applications or smaller scale scientific and engineering problems, and cannot meet the high-end computing needs of cutting-edge scientific and engineering work.

This book ["Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications"] primarily addresses the concerns of petascale scientific applications, which are highly compute- and data-intensive, cannot be satisfied in today's typical cluster environment, and tax even the largest available supercomputer.

When can we expect petascale computers, and who from?

Realising that cyber infrastructure is essential to research innovation and competitiveness, several nations are now in [what has been called] a 'new arms race to build the world's mightiest computer'.

These petascale computers, expected around 2008 to 2012, will perform ten to the power of 15 operations per second, nearly an order of magnitude faster than today's speediest supercomputer.

In fact, several nations are in a worldwide race to deliver high-performance computing systems that can achieve 10 petaflops or more within the next five years. Several leading computing vendors, such as IBM, Cray, Dawning, NEC, Sun Microsystems, and others, are in a race to deploy petascale computing systems.

How do you think technology will progress in 2008 and beyond? What is likely to be the next set of challenges we will face?

We expect to see the first peak petascale systems in 2008, and sustained petascale systems soon thereafter. Many grand challenge investigations in computational science and engineering will be solved by these magnificent systems.

Already, discussions are taking place on the complex applications that will require the next generations of supercomputers: exascale systems that are 1000 times more capable than these petascale systems.

Certainly amazing technological innovations and application development will be necessary to make exascale computing a reality.

Yours is the first book on petascale techniques to ever have been published. What do you hope it will achieve?

My goal in developing this book was to inspire members of the high-performance computing community to solve computational grand challenges that will help our society, protect our environment, and improve our understanding in fundamental ways, all through the efficient use of petascale computing.

This is the premier book that captures the first wave of applications anticipated to run on these petascale computers. Already, international interest in this milestone book is very high, since it is the first book ever to discuss applications of petascale computing.

This book in petascale computing will be a resource for training these [future] generations of students and researchers in how to leverage state-of-the-art high performance computing systems to solve grand challenges of national and global priority, such as sustainability of our natural environment by reducing our carbon footprint and by decreasing our dependencies on fossil fuels, improving human health and living conditions, understanding the mechanisms of life from molecules and systems to organisms and populations, preventing the spread of disease, predicting and tracking severe weather, recovering from natural and human-caused disasters, maintaining national security, and mastering nanotechnologies.

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CW: Bringing open source to the education sector

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

Australian schools are subscribing to proprietary software - but the choice between proprietary and open source may have not been made on entirely equal ground, according to Kathryn Moyle, an Associate Professor who researches issues arising from integrating information and communication technologies into school education at the University of Canberra.

A self-proclaimed open source advocate for the education sector, Moyle has published a number of academic papers detailing the merits of open source from practical, pedagogical, sustainable, and political points of view.

Liz Tay speaks with Moyle, a former teacher who has also worked in the South Australian Department of Education and Children's Services, about the role of open source in the education sector, and how policy makers, teachers, students and parents might overcome what she calls the hegemony of proprietary software.

What sparked your interest in open source technologies?

My son. I was doing my PhD in between 1998 and 2002, and as part of the research that I was doing, I happened to come across the expected prices for the Microsoft licences for the school sector as a forward estimate, in the budget papers for the Victorian government. The amount of money surprised and shocked me.

I was talking to my son about it at the time, and he said, 'have you come across open source software?' and he kept pestering me about it. One thing led to another; I got interested, and actually included a section about open source software in my PhD thesis about digital technology policies in the school sector in Australia.

What role do you think open source technologies have in the education sector?

It has many roles. Basically, the backend of any IT infrastructure can run open source software; most schools that run a server off open source software can attest to the reliability of open source software at the backend.

But because I come at open source not from a technical point of view, but from an educator's point of view, I happen to think that when you're in school, you ought to learn how to use a range of software - we're not in the business in the school education sector of training people to use one piece of software.

Sure as eggs, the software that we train students to use in schools is not going to be the software that is either current or available to them once they leave school. For those students that don't have the money to be able to personally upgrade on a regular basis, proprietary software, I believe, is actually doing those students a disservice.

Should open source be introduced into schools as part of a broader range of software, or should it completely replace of proprietary software?

I'm not advocating a complete replacement, but I am advocating that it should be included into any teaching and learning that is about software. I think that proprietary software has a role. To suggest that we need to get rid of all proprietary software out of schools would be both politically impossible, and also unrealistic about what students are going to face.

I think there is a role for proprietary software, but I do think that we are doing our students a disservice if we don't expose them to learning about open source software; both in terms of its philosophical underpinnings and the communities of practice that sit behind the developing of open source software, but also from a straight user point of view that there are alternatives to proprietary software.

Should these alternatives be actively promoted at schools?

I'm not one that personally thinks that we need to promote open source software per se; I think that what we need to do is come at it from the point of view that there is a range of software out there, and understanding how it works and how it can be used is part of the challenge.

Obviously, open source software has a whole range of benefits that outweigh proprietary software in my mind, but as educators, we need to both be agnostic about the software we promote, and willing to teach the capabilities, benefits and risks of using open source software. Students will come to their own conclusions about which software they want to use for their own purposes.

What are some issues that open source adoption pose to policy makers?

A number of pieces of software -- particularly the Microsoft licenses -- have a lock-in to the education sector. In the school sector, the market is huge in the sense that there are two million odd students in the school sector in Australia. If we're looking at the licencing that the government school sector have, they feel, both in reality and in practice, that they can't pull out of those license agreements because the fall out - politically, as well as from parents, teachers and students -- would be too much to justify the pull out.

I used to work in South Australia with people looking at whole-of-government licence agreements. While I was in South Australia, the Democrats introduced into parliament a bill that suggested that open source software should be the default software unless a case could be made for purchasing a proprietary piece of software.

As a result of that being introduced into parliament, Microsoft had a lobby organisation, and it wrote to every politician in South Australia suggesting that this was not the way to go, and the world as we know it would fall apart if this approach to open source software was taken.

We need to be aware that the big proprietary software organisations, aren't big for no reason; they are politically savvy, and they are operational if their markets look like they are going to be challenged. I think that that's a hurdle for educators, particularly policy makers and politicians.

What other hurdles do open source technologies face before servicing the education sector?

Sometimes, parents and students are their own worst enemy; they feel that they need to be prepared for the world of work, which they believe to be a proprietary world. So they operate on the basis that they need to learn a piece of software.

I don't know if you've seen Office 2007; the interface is so different to Office 2000 that people are going to go berserk when they try to use it. People believe that things stay still and what they learn in school is going to hold them in stead when they go into the workforce -- which might be two, three, four years hence, or might be ten years hence if they go to university.

Often people will write into teaching documents that they have to learn a particular piece of software. We don't do that in home economics; we don't say you have to learn how to bake a cake with a particular brand of milk. What we're interested in is whether a student can bake a cake, or run a hundred metres, or whatever it is. We actually want to focus on what it is we want someone to learn -- to use a database, or to do a presentation - not PowerPoint, or Access, which are simply brand names.

What's currently being done to enable the adoption of open source in schools?

I wouldn't suggest that there is any overall grand strategy, but I think over time, the reality of open source software is eventually going to hit government school education -- if for no other reason, because of the cost.

People like me plug away, and there are a few champions around Australia who are keen to promote open source software in the education sector, but before any substantial changes are going to occur, there has to be leadership taken by policy makers, particularly within government departments, because they have the critical mass as well as the licence agreements that really need to be looked at carefully.

Unfortunately without having agencies that have control to bring about those changes, I'm afraid we're going to be tinkering around the edges a bit for the foreseeable future. That being said, it took one hundred years to get a national railway system in Australia, so getting open source software into schools might take us a little while as well.

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CW: How to maintain market pervasion - the SAP way

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

In a strategic move for dominance of the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) space, SAP has come up with a training program that it hopes will guarantee its market pervasion for years to come.

SAP's University Alliance Program (UAP) is a global endeavour aimed at integrating SAP software into undergraduate and postgraduate courses of study. Partner institutions are given access to SAP and its hosted solutions, vendor-provided course material, the occasional guest lecturer, and training courses for lecturers.

In return, SAP gains up to three thousand students every year from Australia alone, who each have hands-on SAP software experience as part of their business, accounting, information technology, or information systems degree.

Launched in Australia in 1997, the program currently boasts 12 local members, including: Queensland University of Technology; Victoria University; Macquarie University; the University of South Australia; and the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS).

According to John Lombard, SAP's Director of Consulting in Australia and New Zealand, the uptake of the program by partner institutions is a reflection of SAP's strength in the market. While SAP's course material hawks a predictably vendor-specific breadth of knowledge, Lombard expects this to benefit students going into the workforce, where he said SAP currently dominates about 70 percent of the ERP space.

"We see SAP as an industry standard now for ERP products," he said. "It's probably no different to when I was at uni; you learn a certain vendor's product, but if they have a large enough footprint, you've got a fairly good chance of finding a company that uses SAP."

But Bernhard Wieder, Associate Professor of Accounting Information Systems at UTS, has more of an agnostic view of the program.

"Our rationale really for using SAP solutions in our curriculum was primarily business educational reasons, not so much SAP software skills," Wieder said.

"Enterprise systems, irrespective of whether they are Oracle or SAP, are, to my mind, wonderful tools to teach students about integrated business processes," he said. "For example, we use them largely in accounting to show students how accounting works in an integrated system environment and really emphasize the practical nature of accounting."

Wieder cited results of informal graduate destination surveys he conducts regularly on his past students, that he said empirically proved that the SAP knowledge obtained through UTS's courses could also be transferred to other ERP systems.

"Interestingly, from a survey I did last year, I got quite a bit of feedback from students who say they work in an Oracle or PeopleSoft environment," he said. "They said they benefited a lot from what they have seen, because we try to emphasise the generic issues which are not that different in SAP and Oracle."

Still, about 20 percent of Wieder's students go on to complete extra-curricular bridging courses that provide them with vendor-specific SAP certifications. This is good news for SAP's Lombard, whose vision for the company encompasses not only education, but also new hires into SAP's consultancy division.

"We're always hiring," he said. "I'd love to get people with Oracle skills, and train them up in SAP too."

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CW: The interpersonal key to survival in Australian IT

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

A steady stream of IT work being outsourced to offshore developers may be a rising concern for some professionals, but according to SAP executive John Lombard, the Australian workforce has nothing to fear.

With about 40,000 staff employed in more than 50 countries worldwide, Australia seems but a drop in the ocean for business software vendor SAP. Predictably, most of SAP's development work is done in Germany, India and China. However, Australian culture and a penchant for research and development could contribute to an ongoing demand for what Lombard views as "more interesting" IT jobs to remain in-country.

"At the end of the day, some technical development work can be offshored, but we'll always have a need for human-to-human contact in Australia," said Lombard, the company's Director of Consulting in Australia and New Zealand.

"When I came out of university, I spent 5 years code cutting. Now, we're seeing graduates coming into more contact with business processes, and getting a broader perspective of business, early on in their careers," he said. "The sort of work we're seeing in Australia at the moment is all the juicy work, like business transformation."

"It's a great market from an IT perspective," Lombard said. "This is the industry to be in, and it's growing."

Current job openings at SAP certainly highlight a rise of more business-oriented positions. The company is currently on the hunt for 15 consultants in Australia, and a recent advertisement in the Australian Financial Review marks the first time it has advertised vacancies for consulting positions in Australia.

In fact, Lombard said, the company simply does not have any more of a need for the old stereotype of socially-inept technical specialists. Australian IT professionals should be equipped with a range of soft skills in order to thrive in today's job market, he said.

"I'm sure some companies view the pure technical aspect as a critical skill, but for a company like us, it's not just about the tech anymore," he said. "I don't have a job for anyone like that [with purely technical skills]."

"We want smart people who get good grades, but we also want people with good EQ [Emotional intelligence Quotient]," he said. "The most important part of our business is how we communicate with the customer."

Mandy Harris, senior Human Resources consultant of Sydney-based IT consultancy GLiNTECH, disagrees. Citing a nationwide shortage of skilled IT professionals, Harris expects a demand for technically adept staff to remain strong, especially in large, multi-departmental companies.

"There will always be a place for solid technical skills, and the skills crisis we are facing right now will ensure that this continues into the future," she said. "Large corporate companies will typically have layers between the business and the IT team, and this frees them up to focus on the technical skills over the soft skills."

Similarly, recruiter John McVicker, Managing Director of Best International Group, expects there to be no shortage of jobs for Australian IT professionals in the current market. However, noting that interpersonal ability is most vital in some IT roles, such as Business Analyst, Helpdesk Consultant or Project Manager, and less relevant in others, McVicker said that there has been a growing requirement for interpersonal skills in every IT Australian employee.

"There will always be the few handful of technically astute, though less socially inclined individuals, who by the nature of their work will always be essential," he said. "[However,] in my view, these types of people are becoming less employable in a modern business environment."

"While highly intelligent, genius-type individuals will always be in high demand, it's becoming clear that those who lack the social and communication skills, which are fast becoming a necessity in the industry, are being overlooked in favour of their offshore counterparts," he said.

While SAP's Lombard lamented a shortage of IT graduates entering the Australian industry, McVicker and Harris both criticized what could be an increasingly irrelevant tertiary education system.

"Tertiary education should, to a certain extent, prepare graduates for the actual requirements of working in the IT industry," McVicker said. "In my opinion, there has always been a 'disconnect' between what is taught in tertiary education and what is actually required in the workplace, especially in an industry that moves as quickly as IT."

"Regarding soft skills, there is nowhere near enough time, in my opinion, spent developing these basic life skills or even acknowledging their importance in tertiary education," he said.

A lack of simple life skills such as bank account management, a basic understanding of taxation, business communication, and presentation skills tops Harris' list of gripes with new graduates entering the workforce. These shortcomings are so common in recent graduates that employers have been forced to invest in graduate training programs that bridge the education-workforce divide, she said.

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CW: Talk your way to better pay

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

IT salaries have been on a steady incline during the past year. While analysts and industry groups tout a nationwide shortage of suitably skilled candidates, a resource boom and widespread uptake of technology is driving the job market up and up.

A winter 2007 Market Trends and Salaries Report by recruitment agency Ambition Technology boasts that salaries have grown ten per cent from May 2006. But women in IT still could be losing out on the monetary perks of a candidate-short market, according to the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA).

"Women employees across the Australian economy earn just 83 cents for every dollar their male counterpart earns," explained AIIA's Chief Executive Officer, Sheryle Moon, "so clearly, women can benefit from enhanced skills to enable them to negotiate salary packages and working conditions."

To address what it views as an issue that could be restricting women's job opportunities in IT, the AIIA has launched the "Set Up for Success" workshop series, designed to enable women to overcome barriers to negotiating suitable work arrangements in a male-dominated working environment.

Presenting at the AIIA workshop is Candy Tymson, business coach and author of the book "Gender Games: Doing Business with the Opposite Sex". Tymson attributed a bulk of women's workplace disadvantages to an overly modest "feminine" approach to business.

"Women ask me often, 'I am just as good as the men, I work just as hard as they do; why do they get promoted when I don't?'," Tymson said.

"One of the things that have come out of my research is that first of all, a majority of women frankly don't know how to promote themselves. Whereas men have typically been encouraged to boast more, stand up for themselves and tell people what they're capable of, women in the past have been told not to do that, or they'll look bossy."

Citing her own research, as well as scientific studies by the Myers-Briggs Foundation and psychologist Helena Cornelius, Tymson said that women have a genetic and cultural predisposition to build rapport in business.

The focus on interpersonal relationships could also mean that women are more wary of appearing like they are boasting, or looking bossy, Tymson said, so the challenge for women is to effectively promote themselves in a way that they are comfortable with, and that still comes across as feminine.

"Brain research is clearly showing major differences in the way male and female brains work," she said. "Typically, women focus on the relationship, and men focus on the information."

"Women are in a bit of a dilemma really, as to how to behave. What I find really works - and men have told me this too - is if the women treat the males as their peers, but don't try and prove that they're better than them," she said.

Unnecessary modesty could be detrimental to women's careers and remuneration, Tymson said. Instead of running themselves down with typically feminine phrases like "what do you think", Tymson suggests women take a more active role in negotiating their workplace agreements.

"The key with salaries, whether you're male or female, is that you need to demonstrate your value. Women often fail in promoting their value to the organisation, and let the organisation know what they're achieving," she said.

"If you don't ask, you don't get. I think a lot of it [negotiation] is making sure you know what your rights are, and standing up for yourself and asking for them."

One woman who has found negotiation invaluable in her career is Valerie Henson, a freelance Linux consultant who has previously held positions at IBM, and Intel's Open Source Technology Center.

In a LinuxChix presentation at linux.conf.au this year, Henson outlined salary surveys that found that on average, women in Western countries make 70 per cent of what men do. She attributed what she called the "gender pay gap" to a failure to negotiate.

While some women choose not to negotiate their salary packages for fear of losing an amazing job, invalid assumptions of industry standards, a low estimate of self-worth, and fear of ruining relationships in the workplace, Henson said, the difference between accepting an offer of $25,000 a year and negotiating up to $30,000 a year has been calculated to result in a lifetime difference in earnings of over $300,000.

Henson recalls her first experience with negotiation, which she said was both successful and unsuccessful. After receiving an offer letter with a salary which she found "just barely avoided being insultingly low", Henson mentioned a higher salary to the hiring manager. While her negotiations did cause the hiring manager to raise the offer, Henson said that an over-eager tone of voice could have prevented her from negotiating an even better deal.

"I ended up signing an offer letter for $US10,000 more than the original offer, but $US10,000 less than what I could have gotten if I were a better negotiator," she said. "The best part is that it was my dream job and a 50% raise, and I would have taken the job for less than they offered."

Tone of voice and background research are paramount to negotiating a better salary, Henson advises. But the first, most vital step to a better salary could be simply the confidence to ask for it.

"Typically we do find male candidates, particularly at the senior end of the market, tend to be a little more aggressive in their negotiations and in asking for what they want," said Andrew Cross, Managing Director of Ambition Technology, noting that while he "has no doubt" there remain salary differences between men and women in IT, gender differences were not a focus of Ambition's salary survey.

With significant development projects occurring in the Banking and Finance sectors driving a strong demand for skills such as Java, JSP and .NET, employers desperate for additional headcount are becoming increasingly aware of the cost of re-recruitment and re-hire, and as a result are better equipped to manage counter-offers and salary increases to retain staff, he said.

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CW: UTS tags podcasting as future teaching tool

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

In response to student demand for more flexible learning options, the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) is investigating the use of online technologies to supplement, or replace, lectures of the future.

The issue was discussed at a UTS Student Forum this week where podcasting took centre stage for its potentials in self-paced learning and remote education. Other potentially useful technologies have been said to include Second Life and social networking tools.

"There have been so many requests from students to introduce podcasting," said Shirley Alexander, the university's Vice Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President of Teaching, Learning and Equity.

The start-up costs of podcasting are estimated at hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention ongoing maintenance costs, and potential costs and disruptions to students already entrenched in existing teaching methods.

However, this could be a small price to pay for the University of Technology to live up to its name.

Darren Loasby, President of the UTS Students' Association, debated that the university's lack of standardized online teaching methods could be putting it behind its more technologically-enabled peers. The Queensland University of Technology and the University of Sydney were named as institutions with online education systems already in place.

"Podcasting of academic material is being implemented all around Australia and all around the globe," he said. "Students are frustrated that going to the University of Technology, Sydney doesn't give them access to similar systems."

"In 2007, it's harder than ever to be a student," he said, citing an unavailability of income support, a shortage of time, and rocketing education costs as likely causes of difficulty. "Basically, students are paying so much for education; I believe they should have some flexibility in how material is accessed."

Podcasting could alleviate scheduling difficulties for some students as podcasts are easily accessed online and can be made available on-demand. Furthermore, Loasby said, podcasts would allow students to learn at their own pace and in their own time, so students could potentially be listening to course material while at the gym or in transit.

For lecturers, Loasby expects podcasts to allow the university to track student study behaviour, and identify any systemic problems. Far from encouraging students to stop turning up to class, podcasts could drive lecturers to improve their in-class teaching methods, he said.

"If I can download material off the Internet, then there has to be a reason for me to come [to class]; and that should be face-to-face interaction with my teacher," he said.

An ongoing study conducted by Dr Maree Gosper of Macquarie University, in conjunction with Murdoch University, Newcastle University, Flinders University and the Carrick institute, has found that a majority of students report having had positive experiences with "Web-based Leaning Technologies" (WBLT), such as podcasting.

Results were obtained via an online survey that received 817 student responses. Almost 80 per cent of respondents found that WBLT made it easier for them to learn course material, and 66.7 per cent believed that it helped them achieve better results.

More than two-thirds of the survey respondents claimed they could learn from WBLT as well as they could from face-to-face lectures. Worryingly, a quarter of the students admitted to not attending face-to-face lectures, most of whom blamed their regular absences on scheduling difficulties.

However, more than half of the students using WBLT still claim to be attending lectures frequently. Gosper highlighted a motivational atmosphere, and interactions with other students and lecturers, as students' reasons for attending.

Dr Sue Hood, a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at UTS, specialises in language and literacy teacher education. From her research on the role of gesture in creating meaning in face-to-face learning, Hood warned against using podcasting as what she believes will be an incomplete substitute for existing teaching methods.

"We mean through language, we learn through language, we construct knowledge through language," she explained. "What we also know is that language changes as modes of learning change, so if we change a mode [such as moving from face-to-face lectures to podcasting], we are not only changing the mode but also the meaning and knowledge."

"If we are extracting sound from lectures and presenting it in a different context, we are impoverishing the meaning potential," she said.

While Loasby agreed that some subjects may not lend themselves to being podcasted, he said that podcasting should not be used as a simple replacement for face-to-face classes, and should, instead, be used to supplement other existing material.

"Depending on individual lecture styles, not all material is suited to being podcasted," he said. "But I think what students want is a broader range of educational options."

"I don't think that podcasts should ever replace meaningful face-to-face interaction between teachers and students," he said. "While podcasts should be supplementary to other academic material, they can become a very significant part."

Hood said that the use of podcasting as a follow-up supplement to lectures "seems a more attractive proposition". However, she raised the question of if podcasts would then be viewed as a replacement for reading material, which could then present problems in how lecture supplements would be designed.

Meanwhile, Alexander encouraged the university's staff and students to explore other, new uses of technology, rather than considering them mere replacements for existing methods.

"My concern about the way in which we have embraced technology is that we have often used it just because we can; we tend to use it as an automated replacement for existing technologies," she said.

"Let's not just automate what we are doing already; let's look at the root of the problem, which is that students are time poor."

The university has formed three working groups with the aim of formulating a future education strategy within the next 12 months. The groups have been charged with the responsibilities of researching the current and future design of curricula, investigating necessary infrastructure changes, and designing learning spaces of the future.

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CW: Web host turns to Gmail in Microsoft boycott

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

In a move that could alienate it from a lion's share of free e-mail account holders, Canadian Web host GaltGroup Internet Services has turned its back on Windows Live Hotmail - as well as all the products, services and partners of Hotmail's parent company, Microsoft.

The boycott was said to have been sparked by e-mail delivery problems between GaltGroup and some of its customers who were also Hotmail users. Despite having sent legitimate, authenticated messages, GaltGroup found that Hotmail's spam filters had been directing its e-mails past users' inboxes, spam and trash folders, to be destroyed without any notice to either the sender or intended recipient.

"It is analogous to the letter-carrier just deciding to throw away your letters, and not even telling you or the person who sent it," said Laura Brownlee, GaltGroup's chief marketing officer.

"I don't believe they [Hotmail] specifically target us, but rather we fall into some category of 'things their filters dislike'," she said. "As we are unable to reliably deliver email to Hotmail and reliable email delivery is vital for billing, we simply cannot afford to take the risk to customer satisfaction that Hotmail presents."

GaltGroup no longer accepts registrants using Hotmail or MSN email address. Instead, it directs potential customers to sign up for Google's free e-mail service, Gmail.

According to Ashley Friedlein, chief executive officer and co-founder of U.K. e-commerce research group E-consultancy, deliverability problems extend beyond Hotmail to other large Web mail providers also.

Friedlein explained that some country domains, like Russia, are typically treated more harshly by spam filters, because of the volumes of spam known to originate from servers in those countries. Other servers are tagged as likely spammers by spam filters because of the number of e-mails they send within a certain time period.

"Deliverability is a real headache. It's not just Hotmail, but the other large webmail companies too - Yahoo!, AOL, Google, etc," he said. "If you send above a certain threshold you immediately get them all junked as 'spam'."

Meanwhile, a Hotmail spokesperson claimed there to be no evidence that its spam filters unfairly targets specific domains.

"We seldom get Australian customers raise issues due to the spam filters in Hotmail," said Kate Beddoe, head of Windows Live Services at ninemsn. "Our customers have told us that ensuring their email is spam-free is of top importance to them. Given this, we have worked to deliver increased security and safety measures for Hotmail."

"While we are aware of some instances where some legitimate emails in Australia have been blocked by the spam filtering technology in Hotmail, we have not received any complaints from ISPs," she said.

Beddoe said that Hotmail users are able to access spam-filtered e-mail by selecting the message in their junk e-mail folder and adding the sender to a "safe" list. This would cause emails from the "safe" email domain to no longer be classified as spam.

But from her experience with Hotmail users, as well as correspondence with other Web hosts, GaltGroup's Brownlee disagrees.

"Hotmail dumps the mail with no notification, and Hotmail Support reply emails give great indication that they don't even read the complaint emails that get sent to them," she said.

To sidestep issues with e-mail delivery, E-consultancy's Friedlein said that service providers have been known to throttle send speeds for different Web mail clients. Other methods may also include using multiple IP addresses from which e-mail is sent, so that if one address gets blocked, the service provider can simply switch to another address.

"Essentially, all of us legitimate e-mailers are having to copy what the spammers do," he said.

Brownlee outlined other methods mentioned in Hotmail help documents that involve either using a paid, third-party service that Hotmail uses to access a white-list, or installing proprietary Sender-ID software from Microsoft. Even with those methods in place, Hotmail makes no guarantees for the deliverability of e-mails.

Noting that GaltGroup currently is not listed on any online black-lists, Brownlee said the company would not pay for third-party services that make no guarantees for the service being employed.

Citing an opposition to closed software and enforced proprietary standards, she said GaltGroup would not submit to Microsoft's proprietary Sender-ID software.

"The already-established open standards should be sufficient to at least get us into the 'Junk' folder," she said. "I'm not willing to jeopardize our ability to transmit to email addresses outside of Hotmail or risk the security of our servers by using proprietary closed software."

"My only course of action is to stop using Microsoft products, and wherever possible refuse to lend support to those who jump on the Microsoft boat for the fringe benefits," she said.

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CW: Check Point introduces next top security certification

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

In response to what it views as an increasing demand for security in the market, Check Point has introduced its newest top-level certification program for network architects.

The new Check Point Master Architect (CCMA) has been designed to build on the material encompassed by Check Point's three lower-level certifications: Check Point Certified Security Administrator (CCSA); Check Point Certified Security Expert (CCSE); and Check Point Certified Security Expert Plus (CCSE Plus).

Scott McKinnel, Check Point's Australia and New Zealand Country Manager, attributed the introduction of CCMA to a rising awareness of security in the market. Besides providing employers with a higher benchmark for the assessment of new hires, McKinnel expects the certification to offer career benefits to IT professionals.

"We were looking to add a an additional certification which allows IT professionals to validate their real-world security expertise and advance their careers, to ensure they keep up with a market which has a growing demand for skill specialisation along with breadth and currency of knowledge," he said.

"Customers will continue to demand higher levels of expertise from their technology partners," he said. "Although it is difficult to pinpoint an exact financial return that certified experts can expect, as this is really driven through market-forces, this certification will provide individuals with a highly desired skill set and could add a premium to their remuneration."

Although the CCMA program is vendor-specific, McKinnel said it also takes into context the industry demands, and hence requires broad security knowledge.

Besides having already obtained Check Point's lower-level certifications, candidates are required also to have five to eight years experience working within complex infrastructure and security environments, and at least five years of experience with Check Point products.

The certification consists of a two-hour, computer-based qualification examination, as well as a corresponding hands-on laboratory exercise. The qualification examination is currently offered through Pearson VUE testing centres in English, with extra time given to foreign language speakers. The laboratory examination is not yet available in Australia; however, Check Point is currently in dialogue with training partners to provide this service by the end of the year.

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CW: Scientists cash in on fixing spreadsheet errors

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

Spreadsheets are a tool commonly used by businesses to track everything from payroll to accounts receivable. However, experts claim, there could be erroneous code, programming or formulae in spreadsheets that is costing businesses billions of dollars.

A newly-founded company in the U.S. has developed technology to reduce mistakes in spreadsheets, and potentially rake in some profits in the process. Dubbed "Goal-directed Debugging of Spreadsheets" -- "GoalDebug" for short - the technology aims to provide non-specialist programmers with the means to detect and correct programming mistakes simply by selecting from a shortlist of change suggestions.

In the U.S. alone, it has been estimated that about 100 million spreadsheets are created annually, which in turn might be managed by up to 60 million users. As most of these end-users tend to be non-technical staff with limited computer software programming knowledge, spreadsheets are notoriously prone to errors, warned Martin Erwig, an associate professor of computer science at Oregon State University in the U.S., and one of the creators of GoalDebug.

"Most users of spreadsheets are overconfident, they believe that the data is correct," he said. "But it has been observed that up to 90 percent of the spreadsheets being used have non-trivial errors in them. In fact, one auditor has said he never inspected a single spreadsheet during his entire career that was completely accurate."

"Spreadsheet debugging problems are huge; we believe there will be a significant demand for these products -- a large market," Erwig said. "We can't provide a dollar figure at this time, but our company is quite optimistic about this product."

The impact of spreadsheet errors could range from a few dollars misplaced in a personal travel budget, to delayed paychecks, to significant financial misrepresentations of budgets and stocks, which could affect many people, Erwig said.

For GoalDebug to correct a spreadsheet, it requires the user to first identify a suspicious-looking result, and plug in a more accurate figure. By identifying common errors made by humans, the program then suggests several programming mistakes that might have created the error, and what the correct approach might be.

Citing a recent study that found that software engineers spend up to 80 percent of their time testing and debugging programs, Erwig expects GoalDebug to appeal to non-technical spreadsheet users as it allows them to identify and repair errors by looking at a short list of possible problems instead of combing through hundreds or thousands of cells.

GoalDebug will be taken to market through a spin-off company called i5Logic, which was founded by Erwig and two colleagues last year. The current research prototype has been designed to work with Microsoft Excel; however, Erwig expects the program's underlying analysis techniques to apply to other spreadsheet systems as well.

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CW: Bring our talent home, AIIA panellists say

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

Discussions of Australia's value proposition at the AIIA Borderless World Conference yesterday inevitably centred on what panellists agreed was the country's greatest advantage: talent.

Ironically, the realisation comes at a time when Australian IT talent is in dangerously short supply.

Educational institutes are reporting declining IT enrolment figures. Meanwhile, skilled professionals are emigrating towards bigger and better opportunities in overseas markets.

One of the conference panelists was Graham Edelsten, co-founder of Auran Games, which is a Queensland-based company that develops software targeted at the burgeoning online games market in China and Korea.

"Here we are in Australia, where our labour cost is so much higher," said Edelsten, who currently holds both director and chief financial officer positions at Auran. "But because our technology is still more advanced, and [because of] our creativity due to our political system, we can produce a game that's so successful that it is attractive to those [Chinese and Korean] markets."

"There are very, very creative people in Australia - but we lose a lot of our intellectual property especially to the U.S.," he said.

Technology behemoth Google is one U.S. company that has historically attracted some of the top Australian talent away from the country's sunny shores. And while the company's 2005 launch of its Sydney office has allowed more of its Australian employees to remain in the country, remotely located employees still contend with issues to do with Google's globally distributed workforce.

"We're here [in Australia] because that's where the talent is," said conference panellist Alan Noble, head of engineering at Google's Sydney office. "We recognise that not everybody who is an engineer wants to go and work in Mountain View, California."

"I do think we are used to working remotely as a culture," he said, "[but] there are real factors here that we need to work hard to minimize. Time zones are very annoying."

As a nation that is located on opposite ends of the world to its Western-cultured peers, Australia is subjugated to what panellists called the "tyranny of distance".

While panellist David Merson, the Bali-based founder of Australian software company Mincom, views Australia's geographic and cultural positioning as a trading advantage, the tyranny of distance has also been charged with producing a penchant for travel among Australians.

Noble is one example of an Australian-born engineer who took his entrepreneurial activity to the U.S. for about 14 years, before recently returning to Australia to work at Google. A graduate of the University of Adelaide, Noble recalls how initial feelings of homesickness faded away with time. For Australian businesses, he said this meant that opportunities had to be created to draw expatriate talent back home.

"At some point, you stop thinking about Australia," he said. "By and large, we in the industry have to create opportunities for people to come back."

Merson agreed: "I think it is fantastic that there are expatriates overseas, in terms of the knowledge they gain. I think if we build the jobs and the opportunities then they will come [home], because it's [Australia] a great place to live and bring up kids."

Noble and Merson said that it is predominantly the industry's responsibility to create opportunities for returning expatriates. Auran's Edelson highlighted training initiatives put in place by the Singapore and Chinese governments that involved sending students overseas for fixed-term work placements to ensure their return with the advantages of an expatriate experience.

Edelson described a proposal from the Singapore Government, which he said has offered to partly fund Auran's hiring of Singaporean entry-level staff on two-year contracts. The deal is expected to provide Auran with a low-cost staffing option, while assisting the Singapore Government with up-skilling its workforce.

"I wish our government would do things like that, because we are desperate for knowledge," Edelson said.

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PCW: Finger lengths could point out technophobia

As a journalist at PC World Australia:

The measurements of a person's ring and index fingers may come in handy in the early identification of developmental disorders, career paths, and behaviourial issues such as technophobia, psychologists claim.

In a comparative study of the finger lengths of 75 seven-year-old children with their Standardised Assessment Test (SAT) scores, researchers found evidence that finger lengths can accurately predict a child's numeracy and literacy abilities.

Longer "digit ratios'', which were calculated by dividing length of the ring finger by that of the index finger, were generally found in males with good numeracy skills. In contrast, girls tended to have shorter ring than index fingers, and fared more poorly in numeracy than literacy tests.

While finger lengths have long been a source of knowledge to palm readers and mystics, it is only in recent times that scientists have been able to link finger lengths with the sex hormones, testosterone and oestrogen, according to Dr Mark Brosnan, who led the study.

"Testosterone has been linked to spatial skills and mathematical skills, [and] digit ratio has been linked to testosterone," said Brosnan, Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Bath. "So the question then was - does digit ratio relate to mathematical abilities?"

Scientists believe that high levels of exposure to the male hormone, testosterone, while a child develops in its mother's womb, promote the development of the areas of the brain which are often associated with spatial and mathematical skills.

Similarly, the female hormone oestrogen is thought to do the same in the areas of the brain which are often associated with verbal ability.

"Interestingly, these hormones are also thought to have a say in the relative lengths of our index and ring fingers," Brosnan said.

"We can use measurements of these fingers as a way of gauging the relative exposure to these two hormones in the womb, and as we have shown through this study, we can also use them to predict ability in the key areas of numeracy and literacy."

Longer index fingers could also be linked to a greater tendency towards what Brosnan has termed "computer anxiety", or "technophobia", which has been defined as a fear or anxiety towards technology.

And while it is unlikely that finger length measurements could replace SAT tests, Brosnan announced plans for further research into how digit ratio relates to a person's career path.

The early prediction of a person's natural disposition could perhaps be used to reduce anxieties to do with technology, and even open new avenues to technology-related careers, Brosnan said, should the person be willing.

"Those who are good at maths, for example, [might] enter numerate jobs," he predicted, noting that this hypothesis has yet to be empirically researched.

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CW: Headhunters shake up a candidate-short market

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

At a glance, it seems conditions are ripe for active recruitment to take hold of the Australian IT industry. As skilled professionals bask in an opportunity-rich environment, recruiters are fast coming to terms with new laws of the jungle: poach, or get poached from.

The technology industry has taken off at such speeds that a once-overfull workforce is now barely meeting the demand for skilled staff. Employers are faced with the challenge of attracting and retaining employees, while a recent influx of the notoriously fickle Generation Y is pushing employee loyalty to an all-time low.

With a nationwide scarcity of IT staff in full force, active recruitment has become an increasingly attractive prospect for IT hubs such as electronics vendor Altium Limited.

"With the current IT skills shortage, we are increasingly exploring less traditional ways to find people and to ensure those people are a great match for Altium," said Kerri-Ann Wilson, the Sydney-based company's Chief People Officer.

"When companies like Altium require IT staff that possesses a very specific and hard-to-find skill set, then active headhunting can be an effective way to find the right talent."

The battle-worn concept of headhunting certainly has caused its fair share of debate over the years. Proponents view the method as an effective way of recruiting staff with the skills and experience to match a particular position. Challengers argue that headhunters risk too much time to account for the low success rate associated with their passive job-seeking targets.

And active recruiting services don't come cheaply either. As Duncan Thomson, General Manager of FiniteIT Recruitment Solutions explains, active recruitment can be a long process with costs involved along each step of the way.

"The recruitment term for 'headhunting' is 'search' which is more generally used to fill senior/executive roles, or to source hard to find niche skill sets," said Thomson, adding that search comprised only one of several methods the recruitment agency employs to source candidates.

FiniteIT's search contracts would normally involve an initial "retainer fee" of about one-third of the total cost of the contract. This would allow the agency to take a comprehensive brief on the position and what it would offer to potential candidates.

The second step of the process involves market research with a view to eventually producing a shortlist of candidates to approach. On production of the shortlist, the recruitment agency collects a further one-third of the total fee, with the final third being charged upon placement and commencement of a successful candidate.

It is only in the final stages of matching a potential employee to a company that the company's details are actually revealed to a candidate, Thomson said.

"The merits of this type of approach to the client is that it normally remains a very private process, requires a trust in the search consultant's ability and is normally a very thorough, targeted and methodical exercise for both client and consultant," he said.

"However, depending on the seniority of the role or the scarceness of availability of the skill-set in demand, it can take anything up to three months to carry out a search assignment, and does involve a non refundable fee paid up front with no absolute guarantee of eventual success."

Headhunting, or being hunted, may not always be the best option for everyone, Thomson said. While some candidates may feel flattered by unsolicited approaches from headhunters, others may find it a distraction, and can be offended in cases where the consultant has not done their homework sufficiently on their individual background and skills, or adopted the wrong approach.

But even without the guarantee of eventual success, no effort is wasted effort to Altium's Wilson, who views even failed attempts at active recruitment as investments that may pay off in the long run.

"While headhunting means that you are often contacting people who may be very happy in their job, it's still a great opportunity for us to make a potential future employee aware of the unique Altium offering," she said.

"That person, who is happy in their job today, may be ready to move in 12 month's time, and then you want them to remember the unique benefits offered by working at Altium and the positive experience they have already had with the company."

Get hunted

Passive job seekers stand a greater chance of being headhunted if they have a high profile in the industry, and are accessible via a good professional network, FiniteIT's Thomson said.

"The higher the individual's public profile and contacts network, the easier it will be for them to appear within the researched industry candidate long list," he said, mentioning industry publications, the Internet, and media announcements as avenues for publicity.

Meanwhile, Altium's Wilson encourages professionals to take a more active approach to shaping their careers.

"If people are interested in working at Altium we encourage them to get in touch with us directly," she said. "There is no need to wait for a tap on the shoulder or to see a specific job advertised."

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CW: Off-site printing service banks on hardcopy invoice needs

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

Businesses may be moving to digitize their operations in today's technocentric world, but according to Australian start-up bing Technologies, the humble hardcopy letter will prevail.

That is at least what the company has gathered from an Australia Post survey that, at the turn of the millennium, found that while businesses reported a preference for electronic correspondence, ninety percent of their customers would rather receive invoices and statements in the post.

"Mail is a real pain for a lot of companies," said bing's National Sales Manager, Simon Moss, explaining that while the electronic medium does offer a speed advantage over traditional letters, it can be less effective as a reminder of outstanding invoices.

"The average e-mail is handled about once or twice after it enters your mailbox," Moss explained. "Paper is, on average, touched 7 times; people receive letters, stick them on the fridge, and pass them on."

bing Technologies is a software-enabled postal service provider with headquarters in Sydney and Brisbane. Its self-titled service allows businesses to electronically send any document they create to either of bing's facilities for offsite, on-demand printing and next-day delivery through Australia Post.

Aimed at enterprises and small to medium enterprises (SMEs), the service is expected to speed up the mailing process through automation, and reduce the cost of mail by up to 42 percent through economies of scale.

Besides enabling its clients to more readily access wholesale prices from Australia Post, the service boasts the potential to eliminate wasted printing materials and cut down on human hours spent manually printing, folding and posting letters.

bing's automated process has already been welcomed by SME clients, Seek.com.au and a large bank. Moss cited market figures that revealed the number of letters sent in Australia to have increased by 150 million, to 5 billion in 2006. About 41 percent of this market, or 2.1 billion letters, were found to have originated from enterprises and SMEs.

The 2.1 billion letters sent by Australian businesses were still only a small portion of what Moss saw as an "addressable world market" of 450 billion letters sent world wide.

The company plans to open facilities in Melbourne and Auckland by the end of this year, with plans for further international expansion into New York and London in 2008. As outgoing mail is electronically delivered to be printed and posted by the branch closest to the recipient, Moss expects mail sent through bing to reach its destination up to 36 hours faster than courier services such as DHL, with the launch of international branches.

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CW: ACS warns of 'Google-Schmoogle' syndrome

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

"Google, schmoogle," declared Philip Argy, president of the Australian Computer Society (ACS).

Speaking at the National ICT Industry Alliance's (NICTIA) launch of its 10-year Strategic Vision for Australia, Argy criticized what he said to be an often-indiscriminate use of search engine results by the younger generation in their school assignments.

"The Google-schmoogle syndrome is a term that I've invented to apply to mostly kids - and sometimes also journalists - who uncritically copy and paste information retrieved from a Google search into their school assignments and serious reports," he said.

With the convenience of online research in today's world, students in search of information often turn to the Internet as their first port of call.

Unfortunately, Argy said, school curriculums are yet to catch up with the technology, so principles of rigour and intelligent use of online material tends to be overlooked.

Likening much of the material found online to dog-eared scraps of paper handed out by "a vagrant on the street", Argy explained that poor teaching of proper investigative techniques could be contributing to a generation built on plagiarism.

Worse still, students using unverified material in their work are often rewarded with high grades from ill-informed teachers, Argy said.

"We are breeding a generation of uncritical thinkers who don't know how to differentiate between the opinion of one deluded individual, and a well-researched, factual piece by someone who is informed," he said.

"Unfortunately, it's not common sense - people are just copying and pasting uncritically. We need to teach the principles of rigor in research skills and a much more questioning approach to search engine results."

A better education system would teach students to test their sources, investigate a topic, and delve into the background of the persons authoring a piece of information, Argy said.

As part of ACS's involvement with NICTIA's 10-year strategy, the group is currently in discussion with the NSW Board of Studies; Senator Helen Coonan, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts; and Julie Bishop, Federal Minister for Education, Science and Training, about beefing up teacher training programs.

"They've been quite receptive conceptually; they said this [online research] already forms a small part of the curriculum, but have taken on my view that there needs to be more teaching of critical research techniques," he said. "I think the next generation of teachers will probably get most of it right; it's that intermediate generation that has been initially resistant to this sort of technology."

"Based on what we've [ACS] been doing, we're going to see in a teacher training program, and therefore within the next 5 years, we should see an effect on our education system," he said.

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CW: NICTIA takes 10-year industry vision to governments

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

A 10-year strategic vision for the ICT industry was launched this morning by a consortium of 20 industry associations aiming to develop an internationally competitive ICT sector in Australia.

Operating under the umbrella of the National ICT Industry Alliance (NICTIA), the consortium has put forward a Vision Statement containing 12 parameters said to be vital to Australia's economic prosperity, because of the role of ICT as an enabling technology that supports all sectors of the economy.

NICTIA president Tony Hill highlighted the support of innovation and development of opportunities for small to medium enterprises (SMEs) as a key focus of the 10-year vision.

Rather than what he said to be a traditional "rollercoaster" way of innovation, which could lead to phenomena like the transient dot-com boom at the turn of the century, the new Vision Statement has long-term results in mind.

Also on the agenda was the marketing and branding of Australian ICT products in the global market; the development of skills; ICT literacy and standards; and the improvement of national broadband infrastructure.

"The pace of change with ICT has been enormous," said Hill. "We're concerned that Australia may be falling behind in developing our sector.

"In this strategy, we're taking an industry-led approach, and asking the government to join," he said. "The key [focus] is these 12 points that need to be coordinated, and this is the first time we are taking a coordinated approach that has been organized by the industry,"

The ten-year Vision Statement has been endorsed by the Australian Computer Society (ACS), whose president Philip Argy expects NICTIA to present the government with a credible, practical framework through a single, united voice for the industry.

"No government can ignore the weight of support for this document," he said.

"By comparison to other OECD countries, Australia has been a poor promoter and exporter of its own innovation," Argy said, adding that the country's greatest comparative advantage has ironically been its capability for the development and integration of technology.

"Australia really needs to take a step forward and compete on the world stage as a world-recognized brand ... this vision is about an environment in which innovation can thrive," he said.

Argy suggested the long-term licensing of export technologies to bring on-going revenue from royalties into the country.

Broadband and the early adoption of IPv6 were also identified as issues that should be a government priority. Already, members of NICTIA have been working towards the new Internet protocol through initiatives such as the Australian IPv6 Summit and the ITOL IPv6 for e-Business project.

"We want to see an Australia in 10 years time, where bandwidth is not a limiting factor on anything anyone wants to do," Argy declared. "If we are at the leading edge, then the rest of the world will - by definition - look to buy those technologies from us."

To combat the commonly touted ICT skills shortage, NICTIA is also recommending that the industry projects its skill requirements three to five years into the future, and actively communicate its needs to tertiary institutions.

"In the past, that dove-tailing hasn't really been there, and there's been a great push to import them [skilled staff] as a first resort," Argy said. "We say if you can invest more in the skills that you need, then you've got a greater probability of cross-training and up-skilling your staff."

However, according to NICTIA's Hill, having the industry make recommendations to the educational sector will first require more detailed planning, part of which can only be achieved via government discussions.

Currently, members of the alliance are in discussions with the government and opposition at a federal level, Hill said, and meetings with Senator Helen Coonan, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, as well as state governments, are also in the works.

NICTIA's 12-point plan is as follows:

1. National 10-year strategy
Australia to have a vibrant, innovative and globally competitive ICT industry that strategically plans for the future and underpins future productivity gains in all other sectors of the economy.

2. National marketing and branding
An Australian ICT sector to be well supported by the Australian, State and Territory Governments under a strong national Australian ICT brand, which presents a united front globally and is well known for its innovation and quality ICT services in key international markets.

3. Innovation
An Australian ICT industry that is a magnet for private investment to support R&D and commercialization of technology through large, multi-disciplinary commercial R&D and product realization centres.

4. Innovation in procurement practices
Government as a model ICT purchaser of Australian innovation, recognizing that as the largest single ICT customer in Australia, its procurement practices have a substantial impact on innovation in the ICT industry and provide reference sites to facilitate global market penetration.

5. Skills
An Australian ICT industry with a leading skill base by world standards with the Australian, State and Territory Governments, industry and education providers working collaboratively to improve skills foresighting, skills development and enhance enrolments in ICT courses.

6. International opportunities
Australian technology businesses to have the capacity and necessary government market intelligence and support to readily identify and respond to real international business opportunities and consistently convert these to positive business wins.

7. Collaboration and global integration
Australian ICT SMEs to be competing successfully on the world stage with the capability and necessary expertise available to access markets, attract venture capital and commercialise their technology solutions.

8. Entrepreneurship
Our ICT entrepreneurs to possess the managerial, technical and marketing skills to develop their businesses, compete for growth capital and move forward on national and international business opportunities.

9. ICT infrastructure
A high speed, affordable national broadband infrastructure and complementary e-security network that puts Australia amongst the leaders in OECD in terms of its broadband capabilities. Be one of the first nations to gain the benefits from migrating to IPv6.

10. ICT literacy
Australia to become a highly ICT literate and truly technology-proficient society that adopts, adapts and confidently embraces and exploits technology to its advantage and on an equitable basis.

11. ICT standards and conduct
Australia to increase its development and application of open technical and professional standards, at both a national and international level.

12. Regulatory policy
Australia's regulatory policy to be proportionate to the need and not to become an impediment to innovation and investment in ICT.

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