IMAGE: Ten dangerous claims about smartphone security

Created for Computerworld Australia's Mobility and Wireless section:

IMAGE: Fancy phones sell, but services lag

Created for Computerworld Australia's Mobility and Wireless section:

CW: Blogger spat rages over Sierra 'death threats'

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

Tech writer and prominent blogger Kathy Sierra announced on Monday that she would be suspending her blog and cancelling her scheduled presentations at the ETech Conference because of online threats of violence made against her.

In a post to her blog, named Creating Passionate Users, Sierra said she had become too fearful to leave her house. During the past four weeks, she had been the target of abusive messages on two other blogs, as well as receiving death threats on her own blog, she explained.

Sierra included, in her account, screenshots of derogatory images and comments believed to have been made against her on the recently deleted blogs, meankids.org and unclebobism. Also included were the names of prominent bloggers that she believes to have been connected with the offending blogs.

Among those named was Chris Locke, also a prominent blogger and co-author of business titles Cluetrain Manifesto and Gonzo Marketing.

While he admits that he "does not like" Sierra, Locke claims no responsibility for the threats Sierra said she was receiving on her blog.

"If Kathy Sierra was receiving 'death threats' in anonymous comments to her blog, they did not come from me or, to the best of my knowledge, from anyone I know," he said.

Locke was a founding member of both meankids.org and unclebobism, which he said began as a bit of fun. In time, however, the community's sarcastic environment and objection to censorship lent itself to the appearance of what Locke said to be "some tasteless posts".

The site was taken down when Sierra's objections to posts on unclebobism came to light, Locke said.

"Evidently, there are some people who don't much like her [Sierra]," he said. "The same could be said of myself or indeed of anyone who blogs much. It comes with the territory."

"I will not take responsibility for what someone else said, nor will I censor what another individual wrote," he said. "However, it was clear that Sierra was upset, so it seemed the best course to make the whole [unclebobism] site go away."

"I think her response, as it pertains to anything I personally wrote, was unjustified -- but highly effective -- character assassination," Locke said. "As a result, I'm sure I'll be explaining for years to come that I'm not really an axe murderer and child molester."

Another blogger whom Sierra accused in her post goes by the alias 'Joey', and asked for his full name not to be revealed.

Joey has been alleged to have posted death threats in a post that made reference to an image in which Sierra's face appeared beside a hangman's noose.

In a statement that was emailed to Computerworld Australia, Joey claimed having no intention of threatening Sierra, and that his comment was made in jest and targeted not at Sierra, but at Locke's fictional character, Kat Herding.

While he said that some misunderstanding is understandable, Joey also accused Sierra of having frequented the unclebobism site even before the objectionable posts appeared, and should have known what to expect from the site.

"I have nothing but sympathy for the experience Kathy receives in her personal email or blog comments. No one deserves that sort of treatment," he said. "That said, nasty emails should be no shock to anyone in the public arena. That doesn't make them right; it simply makes a shocked reaction to them incredible."

According to Donna Benjamin, a member of the Open Source group AussieChix, the issue goes further than whether or not any physical harm was intended on Sierra. So far, a torrent of emails has flowed from the group's mailing list in support of Sierra, who appeared as a keynote presenter at linux.conf.au in Sydney this year.

"There is some debate about whether or not Kathy was actually under any physical kind of threat, but that's not the point. As Kathy herself points out - it's the idea of the threat that does harm," she said.

"It is precisely this kind of culture and language that serves to alienate people, particularly women, from online communities and interactions," Benjamin said.

Meanwhile, the blogosphere is in uproar.

In a recent blog post, Microsoft technical evangelist Robert Scoble mused that the Internet culture needed "fixing".

"It's this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop," he wrote. "Whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn't happen if the interviewee were a man."

In solidarity with Sierra, and out of concern for previous attacks that targeted himself and his wife on meankids.org, Scoble has elected to suspend his blog for one week.

In an interview with Computerworld Australia, Scoble attributed the increased attacks on bloggers to the growing popularity of the online journalism medium.

"Bloggers are now celebrities -- not on the same scale as Paris Hilton, but amongst geek and developer groups lots of people know us," he said. "Some feel that makes us open season for attacks."

In the meantime, Sierra's silence on Creating Passionate Users is attracting even more attention to the blog. Her latest blog posting in which the situation was described has now attracted almost 1,000 comments from supporters and critics - which is easily twenty times the reader response her blog usually receives.

Unsuccessful attempts were made to contact Sierra for her comment on this story.

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ARN: Sybase looks to channel as key to enterprise mobility market

As a journalist at Australian Reseller News:

Mobile security is a high priority for IT managers and CIOs, but service providers have to adjust their perceptions of what it entails before demand can be met, according to one software vendor.

Speaking at the Toshiba MobileXchange conference in Sydney last week, Sybase mobility director, Mark Geddes, said IT managers were used to being able to manage and mitigate desktop security by having full visibility and access to everything connected to the network. This mindset should be carried over into the mobile space.

"Our play, and discussions on uptake in that [mobile security] space, is about extending to mobile devices that same degree of functionality from an IT perspective," he said in an interview. "The opportunity is how many mobile devices carriers see themselves deploying in the marketplace. Not many of them have thought a lot about how to manage and secure these devices."

Sybase's Afaria software is designed to cater to the demand for security in the enterprise mobility market. Because it is predominantly an infrastructure provider, the vendor is depending on the channel to bring it to market.

"To date, more than 90 per cent of our mobility business is done through the channel in various forms of arrangements," Geddes said, "and we're going to continue to grow in those spaces in 07 and onwards."

Leopard Systems is one partner combining Sybase-developed infrastructure with its expertise in the transport and logistics, retail, and healthcare markets. The partnership, which was announced in October, has seen the Melbourne-based company deliver Afaria frontline management and security product within its suite of mobile application offerings.

"Sybase builds infrastructure that companies like us can leverage without having to go and reinvent the wheel and build that type of technology ourselves," managing director, Alex Koumaras, said. "It allows us to build very feature-rich, targeted applications for the different verticals that we are playing in."

Geddes said it was keen to hear from all manner of resellers and integrators.

"It really comes down to the solution they [customers] require on what sort of device, and in what sort of conditions and what sort of industry," he said. "Every sort of partner model fits into our profile - we don't discount any of them."

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PCW: Sugar-fuelled battery soon to juice up portable electronics

As a journalist at PC World Australia:

Fuel cell technology that is currently in development boasts the ability of extracting energy from virtually any sugar source to power portable electronics like cellular phones, laptops, and sensors. The new technology is expected to be biodegradable, environmentally friendly and more energy efficient than current options, providing a green alternative to current Lithium-ion batteries.

The cell operates at room temperature and uses enzymes to oxidize sugars, hence generating electricity. So far, researchers have run the batteries on glucose, flat soft drinks, sweetened drink mixes and tree sap.

Despite only attaining a maximum of 20 percent efficiency in the conversion of sugar to electricity, researchers say the new batteries will operate three to four times longer on a single charge than current battery technology.

"This study shows that renewable fuels can be directly employed in batteries at room temperature to lead to more energy-efficient battery technology than metal-based approaches," said study leader Shelley Minteer, an electrochemist at Saint Louis University in the U.S.

"Right now we are looking at only partial oxidations, so no more than 20% efficiency, but we are improving as we go along," she said. "Employing sugar as a fuel can lead to three to four times the energy density [of metal-based batteries], which leads to a battery that will operate three to four times longer than current battery technology."

While using sugar for fuel is not a new concept, scientists only recently have learned how to produce electricity from sugar.

Minteer said that her technology is believed to be the longest-lasting and most powerful of its type to date.

One of the first applications envisioned for the sugar fuel cell is a portable cell phone recharger that would contain special cartridges that would be pre-filled with a sugar solution and easily replaced after use. Ultimately, Minteer hopes that the sugar battery can be used as a stand-alone battery replacement in a wide range of portable electronic devices.

"The consumer electronic won't be adapted, but instead a new battery will be developed for the battery compartment," she said. "The only difference [between the new battery and existing technology] will be that the battery will have to contain air holes to allow oxygen into the cell."

Besides being used in consumer electronics, the technology also has potential for use in the military, where sugar batteries could charge equipment in situations where access to electricity is limited. Devices could then be recharged by adding virtually any convenient sugar source, including plant sap, Minteer said.

The technology has been licensed to a small company for commercialisation, and is expected to reach the market in three to five years.

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CW: Researchers spin out smaller electronics than ever before

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

A research team of electrical and computer engineers in the U.S. is taking a new approach to electronics that harnesses the spin of an electron to store and process information. Dubbed 'spintronics', the new technology is expected to one day form a basis for the development of smaller, smarter, faster devices.

Current day electronics are predominantly charge-based; that is, electrons are given more or less electric charge to denote the binary bits 0 and 1. Switching between the binary bits is accomplished by either injecting or removing charge from a device, which can, in more resource-intensive applications, require a lot of energy.

"This [energy consumption] is a fundamental shortcoming of all charge based electronics," said lead researcher Supriyo Bandyopadhyay, a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Spin-based electronics supersede the problem of energy consumption by encoding the binary bits 0 and 1 in the direction that an electron spins in relation to an external magnetic field. This method requires less energy, since switching between the binary states does not require any physical movement of the electron and is achieved simply by changing its orientation.

"The spin of an electron is like a tiny magnet with an associated direction of the magnetic moment, [which] can have only two stable directions: parallel to the external magnetic field or anti-parallel to the magnetic field," Bandyopadhyay explained.

"Since the major obstacle to continued progress in electronics is excessive energy dissipation during switching, spin based electronics obviously can steal a march over charge based electronics," he said.

Storing information in this manner may sound fairly straightforward in theory. In the real world, however, there exist stray magnetic fields from a variety of sources, such as other electronic devices. In time, these fields are known to break down the direction of an electron's spin in a process known as 'spin relaxation', leading to an eventual loss of information.

To be effective in a computing device, Bandyopadhyay said the spin relaxation time should be at least 10,000 times longer than the time scale over which data stored in the device changes, which will allow most errors caused by spin relaxation to be fixed by appropriate software tools.

Achieving an acceptable level of spin relaxation has previously posed a problem for researchers. However, in their latest study, Bandyopadhyay and his research team have use of organic semiconductors to achieve spin relaxation times of up to one second, which is about 1,000 times longer than that of previous systems.

"In today's laptop computers, the clock period [time scale over which stored data changes] is no longer than one-billionth of a second," Bandyopadhyay said. "Therefore, if the spin relaxation time is 1 second, we have achieved a relaxation time that is 1 billion times longer than the clock period ... [which] is more than adequate."

Currently, spintronics-based memory chips are being used in memory marketed by Texas-based Freescale Semiconductors, as well as data retrieval devices like those in Apple's iPods. The technology has not yet been incorporated in computing circuitry in any major way; however, with his new findings, Bandyopadhyay expects this to change within the next decade.

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CW: New recruitment model to change contractor relationships

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

A new recruitment model seeks to address the growing market for IT contractors in Australia by lowering recruitment costs for employers, and improving the traditionally cagey relationship between the agency and contract employees.

Launched this week by Sydney-based IT recruitment firm Best International, the Zero Margin Contracting model boasts the ability to save employers up to 64 percent in agency fees by replacing the usual ongoing recruitment margin with a one-off sourcing fee.

According to current recruitment models, employers that engage a contractor through a recruitment agency are liable to pay ongoing agency fees of about 20 to 30 percent of the contractor's salary for the duration of the contract. In today's increasingly contract-based workforce, however, ongoing agency fees could add up to a hefty sum for employers.

"As contracts get longer and longer and these people [contractors] are maybe even converted into permanent employees, people [employers] continue to pay that ongoing margin," Best International's managing director John McVicker explained.

"On a $50 an hour contractor, that's $27,000 a year in margin," he said. "It certainly is one of the large differentiating factors [between permanent and contract staff], and that can be quite prohibitive for some organizations."

In place of an ongoing agency margin, the Zero Margin Contracting model will introduce a lump sum payment to be determined on a project-by-project basis. While this usually means a larger one-off cost for employers, McVicker expects the new model will be more cost-effective for contracts that span anywhere past the 12- or 13- week mark.

Savings could translate to more money in the bank for employers, but McVicker said it is more likely that the additional resources will be put back into sourcing and paying for more talented staff.

"This will certainly be more appropriate in the market where we're seeing such competition for people," he said. "[Employers will] have more money to pay the contractor, which will have a direct benefit to the employer as well, because they can probably source more talented people."

Contractors stand to gain if more resources are being put on the table - but financial rewards are secondary to what the new model will mean for the typical relationship between contractors and recruitment agencies, McVicker said, expecting the model to address the common belief that agencies are essentially taking money out of what should be the contractors' salaries.

"We find that very talented people love this model, because they believe that they are being rewarded 100 percent for their work, and not having to pay any hidden costs or margins to an agency," he said.

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IMAGE: NextG to enable the wireless enterprise

Created for Computerworld Australia's Mobility and Wireless section:

CW: Bounty hunters sought to recruit staff

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

A new online recruitment board is offering cash rewards of up to $10,000 to users who successfully refer friends, family members or other contacts for advertised job vacancies.

Launched this month, Job Bounty Hunter builds on the concept of 'social recruitment', which is similar to internal employee referral processes that have long been in use within large companies.

Andrew Stuart, founder and managing director of Melbourne-based Job Bounty Hunter, expects social recruitment to widen the reach of employers by encouraging people to tap into their social and professional networks to identify suitable recruits.

"It is becoming extremely difficult for companies to find quality candidates with the battle of the skills shortage in certain industries," he said. Using social recruitment, Stuart said employers could be "potentially having hundreds of people looking for that perfect person, rather than just a few".

The site is governed by a reputation ranking system similar to that employed by auction site, eBay, whereby advertisers and job bounty hunters can post feedback on each other at the end of each transaction. This system is expected to prevent bounty hunters from spamming their contacts and advertisers with people or positions that are not suitable.

Advertisers have so far responded well to Job Bounty Hunter's offerings, Stuart said, posting a total of more than $140,000 worth of cash bounties in the past two weeks. Advertisements encompass a broad range of IT specialities as well as legal, accounting, engineering and sales industries and are currently priced at $150 for a 30-days listing.

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PCW: PS3 withstands hack challenge

As a journalist at PC World Australia:

There was only one winner of an international challenge that offered a PlayStation 3 to any hacker able to attack it: Sony. Over the two-month-long competition, the PlayStation 3 was able to withstand numerous attempts by hackers worldwide, proving to the competition organiser its potential use as a server.

The challenge was first issued in November 2007 by Japanese Web host Shimpinomori to test the security of the PlayStation 3 Open Platform and the viability of using it as a heavy-duty server platform. Results came as a pleasant surprise to Shimpinomori founder, Augustin Vidovic.

"I was half expecting that someone would find a crack in the Linux setup, and it did not happen," he said. "Nobody could hack into the PS3."

And it wasn't for lack of trying. Standard hack attempts have left Vidovic with more than one gigabyte of logs full of what he calls 'unimaginative' attempts on the HTTP. Other hackers attempted brute force attacks on the SSH port.

According to Vidovic, the most notable hack attempt exploited a limitation in the number of simultaneous SSH connections that could be supported on the PS3, in order to prevent other challenge participants to connect to the SSH for a few hours.

The challenge was called to a halt on 2 January 2007 with the PS3 emerging unscathed. Vidovic said this proved the PS3's abilities to run continuously for extended periods of time without any heat problems, and can be trusted to be a good, reliable and secure server.

Vidovic now owns three PS3 machines, one of which will be used as a server, the second as an experiment development platform for the Cell processor, and the third as a game console. He is currently also researching applications and methods to set up a PS3 as a server.

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CW: Is employee loyalty outdated?

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

The IT labour market in Australia has been through some turbulent times in the past decade. The market started out strong in the 1990s, with the dot-com era, millennium bug worries and Sydney 2000 Olympic Games contributing to a massive demand for IT skills. Good times were short-lived, however, as a market crash at the turn of the century left IT professionals disillusioned and unemployed.

Now, as the market is picking up again, the industry is having a tough time wooing back skilled staff. Competitive salaries and flexible working conditions have become the flowers and chocolates of a desperate bid for talent, and still employers are scratching their heads over how to get their employees to commit to the company.

And with the new, notoriously fickle wave of Generation Y's entering the workforce, one thing is for certain: the times, they are a-changing.

"Don't ask employees to be passionate about the company," IT textbook author Kathy Sierra writes in a recent blog entry. "People ask me, 'how can I get our employees to be passionate about the company?' Wrong question. Passion for our employer, manager, current job? Irrelevant."

According to Sierra, employees should be less concerned about contributing to their company and focus instead on their craft, be it programming, designing, or engineering. She likened the ideal company to a good user interface that would allow employees to be so engaged in their work that the company just fades into the background.

Sierra's school of thought may resound with projects dedicated to developing the perfect code, but for employers, a workforce of independent, mobile personnel could be bad news.

Already, the twenty-something-year-olds making their way into the industry have demonstrated a loyalty shift from the traditional focus on their employers to a more selfish interest in their own careers. Described by analysts as 'Generation X on steroids', the new generation is highly skilled, highly ambitious, in high demand - and they know it.

"Whilst Generation X are predominantly loyal employees who believe in building their careers through effective and long periods of service in each role, Generation Y are loyal primarily to their careers," observed John McVicker, Managing Director of Sydney-based IT recruitment firm, Best International.

"The length of time most Generation Y people think is appropriate to stay in one organization is based on the length of time it takes to get a promotion or a better job," he said.

A 2004 survey of about 1,200 Australian employees also indicated a decrease in employee loyalty over the years, with Generation Y staff responding with lower levels of commitment to staying with their organisation than both Generation X and the Baby Boomer generation.

The study was conducted by international human resources consultancy, Mercer. According to Rob Knox, the consultancy's Head of Human Capital Product Services, there is a wide variance in the current five-to-six-year average employee turnover rate.

Some turnover is healthy, Knox said, as it provides the opportunity for the organisation to take on new ideas while allowing other, perhaps unmotivated or low-performing employees to move on. On the other hand, he said, having employees leave after too short a time is likely to have negative consequences on a company.

"In general, I believe employers would prefer an increase, rather than a decrease in loyalty," he said. "Among other things, the cost of recruitment and training associated with a decrease in loyalty has a negative impact on business results."

McVicker agrees that employees who can demonstrate workplace loyalty and passion are highly valued attributes in recruitment, as these are people who are expected to be able to enhance the work environment for existing employees, and ultimately contribute to the organisational culture.

"Passion and loyalty are very high on the list of competencies that employers seek in potential staff," he said. "Whilst individual competency and ability is vital to actually doing the job, to survive the talent drought, employers will be looking for prospective candidates who can do the job but want to grow with the company."

So why are employees moving on? One explanation is that companies are attempting to minimise their recruitment risks by only taking on candidates who already possess the exact skills for a job. It is not uncommon for employers with such a strategy to recruit externally instead of promoting existing staff, thus creating a workforce that rewards job mobility.

"An external hire that has exactly the right skills for a job might be considered a stronger candidate than an internal recruit who needs to be coached and managed into a new and more senior role," McVicker said.

"However, from experience, this is a short-sighted and somewhat risky tactic for employers," he said. "Employers will get more from an employee who is a good cultural fit with their organisation but requires more training, than hiring an external 'superstar' who has the potential to do real damage and disrupt office relations if things don't work out."

But like it or not, the workforce is changing; and the job market is fast adapting to current trends. Mercer's Knox observed an increase in the number of knowledge workers, who are able to easily transfer their knowledge skills from one organisation to the next due to the nature of their work, and are thus best equipped for job mobility.

Best International's latest monthly report also revealed that the increase in demand for IT contractors is now exceeding the demand for permanent positions. While the overall IT job market increased by 10 per cent in February, increase in demand for contract positions was up 10 per cent compared with a rise of 9.3 per cent in permanent roles.

All is not lost, however, as McVicker points out that some employers are now implementing retention strategies to keep their employee base strong. He gave the example of employers with a large contractor or Generation Y employee base, who could look to either locking in their key contractors through contract extensions, or considering longer 12 to 18 month contract periods for new hires.

According to Sierra, while it is 'absurd' to think of employees truly having a passion for the company itself, a workplace that provides enough intellectual stimulation can encourage employees to stay there.

"When employees are supported in their passion for their work, they tend to let some of that passion spill over to their employer," she observed.

"It's like someone who has a passion for digital photography, and feels passionate about Photoshop," she said. "They aren't really passionate for Photoshop -- the passion is for photography -- but Photoshop gets to ride along."

"That's how it is with employers who give the passions for their employees a chance to thrive; the employees' passion for their work casts a glow back on the company that makes that happen," she said.

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IMAGE: Does Google have a mobile phone in the works?

Created for Computerworld Australia's Mobility and Wireless section:

LW: LinuxChix reshuffles its Australian chapters

As a journalist at LinuxWorld Australia:

Worldwide FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community LinuxChix last week announced its latest Australian chapter aimed to encourage women in computing, AussieChix.

The new chapter, which was aptly launched on International Women's Day on March 8, has formed from the amalgamation of the Sydney and Melbourne chapters of LinuxChix and now welcomes FOSS enthusiasts from all across the nation.

It has traditionally been the case that LinuxChix chapters form in cities, such as LinuxChix Los Angeles. However, as the long-established Melbourne and Sydney chapters have remained quite small over the past few years, the merger is expected to benefit community members by providing a larger space for technical and social interactions.

AussieChix will also encourage the participation of women in other Australian cities and towns, who had previously been unable to gather enough members to form their own chapters.

Response to the merger has so far been very positive, according to AussieChix spokeswoman Donna Benjamin.

"We're actually already beginning to see the network effect of joining together," she said. "There's a growing feeling that now we've got this far in connecting women in Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth with the established Sydney and Melbourne groups, there must be more of us out there."

"We're still sorting through all the ideas that have been raised about how working together at a national level will build LinuxChix in Australia."

First on the agenda, Benjamin said, is to establish AussieChix in the local FOSS community to build its membership. Initial plans are to profile women in the local open source community to highlight positive role-models for young women making choices about their futures.

Numbers published in 2001 by the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed that just less than one quarter of people employed in IT are women. A separate survey conducted by APESMA (Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers Australia) has more recently revealed a continued disparity in the salaries paid to men and women.

While it is true that women remain a minority in the FOSS community and IT in general, Benjamin was reluctant to acknowledge FOSS women as a minority group.

"There are a lot of women involved in the FOSS community and I suspect their visibility is an issue," she said. "I guess this is partly why LinuxChix and other [such] groups exist at all."

"There is an increasing realisation that the Open Source community would be better off if more women were involved," she said, citing groups like Debian Women, Fedora Women, and Ubuntu-women as evidence of the participation of women in the FOSS community.

Another significant testament to Australian women in FOSS is next year's linux.conf.au, which follows in the footsteps of a remarkably female-friendly 2007 event and will be organised by a team led by Benjamin.

"This year we had the first woman keynote, and the most women attendees," she said. "Next year the conference organising team will, for the first time be led by a woman. Perhaps we can take this as evidence that we're making progress?"

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PCW: Workplace-based guilds: the next step in training?

As a journalist at PC World Australia:

Games may not be the end-all method of teaching and learning, but they do trump traditional textbooks in some respects, claims communications scholar Douglas Thomas.

Presenting at the annual meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) last month, Thomas argued that Massive Multiplayer Online Games [MMOGs] such as the extremely popular World of Warcraft had the ability to impart leadership and management skills that could be useful in the business world.

To find out what MMOGs have in store for workplace training, Liz Tay spoke with Thomas, a long-time gamer and associate professor in the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, about his research and opinions.

What role does MMO gaming have in imparting practical life skills?

There are two answers to this question. The first is that there are basic social skills as well as skills of leadership and management which games teach. These might include things such as being treasurer for a guild, where you need to make decisions about allocation of resources.

It is pretty easy to see how games can provide a training simulation for practical skills. However, that is not what we found to be the most interesting aspect of games and learning.

Games are also very good at creating what we have called 'dispositional stances' which are much closer to attitudes one takes toward problem solving. So, for example, a 'questing' disposition teaches you how to find and utilize resources from your environment to solve problems, rather than assume a one size fits all solution.

That kind of learning exercises the imagination and, we believe, fosters innovative thinking.

What skills are MMOGs particularly suited to teach?

What we have seen in MMOs such as World of Warcraft is an explosion of technological innovations and problem solving around the game. There are massive databases for items and quests.

Every guild has its own web site, usually composed of internal message forums, raid tracking software, wikis, membership databases, and event planners. Guilds are themselves extremely flexible, hyper-responsive modern organizations, which change and shift dramatically in response to player and game-driven needs. They provide a model not only for management, but for understanding how players continually position themselves in terms of the needs and goals of the greater organization.

Can these skills be useful in the business world, and how do you suggest job hunters could make potential employers aware of these skills?

How to make employers aware? We were half joking when we wrote [in a research report] that people should start listing their World of Warcraft characters in the resumes -- but only half joking. We are already starting to see business moving into spaces like Second Life; IBM has a significant presence of its workforce there already, for example.

The awareness will happen as people in organizations experience the benefits first-hand. It is starting to creep into popular culture as well. 'The Office' [is a TV series that] has a running theme of employees playing Call of Duty as a team building exercise. Maybe workplace-based guilds are the next step!

How does gaming compare to traditional learning methods like books? Can gaming ever replace books?

Books and games are good at teaching different things. Games are no better or worse at transmitting information that other forms [of teaching], such as books, TV, [and] lectures.

What games are very good at, however, is experiential learning. Concepts such as ethics, civic engagement, or teaching unintended consequences are very hard to do in the traditional classroom. They are fundamental to games. So teaching someone that certain choices have long term and potentially unforeseen consequences is relatively easy to embed in the mechanics of a game, while it is difficult to communicate in something like a text book.

Likewise, it is much easier to teach someone principles of citizenship by having them actually be a citizen in an environment and by asking them to reflect on that experience than it is to create a list of rules for good citizenship that someone is expected to memorize.

Games, especially MMOGs, are also good at teaching the social, and often times tacit, aspects of knowledge that are communicated through things like apprenticeship and enculturation.

In your research, you assert that MMOGs provide players with a better understanding of both the real and virtual world through 'conceptual blends'. What are 'conceptual blends'?

Conceptual blending is a theory developed by [Cognitive Scientist] Mark Turner to explain how our brains process seemingly impossible ideas, with little or no difficulty.

An example is a talking animal. We know dogs can't speak, but we have no problem watching a cartoon or even a film where they do. The theory holds that we embrace these ideas when the frames (animality and speech in this case) are non-conflicting.

There is no logical reason why dogs can't speak, they just don't. The blends become powerful because they allow each element to have a depth and vividness that blends together; it allows something to be both/and rather than either/or.

With virtual worlds, most of the framing has been contrasting the virtual world with the real world. Our contention is that when you step into a virtual world, you are entering a conceptual blend where you are both in the real world and in the physical world at the same time. As a result, when things like dispositions form, they are being created simultaneously for the character and the player, rather than being something that happens in the game and must then be transferred out into the physical world.

Are the benefits associated with cognitive blending and learning unique to MMOGs, or do online RTS and FPS games offer such benefits too?

I am not sure if I would say unique. But we find that the most interesting learning that happens is in the space around the game. Games are often the impetus to create learning systems to solve problems and organize players. Not surprisingly, a lot of what we are finding in these game spaces is also providing some insight into other technologies that youth are engaging, such as Myspace.

What characteristics of a game create learning systems that would lend it to teaching and learning?

There are two different questions here. And it is important to mark how different they are. There is one school of thought that says 'games teach'. The idea being that students are more likely to engage with games than with standard pedagogical methods such as text books, so they will have more incentive to learn.

A game like Civilization can teach history or SimCity can teach city planning. There seems to be some evidence that this is in fact true. So games can be a good teaching platform. And it is most useful when you have particular learning objectives you want to impart.

But for us, the second part of the formula is this: players learn. This is where our work on imagination is the most central. What players are doing in these environments is engaging in what [psychologist] John Dewey called 'productive inquiry'. They are using the resources they have at hand to learn how to do the things they want to do.

As my colleague John Seely Brown talks about this, they are inverting the traditional learning hierarchy. Where students used to learn about things in order to learn how to be things -- [for example, learning] math, design and engineering in order to become an architect -- they are now using these new learning environments to be what they want to be and falling back to traditional notions of 'learning about' when they get stuck. For example, you just start building and when you need to learn something to help solve a problem, you go read up on it.

It is a whole new way of thinking about learning, where practice and engagement with the world comes first and knowledge and learning in the older sense is a tool for problem solving, rather than the basis for an identity or professional behaviour.

You mentioned the prevalence of team bonding and social skills in your paper. How much of these social skills translate to the real world, and how do you feel about the 'socially-inept gamer' stereotype?

This is a difficult question to answer, because it is hard to know what the "real world" is. We need to stop thinking about these domains as separate. When you are playing with a group of guildmates and you learn to read their social cues, you are not learning to read World of Warcraft social cues, you are learning to read social cues period.

No one asks the question the other way around. How much of what we know about people's real world behaviour translates inside the game? All of it does! If someone in the game says 'Stop talking about how much you dislike Bob, it is getting on my nerves,' no one pauses to say, 'I understand he is annoyed in the real world but how seriously should I take that in the game space, how much of his real world annoyance is transferring into the virtual world?"

So why should we think of it any differently working the other way? From our perspective, the things you are learning in the space of MMOs you are learning in the virtual and physical worlds at the same time.

Do you think online games like MMOGs will significantly change our social interactions in the future?

I think we are seeing it [happen] already. We are starting to see the emergence of a 'networked imagination'. There are millions of people who now spend extensive amounts of time together, negotiating and completing very difficult tasks and who are in direct communication for several hours a day, but who have never met face to face. They have a set of very deep and very real shared experiences, which define for them a close relationship.

In some cases guild members may have been playing together for five or ten years, often every day, and have no contact with each other except for the game and the connections around it.

That seems to me to be a new form of sociality which is both significant and likely to change some of how we think about friendship, social interaction, and connections between people.

Those kinds of relationships are different from our more traditional face to face relationship and are not designed to replace them. They do point to the possibility of forming significant and meaningful social relationships in an age of globalization where face to face interaction may be difficult, costly, or even impossible.

What do you think is most significant about your research, and what are your plans for further studies?

I think our educational system is currently training people for the jobs of the 20th century. The next generation needs to be a generation of innovative thinkers who understand the importance of imagination and who are able to deploy knowledge in interesting ways.

We continue to look at the ways in which MMOs can tell us something about learning practices. There is no shortage of creativity, innovation, and fun happening with kids today. The trick is to figure out what practices kids are adopting and harness them to reshape our educational institutions to embrace them.

Games and MMOs are not the only tools we have for learning, nor are they always the best or most appropriate ones, but there are some things they do better than anything else. Our goal should be one of matching the right tools to the right job and if we can succeed at that, the payoffs will be tremendous.

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CW: Affiliate marketing scam spells trouble for Fairfax Digital

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

Australian new media giant Fairfax Digital has come under fire for its connections with a fraudulent search marketing campaign. The campaign, which drew traffic to Fairfax-owned RSVP.com.au by manipulating search engine results, has sparked debate on issues in the $1b affiliate marketing industry.

The scam was discovered last week by blogger Mark Fletcher, who also founded and owns dating Web site 3LOVES.

"We were just doing some searching and saw that a '3loves' site came up in Google's search results," he said. "We clicked on the link that was there in the natural results, and it took us across to RSVP."

Fletcher's investigations into Google's cache of the linked page revealed RomanceDating.com.au, a cloaked page rife with keywords to do with 3LOVES, sex and dating. When viewed from a normal Web browser, however, Web surfers were simply redirected to Fairfax Digital's RSVP dating Web site.

The cloaking technique was similar to that once employed by BMW's German Web site, in which the page displays itself differently depending on if it is being viewed by a Web browser or a search engine. It was this technique that led to the delisting of BMW.de from Google in February last year.

"That cache is evidence of very clever SEO [Search Engine Optimisation] tactics that are being used - not only for 3LOVES but also for other online dating sites - all designed to capture interest in those sites and funnel it across to RSVP," Fletcher said.

Besides 3LOVES, Fletcher has discovered some 15 other dating Web sites that were targeted by the same marketing campaign, including Adult Match Maker, HornyMatcher and ezifriends.

Romancedating.com.au was found to be operated by a 'rogue affiliate' of Melbourne-based affiliate network, Commission Monster, of whom Fairfax Digital is a client. The affiliate network operates by recruiting publishers who create and manage Web campaigns, and offers commission-based payments on the traffic generated by each campaign.

According to Commission Monster's Strategic Director Peter Bojanac, the network was unaware of its rogue affiliate's dubious tactics until coming across its mention in Fletcher's blog.

"Basically, how we found out about it was through his [Fletcher's] blog," Bojanac said. "We ceased the campaign under the terms and conditions of Commission Monster, killed all the links and investigated into that particular campaign."

RSVP Marketing Manager Lija Jarvis said that this has been the first incident of search engine manipulation involving Fairfax Digital in its two-and-a-half years of affiliate marketing, and will not deter its marketing strategy or affect its relationship with Commission Monster.

"We've always been very, very careful about validating our affiliates," she said. "In the two-and-a-half years in which Fairfax Digital has been applying affiliate marketing, this was the first time we've had an issue and he [the rogue affiliate] was banned from the network as soon as the issue was in light."

Although the cloaking techniques employed by the affiliate advertiser were comparable to those leading to BMW.de's delisting, Jarvis is confident that RSVP is too far removed from the offending Web site to be penalised by Google.

"Google won't penalise somebody who hasn't done the manipulation," she said. "This is a situation where RSVP do not own the domain that has manipulated the results and therefore, we can't be penalised for someone else's doings."

Meanwhile, Fletcher has raised the issue with Google and is convinced that something has to be done.

"I think that Fairfax and RSVP has to assume some responsibility for this," he said. "The fact that RSVP was benefiting from this behaviour, and that they were paying for a marketing technique that they know has had problems in the past, suggests to me that they can't say that their hands are completely clean in this."

While Google declined to comment on Fletcher's complaint, its Webmaster Guidelines includes specific instructions against cloaking techniques: "Don't deceiving your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users."

Both Fletcher and Bojanac agreed that while the potentials of affiliate marketing are great, there are yet some hurdles to do with the regulation of affiliate strategies that have to be overcome.

The burden of responsibility in affiliate marketing campaigns is a question that requires careful consideration and public debate, Fletcher said, suggesting that rules of self regulation should be formulated and implemented with the help of the ACCC.

Bojanac said that Commission Monster is currently working with Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA), the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and other affiliate networks in efforts to develop and implement industry standards.

"They [Fraudulent Web pages] are a minority in the industry, and it is a standard that, as a business, we don't like and don't condone," he said. "If it does occur, we end the relationship with the affiliate who does that."

"At the end of the day, we're trying to be as proactive as possible with regards to the industry, the breach of search engine guidelines and the breach of industry standards," he said.

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CW: Can rethinking technology transform our economy?

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

It's not exactly a snail's pace, but Australia isn't really keeping up with global innovation either. Recent evaluation of 26 OECD nations has revealed that although Australia naturally lends itself to technological innovation, there is yet a way to go before the country's economy can fully capitalize on that potential.

The study was conducted by U.S.-based Forrester research and aimed to demonstrate how governments can improve their innovative strategies, and hence their economies and geopolitical statuses, by building on their comparative strengths in the global arena.

Instead of operating as single research and development entities, nations could more effectively use existing inventions, skills and services by collaborating to form multi-country innovation networks, researchers say.

Within such networks, individual countries would be required to specialize in only one or two of four roles: Inventors, who formulate new ideas; Transformers, who develop those ideas into marketable products or services; Financiers, who fund the activities of inventors and transformers; and Brokers, who bring the network together by forging relationships among partner nations.

"Essentially, not being good in one of the roles doesn't mean that you're a bad innovator," explained Navi Radjou, Vice President of Forrester Research. "You can be an innovator in different ways; in order to be a good innovator all you have to do is partner with other nations or with universities to take some great ideas or inventions to market."

Sadly, when its current situation was evaluated against other OECD nations, Australia was revealed to be somewhat of a non-performer in all four roles, oscillating between Forrester's bottom two labels: 'Contender' and 'Risky Bet'. Australia ranked 10th in the Broker category, 15th as a Financier, 17th as an Inventor, and 23rd as a Transformer.

It was a poor result for a nation that Radjou acknowledged to have excellent institutions and good government-funded research and development (R&D) agencies, as well as being well-positioned as a society with a West European-style culture that is also in close geographic proximity to Asia.

"The brain power is there, but just the raw brain power isn't enough," he said. "Where we can find limitations is [how Australia is] taking inventions and bringing them to market."

While the study found Australia lacking in hi-tech R&D areas such as space exploration and nanotechnology, it found strength in more traditional areas of science and engineering like mining and raw material extraction.

Radjou said it was important for the country to recognize and play to its strengths, leveraging them for both domestic and global markets.

"If you look at what role Australia needs to emphasize more in the future, I would say the Broker role is more important," Radjou said. "The goal of the government should not be just in funding more R&D, but building bridges with other countries."

Australia should take advantage of its geographic position in becoming a gateway to Asia for Western countries, Radjou said. This would require research organizations, trade associations, and the government to invest in more trade missions to attract partner companies and nations.

Researchers and universities are already acting very aggressively in promoting Australia as an innovation gateway, he said, but these informal relationships should be backed by the government for good international networks to form.

"Companies can do their best, but there are a lot of things that the government has to do as well to take it to the next level," he said. "I think without some sort of formal support from the government, these informal networks can really not take off."

Radjou raised the example of Ireland, a leader in the Transformer role whose government-funded Ireland Development Agency conducts trade missions all over the world to help build R&D partnerships in Europe and Japan. The Australian Government could think about formalizing network links with the rest of the world in the same way, he said, starting with Asia.

Australia's diverse population can also lend itself to the Broker role as long as the nation and its companies can capitalize on multinational backgrounds and start producing more people who are multilingual.

"Not only do you have very creative people, but you also have very diverse people," he said. "You are [Australia is] a bit like the U.S. in that you are an immigrant country, which is a great asset, but the asset has to be exploited. You have to figure out a way to take advantage of that diversity, versus just being aware of the diversity."

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IMAGE: New 'CrackBerry' rehab site aimed at BlackBerry addicts

Created for Computerworld Australia's Mobility and Wireless section:

CW: CSIRO signs wireless deal with Chinese research company

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

CSIRO on Thursday announced a partnership with research and manufacturing company, the China Electronic Technology Corporation (CETC), to commercialise its wireless technologies in China.

The deal is said to be among the first to be reached with a Chinese partner, and will require CSIRO to transfer its advanced wireless antenna technology to CETC for a stipulated upfront fee. When CETC begins manufacturing the resulting product, CSIRO will also receive a portion of retail revenues in the form of royalties.

Besides immediate financial benefits from the technology transfer, the deal is expected to provide CSIRO with an opportunity to enter the booming Chinese market, according to Jay Guo, director of the CSIRO Wireless Technologies Laboratory who negotiated the deal.

CSIRO, which is also partnered with several Australian companies and organisations for its other technologies, had previously approached local manufacturers to bring its wireless technology to market, but found none as suitable as CETC, which Guo says has around 50 percent market share in China's wireless space.

"China, at the moment, is one of the most promising, fastest growing markets; they are becoming the early adopters of technology," he said. "This [deal] opens the door for us to commercialise our advanced technologies in cases where there aren't any Australian adopters, because Australia doesn't have as strong a manufacturing base."

The deal builds on a long-standing relationship between the Australian government-owned scientific research organisation and the Chinese state-owned corporation, although dealings in the past have had more of a scientific slant than commercial.

Guo described the contract as a sustainable model that is mutually beneficial, while protecting CSIRO's intellectual property. He expects the deal to set precedent for future partnerships.

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CW: Attracting commerce-minded devs to an open source business

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

Cool. Sassy. Hip. When New Zealand consultancy Catalyst IT started up in 1997, it had none of those attributes. What it did have, however, was a vision to make open source software the preferred option for local businesses, and it was that vision that eventually led to the company's current financial success.

Catalyst's biggest asset, said the company's co-founder and director Donald Christie, has been its use of open source technology, which has enabled the company to deliver cost-effective, highly customized products to its clients.

The company has worked with some of New Zealand's most reputable organizations, including NZ Post, Telecom NZ, TAB, and the Electoral Enrolment Centre. Turnover is good, and the company has zero debt, Christie said.

"If anyone says that you can't make money doing open-source type work, they're just wrong," he said.

Staffing, on the other hand, was said to be the company's greatest liability, as the coming and going of employees was at times disruptive to the organization.

The company, which currently operates under what Christie calls a meritocractic 'management unstructure', is also now having to deal with management and internal communications issues owing to its growth over the years.

While existing employees have recently shown initiative and come forward with management suggestions, Christie acknowledged a need to recruit project managers - either externally or from existing employees - to establish clear leadership.

"We're trying to manage change and growth without losing some of the things that made us enjoy starting our own company in the first place," Christie said.

Catalyst maintains a rather flexible recruitment policy of "never turning away a good person". As a result, the company now has almost 80 staff, including six full-time directors.

Christie said potential employees tend to be involved in open source community projects, which can provide the recruiter with some measure of a developer's skill level and how he or she interacts with colleagues on forums.

Participating in open source projects can also be a valuable maturing process, Christie said, in which young people can obtain skills that took himself years to learn - "like that being polite and respectful to people is good," he said.

In its aim to attract mature, lucid developers who understand how open source projects work and are also able to work closely with clients, Catalyst has once again found its greatest asset to be its passion for open source. Christie recalls one employee who first contacted Catalyst because of how he perceived open source to be promoted on the company's Web site.

The work environment in an open source company should also reflect its ideology, Christie said, starting from the tools that developers use in-house.

"Nothing tells a developer more than they are working in an open source company than pointing them to a Debian repository and telling them to set up their own desktop," he said.

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