iTnews: Recruiters expect temporary slowdown in IT vacancies

As a journalist at iTnews:

The global economic slowdown might be softening the IT recruitment landscape, recruiters say, but the Australian skills shortage is far from over.

Specialist recruitment firm Olivier Group has observed a 9.73 percent fall in the number of IT job advertisements posted online during the past three months. According to the firm’s director Bob Olivier, the decline is led by a fall in permanent job vacancies, especially in the banking and public sectors.

“The big falls are in banking where sub prime write-offs and credit crunch are having direct impact on the larger investment banks,” he said.

“Jobs in the public sector have been subdued for the last 12 months and I would expect this to soften further if there is a tough budget in May.”

Noting that the economic downturn has led to staff layoffs in some U.S. firms, Olivier expects a subsequent easing off in staffing requirements of international branches also.

Senior recruitment consultant Priyanka Bhagat of Kelly IT Resources in Singapore shared similar expectations, saying it is likely that skilled staff may be more successful in their job applications when the economy takes a more positive turn.

However, she noted no evident change in demand for IT staff in Asia Pacific at present, adding that an economic recession in the U.S. may create more demand for staff in India and China.

“There are still a lot of companies who are doing aggressive hiring,” she said. “In fact, a lot of US companies who are not making losses yet are trying to replicate their business model in Asia Pacific before the recession hits them.”

“Australia is not a market that is ever seen as a replacement,” she said. “If they [U.S. companies] have to turn to other markets, they would first turn to India and then China. The idea is to cut cost and not change location.”

Local companies stand to gain from an improved supply of skilled staff, Olivier said, but there are companies that may lack the courage to capitalise on current opportunities.

“Firms have to be confident to hire,” he said. “I think there is still a lot of fear and uncertainty out there. If firms can look from a longer-term perspective this could be a golden opportunity to find those they would not otherwise have access to.”

And while the nationwide skills shortage may be improving, the country has yet a way to go in producing enough skilled staff to meet demands of the IT industry, he said.

“There are still global systemic shortages in many fields,” he said.

“This is a short to medium term balancing of the market. When will that situation return? It depends on how long and deep the US and potentially global recession lasts.”

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iTnews: Three-dimensional PDFs for Adobe Acrobat 8.0 and above

As a journalist at iTnews:

A new software technique has been developed to allow interactive, three-dimensional visualisations to be embedded into Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files.

Developed by a pair of researchers from the Swinburne University of Technology’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, the technology is expected to support a shift from paper-based scientific journals to fully digital publications.

Version 8.0 and above of Adobe Acrobat Readers currently support three-dimensional features via its Acrobat 3D software, which is designed to support CAD imaging for engineering operations. But scientific researchers have different requirements to engineers, explained Christopher Fluke, who developed the new technique at Swinburne.

“The way that researchers deal with data is very different to an engineering model,” he said. “We’ve made use of that [Acrobat 3D] framework, but what we’ve done that’s different is put more of the emphasis on getting data sets in.”

Using the newly-developed technique, there are two steps to embedding a three-dimensional model into a PDF document. The first step is based on a tool called the S2PLOT programming library, which has been built on top of OpenGL to simplify the creation of three-dimensional science visuals. Three-dimensional visuals are then exported and embedded into a PDF document.

S2PLOT has been two years in development, Fluke said, after which the technique to embed the tool’s three-dimensional product into the PDF format took the researchers a mere three weeks to create.

“We’d been working with 3D projection techniques at Swinburne for the last eight or nine years,” he said.

“Several years ago, we went back and looked at some of the reasons why researchers weren’t using 3D techniques in their work. This technique has been in part motivated by what the researchers want, which is a way to publish their three-dimensional data sets.”

“One of the biggest advantages is that as a reader of a document with interactive three-dimensional features in it, you can actually do science while reading the article. You could maybe even see things that the original author didn’t realise were there,” he said.

As yet, the researchers have neither plans to discuss the technique with Adobe, nor plans for commercialisation. While the technique is open for consumer use, Fluke said its main focus is the scientific community.

“As astrophysicists ourselves, [colleague and co-developer] David Barnes and myself are most in the short-term [outcomes]: doing better science, and helping our colleagues to do better science. But we can see that there are lots of other applications for this technology as well,” he said.

“We’re certainly interested if someone saw a [commercial] use for it. In the short term, we’re mostly interested in making sure this is a technique that researchers can use, and the easiest way to do that is not commercialise it.”

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iTnews: Nominations open for OSCON Open Source Awards

As a journalist at iTnews:

In the lead up to the tenth annual OSCON Open Source convention, organisers at O’Reilly and Google are welcoming nominations for their jointly hosted Open Source Awards.

This will be the fourth year of the Open Source Awards, which are granted to individuals on the basis of dedication, leadership, innovation, and collaboration in the development of Open Source software.

Winners are selected by a committee of OSCON organisers from O’Reilly and Google, along with a panel of winners from previous years. Previous winners include Firefox developer Gervase Markham, Internet pioneer Doc Searls, and Australian Open Source evangelist Jeff Waugh.

Held from 21-25 July in Portland, Oregon, OSCON 2008 is expected to bring together more than 2500 members of the open source community to discuss topics such as Linux, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, Mobile, Databases, Desktop Applications, Web Applications, Administration, Security, People, Business, and Emerging Topics.

Having reached the ten-year milestone, OSCON is expected to move from its corporate-focussed evangelistic goals of the past decade to explore technological possibilities of the future.

While the Australian representation at OSCON 2008 currently is unknown, a “decent number” of people from down under are expected to attend, according to Leslie Hawthorn, Google’s program manager for Open Source.

“It's [The Australian Open Source environment] very fertile,” she said. “There are many great developers who live here like Andrew Tridgell. It's a very active community and very focused.”

Hawthorn represents Google on a panel of judges for the Open Source Awards, alongside colleague Chris DiBona, as well as O’Reilly Media’s Allison Randal and Tim O’Reilly.

Touting OSCON as an opportunity for Google to connect with the Open Source community, Hawthorn said that the awards have traditionally been popular with conference attendees.

“It's a great opportunity for us to continue reaching out to our colleagues in the Open Source community,” she said. “We have a really deep commitment to this area. We will enjoy doing the annual Google Open Source update to talk about all our open source programs and open source activities.”

More information about the Open Source Awards 2008 is available from Allison Randal’s blog posting to the O’Reilly Radar. Nominations close on 15 May.

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iTnews: Teradata announces new data warehousing platforms for enterprises

As a journalist at iTnews:

Teradata has announced a new family of enterprise data warehousing platforms that are based on the latest version of its database engine.

Expected to appeal to a range of customers from entry-level to active enterprise-level, the family includes three new platforms priced from $72,000 to $215,000 per terabyte.

The platforms feature improved energy efficiency, and are geared towards business intelligence and analytic applications. The platforms target enterprises looking to unify existing combinations of legacy and analytical architecture into the core enterprise data warehouse.

By standardising multiple hardware platforms and database combinations that may currently be used to meet the demands of compliance and privacy, security, human resources, and customer management, Teradata’s platforms are expected to deliver cost savings in training, application development, support, and IT infrastructure.

“Enterprise data warehousing drives the highest business value with the lowest overall total cost of ownership,” said Darryl McDonald, chief marketing officer of Teradata.

“Virtually without exception, every customer we talk to is implementing or has plans to implement an enterprise data warehouse.”

At the cheapest end of the new offering is the Teradata 550 SMP, which is a departmental data warehouse that has been developed to run a single application or support test and development workloads. The platform supports up to six terabytes of storage capacity, and operates on either Novell SUSE Linux or Windows.

The Teradata 2500 sits at the middle of the newly-announced range, and is priced at $134,000 per terabyte. The fully integrated, scalable platform sports dual-core Intel processors, enterprise-class storage, open Novell SUSE Linux 64-bit operating system, and the Teradata 12.0 database and utilities.

At the top end of the new range is the Teradata 5550, which is an active data warehouse-class platform that is said to provide three times the system performance of its predecessor.

All Teradata platforms currently are available directly from the vendor in Australia. Teradata’s partners, including business intelligence and ETL providers such as Business Objects, Cognos, Microstrategy, Informatica and SAS, are certified with the new platforms.

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iTnews: University of Ballarat touts Nortel network upgrade

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To support increasing staff and student demands for high-bandwidth applications like IP telephony and videoconferencing, the University of Ballarat has increased the capacity of its Nortel data network tenfold.

The university joins RMIT, Macquarie and Edith Cowan in its deployment of Nortel’s high-bandwidth voice and data infrastructure, the demand for which is said to be driven by hyperconnectivity in Australian higher education campuses.

The upgraded Nortel network connects the university’s main campus with a data centre located at a nearby technology park, as well as a second data centre that is located on another campus.

All the applications and administration systems on the university’s network of 25000 students and 2300 staff operate from the institution’s data centres, which also support students who may be accessing facilities such as the library database from remote locations including Melbourne, Sydney and throughout Asia.

“The biggest challenge we had was ensuring our data network could not only scale to support the extra traffic generated by the second data centre, but also support future projects, such as campus-wide IP telephony,” said David Edwards, manager, Network Infrastructure, University of Ballarat.

“This not only meant upgrading our existing network switch capacity from one gigabit to 10 gigabits, but also ensuring the fastest, most resilient network infrastructure for moving high volumes of information through 18 main campus buildings and across five other campuses spread across an area of 200 kilometres.”

The network upgrade builds on a longstanding relationship between Nortel and the University of Ballarat and is based on four Ethernet Routing Switch 8600s, which each feature Nortel’s unique Split Multi Link Trunking (SMLT) technology.

Working together, the infrastructure is expected to provide the functionality of a high-speed terabit cluster that can provide sub-second failover in the event of hardware malfunction, supporting applications like CRM, ERP, IP telephony and collaboration tools.

“The most important – and yet frequently overlooked – component of a successful wide-area multimedia communications network is the data infrastructure because organisations don’t take into account the additional load of these bandwidth-hungry applications,” says Mark Fioretto, general manager, Enterprise Solutions, Australia and New Zealand, Nortel.

“This is particularly true in a university environment where the volume of data traffic brought about by hyperconnectivity – where anything that can be networked is connected – can be astronomical, and where multimedia communications like video are increasingly playing a crucial role in the education curriculum,” he said.

“Without a resilient data network, and enough bandwidth to support new applications, the quality of multimedia communications can be severely degraded, let alone the stability of other business-critical applications that already reside on the network.”

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iTnews: Self-assembling ‘perfect mirrors’ could pave the way for optical computers

As a journalist at iTnews:

A newly-developed method for the manufacture of diamond-like crystals could yield “perfect mirrors” that vastly improve optical technologies, paving the way for future sensor technology, optical computers, and circuits that use light instead of electronic signals to process information.

Developed by chemical engineers at Purdue University in the U.S., the technique works by attracting tiny, floating particles into forming the desired structure in a silicon template. The technique is expected to be faster and less expensive than current processes that are commonly used in the semiconductor industry.

Already, the self-assembly technique has been used to create a precisely ordered two-dimensional layer of particles, which is called a colloidal crystal. These single-layer structures may be used to form “micro lenses” that researchers expect to improve the performance of optical equipment in cameras and other consumer products.

The next step is to grow three-dimensional crystals for the development of “omni-directional photonic band gap materials”, which are mirrored materials capable of reflecting certain wavelengths of light coming from all directions. Such materials currently are prohibitively expensive to manufacture, although they would vastly improve the capabilities of optical fibres.

"We envision that this self-assembly method will open a new possibility for mass fabricating complicated 3-D colloid crystal structures for various applications," said You-Yeon Won, an assistant professor of chemical engineering who is researching the technique at Purdue.

"Making the first layer is very difficult, so we have taken an important step in the right direction. Creating three-dimensional structures poses a big challenge, but I think it's feasible."

In a similar vein to Leonardo Da Vinci’s fabled dream of scientifically turning carbon into gold, the Purdue researchers expect the self-assembly technique to one day produce diamonds.

"There is no conventional technology that allows you to easily fabricate the diamond-crystal structure, so our method could open the door to doing so," Won said.

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iTnews: Protecting human values from Human-Computer Interaction

As a journalist at iTnews:

These days, it is nigh on impossible to stop the infiltration of technology into our lives. Business communications are conducted via phone or e-mail. Information is searched for and obtained online. Even our kitchens are getting smarter, with Internet-enabled fridges opening doors to food for both the body and mind.

It seems the technologically-driven world envisioned by so many science fiction authors is fast becoming a reality, but to what end? For fear of losing sight of basic human values such as identity and privacy, institutions and technology vendors now are investing in a new research area with an aim to protect the hazy margins that separate man from machine.

A recently-released research report from Microsoft and the University of Nottingham investigates how advances in interfaces may affect human society in the year 2020. Titled “Being human: human-computer interaction in the year 2020”, the report details the findings of a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) conference that was hosted by Microsoft in March 2007.

Highlighting advances in display technologies, digital storage, connectivity and artificial intelligence, the report warns that without proper monitoring and assessment, humans may lose control of key decision-making processes, thus surrendering basic human values and concepts such as personal space, society, identity, independence, perception, intelligence and privacy.

And as machine learning technology develops, humans may become increasingly reliant on artificially intelligent computers to make decisions on our behalf.

“New computing technology is tremendously exciting, but the interaction between humans and computers is evolving into a complex ecosystem where small changes can have far-reaching consequences,” said Tom Rodden, Professor of Interactive Systems at the University of Nottingham who worked with Microsoft on the report.

“It is imperative that we combine technological innovations with an understanding of their impact on people,” Rodden said.

Rodden’s cautions resound with those of Noel Sharkey, a Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics from the University of Sheffield who this week addressed the U.K. House of Commons on potential ethical pitfalls of near-future robots.

While robots may be beneficial to mankind in a range of applications including domestic cleaning and more effective, efficient surgery, Sharkey warned against the current lack of government guidelines in place in the U.K. for the rapidly increasing use of robots.

The increasing use of robots may also neglect human needs for companionship in areas such as healthcare where robot carers are designed to look after children and the elderly. While mechanical caregivers may yield economic benefits, they may also come with negative effects such as social exclusion.

“Much of this work is very useful in keeping old people out of care homes and hospitals for longer, but my worry is that economic consideration could see us all spending our last year socially excluded in the company of dumb machines,” Sharkey said.

Meanwhile, machines in Microsoft’s future-facing vision of 2020 will be far from dumb. While Human-Computer interactions of today are easily recognisable by the conventional keyboard, mouse and monitor set-up, futuristic devices may be controlled by bodily movements, such as two hands touching multiple, textured surfaces, and may be stored within our bodies.

A 2007 report on “The Hype Cycle for Human-Computer Interaction” by technology-focussed analyst firm Gartner similarly expects a radical shift towards a world of ambient intelligence after the year 2015.

Ambient intelligence will extend the human-computer interface past the desk and into office appliances and the walls around the user so non-trivial devices will be expected to contain some degree of embedded processing and communications capability.

Of course, the benefits of understanding the more subtle, pervasive nature of human interactions with future devices extend past the lofty goals of protecting human values, to the more mercenary aim of gaining a commercial advantage in the technology marketplace.

“Technology, and our relationship with it, is changing fast and encompassing every aspect of our existence,” said Richard Harper, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. “We need to comprehend and manage key aspects of this change if we are to ensure that technology adds to human experience, rather than detract from it.”

“At Microsoft we are interested in this topic because we want to develop technologies that improve people’s lives, and it is impossible to do so without thinking carefully about human values and how humans want to interact with technology,” he said.

Highlighting current research and development efforts at IBM that centre around translating consumer technologies to the corporate space, IBM researcher John Tang, described HCI as a means of developing technologies that have efficiently and effectively match human abilities.

“HCI is an important research topic because it is important to understand how our technologies will be usable or useful so that we can build products that will be successful in the commercial marketplace,” said Tang, a researcher in the USER group of IBM’s Almaden Research Center.

With a focus on what Tang called “understanding the why” of usage patterns to determine the context in which particular technologies are used, IBM’s HCI research group is conducting a mix of quantitative and qualitative studies in efforts to translate the popular consumer applications Facebook and del.icio.us to the corporate setting.

Cross-cultural collaboration has been another focus of IBM’s research team, Tang said, as certain social networking tools have been observed to be more readily adopted by some cultures and not others.

Noting a higher uptake of social networking in Western cultures when compared with the Eastern world, Tang explained that the technology has drawn attention to human values of friendship and the information that interpersonal connections may reveal to other people.

“There are subtle but important differences between things that are successful in the commercial space compared to that in the enterprise and business space,” he said. “They [researchers] really study how people are using these [social networking] tools to figure out underlying human needs that drive that use and how to translate that to an enterprise setting.”

Given the social nature of HCI research, IBM has broadened its focus and is bringing more academic disciplines into the research team, said Tang, who is a mechanical engineer and has also been trained in design and anthropology.

IBM currently employs a group of social scientists and anthropologists that are involved in researching how people are interacting with technology, especially in emerging tools such as Second Life and other virtual environments.

“I think in general, we have to include more of these kind of [social science] disciplines to get a holistic view of how people are using technology,” Tang said. “Involving those disciplines as part of our corporate collection of skills is one area that we’re moving towards.”

Tang agreed with Microsoft's 2020 research report, which urges the HCI community to educate young people about the impact of technological advancements, engage policy-makers in the implications of new computing ecosystems, and involve specialists from disciplines such as psychology, sociology and the arts in the development of HCI technologies.

While he noted that most companies currently are quite early in the process of adopting value-sensitive design strategies, Tang described numerous conversations between IBM and academics from the University of Maryland and University of Washington, where the concept of value-sensitive design is beginning to be expressed.

"We need to be better at predicting, anticipating and understanding how our technology interacts with human values", he said. "I think that's an area that HCI developers need to pay more attention to and make more investment in."

"It's an area where there aren't that many answers, but where more conscious-raising, awareness questions are being asked," he said.

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iTnews: TED talks come to Australia, innovatively

As a journalist at iTnews:

Given the cutting-edge nature of the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) convention that annually brings together the world’s sharpest minds in one U.S. location, it is unsurprising that TED presentations are to set foot on Australian shores in a rather unconventional fashion.

Held across one and a half days from Thursday 8 May, The Best of TED 2008 is an opportunity for like-minded individuals to gather in Sydney, view and discuss high-definition video recordings of this year’s presentations.

Among an impressive list of presenters are: U.S. presidential candidate Al Gore, who addressed TED 2008 attendees on climate change; brain scientist Jull Bolte Taylor, who mused about how human brains define us; artist Siegfried Woldhek, who presented his discovery about Leonardo Da Vinci; and physicist Stephen Hawking, who discussed the origins of life, the universe and everything.

The event has been jointly organised by Australian think-tank Thought Leaders in conjunction with Pow Wow Events, and will take place at the Hoyts Cinema Complex in the Sydney Entertainment Quarter.

While the Sydney event organisers admit to having no formal relationship with organisers of the annual Monterey, California TED convention, the idea for hosting the gathering in Australia is said to have sprung from Thought Leaders’s attendance and discussions at TED in February 2008.

“We all love TED, and selfishly, we want to see it here,” Michelle Falzon, CEO of Pow Wow Events, told iTnews. “Thought Leaders, whose ethos essentially match those of TED, really grabbed the tiger by the tail and later contacted Pow Wow to help with organising the event.”

“It’s still very early days for TED in Australia, but from little things, big things grow. We hope that TED will one day be held in Australia,” she said.

Tickets to The Best of TED 2008 are priced at $295 per person, which includes a screening of selected videos from the four-day-long, $6000-per-person, live event, refreshments during the event, and facilitated discussion groups with other event attendees.

Videos screened at the event will include recordings that are not presently freely available on the official TED Web site. Falzon expects the event to appeal to what she called an “underground” pool of creative, highly intelligent individuals in Australia.

Since The Best of TED 2008 was announced last week, public response has been strong, but not overwhelming, Falzon said, expecting TED’s Australian presence to grow with public exposure and time.

“TED is very much an underground movement here, but we’ve had a fantastic response so far,” she said.

“We’re doing the best we can to replicate the atmosphere at the [Monterey] conference. We’d love next year to be able to host a simulcast of TED, but of course there are budgets, planning, and time frames to consider.”

Tickets and more information are available from The Best of TED 2008 Web site.

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iTnews: Google announces Sydney Developer Day event

As a journalist at iTnews:

Google Australia today extended an open invite to developers in Sydney to attend a day-long discussion about building Web applications and advancing the Web as a platform.

Scheduled to be held on 18 June, Google Developer Day will feature presentations from top Google engineers, including Lars Rasmussen, Ben Appleton, Mike Jones, Dmitri Abramov, David Day, and David Glazer.

Attendees also will receive a mix of hands-on advice for building Web applications, as well as opportunities to learn about emerging programming trends.

Sessions at the event will cover: AJAX and JavaScript technologies; APIs and Web tools; social applications of the Web; mobile devices and applications; and Google Maps.

The event follows what is said to have been a successful Google Developer Day at the Australian Technology Park last year, which brought together developers from across the nation.

"In the past year, the web has evolved to be a more open and collaborative platform, and Australian developers have pushed us to expect new and greater things from our experience on the web,” said Alan Noble, head of engineering for Google Australia and New Zealand.

“Our upcoming Developer Day is an opportunity for the Australian developer community to learn about these innovations, to place our Australian developments in a global context, and to continue building a web that is open and useful to developers and users alike," he said.

Google Developer Day will be held at Wharf 8, Sydney on Wednesday, June 18th 2008, and is free to attend. More information about the event is available from Google’s Developer Day 2008 Web site.

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iTnews: HP launches largest ever Print 2.0 range

As a journalist at iTnews:

In a grab for a larger piece of the global printing pie, HP has introduced a slew of printers, services and business solutions.

Launched this week at the hardware giant’s Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) Launch event in Shanghai, HP’s “Print 2.0” range aims to bring the concept of printing to the forefront of business optimisation concerns.

The new offerings include two HP LaserJet multifunction printers (MFPs) and a flatbed scanner targeted at enterprises. For SMBs, HP also has launched eight colour and monochrome laser printers, and three ink-based printers which have been re-branded to HP Officejet.

“With all the economic challenges in the world today, customers are looking at printing no longer as an afterthought, but as a strategic opportunity to cut costs,” said Bruce Dahlgren, senior vice president, Global Enterprise Business, Imaging and Printing Group, HP.

“Meanwhile, they recognise that this economic challenge won’t last forever, so the focus is also on how they can optimise and leverage their infrastructure.”

“Today, I would suggest that the printer, combined with the functions of a copier, fax machine and scanner, has truly broken free of being a peripheral. Today, multifunction devices sit on the company’s network, and can act almost as a portal into the company’s infrastructure.”

But devices form only a part of HP’s Print 2.0 strategy. At the heart of the Print 2.0 launch is a range of software and services that HP expects will help businesses to optimise their printing infrastructure, manage the networked environment, and improve workflow.

HP first introduced the concept of Print 2.0 at its annual Imaging and Printing Conference in New York in May 2007. The Print 2.0 strategy represents an increased flexibility of purchase models, increased visibility of printing and management options, a greater focus on Green IT, and a surprising drive towards digitised information.

To support the Print 2.0 push, HP has made a US$300 million investment in an interactive marketing campaign, called “What Do You Have To Say?”, that is aimed at large businesses.

The company is also bolstering its range of IPG offerings with a revamped channel partner program and the recent acquisition of Exstream Software to develop software solutions that complement HP’s devices.

“Back when we started in 1985, we were very good at bringing out user-friendly printers. But over time, the device wasn’t enough,” said Chris Morgan.

Citing a growing awareness from businesses about inefficiencies in their printing infrastructure that may lead to costly wastage of power, paper, ink and time, Morgan explained HP’s aim of adding value to enterprise print solutions through assessments of customers’ infrastructure by HP and HP’s Gold partners.

By delivering a holistic range of products and services, HP hopes to win new customers from the analogue printing market that currently comprises 90 percent of the total analogue and digital printing market.

Morgan highlighted opportunities in the booming signage marketplace in Asia, including the printing of billboards and advertisements on public transport vehicles. China, India and the North Pacific were mentioned as areas of particularly high growth.

“If companies were all ineffectively printing paper, then in the short term it would be good for our business,” Morgan said, “but in the long term, we have a greater business opportunity helping customers waste less, because we stand to gain so much more of the greater pie.”

“Our focus right now is about extending the depth of our coverage. We’re in a full growth and penetration mode,” he said.

Meanwhile, the company is boasting healthy financial results with worldwide revenue of $28.5 billion reported in the 2007 financial year. According to the IDC Quarterly Printer Tracker report for the fourth quarter of 2007, HP currently has a 47 percent market share of the overall ink and laser printer market, servicing 53.8 percent of the enterprise market, and 45.1 percent of SMBs.

Morgan expects the breadth of products and services from HP’s IPG group, as well as offerings from HP’s overall portfolio, to appeal to customers in the SMB and enterprise sectors.

“We are not just a printer company; we are one of the biggest IT companies in the world, and being one of the largest IT companies in the world is going to be an asset in helping customers deal with the complexity of IT options,” he said.

“If you look at where Print 2.0 is going, HP has a big advantage in having a notebook presence, as well as a presence in the desktop and printer markets. Imaging and printing today is the sales lead for our consumer notebook division, and our notebook division is the sales lead for imaging and printing.”

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iTnews: Green search engine lays down Australian roots

As a journalist at iTnews:

A new, free-to-use search engine has been launched in Australia with the promise of sponsoring the growth of up to two trees for every 1000 Web searches made.

Launched today, ecocho acts as a Web portal between users and popular search engines Yahoo and Google, and claims to offset carbon emissions with no speed, quality or monetary costs to users.

The service is made available through agreements between ecocho and the search providers that allow Google and Yahoo to provide search technology and results for the new site. Ecocho’s founder Tim Macdonald expects the site’s use of the already popular search technologies to appeal to the ample pool of current users to the technologies.

“Yahoo and Google are the two dominant search engines worldwide,” he told iTnews. “We’ve really stuck with these two main ones [search engines] because they are the ones which are most used by people to get the results that they want on the Internet.”

“We are basically providing users with the same search results that they receive from either of those two sites, so people are already familiar and trust the quality and the speed of those search results,” he said.

Ecocho’s launch in Australia is part of a global initiative that involves 14 countries, including Germany, France and New Zealand. By locating international servers as close as possible to the site’s users, Macdonald expects users of ecocho to experience negligible speed differences compared to using Google and Yahoo directly.

Similar to existing search engine business models, ecocho is supported by advertising revenue, of which 30 percent goes towards the site’s operational costs and 70 percent is put towards planting trees.

Based on the sheer volume of Web searches conducted by Australian Internet users, Macdonald expects the site to make an impact on the environment – especially since the advertising-supported model enables users to make a difference without having to spend any money or alter their personal lifestyles.

“It’s an advertising-supported [tree planting] scheme,” Macdonald said. “This effectively is free for a user and it’s something that you do everyday already.”

“There’s definitely a lot of user interest in climate change issues because it’s really important,” he said. “When we knew that one percent of people actually take money out of their wallets and pay to offset their flights, we thought, well if something is free, a much bigger percentage [of people] than that would be interested.”

In Australia, ecocho will purchase carbon-offset credits through the New South Wales Government Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme (GGAS). The site will employ financial audit, tax, and advisory firm KPMG to check the acquisition, registration and retirement of the carbon credits.

According to ecocho’s Australian Web site, the site already has sponsored the growth of 2702 trees in Orange, Oberon, and Mona Vale, all in New South Wales.

“We’re aiming pretty big,” Macdonald said. “We don’t have a set number in mind, but we’re thinking that it’s entirely possible to be doing [sponsoring] tens of thousands of trees in a year.”

“In Australia alone you’ve got almost 800 million searches performed every month. If we could capture even 5 percent of that market, that’s an enormous number of trees that can be planted.”

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iTnews: Microsoft Australia touts start-up innovation

As a journalist at iTnews:

Software behemoth Microsoft has plans to grow the Australian software industry by extending a giant hand of support to local start-up companies.

Through partnerships with state governments, the AIIA and La Trobe University, Microsoft is offering a holistic incubation program, dubbed Empower, to provide and connect Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) with the resources needed for bringing innovative software products to the Australian market.

“While we are part of an international corporation, Microsoft Australia is absolutely an Australian company,” Microsoft Australia’s industry development manager, David Sajfar, told iTnews.

“We put a lot of effort into growing the Australian industry and into making the Australian software economy succeed, because if they succeed, we succeed.”

So when Microsoft was approached by a cash-strapped biotechnology start-up named Evado just over a year ago, it was eager to welcome the budding software company into the folds of Empower.

Microsoft’s Empower program is offered on a subscription basis of $1000 per year for a maximum of two years, after which enrolled start-ups are expected to have completed their development work and be able to move on to other Microsoft partner programs.

The program provides enrolled start-ups with a software package that includes the Windows operating system, Office, Windows Server, Exchange, and SharePoint, as well as access to software development kits, driver development kits and the MSDN library.

“For a small company, it was very hard to negotiate through Microsoft’s resources and find subject experts easily,” said Evado’s CEO Jenny Anderson of the start-up’s difficulties during its first three years of development efforts before enrolling in Microsoft’s partner program.

“Microsoft helped us in various ways,” she said.

After working with Microsoft and Microsoft’s innovation centre at La Trobe University for the past year, Evado has completed its software offering and now has signed a major contract with the Australian heart device company, Ventracor.

Evado plans to take its Web-based clinical reporting software to U.S., European and Asian markets, with the eventual aim of offering the software for free to third world nations.

Besides the financial benefits of a partnership with Microsoft, Evado has also benefitted from the connections it has forged through Microsoft’s relationship with La Trobe University and the Victoria.NET program.

“Through Victoria.NET, we’ve met many other companies; some of which we’ve used in the development of our software,” Anderson said.

“The program also helped us bypass university bureaucracy by putting us in touch with a La Trobe PhD student who has done a lot of work with us.”

While she acknowledged the existence of cheaper platforms on which Evado’s software may have been developed, Anderson said the company made a conscious decision to build on Microsoft’s development platform as it is most widely used by organisations in its target market.

“Very few hospitals have open source, and support for open source software,” she said, “and nearly every hospital and research organisation has Microsoft [software installed]. Building software on Microsoft’s development platform was our decision and we haven’t regretted it.”

According to Microsoft’s Sajfar, the company’s partner programs provide networking opportunities for ISVs within and beyond the $1 billion local .NET market, as well as assistance with what he called “the issue of bridging the gap between research stages and going to market”.

“Evado came to us with a huge innovation opportunity. They had many platforms, frameworks and toolsets to consider, but they choose Microsoft,” Sajfar said, listing speed to market, technical assistance, and easy-to-use framework as some benefits of working with Microsoft.

“The local software [start-up] companies tend to be quite small and that can be a very lonely place for a company,” he said.

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iTnews: Do search engines encourage suicide?

As a journalist at iTnews:

A study of the Internet has found that Web engine results for suicide-related searches are more likely to encourage suicide rather than offer help and support.

Following U.K. media reports about the existence and possible influence of Web sites and forums that may encourage suicide in young people, the study aimed to investigate the pervasion of pro-suicide Web sites and the ease with which such sites may be found.

Researchers from the Universities of Bristol, Oxford and Manchester set out to replicate an online search that might be undertaken by a person looking for information about suicide methods.

Using four top search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask, the researchers analysed the first ten sites from each search of 12 suicide-related search terms. Of the 480 total hits that were analysed, 240 different Web sites were found.

The top four most frequently occurring sites evaluated methods of suicide including detailed information about speed, certainty, and the likely amount of pain associated with each method. The three most frequently occurring sites were found to encourage suicide, with user-generated encyclopaedia, Wikipedia coming in fourth.

Just under half of the sites found provided information about methods of suicide. Almost a fifth of hits were for dedicated suicide sites, of which almost all provided information about methods of suicide, and half were judged to be encouraging, promoting, or facilitating suicide.

A mere 13 percent of the sites found, focussed on suicide prevention or offered support, of which a majority actively discouraged suicide. Even so, the researchers found that a fifth of support and prevention sites also provided information about suicide methods.

Google and Yahoo were found to produce the highest number of dedicated suicide sites, whereas MSN had the highest number of prevention or support sites and academic or policy sites.

According to 2005 figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, suicides account for about a fifth of deaths between the ages of 20 to 35.

Authors of the study, which was published this week in the British Medical Journal, encourage the use of Web site optimisation strategies to maximise the likelihood that suicide prevention sites are preferentially sourced by people seeking information about suicide methods.

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iTnews: IT provider speaks out against National Secondary School Computer Fund criteria

As a journalist at iTnews:

With round one of applications now closed for the $1 billion National Secondary School Computer Fund, educational computing provider Computelec is raising concerns of whether some schools are equipped with sufficient support facilities or internal resources to meet the Rudd Government’s application criteria.

Following an initial audit of Australia’s secondary schools, round one of the National Secondary School Computer Fund promises up to $1 million in funding to schools selected from a pool of 937 institutions with a computer-to-student ratio of 1:8 or worse.

Eligible schools each were required to submit an application for funding by 4 April, including an Information Communication Technology (ICT) plan to purchase software, hardware, maintenance, training, and technical support, as well as developing a teaching effort to make full use of the ICT resources provided.

“There has clearly been some concern from schools about meeting the deadline, because an ICT plan has to be submitted with the application for funding,” said Darren Elsby, national sales and marketing manager of Computelec, stressing that the industry should be aware that some schools in urgent need of ICT development may be left behind.

“There are some schools that have probably struggled with that, and rightly so, because they are very small regional schools that don’t necessarily have the resources or the ICT proficiency to enable a plan like that,” he said.

While he was unable to name specific schools that may be disadvantaged by the program’s requirements, Elsby said that the group of institutions most at risk included “small schools that have traditionally had limited spend around ICT”.

Applauding the government for an initiative that he said represents an incredible effort to bridge the digital divide and close the gap between the haves and the have-nots, Elsby said the program also provides a focus around digital literacy and the importance of teaching ICT in the school curriculum.

“The government is clearly heading down this excellent path, but at the same time, schools need to realise that technology is extremely important,” he said, putting the burden of responsibility on the industry, local governments, and the Federal Government to provide ICT training and equipment to schools.

Since 1990, Computalec has worked with Australian schools such as the Methodist Ladies College to deploy 1:1 notebook programs that provide each student with a computer. The company also offers software, hardware, teacher training, and infrastructure support to suit each school’s unique requirements.

Elsby estimated the cost of Computalec’s 1:1 notebook programs to range from $2000 to $3000 per child over the course of three years, depending on the device, software bundle and payment options selected by the parents and school.

He pointed out potential cost reductions with the Rudd Government’s Family Tax Benefit, which allows parents to collect a rebate on the purchase of technology products that may be required for their children’s education.

“It’s never been cheaper for parents and schools to enter into technology programs,” Elsby said, noting that while a majority of Computelec’s notebook programs tend to exist within the independent school sector, cost reductions and government funding may allow the company to extend its reach to government schools also.

“That’s what’s exciting about this new government program,” he said. “It allows all schools of all sizes, shapes, denominations, whatever the case may be, to rake into this 1:1 or 1:2 notebook program space.”

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iTnews: Racetrack memory to change the storage landscape within a decade

As a journalist at iTnews:

Advancements in the development of spintronics-based storage technology could provide a basis for lightning-fast devices capable of holding a hundred times more data in the same amount of space than is possible today.

Developed by researchers at IBM’s Almaden Research Centre, racetrack memory combines the high performance and reliability of flash with the low cost and high capacity of hard disk drives to yield solid state electronic devices that are cheaper, more durable, more stable, and faster than storage devices of today.

Racetrack memory is named for the physical configuration in which information is stored: in tiny magnetic domains within a U-shaped, nanoscopic wire that is embedded into a silicon chip. Each successive domain wall along the racetrack has an opposite magnetic charge to its neighbours, hence altering the magnetic spin of electrons as current passes through the wire.

Since racetrack memory has no moving parts and stores data in the spin of electrons rather than as ensembles of electric charge, it has no wear-out mechanism and so can be rewritten endlessly without any wear and tear, according to Stuart Parkin, who leads the IBM research team.

Expounding the respective drawbacks of currently used solid state random access flash memory (RAM) and the magnetic hard disk drive, Parkin expects racetrack technology to have a significant impact on the IT landscape.

“We're moving into a world that is more data-centric than computing-centric,” said Parkin, IBM Research Fellow and Director of IBM-Stanford Spintronic Science and Applications Center. “It [Racetrack memory] will not only change the way we look at storage, but the way we look at processing information.”

“The devices would not only store vastly more information in the same space, but also require much less power and generate much less heat, and be practically unbreakable,” he told iTnews, forecasting future devices that provide massive amounts of personal storage that could run on a single battery for weeks at a time and last for decades.

While he expects racetrack memory to be commercially available within the next five to 10 years, Parkin said that the research team still faced developmental hurdles.

The team has previously encountered problems in experimentally producing speeds that have been predicted in theory, due to imperfections in the silicon chip. Now, the researchers are investigating the interaction of spin-polarised current with magnetic moments, the result of which may allow a reduction in current and enable lower-power devices.

“We expect that our exploration of a wide variety of materials and structures will provide new insight into domain wall dynamics driven by current, making possible domain wall based memory and even logic devices that were previously inconceivable,” Parkin said.

Ultimately, researchers are looking to expand the racetrack concept into the third dimension. By constructing a three-dimensional racetrack memory device, the IBM research team hopes to instigate a paradigm shift from traditional two-dimensional arrays of transistors and magnetic bits found in the silicon-based microelectronic devices and hard disk drives of today.

“By moving into the third dimension, racetrack memory stands to open new possibilities for developing less expensive, faster devices because it is not dependent on miniaturisation as dictated by Moore’s Law,” Parkin explained.

“The promise of racetrack memory - for example, the ability to carry massive amounts of information in your pocket - could unleash creativity leading to devices and applications that nobody has imagined yet,” he added.

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iTnews: Australia’s first Open Source Census published

As a journalist at iTnews:

Results of Australia’s first large-scale Open Source community census have been released to the public.

Produced by Open Source consulting firm Waugh Partners, the Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report gives voice to the business potentials, patterns and concerns of a previously mute sector of the IT industry.

“This is a first step towards addressing some of the misconceptions and lack of information about Open Source in the Australian market,” said Jeff Waugh, co-founder and co-director of Waugh Partners.

“We were also keen to learn more about the relationship between the industry and community, and understand the industry's need for skills and education,” he told iTnews.

Waugh raised the issue of a commonly-held misconception around what is perceived to be a lack of support and services for Open Source in Australia, despite the international recognition of the Australian Open Source community.

Far from the stereotype of students coding from darkened rooms of their parents’ homes with half-eaten slices of pizza in hand, the census found that Open Source developers tend to be well-paid professionals who service a growing market.

Boasting a “very strong”, “rapidly growing” local market for Open Source in both private and public sectors, the census listed property and business (which includes ICT), education, health, retail and government as industries that are most serviced by Open Source currently.

The report expounds what it says is an industry responsibility to tackle the $21 billion trade deficit generated by the ICT industry. Most of the deficit is derived from equipment necessary for the productive use of ICT in the country, the report says.

“We feel that the ICT industry has a responsibility to address the ICT trade deficit, by creating innovative solutions to sell to the world, but also to deliver productivity gains to Australian business and government,” Waugh told iTnews.

“It is a topic we have raised [to industry and government bodies] on numerous occasions in the past, to some interest. The key issue from our point of view is that Open Source -- the technology and methodology -- has enormous potential for Australian research, innovation and productivity.”

“It's not just a technology issue though -- open innovation, collaboration, and access will be absolutely necessary to keep our small population ahead of the game,” he added.

Open Source was suggested as an export avenue to offset a part of the trade deficit. Currently, 45 percent of the open source industry service export markets, generating revenue of $60 million, the report says.

Furthermore, export services that are based on open source generally sidestep the need for software royalty imports, which the report estimates to amount to more than 40 percent of the ICT trade balance deficit.

The report was sponsored by research organisation NICTA, as well as IBM and Fujitsu.

“The census results are important to IBM and Australian businesses as they prove that the OSS [Open Source Software] industry in Australia has matured,” IBM’s Lotus Competitive Solutions Executive, Kevin Wilson, said in the report.

“Simple facts such as 46 percent of respondents gained 70 percent or more of their revenue from Open Source activities suggest that Australian businesses are already taking advantage of what OSS has to offer.”

The Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report is available for download from Waugh Partners’s Web site.

Looking forward, the firm has planned qualitative research inspired by the industry and community report, including investigating the use and teaching of Open Source skills in Australian educational institutions, and the impact of Open Source in Australian research and development.

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iTnews: CO2-infused plastics may yield green CDs and DVDs

As a journalist at iTnews:

A new technique for the production of plastic may yield CDs and DVDs that thwart global warming.

By using waste carbon dioxide [CO2] in the manufacture of polycarbonate plastics, scientists expect to remove the greenhouse gas from the environment while delivering less expensive, safer and greener products compared to current production methods.

“Carbon dioxide is so readily available, especially from the smokestack of industries that burn coal and other fossil fuels,” said Thomas Müller, a Professor at the Institute for Technical Chemistry and Macromolecular Chemistry at RWTH Aachen University in Germany.

“And it’s a very cheap starting material,” he added. “If we can replace more expensive starting materials with CO2, then you’ll have an economic driving force.”

Through a five-year research agreement with German manufacturing company, Bayer Material Science, Müller and his research team will investigate methods of using the chemically inert carbon dioxide molecule for chemical syntheses.

CO2 produced by power plants during the combustion of fossil fuels is generally released into the atmosphere, where it contributes to the greenhouse effect. By incorporating CO2 into polymers and other materials produced in large-scale, the chemists expect to reduce the contribution of the greenhouse gas to global warming.

Plastics that are manufactured with the proposed technique could be used as material for sunglass and eyeglass lenses, safety goggles, headlamp lenses in vehicles, drinking bottles, CDs and DVDs.

Millions of tons of polycarbonates are sold each year, researchers say, and capturing carbon dioxide in this manner could avoid the release of many million of tons of the greenhouse gas into the environment.

“Using CO2 to create polycarbonates might not solve the total carbon dioxide problem, but it could be a significant contribution,” Müller said.

Speaking at the 235th annual meeting of the American Chemical Society on Tuesday, Müller said that consumers may be drinking from a carbon dioxide product and watching movies on waste-CO2 DVDs sooner than they think.

“I would say it’s a matter of a few years [before CO2-derived polymers are available to the public],” he said.

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iTnews: AIIA backs Swimming Australia in Facebook photo removal

As a journalist at iTnews:

Swimming Australia may have copped some flack over the removal of its members' personal photos from popular social networking site Facebook, but according to the AIIA, the sporting organisation was correct in its instructions to the athletes.

The Facebook privacy crackdown is said to have been inspired by the recent media coverage of swimmer Stephanie Rice’s personal photos. Among the photos are shots of the Beijing-bound athlete posing in a figure-hugging police uniform at one costume party and pole-dancing with a teammate at another function.

Since its 2004 launch, Facebook has extended its reach beyond tech-savvy, Generation Y students to encompass businesses, advocacy groups and politicians. While corporate use of the Web site may yield business potentials, the increasingly public uptake of the Facebook may raise privacy concerns for personal users.

“There are huge upsides for business through allowing staff access to such websites,” AIIA Chief Executive Officer Sheryle Moon told iTnews. “They show they are up to date and Gen Y will certainly want this sort of access.”

“There is also the possibility of alumni tracking for a business; new talent attraction, collaborative problem solving with remote staff, clients and suppliers,” she said.

However, Moon raised issues to do with how organisations should handle confidential business information, to ensure that sensitive information is not leaked. Sometimes, a person’s location information on a social networking Web site may alert a competitor to their activities and clients, Moon pointed out.

Just as there are corporate policies that deal with the use of e-mail and telephone services, Moon encouraged businesses to inform their employees about the risks of social networking sites also.

“The [Swimming Australia’s] request was appropriate,” Moon concluded. “An organisation should be able to request staff – members – to show information in a way that is respectful of the organisation or team.”

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iTnews: Virtual world to help children cope with cancer

As a journalist at iTnews:

Researchers in Canada are developing an online virtual world in which children with cancer can talk with others about their illness, and manage symptoms caused by cancer and other chronic diseases.

By studying children’s perceptions of their cancer symptoms, researchers hope to discover methods for assessing symptoms, and better evaluate the effectiveness of interventions.

“Cancer is a very scary word for children,” said nursing researcher Dr. Roberta Woodgate of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada.

“We want to help them deal with the subject in a way that is most appropriate to them, and at their level.”

The interactive game will represent symptoms in a non-violent story such as travelling through a jungle or a haunted house and encountering challenges, or symptom experiences, and the opportunity and means to meet the challenges.

Interviews with seven to 17 year olds will help determine content in separate games for children and teenagers.

Woodgate believes gaming will teach children with chronic diseases how to recognise and manage real-life symptom experiences such as fatigue and pain. In addition to helping children take their minds off their illness, Woodgate said the virtual world would allow children to “act” and “react” in a safe and comfortable environment.

“I hope that gaming as an intervention will improve children’s symptom assessment and management, and their quality of life. What we learn may improve the experiences of families and professionals,” she said.

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iTnews: Computer system makes best sports bets

As a journalist at iTnews:

Researchers have created a computer ranking system that consistently predicts US basketball rankings more accurately than polls of sportswriters, coaches, currently used formulas and computer models, and even the tournament seeds themselves.

Dubbed the Logistic Regression Markov Chain, or LRMC, the new method is said to have proven itself by correctly picking all four of the 2008 finalists for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournament.

By identifying the 30 of the 36 Final Four participants in the past nine years of tournaments, the method has achieved 83 percent accuracy. In comparison, the seedings and polls have correctly identified only 23 of the 36 NCAA Final Four participants in the same nine year stretch, and the currently used Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) formula identified 21.

Similar to other rankings systems, LRMC uses the quality of each NCAA team’s results and the strength of each team’s schedule to rank teams. The method has been designed to use only basic scoreboard data, including which teams played, which team had home court advantage and the margin of victory.

Designed and maintained by Joel Sokol, Paul Kyam and George Nemhauser, who are three Engineering Professors at the Georgia Institute of Technology, LRMC is set apart from other computer rankings systems in its method of determining the value of home court advantage. LRMC considers how much playing at home helps a team win rather than how many points playing on a home court is worth.

Besides picking the Final Four, LRMC also identified several over-rated and under-rated NCAA teams as potential upsets. Georgia Tech researchers have also been able to show that very close games are often “toss-ups,” meaning the better team barely wins more than half the time.

LRMC’s ranking methodology takes into account the researchers’ expectations that winning a close game shouldn’t be worth as much as winning easily, and losing a close game shouldn’t hurt a team’s ranking as much as losing badly.

Computer rankings systems are expected to have a distinct advantage over the picks of sports professionals and fans by taking the emotional aspect out of the decision-making process.

“As fans, we only get to see most tournament teams two or three times at most during the season, so our gut feelings about a team are really coloured by how well or poorly they played the few times we've been watching,” Sokol said.

“On the other hand, our system objectively measures each team’s performance in every game it plays, and mathematically balances all of those outcomes to determine an overall ranking.”

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iTnews: Is 'industry-ready' a University responsibility?

As a journalist at iTnews:

To combat a persistent skills shortage in the Australian IT industry, educational institutions have focussed their efforts on attracting students to science and engineering studies in recent years.

However, despite the best efforts of Australian universities, the industry remains unimpressed. University graduates have not been suitably prepared to fulfil commercial demand, industry players say.

“One of the things we see with people coming out of universities is that they are generally a fair way behind where the industry is,” said Nick Rodda, Managing Director of hosted contact centre solutions provider, Global Speech Networks.

Estimating two to three years in training expenses to do with hiring fresh graduates, Rodda blamed the Australian tertiary education system for not keeping up with industry demands.

“We hire graduates from time to time with the intention of investing in them to make them productive in two years time,” he said.

According to specialist IT recruitment agency, Kelly Services, employers greatly value candidates with a proven experience in the technologies that are already used by the company.

Naming .NET as the most commonly used programming language being used at present, Kelly Services’s Resources Branch Manager, Jason Fuller, noted an industry appreciation for candidates who have previously worked on time sensitive commercial projects and an experience in high-pressure, commercial environments.

“Employers will almost always choose to have someone join their company with a proven experience using the same technologies that they already use, or may be in the process of migrating towards in the near future,” Fuller said.

But training students to meet exact industry demands may be impossible, University of New South Wales lecturer John Shepherd said.

“For us to actually pick the exact technologies that are going to suit [the industry] and training up our students hoping those technologies are going to suit every company - we’ve got no chance,” he said.

“We could go for the dominant market players and teach all our students those technologies, but that’s not really the point. The point is learning how to learn,” he said.

As a lecturer of database programming at the university’s School of Computer Science and Engineering, Shepherd specialises in the PHP programming platform on top of the PostgreSQL database in his teachings.

While he admitted that the industry tends to favour Oracle over PostgreSQL in commercial databases, Shepherd said that Open Source platforms such as PostgreSQL and PHP are better suited to his teachings due to cost advantages and the ease of access to the technical mechanisms behind the platform.

Rather than teaching any one particular system, Shepherd said the University is more concerned with teaching the ideas behind the systems, which he expects will better equip students to adapt to new versions of existing technologies.

While the university’s teaching decisions may not have completely satisfied the demands of its students, Shepherd pointed out that several training institutions already offer courses targeted to industry-specific platforms and languages.

“We’re not teaching a particular system; we’re teaching the ideas behind the system,” he said, “and that’s what university is about.”

“The students say why don’t you teach us .NET, why don’t you teach us Oracle, and we have to keep justifying that you’re not learning .NET or Oracle, you’re learning Object-Oriented distributed programming, or you’re learning SQL.”

“We’re not a training institute; there are plenty of those going around. If they [students] want to learn version 3.0 of Oracle, they can go to an Oracle training course, or go to a TAFE,” he said.

While he agreed that tertiary institutions tend not to exactly satisfy the demands of the industry, Dimension Data’s General Manager for Application Integration, Peter Menadue, said that the educational tendency towards more academically-targeted platforms has been an ongoing theme for decades.

“It’s true to say that in tertiary institutions, more of the languages that are taught are of a great educational basis and less of a commercial basis,” Menadue said.

“There’s probably a little more of a preference around a spread of things [platforms], including open source, in tertiary institutions, [but] we just haven’t seen a bulk of commercial development that’s happening in Open Source for our enterprise customers.”

Mentioning .NET and Java as programming platforms that are more popular in the enterprise, Menadue encouraged tertiary institutions to make sure that students are equipped with relevant skills.

Meanwhile, UNSW’s Shepherd argued that universities should be more focussed on the long-term employability of students rather than the immediate demands of the industry.

“Is it our job to produce industry-ready graduates, or should we produce people who will be better long-term employees,” he asked.

“The company that takes them [graduates] will have to train them on a particular platform, but then this person should be easy to train because they’ve got the foundations down, and they should be more adaptable in the future,” he said.

Both industry experience and tertiary qualifications are attractive qualities in job candidates, Kelly Services’ Fuller said, noting a rise of work experience requirements in University courses to meet industry demand.

“Depending on what particular industry the client is within, a university degree may be a pre requisite of the role,” he said. “Others will simply need the candidate to be able to display a combination of the commercial and technical experience required to successfully work the role on a daily basis.”

“As employers demand more of their employees than they did 10 years ago, the educational institutions have responded by dramatically improving the level of preparation they put in place for making the graduates ‘career ready’ for when they gain their first commercial role.”

“More and more education facilities are incorporating a level of on site work experience as an integral part of their curriculum,” Fuller said.

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iTnews: Rising interest rates may drive online sales boom

As a journalist at CHANGEME:

As a journalist at iTnews:

A tightening Australian economy may be driving Australian consumers to look online for better deals, online shopping comparison site GetPrice suggests.

As the Reserve Bank of Australia raises interest rates in an effort to curb what has been said to be the fastest inflation in 16 years, higher borrowing and living costs are likely to discourage consumer spending.

Meanwhile, rising wages and the record low unemployment rate of recent years has fuelled the rise of a “borrowing” culture in Australia. Lending to consumers and businesses increased the most in five months in December, indicating last year's interest-rate increases haven't deterred borrowing.

According to GetPrice’s Managing Director, Chris Hitchen, the rising interest rates are likely to drive Australians to spend online, rather than haggling on High Street.

"As we approach Autumn, High Street sales are likely to moderate as consumers feel the pinch of an increase in petrol prices at Easter, escalating rents, falling share prices and the highest interest rates for 11 years," Hitchen predicts.

Price history and comparison data that is available online for specific products is likely to benefit consumers who are on the look out for better deals, he said, citing an especially strong demand for consumer electronics during the Christmas period and in the first quarter of 2008.

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iTnews: New music format thousands of times smaller than MP3

As a journalist at iTnews:

Scientists claim to have developed a music storage format that uses the absolute least amount of data needed to reproduce a piece of music.

By virtually modelling the interactions between a clarinet and clarinet player, researchers have digitally reproduced a 20-second instrumental solo in a file nearly 1,000 times smaller than a regular MP3 file.

"This is essentially a human-scale system of reproducing music," said Mark Bocko, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester and co-creator of the technology.

"Humans can manipulate their tongue, breath, and fingers only so fast, so in theory we shouldn't really have to measure the music many thousands of times a second like we do on a CD.”

“As a result, I think we may have found the absolute least amount of data needed to reproduce a piece of music,” he said.

In developing the format, researchers built a computer model of the clarinet based on measurements of every aspect of the instrument that affects its sound: from the back-pressure in the mouthpiece for every different fingering, to the way sound radiates from the instrument.

The team then created a virtual clarinet player by modeling the interactions between the musician and instrument, including the fingerings, the force of breath, and the pressure of the player's lips to determine how they would affect the response of the virtual clarinet.

After the virtual clarinet and musician were created, Bocko said it was a matter of letting the computer "listen" to a real clarinet performance to infer and record the various actions required to create a specific sound. The original sound is then reproduced by feeding the record of the player's actions back into the computer model.

While they have not yet achieved a flawless reproduction of an original performance on the clarinet, the researchers expect their finish line to be not far away. The team is currently working on including acoustic effects such as tonguing, which is how a clarinet player strikes the instrument with the tongue to better define ‘staccato’ notes.

As the method is refined, the researchers imagine that it may give computer musicians more intuitive ways to create expressive music by including the actions of a virtual musician in computer synthesizers.

As acoustic measurements and modeling algorithms improve, Bocko said the process eventually may represent the maximum possible data compression of music.

Future developments may allow the method to be applied to reproducing the highly complex human voice as well, he said.

"Maybe the future of music recording lies in reproducing performers and not recording them," Bocko said.

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iTnews: Virtual business

As a journalist at iTnews:

Beyond the realm of virtual escorts, real estate agents, and other entrepreneurial start-ups, the Second Life business world has been traditionally dominated by the largest of the real-world companies.

Australian telecommunications incumbent Telstra last year launched what was said to be the country’s first major corporate presence in the online virtual world. Dubbed “the Pond”, Telstra’s Second Life islands aim to encourage customer interaction while creating new sales and marketing opportunities.

Spanning multiple islands, and estimated to cost more than $20,000 at launch, Telstra’s Second Life presence features virtual recreations of iconic national landmarks such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Opera House, the Outback and Uluru.

"Second Life is a very compelling package offering entertainment, creative collaboration and business possibilities,” said Justin Milne, who is the Managing Director of BigPond Group.

"We've already seen how rapidly user-generated content has gained popularity online, in particular through our interactive BigBlogs and Game Arena,” he said.

"Now we're taking a glimpse of what the internet of the future could be like - driven by user-determined experience.”

Telstra’s vision of the future looks to be shared by the likes of IBM, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and Dell, which each have launched their respective Second Life presences for a mixed bag of purposes including staff recruitment, research and development, marketing and customer support.

Outside of the Fortune 500 big league, however, corporate uptake of virtual worlds has been less enthusiastic. On top of Linden Labs’s real estate hosting prices of US$1,675 per island, businesses can expect to pay US$295 per month in maintenance fees per island, not to mention the costs of hiring Second Life developers and support staff.

Open source opens virtual doors

In hopes of making the Second Life metaverse more palatable to businesses, enterprise solutions provider Clever Zebra has developed ready-made corporate complexes that it has made available under the Open Source GPL license.

Clever Zebra was founded last year by virtual worlds enthusiast Nick Wilson, on the principle of promoting virtual worlds as a platform for business. The company operates with the simple idea of “disrupting the way development in virtual worlds currently works”.

With the goal of making it easy and inexpensive for companies to work in virtual environments, Clever Zebra offers free copies of the buildings, code and tools that organizations need to develop their own Second Life presences.

Monetary opportunities for Clever Zebra come from additional paid offerings such as customisation, branding, installation, and training.

“I’m fond of the phrase "a rising tide lifts all boats" when describing our philosophy,” Wilson said.

“Unless we make this stuff easy and cheap, we'll never get anywhere, and it [virtual worlds] will only ever be the domain of large companies with six-figure research and development budgets.”

“I think the most valuable thing we have to offer is service, not architecture or code. By making it [the code] free, we make it easier for any company to come in here and experiment, to use SL for what we know it's good for: meetings, distance learning, etc,” he said.

It’s an odd tack on the virtual world business model, especially when compared to traditional virtual businesses whose profits are derived solely from in-world development work.

Wilson believes Clever Zebra to be the only enterprise solutions provider of its kind, adding that the company has received a mixed response to its business model from the wider Second Life community.

“Some folks love us, evangelize us, work with us and hang out with us while we do this stuff. Some folks hate us, think we're the death knell for the SL economy and go out of their way to tell people that,” he said.

“I think it's a pretty good balance. I’m happy to produce products that cause so much passion at either end. I figure we must be doing something right.”

Clever Zebra will this month launch Version 1.0 of its open source development kit, which includes a corporate complex, presentation halls, roads, showrooms and meeting areas.

The company currently spans five Second Life islands with its free, open source corporate architecture, providing ample room to its four staff members who perform all their work in-game.

“We really do work here [in Clever Zebra’s Second Life office],” Wilson boasts. “None of our company have met any of the others; we work from Denmark, Canada and the US and have never met physically.”

The tastefully designed headquarters and has all the appearances of a real-life office, and features numerous workspaces, glass-walled meeting rooms, casual sitting areas in which red couches surround glass coffee tables, and wall art.

“We actually find that by mimicking a real-life office, we get that wonderful effect of spontaneous interaction, and a lot of ideas and information get shared that would never have by just using email, instant message or some kind of teleconference gear,” Wilson said.

“It feels like we all work together in the same space, and get a lot done by just being close to one another.”

Dubbed “Zebra Corporate”, the kit has taken the four-person company some months to build, and has been in quiet beta for the past few weeks. Already, Wilson is aware of three users of Zebra Corporate, including Non Profit Commons, Coventry University's Serious Games Institute, and recruitment firm Kelly Services.

Virtual discussion

Meanwhile, information technology analyst firm Gartner is warning businesses against investing too heavily in Linden Labs’s metaverse.

Citing hardware requirements, server downtime, security, and identity authentication as potential issues, Gartner analysts have advised businesses to carefully consider the risks of establishing virtual operations when faced with the virtual world hype.

"The risks enterprises face as a result of their involvement in virtual worlds are real and can be significant," said Steve Prentice, vice president and analyst at Gartner.

"When planning enterprise activities in virtual worlds, an enterprise's awareness of the risks, as well as a reasoned and objective analysis of them, will enable it to objectively evaluate the overall situation and offset risks against often-nebulous benefits," he said.

The highly interactive world of Second Life could pose brand marketing problems for companies that are particularly sensitive to brand issues, as well as social and ethical positioning, Gartner analysts say, suggesting the use of more heavily moderated virtual worlds such as There, Kaneva and Activeworlds.

By the end of 2009, Gartner predicts that other, more scalable virtual environments will emerge as attractive alternatives to Second Life. Sony’s forthcoming Home, a free-to-download, three-dimensional community for Playstation3 users worldwide that has been planned for launch early this year, was named as one such alternative.

"Second Life is acceptable for pilots and prototypes," said James Lundy, managing vice president at Gartner.

"However, current technical issues would have a significant impact on any organisation that wanted to use it in a production environment, and we are advising companies to evaluate alternatives."

To discuss the potentials and issues to do with the corporate uptake of Second Life, Clever Zebra is hosting an in-world vBusiness Expo.

The four-day-long conference will be held in the largest of Clever Zebra’s ampitheatres from April 24 to 27, and will feature keynote presentations by Erica Driver, principal analyst with Forrester Research; Sandra Kearney, IBM’s Global Director of Emerging 3D Internet and Virtual Business; and David Fenech, Senior Director of Internet Services with Kelly Services.

A separate panel about the value of virtual worlds in the enterprise will be chaired by Gartner's Prentice, and bootcamps for virtual world newbies will run in the lead up to the conference.

Among other guests are Qwaq Forums’s CEO Greg Nuyens, and Nicole Yankelovich, Sun Microsystems principal investigator of collaborative environments, who was responsible for Sun's own virtual world, Project Wonderland.

“This will be the first large scale virtual worlds business event [to be] actually hosted in a virtual world,” Clever Zebra’s Wilson said.

“The other conferences want to talk about virtual worlds, but won’t actually eat the dog food as well,” he said with a laugh.

Having just past the first birthday of his Second Life avatar, 57 Miles, Wilson has great expectations of the future of virtual worlds, and big plans for Clever Zebra.

“I discovered Second Life at the start of 2007,” he recalled. “Within six weeks, I’d quit my social media startup to work with Virtual Worlds.”

“I think this, or something like it will eventually become a huge part of everybody’s online daily lives, and I want to be involved in it, and influencing it, right from the start.”

“We [Clever Zebra] will be working on vBusiness Expo, and vBusiness Legal [conference] the following month, as events are what fuel SL,” he said. “We also want to build a pretty vast repository of high quality corporate and educational architecture and tools, and will keep working on the library.”

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iTnews: IT recruiter signs international hire agreement

As a journalist at iTnews:

A newly-awarded Federal Government labour agreement will allow three recruitment companies to hire and land skilled workers from overseas.

In accordance with a newly implemented overhaul of the 457 Visa system, the agreement ensures that members of the recruitment industry meet the country’s targets for foreign skilled hires.

IT recruiter 3W, which was awarded the agreement this week, expects the 457 Visa reforms to facilitate the recruitment of skilled professionals from overseas to help meet the demands of Australia’s skills-short market.

“In the past, the Recruitment and On Hire Industries have displayed an inability to regulate themselves in relation to the hiring of overseas workers,” said Bruce Mills, joint CEO of 3W.

“Collectively they have made significant returns from this source of workers; however their reinvestment into building the local IT skills base has been questionable.”

“The new On Hire rules bring long-needed regulation and will support appropriate investment and industry development,” he said.

457 regulations encourage companies to adhere to the Australian immigration system by fast-tracking skilled temporary visa applications that are lodged by recognised employers.

While the agreement means that more Australian jobs will be granted to international workers, 3W Director and joint CEO Andrew McCarroll believes that it may alleviate the larger threat of offshoring.

“This overseas pipeline of skills will also allow many of our clients to commit to new IT projects, confident that they can resource these projects from the local workforce, supported by key skills sourced from offshore,” he said.

“We are already aware of a number of situations where this will be a defining factor in the decision not to send whole projects offshore to locations such as India,” he said.

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