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iTnews: Forgetful mobile devices for careless users

2008-10-16T16:05:00.005+11:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

“Blessed are the forgetful: for they shall have done with their stupidities too,” German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote.

The 19th Century philosophy seems to have struck a chord with modern day manufacturers, who tout mobile devices with remote memory erasure capabilities or that store no user data at all.

Securing mobile data has become an increasingly prevalent issue for businesses in recent times, as notebooks and smartphones gain ubiquity in the corporate world.

Employees who access corporate data remotely and out of office hours may threaten the security of sensitive information in cases of accidental loss or theft of their mobile devices.

IT contractor EDS recently was reported to have lost a portable hard drive containing data on as many as 1.7 million prospective U.K. armed forces recruits.

The incident follows the U.K. Ministry of Defence’s recent admissions to the loss of three hard drives containing details of more than 50,000 members of the Royal Air Force, and the loss of loss of 658 laptops and 121 USB data drives since 2004.

Other storage devices such as CDs and flash memory cards also have resulted in data leakage in the past.

Sensitive MI6 photos found their way to the public last month via a camera that was sold on eBay. Meanwhile, in March, HSBC lost a CD containing names, life insurance cover levels and dates of birth of 370000 of its customers, prompting industry criticisms of ‘basic stupidity’.

Microsoft has partnered with Nokia, Apple and Sony Ericsson to safeguard sensitive information through technology that wipes clean the memory of missing smartphones.

Dubbed Microsoft System Centre Mobile Device Manager 2008, the technology is a function of Windows Mobile 6.1, and allows system administrators to deliver a ‘kill command’ to a lost or stolen mobile device via Microsoft Exchange.

The kill command is executed as soon as the missing device is connected to a cellular or Internet-enabled network, after which a confirmation notice is delivered to the administrator.

Users also are able to encrypt external memory cards, such as SD cards, so that they can only be read by the smartphone. Because the encryption key is stored on the smartphone, an executed kill command would render data on encrypted memory cards inaccessible.

Personal data that is not backed up will be lost forever with the execution of a kill command. However, as most corporate data is stored on the Exchange server, it can easily be restored on a replacement device.

Rick Anderson, who is Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobile Solution Specialist, said that the technology is focussed on reducing the chance of corporate data being compromised by reducing the window of opportunity.

He noted that Windows Mobile 6 has attained the Common Criteria EAL2+ Assurance Level after assessment by the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), and has been accepted for use in the Australian Government's official communications and information systems.

“You certainly have your mobile phone everywhere, so you have to be conscious of the fact that you can lose it, by leaving it on the train for example,” he said.

“Blackberry and us [Microsoft] would probably be the ones to look at in terms of corporate mobile solutions,” he told iTnews.

Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard (HP) has added to its notebook range the HP Compaq 6720t, which features an embedded, write-protected operating system.

The 6720t is a mobile thin client which, like conventional desk-based thin clients, is designed to provide access to virtual computing solutions, such as blade PCs or virtual desktop infrastructure.

It is a solid-state system with flash memory and no moving parts. No data is stored on the device, so sensitive data is not compromised in case of loss of theft.

“From a thin client point of view, it’s [corporate data] all secured in a data centre,” said Fiona Wright, who is HP Australia’s Market Development Manager for Thin Clients.

“For example, if an agent is on the road and left the device somewhere, their sensitive information would not be lost or compromised,” she told iTnews.

The 6720t was released in July 2008 as the commercial world’s first thin client that has been built for mobility.

However, the fact that it relies on server-based data and applications may somewhat limit users’ movements.

IDC research manager of IT spending, Jean-Marc Annonier, expects a broadband connection to be the minimum requirement for the remote use of thin clients.

“Thin clients are not really good for mobility,” he said. “What you need is a live network connection for the thin client to connect to the server.”

“You can’t do this on a train, definitely, even if you have a 3G connection,” he told iTnews.

“The problem is latency,” he said. “With 3G, you may have one second of latency, [during which time] you can’t see what you’re doing.”

But for businesses whose employees work predominantly from the office, home, or a client’s broadband-enabled premises, mobile thin clients could deliver not only security, but economic benefits as well.

A recent report by IDC found thin clients to reduce hardware and software costs by 87 percent, IT costs by 61 percent, and worker downtime by 49 percent when compared with traditional PCs.

Through reducing the need for hardware upgrades and enabling software updates to be rolled-out centrally on the server, thin clients were found to produce a 466 percent return on investment for businesses that were studied.

Large organisations are expected to reap the greatest return on investments for thin client deployments. Annonier expects organisations with between 500 to 1000 workers, using between 300 and 700 devices, to have most to gain.

IDC estimates that one quarter of Australian organisations already have deployed thin clients, and deployments are roughly evenly split between production or pilot phases.

13 percent of organisations are found to be evaluating the technology, while six percent claimed to have no plans to deploy thin clients. The remaining 56 percent of organisations surveyed were either unable to respond, or unaware of the technology.

“Computer virtualisation, although not a new concept, has come of age,” Annonier wrote in the report.

“The days of the traditional PC and the distributed computing model as we know them are numbered and the trend towards centralised computing is already becoming increasingly evident,” he wrote.

According to HP’s Wright, customer feedback for the 6720t has been positive so far.

She expects mobile thin clients to appeal especially to mobile workers who deal with sensitive information, such as those in the health and finance industries.

“Being a new product, there’s a lot of conversation and a lot of hype,” she told iTnews. “From my point of view, it [the technology’s suitability] really does depend on what the IT manager wants to use the thin client for.”

“I do hear from customers that security is on their minds, and I do believe that mobile thin clients will offer what they are after,” she said.

iTnews: Economic crisis a 'return to normality', ANZ CEO says

2008-10-08T16:23:00.000+11:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Global economic uncertainty may be curbing jobs and investments, but according to Mike Smith, CEO of the ANZ bank, ‘good businesses’ should have nothing to fear.

Addressing 850 business delegates at a luncheon organised by the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce (AICC) last month, Smith described ‘one of the greatest economic crises since the Great Depression’.

“I’ve lived through -- and survived -- at least seven economic crises,” he said. “Everyone is very skittish, very nervous, and least bit of information is often taken out of context.”

“I believe we have 18 months to run of this extreme volatility,” he said.

Following the U.S. sub prime crisis and the subsequent collapse of major financial institutions, Australian businesses now face a tightening of credit availability and a softening local economy.

According to Smith, the credit crunch could re-establish a divide between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ businesses -- a divide that he said has blurred due to Australia’s strong economic growth in recent times.

“If you think about Australia, for 15 years, we’ve had very good credit growth and access to equity has been extraordinary,” he said. “That has meant that good businesses have been doing well, but so have bad businesses.”

“What we’re seeing is a return to normality. Good businesses will continue to do well, but bad businesses may not,” he said.

“Access to credit should not be a problem for a good project -- if it stacks up, it will work,” he said. “If you’re a good customer of the bank, there should not be an issue. You should have access to credit.”

Event sponsor IBM echoed Smith’s optimism, citing a global expansion strategy that has resulted in 63 percent of its revenue coming from outside the U.S., including 21 percent from the Asia Pacific region, during the past year.

Glen Boreham, managing director for IBM Australia and New Zealand, highlighted recent Gartner research that predicts regional spending to increase by 8 percent from last year, despite the U.S. downturn.

As well as striking recent deals with BHP Billiton, Customs, and QLD Motorways, IBM also has invested $10.8 million in a new IT Services Centre at the University of Ballarat Technology Park (UBTP).

“In the last 12 months, IBM has hired over 1,000 people through acquisitions, contracts, graduate and professional recruitment,” Boreham told iTnews. “Currently IBM employs nearly 15,000 people in Australia.”

“IBM has a proven record of providing high value to clients during turbulent times, which reflects the market's confidence in our strategy and business direction,” he said.

“For IBM in Australia, we are continuing to win major deals and our clients are continuing to look to IT to help transform their organisations by improving productivity through innovation and automation.”

iTnews: Poor IT performance surprises job market survey

2008-10-08T16:21:00.001+11:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Advertisements for IT jobs have fallen 19 percent during the past twelve months, signalling the beginning of a buyers market for jobs in Australia, the Olivier Job Index claims.

Of 385,488 online job vacancy advertisements surveyed in September, vacancies in the IT sector fell 3.27 percent in the month.

September was the fourth consecutive month of decline, and saw the overall Olivier Job Index fall 1.17 percent in the month and 2.03 percent in the year to reach a five-year low.

A year ago, IT was the second largest job sector after Sales and Marketing. It has fallen behind Engineering, Trades and Services, and Building and Construction to be ranked fifth.

“I've been surprised at how poorly IT has performed,” said Olivier Group’s Director, Robert Olivier, noting that IT has experienced the second largest fall during the past year, after the Banking and Finance sector.

“In a year it’s gone from a sellers market to a buyers market. It’s been a slow painful decline -- a death by a thousand cuts.”

“I think this is because banking and the public sector are big IT users and demand has fallen. Also, many Australian operations are part of US global businesses and the squeeze is coming from head office,” he speculated.

Although the ‘innovative spirit and drive’ is unlikely to be lost, a decline in the availability of venture capital cash and monetary investment could curb commercial development, Olivier said.

Meanwhile, he expects employers to be gambling on how long the economic slowdown will last by cutting back on temporary staff and contractors, and graduate hires.

Job advertisements for temporary staff and contractors fell 4.7 percent in September and 14.3 percent during the past year. Meanwhile, advertisements for graduate positions fell 2.2 percent in the month and 16.03 percent in the year.

“There’s no point letting people go if you’re going to have to rehire in 12 months or less,” Olivier said, highlighting the security of permanent positions so far.

“But if employers see the problems lasting longer, then we’ll see a rise in the jobless rate,” he said.

For the younger generation of employees and job hunters, there may be tough times ahead, as the falling value of superannuation and investment funds may lead mature workers to defer retirement, and in some cases, bring people out of retirement.

“When employers become more careful about whom they employ and supply exceeds demand, job tenure becomes a critical factor,” Olivier said. “In the 2001-2 downturn, we saw employers penalising the job hoppers.”

“They [Gen Y] have never experienced a contracting labour market and with all the talk of an aging population and skills shortages perhaps were not expecting it either!”

Olivier said workers should consolidate with one employer, and make sure that they are considered core staff and high performance / low maintenance.

He said the global economic slowdown could put an end to part of the widely-touted skills shortage. However, he noted that demand for staff in some sectors will be stronger than in others.

“If the global meltdown gets worse or stays for longer then overall supply will exceed demand and some of the shortage will be over,” he said.

“But it’s also important not be generalise and to consider matters on an occupational basis,” he said.

“Healthcare, mining and engineering will continue to have shortages, but there will be a lot of pain in financial services, IT and a wide range of white collar professions.”

iTnews: iPhone startup brings fuel price app to Australia

2008-10-03T16:26:00.002+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

A team of developers from Australia and the U.S. is monetising consumers’ petrol price concerns with the launch of a free-to-use iPhone application.

Dubbed ‘GasBag’, the application is designed to locate the cheapest local petrol station using user-submitted price information and rich mapping framework.

Since its launch in the U.S. last month, GasBag has attracted about 75,000 unique users across the country. The application is expected to launch in Australia, Canada and the U.K. by the end of this month.

GasBag was conceptualised in May, and its parent company, jamcode LLC, was incorporated one month later.

Although three of the four jamcode founders are Australian, the team chose to focus its initial development efforts in the U.S. due to the popularity of the iPhone and consumers’ sensitivity to fuel prices.

“Everyone here [in California] talks about fuel all the time,” said Mick Johnson, an Australian GasBag developer who currently resides in California.

“We saw that need, and realised that if we could cater to it, we could do very well,” he told iTnews.

The application currently is offered as a free download from Apple’s iTunes App store and is supported by target advertisements through a partnership between jamcode and mobile advertising company, Mobclix.

As GasBag develops, jamcode expects to provide improved targeting according to information such as car model, trip destination, how often the user fills up, and users’ advertising preferences.

“Our current modelling shows GasBag to be monetisable to the tune of roughly one to five dollars per user per year, once you take into account how often someone fills up, how many ads they'll see, and how much each ad is worth,” Johnson told iTnews.

“We are currently targeting to hit 400,000 to 500,000 users by the end of 2008 across four countries,” he said.

Prior to launching in Australia, GasBag developers will be working on locating petrol stations using street directories and public maps, and converting units from gallons to litres and miles to kilometres.

Another challenge could be competition from Google, which recently partnered with petrol price monitoring company Motormouth to provide a similar Web-based application.

However, Johnson views competition from Google in a positive light, noting that GasBag has become the most popular application of its kind on the App Store despite competition from ‘four or five’ similar applications in the U.S.

“I'm very happy to see the Google-Motormouth collaboration,” he said. “For starters, it's a direct validation of the Australian market for GasBag.”

“Secondly, I think their [Google’s] model of receiving data from their own fleet of sources is a good reliable pulse, but I also think GasBag's inherent advantage is the extremely strong user community it's built on. As such, we can update our list of stations, our prices, and our addresses much more rapidly,” he said.

Johnson said the iPhone provides developers with opportunities for innovation through its extra features and the coherence of the iPhone SDK code base.

He expects GasBag to be just the beginning of products and opportunities for jamcode.

“It [GasBag] looked like a good application to start with, as we can now leverage this user base to bring out a suite of applications with similar functionality but for different use cases, such as finding parking lots, ATMs, hotels, etc,” he told iTnews.

“The iTunes store has been great for GasBag - it really let us provide our application to an extremely wide market very quickly,” he said.

iTnews: Non-equilibrium chips could avoid overheating laptops

2008-10-02T16:28:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Researchers are re-examining the Second Law of Thermodynamics in a bid to manage heat from laptops and other miniaturised electronics.

As chip manufacturers cram increasing numbers of transistor switches in small areas to make faster, cheaper chips, heat dissipation has become a growing concern.

The Pentium II processor, introduced in 1997, was said to generate more heat than a hot plate, and Intel in 1999 predicted that the amount of heat generated by computer chips would increase linearly as chip sizes decrease.

Should the trend continue, future electronic devices could generate more heat than nuclear reactors and be ‘as hot as the Sun’ within two decades, researchers say.

“Laptops are very hot now, so hot that they are not 'lap' tops anymore,” said Avik Ghosh, who is researching new heat dissipation methods at the University of Virginia's School of Engineering and Applied Science.

“It [heat] is probably the most critical impediment to continued miniaturisation of transistors, which carry out logic operations in computers,” he told iTnews.

Ghosh and his colleague Mircea Stan are investigating a concept known as ‘non-equilibrium Brownian ratchets’ which could revolutionise how heat is dissipated between computer components.

Currently, devices are engineered to operate near thermal equilibrium, in accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states that heat tends to transfer from a hotter unit to a cooler one.

However, using the concept of Brownian ratchets, which are systems that convert non-equilibrium energy to do useful work, the researchers hope to allow computers to operate at low power levels, and harness power dissipated by other functions.

“The main quest we have is to see if by departing from near-equilibrium operation, we can perform computation more efficiently,” Ghosh told iTnews.

“We aren't breaking the Second Law -- that's not what we are claiming,” he said. “We are simply re-examining its implications, as much of the established understanding of power dissipation is based on near-equilibrium operation.”

But while the physics of non-equilibrium Brownian ratchets has been studied extensively for some time, the concept’s application in a technology context has not.

Ghosh expects to face challenges ranging from proof-of-concept demonstration, to going beyond models to experimental testing, and analysing the practicality, robustness and cost-effectiveness of these schemes.

“Until we do a proper study, we can't be sure whether this method would suffice
to address the considerable challenges of heat generation and removal,” he said.

“Our short-term plan is to study this over the next three to five years at this time to see where we end up with non-equilibrium switching, and whether it could offer a solution.”

iTnews: GPS spoofing device developed to thwart spoofing

2008-10-01T16:30:00.001+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Researchers have developed a portable Global Positioning System (GPS) spoofing device in a bid to explore aspects of civilian spoofing and how such attacks may be thwarted.

By providing researchers with information about which aspects of spoofing are most easily implemented, the project could allow device manufacturers to prioritise their spoofing defences.

Spoofing is a term used to describe the transmission of fake signals that navigation devices accept as authentic signals from GPS satellites.

As GPS devices become more pervasive in home and business use, spoofing could have a serious impact -- for example, through large enterprises such as utility companies that use GPS in their core operations.

“A spoofed GPS device can be tricked into computing the wrong position or time,” said Brent Ledvina, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech who conducted the research in collaboration with Cornell University.

“This can be devastating for some receivers and a nuisance for others,” he said.

The research was presented at the Institute of Navigation GNSS conference in Georgia last month, after more than a year of equipment building and experimentation.

While GPS spoofing has attracted some U.S. government attention during the past half-decade, manufacturers have yet to address these security concerns, Ledvina said.

“Currently, GPS receiver equipment manufacturers do not have spoofing on their
radar,” Ledvina told iTnews.

“[Cornell researcher] Todd Humphreys and I talked with the leading receiver manufacturers at the Institute of Navigation conference … and not a single individual we spoke with was knowledgeable of the topic.”

“That doesn't mean these companies are not interested or concerned, per se, but their representatives at this conference certainly were not,” he said.

Ledvina expects most current GPS receivers to be vulnerable to spoofing attacks, with the yet-to-be verified exception of multi-antenna receivers that use special signal processing.

The researchers have proposed two software modifications that they expect to make receivers less vulnerable to spoofing by changing how they react to signals.

They have filed a provisional patent application for the technology and are in discussion with ‘a couple’ of companies about commercialisation.

However, Ledvina expects the only long-term solution to come from encrypting signals broadcast by the GPS satellite constellation by adding an authentication signal.

“The truth is there is no perfect solution for a stand-alone, single-antenna receiver that does not use any type of authentication,” he told iTnews.

“It would most likely take a long time [for authentication signals to be added] because the signal specifications for the broadcast GPS signals are difficult to modify, and satellites on orbit today have a long lifetime.”

“Note that adding an authenticating signal is not a technical issue; it's more of a political issue,” he said.

iTnews: HP collaborates to identify Wi-Fi dead zones cheaply

2008-09-30T16:32:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

A collaborative effort by HP Labs and Rice University has produced a technique that could lower the cost of identifying ‘dead zones’ in large wireless networks.

The technique enables Wi-Fi architects to test and refine their layouts before a network is deployed.

According to Joshua Robinson, a graduate student at Rice University, there currently is no standard industry practice to identify Wi-Fi dead zones.

“The frequency of dead zones have actually been a huge obstacle to deploying city-wide wireless networks,” he told iTnews.

“Since companies don't advertise how they find dead zones, it's hard to say authoritatively what happens.”

Some providers employ expensive, exhaustive measurement studies that require the network to be tested from every location from which potential users may wish to connect.

Other approaches involve taking a few measurements in an ad hoc fashion and fixing any remaining dead zones after the network is deployed.

According to Robinson, the goal of the new technique is to focus measurement efforts on ‘trouble areas’ that potentially could be dead zones.

The technique identifies locations at which the network should be tested by combining wireless signal models with publicly-available information about basic topography, street locations and land use.

“We develop accurate predictions and use these predictions to avoid spending a lot of measurements in areas that have clearly very good or very poor performance,” he explained.

“This is how we are able to use a small number of measurements to more accurately find a network's performance and identify all the dead zones.”

The research won best-paper honours at the annual MobiCom ’08 wireless conference in San Francisco this month.

By requiring five times fewer measurements when compared with a grid sampling strategy, and ‘far fewer’ measurements than needed for an exhaustive measurement strategy, the new technique could reduce labour and equipment costs, researchers say.

Robinson expects the municipalities, companies, and non-profit organisations looking to deploy city-wide wireless mesh networks to benefit most from the new technique.

He named for example the Technology-for-All (TFA) network that is being built by Rice University in partnership with a local non-profit organisation to wirelessly provide free Internet access to an under-served neighbourhood in Houston, Texas.

“We currently serve around 4000 people,” he told iTnews. “Since we do not have a big budget to test the network, techniques to reduce the cost and time involved in finding our dead zones are very helpful.”

Besides the TFA deployment, the new technique also has been tested on Google’s wireless network in Mountain View, California.

When compared with exhaustive measurement studies of both networks, the technique was found to achieve approximately 90 percent accuracy while requiring less than two percent of the number of measurements performed.

In the short term, Rice University researchers will be focusing on extending their research for use in the network planning process.

HP Labs has a definite commercial interest in the project and has been involved in prior deployments in Taipei. However, no plans for commercialisation of the technique have been announced as yet.

iTnews: Beware smartphone data leakage, Marshal warns

2008-09-26T16:38:00.001+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

The increasing use of Blackberry, iPhone and other smartphone devices in the enterprise could put corporate data at risk, content security vendor Marshal warns.

According to Marshal’s Asia-Pacific Vice President, Jeremy Hulse, companies need to govern the use of smartphones, which enable a greater number of people to access company data from anywhere.

While notebook computers have enabled similar data mobility in the past, Hulse expects the burgeoning smartphone culture to introduce new risks to enterprise security.

“You don’t really pull a notebook out as much as a smartphone,” he noted. “The risk is pulling a smartphone out with friends at a bar, leaving it around, or losing it in a public place.”

Highlighting the importance of financial and strategic data to a corporation, Hulse said businesses should pay more attention to defining and protecting their critical information.

“The level of risk [posed by smartphones] depends on the type of information that people are pushing down to mobile devices, and the locations they are accessing this information from,” he told iTnews.

“They [businesses] have to ask themselves, ‘Do people need to access corporate information on mobile devices?’”

Market pervasion and a diminutive size have contributed to the fact that mobile phones and PDAs currently are far more commonly lost, or left behind, than notebook computers.

According to a recent survey by privacy vendor Credant technologies, a total of 62000 mobile devices have been left in London cabs during the past six months.

While personal data and identity fraud has been the main worry of lost mobile devices in the past, Hulse expects corporate data loss soon to steal the spotlight.

“It’s only a matter of time, especially with the amount of storage available in new devices,” he said.

Besides instilling a corporate culture of greater care when accessing company data on a smartphone, Hulse suggests the use of technologies such as content filtering, hardware and software locks.

While he could not identify manufacturers of mobile devices that offer particularly good or bad security, Hulse noted that some vendors have collaborated with Microsoft to install technology that wipes clean a devices’ memory in case of loss or theft.

Other vendors offer software that provides a standard operating environment across mobile devices and enterprise desktop computers, which could enable organisations to monitor and filter the transfer of sensitive data.

Noting that smartphone technology could benefit employees’ productivity, Hulse said security should not be seen as a barrier to mobility, but an enabler to maximise the benefit from mobile technology investments.

“I think smartphones can actually be really productive, but I think they need to be looked at in terms of security,” he told iTnews.

“The capability [for increased productivity] is there, but training for staff needs to be there too,” he said.

iTnews: In-the-cloud security to grow in economic crisis, Webroot predicts

2008-09-25T16:40:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

The economic downturn could give the software as a service (SaaS) model an edge over traditional security software provision, Webroot believes.

In Sydney this week to speak at Gartner’s IT Security Summit, Webroot CTO Gerhard Eschelbeck highlighted the difficulty of managing an evolving threat landscape amid staff shortages and tightening budgets.

While e-mail security has dominated the spotlight previously, Webroot research indicates that the Web has been a greater source of threats in recent times.

The research also found that more than half of Web security decision makers feel that keeping security products up-to-date is challenging, and almost 40 percent believe their companies devote insufficient resources to Web security.

“Nowadays, the threat landscape is changing in so far that the variants of malware is exploding compared to five years ago,” Eschelbeck said, noting that malware variants in circulation today are five times as numerous as those five years ago.

“It is clear that the traditional applications are reaching some of their physical limits,” he told iTnews.

Compared to traditional, on-premise security applications, Webroot’s SaaS offerings provide businesses with the ability to outsource the burden of security.

Companies’ e-mail and Web traffic is filtered through Webroot’s data centres in Australia to detect and remove any malware.

Webroot has invested approximately $1m in its Australian operations, including a newly-launched data centre in Sydney and eight support staff across Sydney and Melbourne.

According to Charles Heunemann, Webroot’s Managing Director of Asia Pacific Operations, the company has provisioned for ‘significant growth’ in the region.

The Sydney data centre currently is used to only a ‘single digit percentage’ of its capabilities, he said.

“What we’ve got is a situation where we’ve come from an early adaptor stage to a wider use of SaaS,” Heunemann said of the growing market for in-the-cloud security applications.

The rise of SaaS was said to be a result of economic pressure to deliver more value through IT and a trend towards outsourcing ‘non-core’ applications.

In the Asia-Pacific region, the market for SaaS is experiencing a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 44 percent, Heunemann said, compared to a CAGR of 13 percent for on-premise software.

Webroot estimates in-the-cloud security applications currently to have a market penetration of 8 percent in Australia, 4 percent in Asia and 25 percent in the U.K.

“The genesis of security technology tends to be in the U.K.,” Eschelbeck said, expecting Australian adoption to reach similar figures ‘before long’.

In terms of Eschelbeck’s research into the ‘Laws of Vulnerabilities’, the SaaS model could reduce the threat posed by current Web-based malware by narrowing organisations’ window of exposure.

“The Laws of Vulnerabilities is to do with how quickly organisations are patching their systems,” he explained. “There is a physical limit to how quickly companies can patch, so there is always a window of exposure of five to nine days.”

“The huge advantage that it [SaaS] brings is moving the responsibility [of patching] from the organisation to the provider,” he said.

Heunemann noted that through providing a specialised security service to multiple organisations, service providers such as Webroot also have access to economies of scale and greater visibility of the overall threat landscape.

Webroot also is able to provide its customers with some level of insurance, through guaranteeing a minimum malware capture and detection rate.

“Compared to the traditional model where you’re looking at deploying an on-site application to protect against malware, the SaaS model essentially is a pay-as-you-go option that scales very well linearly, as you grow,” Eschelbeck said.

“Typically, IT departments are not overstaffed -- I’ve never heard of overstaffing as an being an issue for these departments -- so the advantage [of SaaS] is taking the burden [of security] away from end users,” he said.

iTnews: Ruxcon hacker conference opens arms to security pros

2008-09-24T16:42:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Community-organised hacker conference, Ruxcon, is aiming to attract a ‘more diverse field’ of attendees to its annual event in November.

Now in its sixth year, Ruxcon is expected to bring together some 350 vulnerability enthusiasts from across Australia.

Ruxcon 2008 will be the sixth such event since its launch in 2003. Over the years, the conference has evolved from a technical, specialist event to have a broader security focus, according to conference organiser Chris Spencer.

“The focus is going to be a little more professional this time around,” Spencer told iTnews. “We want to start attracting a more diverse field of security professionals.”

“I don’t think there is much of an Australian hacking community anymore; the security industry has commercialised vulnerability research, so that there just isn’t a vibrant hacking community,” he said.

Spencer compared Ruxcon to high-profile hacker conferences such as Defcon and Black Hat in the U.S., describing Ruxcon as a hobbyist, community-driven event.

Since its inception, the conference has been organised by the same group of volunteers, all of whom have day jobs in the Australian security industry.

When not organising Ruxcon, Spencer works as a vulnerability researcher. Other organisers include consultants and security administrators.

Ruxcon 2008 will be held at the University of Technology, Sydney from 29 to 30 November, and costs $60 to attend.

Presenters hailing from Australia, New Zealand, Italy and France will discuss topics such as how Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) can be used by malware, and heap exploitation theory in Windows Vista.

Despite the vulnerabilities and methods that will be discussed at the conference, Spencer notes that Ruxcon has not encountered any resistance from vendors to date.

And previous years’ sponsorship by vendors such as Google and VeriSign’s iDefense has not impacted presentations such as ‘Google Hacking’, which will be discussed this year.

“When they [Ruxcon presenters] present on these topics, they are doing it from a research background and not a malicious standpoint,” Spencer said of the risks of revealing vulnerabilities.

“As a whole, it’s [Ruxcon] just about putting on a demonstration of the talent we have in Australia,” he said.

iTnews: Angel investor seeks geek chic innovations

2008-09-23T16:43:00.001+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Australian Web site developer Geekdom is seeking geeky ideas for its online business incubation program.

The program, dubbed ‘Geeksville’, targets projects in Australia and offers successful applicants angel funding, mentoring and business resources.

According to Ian Naylor, Chief Technology Officer of Geekdom, the program aims to ‘bridge the gap’ between budding and business-ready stages of an idea.

“Typically VCs will not fund an idea from inception,” Naylor explained. “Effectively, they are stage two investors once the business has been bootstrapped for a period and a modicum of success has been achieved.”

“The core area of our business is developing with investment in mind,” he said. “Using our venture capital connections, we have a good idea of what has a chance to be picked up.”

Geeksville was formed early this year, when Geekdom executives realised that its core Web site development business structure could support external as well as internal innovations.

The incubation program has now been running for six months and is slated to publically launch its first batch of start-up companies soon.

A six month time to market is among a loose set of selection criteria for Geeksville hopefuls. Other criteria include: innovative ideas for the online market; and a project’s manageability.

While the incubator program has a distinct focus on Australian innovations, it encourages applicants to focus on both local and international markets to create scalable opportunities.

Along with salary, resources, mentoring and business structure, successful applicants also receive access to other resources within Geekdom’s parent organisation, the Photon Group.

The Photon Group encompasses more than 50 other companies, including strategic communications company Love, Naked Communications, and European public relations consultancy Hotwire.

“As an incubator we see our value not just in providing money, but structure and resources,” Naylor told iTnews, “so really the less you [applicants] have, other than the idea, the more value we can add.”

iTnews: Video game GPUs find use in biological modelling

2008-09-22T16:46:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Forget supercomputers -- researchers have devised a method of using graphics processing technology from video games in complex biological modelling.

Applied to a new area in biology called agent-based modelling, the technology could enable a wider range of researchers and medical practitioners to simulate processes graphically.

Agent-based modelling simulates the behaviours of complex systems by predicting the actions and interactions of its various components.

Currently, researchers in this field of work either manually develop, or use toolkits to build, code which runs directly on a computer’s CPU (central processing unit).

According to Roshan D'Souza of the Michigan Technological University, such code often has limited scalability, so large-scale models often require the use of a supercomputer.

D’Souza is attempting to make large-scale modelling more accessible with the use of graphic processing units (GPUs) that currently are used in video games to do parallel computation for the purpose of realistic rendering of scenes.

Using GPUs, researchers could simulate large-scale models with tens of millions of cells on a regular desktop costing under US$1400, he expects.

“Currently, if you want to simulate a model anywhere close to what we are handling, you have to go to a supercomputer costing a few million quid,” he told iTnews.

“GPUs are cheap – [costing around] $400 -- and are a bang for the buck,” he said. “You can do sufficiently large models to handle quite a large portion of the scenarios.”

Another benefit of using GPUs is that they produce real-time simulations, whereas supercomputers calculate simulations offline without real-time visual display.

Results of GPU simulations may not be any better than those produced by a supercomputer, nor do GPUs replace supercomputers in simulating ultra-large models comprised of billions of agents, D’Souza said.

However, by providing a cost-effective method for large-scale modelling, GPUs could be used by physicians to do diagnostics or to plan individualised treatment plans for patients.

“The big picture is this: in the near future, when your local physician starts using ABMs [agent-based models] … he/she will not be able to access a supercomputer,” D’Souza said.

“But for sure he/she can buy a GPU and insert in into his/her desktop,” he said.

In the past, GPUs have been used for research into fluid simulation, n-body dynamics and protein folding.

The application of GPUs in agent-based modelling came as an ‘accident’, D’Souza said, when investigating CAD (computer-aided design) tools to detect design errors in mechanical engineering designs.

“I used GPUs for this,” he recalls, “then I was looking around for other ‘stuff’ to do with the GPU. I found that people had already worked on molecular dynamics, fluids, protein folding etc – but agent-based modelling was open.”

“With a $1,400 desktop, we can beat a computing cluster,” he said of the technology. “We are effectively democratising supercomputing and putting these powerful tools into the hands of any researcher.”

“Every time I present this research, I make it a point to thank the millions of video gamers who have inadvertently made this possible,” he said.

iTnews: 'Spoken tokens' touted as ultimate security

2008-09-19T16:50:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

An Australian market for biometric voice authentication is taking shape from early adopters in the banking, government and service industries.

According to Chuck Buffum, who is Vice President of Caller Authentication Solutions for Nuance Communications, more Australian companies are likely to be authenticating their customers with ‘spoken tokens’ within the next few months.

In Sydney to meet with customers this week, Buffum expects the local voice authentication market to grow to within three months of more mature markets such as the U.S., U.K. and Canada by mid-2009.

“It’s very early in the market take up,” he said, estimating there to be eight to 10 consumer-facing biometric voice authentication deployments in the world currently.

“That will change in the next few months,” he said, citing discussions with Australian banks and government agencies, which are expected to deploy the technology within six to nine months.

Currently, Nuance’s voice authentication technology is used by subscription television provider Austar to handle orders for its premium services and movies.

The authentication and call steering system is said to have achieved an initial return on investment in less than 12 months, and currently handles more than 1.5 million (51 percent) calls per year.

Besides the convenience and cost benefits of an automated voice authentication system, Buffum expects the biometric technology to provide consumers with greater account security.

“All around the world, there is more and more attention on protecting personal information and keeping that secure,” he told iTnews.

“Companies need to be encouraged to recognise that vulnerability and use suitable technologies to protect their customers,” he said.

Buffum warned of the public availability of personal information on the Internet. Such information often is used to secure accounts with traditional authentication protocols, he noted.

Social networking sites such as Facebook were highlighted as sources from which malicious persons may obtain information such as a person’s date of birth and hometown.

Search engine queries can be used to obtain yet more personal information about a target, as evidenced by the hacking of U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s e-mail account this week.

With the right design and security settings, biometric voice authentication methods could provide greater security by combining ‘something you know’, such as a password, with ‘something you are’, through your voice print, Buffum said.

Binary voice prints in Nuance’s software consist of 28 features, which are vocal characteristics such as the geometry of one’s vocal tract and behavioural patterns such as cadence, rhythm and volume.

The system determines the statistical likelihood of a caller and his or her saved voice print, and authenticates the caller in accordance with the security threshold set by the company.

Some transactions such as airline timetables may require lower security thresholds than others, such as banking, Buffum said.

Noting that ‘nothing is as good as iris scanning’, Buffum estimates the security level of voice authentication to be similar to that of fingerprint technology, and ahead of face scanning.

A hacker could make an audio recording of an account holder’s interaction with a voice authentication system and play it back to gain access, but such attacks could be thwarted by requesting the caller to repeat a random series of words, he said.

“The Mission Impossible squad can always break in,” he said, “but with this technology, you can at least keep everyone else out.”

“2009 is the year of the early adopters,” Buffum said of the Australian voice authentication market.

“Hopefully you’ll be counting them [deployments] on more than one hand -- but that’s around the figure we’re looking at.”

iTnews: Mobile operators warned of 'dumb pipes' ISP scenario

2008-09-17T16:54:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Mobile broadband operators need to look beyond flat-rate access offerings to future-proof their business, analysts say.

Recent research from analyst firm Ovum suggests that operators could bolster their revenues by leveraging subscriber information and network-based assets.

Melbourne-based Ovum analyst Nathan Burley likened the current mobile broadband market to last decade’s fixed broadband offerings that bundled access with services such as e-mail, hosting and content.

As consumers turned to other Web sites for their online activities, fixed broadband ISPs were muscled out of content revenue and into what analysts call a ‘dumb pipes’ scenario.

Mobile broadband operators such as Telstra currently support a bulk of their customer’s activities through services such as mobile TV, games and customised music sites.

But with the growing popularity of smartphones that feature more user-friendly Web browsers, mobile broadband operators may soon go in the way of their fixed-line counterparts, Ovum predicts.

“If you look at these smartphones, browsers on the phones are getting better and you are seeing users of these handsets use the phones for their own content on the Internet,” he said.

Burley named the Blackberry Bold, Nokia N96, HTC Touch Diamond and Apple’s iPhone as examples of game-changing devices.

“In terms of the iPhone, Apple’s strategy to some degree is to relegate the [mobile broadband] operator to offering access only,” he said.

“It’s a very open model for content providers,” he told iTnews.

While this open model could mean less content-based revenue for mobile operators, Burley points out that external content could bolster data access revenue.

Additionally, mobile operators could have a place in the value chain for supporting third-party content and other services by leveraging in-depth information about their customers and network-based assets such as location.

Areas such as social networking applications could benefit from customer metadata, Burley said, highlighting opportunities for advertising revenue.

“On the Internet, if you look at the people [companies] who have prevailed in terms of advertising revenue, it [their success] sits on a lot of information about their subscribers,” he said.

But not all operators will be successful in gaining a share of the advertising pot, analysts predict, due to the strong competition between broadcasters, Internet businesses and traditional media.

Ovum suggests that mobile broadband operators consider options such as: having their own paid-for content and service offerings; offering their own and third-party content on an ad-supported basis; and providing access to free Internet-based content to drive usage and hence access revenues.

iTnews: 'Cognitive radios' to improve wireless devices

2008-09-16T16:58:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Researchers are developing intelligent radios that can sense their surroundings and adjust their mode of operation accordingly.

Dubbed ‘cognitive radios’, the technology is expected to reach the market within five years, finding uses in public safety devices and wireless networks.

Cognitive radios build on the concept of ‘software defined radio’, in which most functions in a radio device are performed by software-controlled digital electronic circuits.

Similar to how a modern day cell phone signs on to different networks while roaming, a cognitive radio is designed to be adaptive to its situation.

“A cognitive radio is aware of its environment, its own capabilities, the rules within which it can operate, and its operator’s needs and privileges,” explained Charles W. Bostian, an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech.

“It is capable of changing its operating modes in ways that maximise things that the user wants while staying within the rules ... is capable of learning in the process and of developing configurations that its designer never anticipated.”

Adaptive, cognitive radios could enable techniques such as dynamic frequency sharing, in which radios automatically locate unused frequencies, or share channels based on a priority system.

In public safety, cognitive radios also could be used to provide interoperability between various signals and automatically adjust radio performance.

“For example, if its user is inside a building where there is little or no public safety radio coverage, the radio may automatically switch to a VoIP mode and reach the dispatcher through a WiFi access point and a telephone line,” Bostian said.

“These ideas are research topics now, and some of them will soon reach the market,” he said.

“It will mean more business and more equipment to sell for the wireless infrastructure manufacturers. They have nothing to lose and a lot to gain.”

Microsoft is researching the technology’s potential to alleviate bandwidth scarcity in wireless networking through its Kognitiv Networking Over White Spaces (KNOWS) research project.

The project works towards opportunistically accessing unused portions of the TV spectrum, and already has birthed a prototype that scans for unused frequencies by sensing the TV spectrum.

When an open frequency band is located, the device is designed to dynamically switch to it in a way that does not hurt incumbent TV receivers.

“I think dynamic spectrum access will be the first application for commercial wireless services like WiFi and WiMax,” Bostian told iTnews. “There is movement toward doing this in vacant U.S. TV channels.”

According to Bostian, current challenges in the development of cognitive radio are reducing cost and improving battery life.

While the technology is expected to reach the market within five years, it will take twice as long to become commonplace, Virginia Tech researchers predict.

iTnews: Contact centres urged to look offshore for staff

2008-09-15T17:18:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Australian contact centres need to look offshore to solve staffing issues, claims customer service outsourcing agency, Convergys.

Convergys’s statement comes on the heels of the 2008 Australian Contact Centre Industry Benchmark Study, which highlighted high levels of employee attrition in the contact centre industry.

Conducted by ACA Research, the study found staff turnover, difficulty in recruiting and inadequate headcount to be the industry’s three greatest challenges.

Staff attrition was ascribed to the fact that only one-third of contact centre staff view their job as a career, while other survey respondents described their job as part-time, gateway, and transition gigs.

“In Australia, a lot of industries just don’t see a contact centre job as a career,” said Max Tennant, Senior Account Executive of Convergys.

“Top that off with the highly transactional functions in most contact centre jobs, and it just doesn’t make it [contact centre work] an appealing job for young people,” he said.

Tennant suggests that contact centre operators move some functions offshore, where the ‘highly transactional, monotonous functions’ that are required may be considered appealing.

He named the Philippines and India as prime offshore locations due to the language and customer service skills that are available.

“Culturally, the offshore agents are a lot more open to these transactional tasks that Australian agents may find monotonous,” he said, describing ‘hierarchical’ tendencies in the Asian culture, and adding that offshored contact centres tend to pay three times the minimum wage in host countries.

Contact centre operators could direct specific customer requests to locations with staff adept at those functions, Tennant said, noting that while Indian contact centres have been found to excel in backoffice functions, staff in the Philippines traditionally provide a better customer service experience.

“If you ask your customers, ‘would you prefer an offshore or onshore agent’, they will ask for onshore, because that’s what they’re culturally used to,” he noted.

“But if you say, ‘look, here’s our situation -- you can wait 45 minutes for XYZ and our operating hours are 9-5 -- would you like 24/7 service and all these other options if we provide offshore agents?’ They will say yes.”

“It’s important that offshoring needs to be a part of an organisation’s overall strategy and is not just a cost savings thing,” he said.

Teleworking and process automation previously have been heralded as solutions to staffing problems in the Australian contact centre industry.

However, Tennant said that there are some transactions that once automated, do not provide a satisfactory customer experience, and expects there to be insufficient Australian teleworkers to provide the required headcount to satisfy customer demands around the clock.

Convergys maintains 84 contact centres worldwide, which house a total of 45,000 agent stations -- most of which are staffed around the clock, Tennant said.

A majority of Convergys’s facilities are located in the U.S., where the business originated. The company plans to direct more of its clients to its 9 contact centres in India, and 14 in the Philippines.

iTnews: Supercomputing revenue to grow $6.4b by 2012

2008-09-12T17:20:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

High Performance Computers (HPC) are extending their reach from academic research to government, manufacturing and financial industries, analysts say.

According to analyst firm IDC, revenue from HPCs -- which are commonly termed ‘supercomputers’ -- will grow by $6.4 billion during the next five years.

Industries experiencing the most growth in HPC applications are expected to be software engineering, mechanical design, weather, financial and digital animation.

Universities, which in 2007 spent more than $2.1 billion on HPCs, will continue to lead HPC spending with a forecasted spending of $3.2 billion in 2012.

Although optical and quantum technologies have received much attention as potential supercomputing technologies, most HPCs today are comprised of high performance configurations of ordinary technologies.

“Most high performance computers today are based on commodity technologies that are readily available in the open market,” explained Steve Conway, who is IDC’s Research Vice President of Technical Computing and Steering Committee Member of the HPC User Forum.

Speaking with iTnews in the lead up to IDC’s HPC roadshow in Sydney this month, Conway said that common HPC configurations include standard x86 microprocessors from AMD or Intel, and the standard Linux or Microsoft Windows operating system.

“The trick is in how these technologies are connected together in supercomputers that may have 100,000 or more processors each in some cases,” he said. “Increasingly, fibre optical connections are used to link the components together.”

Outside of the academic sphere, current supercomputers have found uses in aircraft design for Boeing, assembly line modelling for Proctor and Gamble, and manufacturing simulation for Whirlpool.

IBM and Hewlett-Packard lead the fray, each occupying 32.9 percent of the HPC market. Dell currently owns 17.8 percent market share, while Cray owns 1.1 percent.

During the next decade, Conway expects supercomputers to reach speeds 1,000 times faster than today’s best by 2017.

These ‘exaflop’ computers will perform 10^18 calculations per second and will be able to process the informational equivalent of all 20 million volumes in the New York Public Library system in less than one second, Conway said.

But as energy concerns come to the fore, analysts expect the cost and availability of electricity to be biggest challenge for the HPC market.

While petascale supercomputers slated for delivery in the 2010 timeframe are expected to require as much as 20MW of power, similar projects could demand 60MW in the 2015-2017 timeframe.

“Today's biggest supercomputers consume enough electricity to power a small city,” Conway said. “In some cases where the infrastructure is lacking, adequate power is simply not available to an HPC site at any price.”

“The biggest challenge will likely be the cost and availability of adequate electricity to operate computers this large and power-hungry,” he said.

“When the sharply rising costs of oil and gas, it is no surprise that power and cooling has become one of the top few issues for HPC users.”

iTnews: University of Sydney takes records management online

2008-09-11T17:24:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

The University of Sydney has completed the second stage of a decade-long move from paper to an electronic records keeping system.

Working with systems integrator Alphawest during the past four years, the university has implemented the Records Online 2 Web interface, which allows staff to create and manage student records online.

The implementation, which is estimated to have cost $160,000, has already delivered an annual return on investment of $675,000.

According to University of Sydney’s acting registrar Tim Robinson, Records Online 2 currently has 1,500 users out of a prime audience of 2,800 administrative staff.

It is estimated to have saved 10 minutes per week of physical filing work and reduced the need to create 10 or more physical files each year for 40 percent of its users.

Staff members are being introduced to the system in groups, in line with the project’s cautious approach to change management.

“One of the fundamental things we decided from the outset was that we weren’t going to go for the big king hit,” Robinson told iTnews.

“Making things simple is always time consuming,” he said, describing an aim to make the records keeping system user-friendly while maintaining a suitable privacy and access regime.

“An enormous amount of thought went into it; we knew that if it wasn’t simple, it would not be used,” he said.

The university took its first step away from its traditional paper registry in 2000, with the implementation of the Captira management tool in the back end.

Online search functionality was added shortly after, but it wasn’t until 2007 when users were able to access 98 percent of records management functions online.

The latest implementation of Records Online 2 now integrates the university’s records system with its business system, as well as allowing staff to access records via Microsoft Outlook.

Robinson noted that each stage of the implementation required ‘a lot’ of training for staff, estimating the cost of training to equal that of hardware and software combined.

“With an organisation as big as the Uni, we knew that we couldn’t train all these people in one go,” he told iTnews, describing one-on-one, roadshow, and small group training options.

After all administrative staff members are trained, the next challenge for Robinson’s team will be to introduce the Records Online 2 to academic staff, so they can access student records more efficiently.

Looking forward, Robinson expects the university to be looking to update its records management system again within the next three years.

He mentioned Microsoft Office SharePoint and an Open Source system that is in development at Curtin University as candidates.

“We’re always looking at what the next stage is,” he said. “I’m guessing by three years time, there will be some significant changes, and we’d be looking to update our systems.”

iTnews: Researchers find racial bias in virtual worlds

2008-09-11T17:22:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Real-world behaviours and racial biases could carry forward into virtual worlds such as Second Life, social psychologists say.

According to a study that was conducted in There.com, virtual world avatars respond to social cues in the same ways that people do in the real world.

There.com is a relatively unstructured virtual world that brands itself as an online getaway where users can hang out with friends and explore an immense, unusual landscape.

Users, who were unaware that they were part of a psychological study, were approached by a researcher’s avatar for either a ‘foot-in-the-door’ (FITD) or ‘door-in-the-face’ (DITF) experiment.

The FITD technique works by first asking a participant to comply with a small request -– which, in this experiment, was “Can I take a screenshot of you?” -- followed by a moderate request: “Would you teleport to Duda Beach with me and let me take a screenshot of you?”

Participants who fulfilled the small request are expected to be likely to see himself or herself as being helpful, and thus be more likely to fulfil the subsequent larger request.

The DITF technique work works in an opposite way: the experimenter first makes an unreasonably large request to which the responder is expected to say no, followed by a more moderate request.

In the DITF condition, that large request was to have screenshots taken in 50 different locations, which would have required about two hours of teleporting and travelling.

As the researchers expected, DITF participants were found to be more likely to comply with the moderate request when it was preceded by the large request, than when the moderate request was presented alone.

But while results of the FITD experiment revealed no racial bias, the effect of the DITF technique was significantly reduced when the experimenter took the form of a dark-skinned avatar.

White avatars in the DITF experiment received about a 20 percent increase in compliance with the moderate request; however, the increase for the dark-toned avatars was 8 percent.

According to the researchers, skin colour had no effect on FITD experiments because the elicited psychological effect is related to how a person views himself or herself, and not others.

However, the DITF technique is said to reflect a psychological tendency to reciprocate the requester's ‘concession’ from a relatively unreasonable request to a more moderate request, and thus is affected by whether the requester is deemed worthy of impressing.

The finding is consistent with previous DITF studies -- in real and virtual worlds -- that demonstrate that physical characteristics, such as race, gender and physical attractiveness, affect judgment of others.

Numerous studies done in the real world show that people are more uncomfortable with minorities and are less likely to help them.

“This study suggests that interactions among strangers within the virtual world are very similar to interactions between strangers in the real world,” said Paul W. Eastwick, who conducted the study at the Northwestern University.

“You would think when you're wandering around this fantasyland … that you might behave differently,” he said. “But people exhibited the same type of behaviour -- and the same type of racial bias -- that they show in the real world all the time.”

iTnews: Kaspersky Lab patents dynamic antivirus technology

2008-09-10T17:27:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Kaspersky Lab has patented a method of antivirus scanning that assesses files according to when and how they first appeared on the computer.

The method has been granted Patent No. 7 392 544 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Internally, it has been unofficially named ‘FirstTimeCheck’.

By dynamically varying the scanning level and set of tools used for file scanning, FirstTimeCheck is expected to minimise the impact of antivirus scanning on the overall system performance.

The technology also makes it possible to extend the time taken to scan new files and files received via ‘high-risk’ sources such as suspicious Web sites, P2P networks and e-mail attachments.

“In the past, antivirus products were scanning files with a standard set of technologies,” said Nikolay Grebennikov, Kaspersky Lab’s Vice-President for Research & Development.

“Now, the antivirus arsenal includes many new technologies, which significantly raise detection rate, but use more RAM and CPU time.”

“The standard solution for this situation is to limit the usage of these technologies to a level where antivirus scanning will not affect users’ activities too much," he told iTnews.

Grebennikov explained that the ‘standard solution’ to limit the resource usage of antivirus programs has been to set strict limits on the time taken to scan files.

He described such methods as a ‘compromise’ that may affect the quality of scanning and decrease the level of user protection.

“The main advantage of our method is that it minimises the impact on the overall system performance,” Grebennikov told iTnews.

“Normally such a deep system scan would greatly affect performance of the computer it is running on, but our new technology manages to bypass this negative effect to ensure maximum system performance all the time,” he said.

Kaspersky Lab is working on implementing FirstTimeCheck in current products and plans to implement the technology in the next version of its consumer products.

iTnews: Red Hat to launch Enterprise Messaging, Realtime, Grid

2008-09-10T17:25:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Red Hat is launching a new platform for managing next-generation architecture in enterprise data centres and High Performance Computers (HPC).

Dubbed Enterprise Messaging, Realtime, Grid (MRG), Red Hat’s new offering is said to highlight a long-term industry trend towards utility computing.

The software integrates a standardised messaging platform and realtime capabilities with grid management technology, and could speed communications, promote interoperability and enable more flexible load and resource management.

According to Red Hat’s Global Product Manager Bryan Che, current e-mail and messaging offerings tend to be diverse, specialised, and lack interoperability.

In Sydney this week to meet with Red Hat’s local team and customers about Enterprise MRG, Che explained that a lack of interoperability could mean that organisations are faced with architectural challenges and are unable to reap the benefits of a holistic messaging ecosystem.

“If you look at the messaging space today, there’s no standard for messaging,” he said. “This means that if you buy one product from Vendor A, and another from Vendor B, they are not interoperable with each other.”

“[Enterprise MRG] is a pretty transformative stand for the industry,” he said. “We believe there to be some pretty transformative effects in how applications are written and how they operate with each other.”

To date, Red Hat’s messaging platform has been deployed by organisations such as Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, as well as JP Morgan, with whom the software was developed in collaboration.

The messaging platform is supported by a realtime component, which enables deterministic performance of a system using fine-grained control.

Red Hat’s realtime technology was developed in collaboration with the upstream Linux kernel community and has been optimised for use in the standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment.

The grid component of Enterprise MRG builds on the University of Wisconsin’s Condor Project, which was first developed in the 1980s and now is used in the Open Science Grid and IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputers.

The technology is expected to enable organisations to manage their resources and load with greater dynamic flexibility.

Similar to virtualisation, grid technology handles load using a shared pool of resources.

However, the grid technology further adds the ability to integrate traditional server resources with resources such as unused desktops and cloud computing resources.

“The virtualisation model is the first step towards the eventual goal of ‘I want to be much more efficient and how do I best manage my resources’,” Che explained.

“I think there is a lot of converging trends,” he said, describing Enterprise MRG and a rising demand for utility computing.

“Fundamentally, we’re going beyond HPC; what we’re looking to do [with Enterprise MRG] is provide you with the capability to take advantage of any company resource available to you,” he said.

Since it was publicly announced in December 2007, Enterprise MRG has been made available via limited release in North America and Europe.

Enterprise MRG will be available in Australia by the end of the year, when version 1.1 of the software is released globally.

iTnews: Eyeball reflexes to improve biometric authentication

2008-09-09T17:28:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Researchers are developing a new approach to user authentication that cannot be spoofed, even with the most sophisticated contact lenses or surgery.

The method is based on eye saccades, which are the rapid, tiny, reflex movements of a user’s eyeball.

Since reflexes are said to be beyond conscious control, the researchers expect it to be impossible for attackers to adequately replicate an authorised individual’s saccades.

“Biometric information can easily be leaked or copied,” said Masakatsu Nishigaki, who is a researcher at the Shizuoka University in Japan.

“It is therefore desirable to devise biometric authentication that does not require biometric information to be kept secret,” he said.

Nishigaki and his research partner Daisuke Arai are working towards the long-term aim of creating an authentication system which is directly based on differences in human reflexes.

However, the researchers so far have been unable to identify any human reflexes that exhibit sufficient differences between individual people to enable their use in user authentication.

Currently, the researchers are investigating what Nishigaki describes as an ‘indirect’ method of extracting differences in human reflexes.

The method examines the blind spot, which is a fixed region on the retina of the eye, and determines its position relative to the direction of the gaze.

User authentication is carried out by displaying a target within and outside a person’s blind spot, and using eye tracking technology to measure the reflex time taken until the eye movements occur.

As the method still relies on the shape of the user’s eye, an impostor may be successful with the use of surgery or sophisticated contact lenses, the researchers say.

However, the researchers expect each pattern of responses to be unique to the individual and the method to reduce greatly the likelihood of spoofing.

In a preliminary experiment with ten test subjects, the researchers achieved zero spoofing success rate with their method.

As the authentication system requires a costly point-of-gaze detection device, Nishigaki expects the system to be used only for situations that require highly sensitive, important information to be secured.

Further research is required to investigate the consistency of saccade response times, position and size of the blind spot, and conduct trials involving larger groups of people, Nishigaki said.

iTnews: Australia gears up for Software Freedom Day 2008

2008-09-08T17:30:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Free and Open Source Software zealots in Australia will celebrate Software Freedom Day 2008 with free software, CDs and seminars this month.

On September 20, teams from metropolitan and regional Australia will join more than 300 teams from around the world to celebrate the annual, grassroots event.

Although all teams share a common cause, each team is run independently and will be celebrating Software Freedom Day in their own way.

Melbourne event organiser Donna Benjamin, of the Linux Users of Victoria, described the day as a ‘Think Global, Act Local’ type of celebration.

“Each team plans and designs their own event, with little to no intervention or interaction with other teams,” she explained.

“So, it's hard to know what's happening in each city -- but at the same time, it means each event is relevant to the local community where it takes place.”

According to the Software Freedom Day Web page, events have been planned in Adelaide, Bathurst, Canberra, Tasmania, Melbourne and Newcastle.

Canberra Linux Users Group plans to distribute free software on 8,000 CDs that have been funded by Linux Australia.

Meanwhile, the Launceston team in Tasmania will be staging a day-long event at the Gateway Baptist Church Hall to showcase free and Open Source software use for the home and business.

Melbourne’s Software Freedom Day celebrations are supported by the Victorian Government, and will include a series of free talks, live software demonstrations, and free software giveaways.

As well as promoting Open Source software by groups such as Red Hat and Fedora, Melbourne event organisers are promoting the freedom to run, copy, distribute, change and improve software without needing to ask or pay for permission to do so.

iTnews: Energy level probe could speed quantum computing's advent

2008-09-05T17:35:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

A newly developed technique of characterising artificial atoms could speed the development of quantum computers.

The technique, called 'amplitude spectroscopy', allows researchers to probe the energy level structure of artificial atoms so that they can be used in quantum computing as quantum bits, or qubits.

"There are several things one needs to determine about a candidate technology before it can be considered a qubit technology," said William Oliver, who developed the technique with a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

"One key piece of information is the energy-level structure of the qubit," he told iTnews.

"Although only the lowest two energy levels are utilized as the qubit, the other energy levels may influence its behaviour," Oliver explained. "Knowing where those levels are facilitate the engineering of the qubit and its control."

Due to the laws of quantum physics, an atomic-scale system may exist in multiple energy states at any one time, which is known as a 'superposition' of states.

While traditional techniques exist for characterising the states of atoms and molecules, the energy levels of artificial atoms occupy a wide swath of frequencies that can be difficult to measure.

Using amplitude spectroscopy, the researchers have been able to characterise quantum entities over frequencies that range from tens to hundreds of gigahertz.

The technique works by measuring the interference patterns resulting from the superposition of multiple energy levels in an atomic-scale system. Artificial atoms are probed with a single, fixed frequency which pushes the atom through its energy-state transitions and measures the response.

Although very far away, Oliver expects quantum computers also to rely on interference to perform calculations.

"Quantum computers are still rather far from commercial realisation; we remain today at the single or few-qubit level," he told iTnews.

"Techniques like amplitude spectroscopy allow us to look carefully at the structure of our qubits.

"Through clever algorithms, the net result of the interference should coalesce the output of the computer into a single state that we can easily measure with high probability," he said.

iTnews: Researchers warn of Orwellian technology

2008-09-05T17:33:00.001+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

The combination of ICT and pervasive computing could enable individual activity to be monitored even more closely than George Orwell imagined in his novel 1984, social scientists warn.

While users have reported digital privacy concerns in several surveys, they are not taking appropriate measures to protect themselves or their data, according to social psychologist Saadi Lahlou.

Describing a ‘privacy dilemma’ that is brought about by the fact that technology requires information to deliver better or customised service, Lahlou warns that such data may later be used in another context and against users’ interest.

Lahlou mentioned Gmail as an example of his personal experience with the privacy dilemma.

“I feel that it is actually not reasonable to leave all my mail in someone else’s hands; but I am, as most of us, taken in this privacy dilemma,” he told iTnews.

“It is such a good indexation service of my own mail and so easy to use that I prefer not to think about the possible consequences of misuse or accident.”

He referenced ‘the system’ of interconnected data-collection devices including mobile phones, Web sites and surveillance cameras that can search, analyse and predict the actions of individuals.

“We are creating a system that will be aware of all that we do … virtually from cradle to grave,” Lahlou wrote in the journal Social Science Information. “The system as a whole will know more about us than we know about ourselves.”

Besides the risks to individuals of having their data used inappropriately, Lahlou suggests that an interconnected system could pose dangers to culture and organisations also.

“Subjects who are aware of being constantly monitored with their actions traced will tend to behave exactly according to the rules, in what is called ‘agentic’ manner,” he explained.

“No rule can in every case exactly encompass the complexity of reality,” he told iTnews. “There is a need for some free space of initiative when one should go to adapt the rules to be more efficient.”

Lahlou highlighted common acts of lying to be polite and ‘playing with rules’ in a professional capacity as example situations in which privacy is necessary.

In such situations, technology that enables users to use different sets of information about themselves in different situations could be beneficial, he suggests, proposing a new definition of privacy, termed ‘face-keeping’.

“We all have many faces -- combinations of role and status -- but each one is used only in some settings,” he explained.

He suggests that a new set of guidelines be developed for system designers that emphasises what designers should do, rather than unrealistically focussing on control.

“We are all responsible for the world we build; it would be foolish to lock ourselves in a straightjacket of continuous control,” he told iTnews.

“But the user should not always the one who carries the burden of protection,” he said.

“[Companies] should include privacy in the design specification of the software they build or buy, and not merely consider this as a cumbersome constraint.”

iTnews: Fighting fire with fire

2008-09-04T18:41:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

The Web is a pretty nasty place, according to reverse engineer and privacy advocate Mike Perry -- and he should know.

At underground hacker convention DEFCON last month, Perry revealed vulnerabilities in cookies used by sites such as Gmail, Facebook and LinkedIn.

As if publicising the security flaws isn’t enough, Perry will be releasing an automated hacking tool that exploits them.

The self-proclaimed 'mad computer scientist' spoke with iTnews about the vulnerability, his plans, and the online security landscape.

What security issues will be exposed with the release of your https hacking tool?

There are actually two vulnerabilities here. The first is that many sites do not secure their content via https past the initial login page. This allows an attacker to steal their users' cookies and impersonate them on the local network whenever they use the site.

A tool to do this (Robert Graham's 'Hampster') has been circulating for a year, but there has been no response from the major sites.

The second vulnerability is that many sites that do use https past the login page but do not mark their cookies as 'secure'. This is what allows an attacker to induce their browser to transmit these cookies over unsecured, regular http connections so they can observe them and impersonate the user.

Why are you releasing your https hacking tool to the public?

There are two issues I am trying to tackle here. One is to launch a more direct assault against the trend towards 'security theater' -- providing the show of security to people while not actually protecting them at all.

This is exactly what websites exposed to the first vulnerability are doing, and have been doing in the face of a publicly available exploit for over a year.

The second goal is to ensure that the second vulnerability is well publicised and well understood - because it is a subtle one that even many web developers do not consider.

Both of these goals have required the threat of an automated tool to really make any progress towards addressing.

Again, I waited a full year after announcing the vulnerability without a proof of concept exploit, and nothing happened. It was only the existence of and the threat of release of the tool that has caused things to move forward.

When will the tool be released?

I am still continuing to wait a limited time while major sites (such as Google and Microsoft) continue to work on fixing the issue.

However, eventually we'll reach the point at which the major sites that intend to fix the issue have done so, and all we have left are sites that have no intention of investing in the security of their users, or at least no intention of doing so in a timely fashion.

At this point, I will make the tool more widely available, and attempt to use the publicity to encourage people to move away from these sites towards their more secure counterparts.

How easily exploitable is the https cookie vulnerability? Do you expect there to have been many accounts hacked this way so far?

I have seen anecdotal accounts of hijacked 'security theater' webmail accounts (such as Yahoo mail) being hijacked on the comments sections of various articles about the tool.

These were likely performed by the 'sidejacking' tool, or similar independently derived method, since my tool has only been shown to a limited number of people, and was even then only in a reliable, working state very shortly before DEFCON.

So yes, people have begun to exploit this vulnerability even though I have delayed my tool from public release.

What information can typically be obtained using the https cookie vulnerability?

The risks are quite large for affected sites, and very frequently run all the way up to complete identity theft and access to financial data. An incomplete list of sites that are vulnerable (including the type of information available) is here.

Have you had any discussions with owners and administrators of large vulnerable sites so far?

The only sites to even respond to my attempts to contact them have been Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has given several indications that they do not intend to provide SSL protection for the ability to edit profiles on the site, and to view user messages. The exact statement I received was that ‘this is an attack against the end-user, not the web application itself’, which I suspect is the attitude many sites seem to have towards this issue.

How have Web sites like Gmail, Facebook and Hotmail been able to get away with this vulnerability in the past?

I think it stems from three factors: lack of awareness on the part of their users, a desire for ‘usability’, and a desire to avoid the expense of providing secured connections to their users.

To their credit, Gmail has been the most proactive about fixing this: in fact they are the only major email provider to offer complete SSL at all. It's just that their multi-service single sign-on system has made it difficult to properly implement this securely. They are working on fixing this, though.

What is your opinion of the security of most popular consumer Web sites?

In general the web is a pretty nasty place. A lot of this stems from the way the web was designed: as an open, stateless, and mostly unauthenticated medium where sites can load content from other sites, refer their users to other sites, and have them execute almost arbitrary actions automatically.

This requires each site to have to do a lot of custom, independent legwork to secure things from this originally open state, and a lot of them end up getting bits and pieces wrong. Sometimes even fundamental pieces that are fully supported in major browsers, such as the cookie issue we see here.

As more and more people - Internet pros and newbies alike - begin to use social networking Web sites, do you think online security demands will change?

I'm not sure. I certainly hope so. However, while Internet security pros are well aware of these issues, they are a minority.

Without widespread publicity to create a market differentiator around web security, it is going to be hard for people to 'vote with their feet' to avoid insecure sites.

By taking this issue to the public and releasing this tool, I am trying to create this differentiator. It's my opinion that sites that are willfully negligent in securing their users do not deserve any customers at all.

What does a reverse engineer like yourself do? What sparked your interest in privacy, security and censorship resistance?

In general, reverse engineers help to bridge knowledge gaps by figuring out how systems behave so that products and services can interoperate together. At least this is the most common legal form of reverse engineering.

I actually came to privacy, security, and censorship resistance through my independent study of reverse engineering in University.

Right around the turn of the century, all of these ideas came under attack in my country [USA] via rather draconian laws such as the PATRIOT Act and the DMCA. Because of the vague nature of these laws and the climate of surveillance and fear, it was necessary to be very careful about what I studied and how, while the legal climate stabilised.

It has since become a bit more clear exactly what is legal and what is not, but for a student facing these very vague and overreaching laws while just trying to learn, it was a very frightening time, and I naturally sought ways to protect myself.

We still have a long way to go, of course. Many security professionals and computer researchers are still afraid to travel to the USA, and several that do face extreme difficulty at customs. I've even heard cases where they have been flat out refused entry.

What is your opinion of privacy - or lack thereof - in today's world? What is your opinion of information-rich companies like Google?

It's pretty scary. Many companies are compiling a large amount of data about us, and often simply because we willingly cede it over to them without thinking about the consequences.

Privacy policies are often a joke and riddled with exceptions, loopholes, rapidly changing terms, and I believe not even regarded as binding contracts by the courts.

I don't think society has had time to evaluate the consequences of all of this data being accumulated by these organisations. From the fact that it can be stolen or leaked; used in lawsuits, divorce cases, or custody battles, or the fact that it will rapidly become a political weapon used to manipulate our public officials, the consequences of all this data being gathered (and often sold), even if it is held under the strictest of safeguards, is very dangerous.

It is my hope that the more enlightened companies will begin to realise the importance of allowing people to 'opt-out' of this constant surveillance.

Google in particular is showing some signs of understanding the need for projects like Tor (an anonymity, privacy, and censorship resistance network which I volunteer for) to exist and mature, to allow this 'opt-out' option. But only time will tell how it will all shake out.

iTnews: Scientists to collaborate on Google's OpenSocial

2008-09-03T17:37:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Researchers have launched a new social network to support long-distance collaboration between scientists.

Built on Google’s OpenSocial platform, the newly launched Laboratree Research Management System joins tools such as Facebook and IBM’s SameTime in the online social networking and collaboration arena.

Unlike consumer or commercially available tools, however, Laboratree has a heavy focus on academic research and includes features such as scientific applications, data and document managing and project messaging.

According to its developers at the Indiana University School of Medicine, Laboratree aims to facilitate day-to-day research activities in a way that eliminates barriers to entry by using the familiar structure of social networking.

“My thinking is that we should actually try to do things with a social network -- that is, we should consider the social network the model by which we do things,” said Sean Mooney, who is an assistant professor of medical and molecular genetics at the university.

“We didn’t use an existing network because we created very sophisticated group and project features not offered by other sites,” he told iTnews. “Our focus is on providing scientists with tools specifically useful for researchers.”

Laboratree has been ten months in the making, and is said to have grown from a desire for tools to solve organisation, collaboration, messaging, and document control issues in Mooney’s own lab.

The system is completely Web-based and runs on Linux-based webservers. It allows scientists to maintain their own unique profile, create groups for their labs, manage individual projects, and invite users to collaborate as ‘colleagues’.

In addition to pre-installed features, the system supports embedded applications built on the OpenSocial platform.

“We believe that the culture of science tends toward more openness,” Mooney told iTnews.

“For example, many publicly funded researchers are required to share their data after they publish, and many scientific journals have adopted open access models.”

“We see the same for OpenSocial,” he said. “If an application developer develops an tool for Laboratree, other scientists are welcome to embed it somewhere else -- Orkut for example.”

Response to Laboratree within the scientific community has been ‘very enthusiastic’ so far, Mooney said. At the time of launch, the site had around 500 users, and visitors from 32 countries.

Looking forward, Mooney expects Laboratree’s user base to grow among the global scientific community.

“The stereotype of the lab bound scientist who does not interact with others is a bit of a misnomer,” he told iTnews.

“Today, science is heavily collaborative, and big science is only enabled by many experts working on various aspects of that big problem.”

“We are solving a problem most scientists share,” he said. “As we grow, it will be interesting to see where our user base is strongest.”

iTnews: Digital Education Revolution revolts

2008-09-02T17:41:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

The Rudd Government’s $1.2 billion Digital Education Revolution could be nothing more than a futile grab at an intangible, unsustainable future, experts have warned.

Announced in February as a part of Labor’s budget forecast, the Digital Education Revolution aims to provide all students in Years 9 to 12 with access to ICT.

The program pledges a total of $100 million over the next four years towards the provision of high-speed broadband connections to schools.

The remaining $1.1 billion will go towards the National Secondary School Computer Fund, which is expected to supply schools with enough computers to reach a minimum ratio of one device for every two students.

If successful, the Digital Education Revolution could see Australia overtaking the U.S. state of Maine as the largest digital education program rollout of its kind in the world.

But despite the Rudd Government’s efforts, the Digital Education Revolution has been labelled by some as ‘unsustainable’ and ‘appalling’.

“Every kid having a laptop is a great idea, but it’s really only a small part of the problem,” said Bruce Dixon, a self-proclaimed technology evangelist and the president of the Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation.

“[This is] a fact that seems to have escaped the attention of our illustrious leaders,” he said.

Speaking at the Expanding Learning Horizons 2008 conference in Lorne this week, Dixon criticised Labor’s rollout strategy in which schools with the least amount of technology are the first to receive funding.

“Basically, the Government has said they’re going to give the most money to the schools who are least ready for it,” he said.

“I think it’s one of the most appalling digital education initiatives in the world,” he said, speculating that the program was created with minimal consultation with the industry, and an ill-defined implementation plan.

As a positive example, Dixon highlighted discussions with Singapore’s Minister of Education in which the country’s educational goals -- rather than technology per se -- took centre stage.

Mary Burns, who is a Senior Technology Specialist at the U.S.-based Education Development Center (EDC), agrees that digital education programs should focus primarily on educational goals instead of hardware and software tools.

Studies by EDC have highlighted student achievement, the learning of transformative skills, and digital equity as indicators of a digital education program’s success.

“I think with any major technology infusion, it’s important to have conversations about vision and change,” she said at the conference, noting that the mere provision of computer hardware does not necessarily ensure digital equity among students.

Burns cited a 2006 study of home broadband usage that found that while children in high income families tend to use their computers for educational purposes, children in low income families tend to use their computers for entertainment.

“It’s not just about how technology will help us; it’s about how do we do this and how we assess if kids are learning what we want them to be learning,” she said.

“We just haven’t figured out how to use these things well,” she said.

iTnews: Teachers urged to go virtual

2008-09-02T17:39:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Web 2.0 technologies such as blogging, wikis and virtual worlds are disrupting traditional ways of teaching, education experts claim.

According to technology and education consultant Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, educators have yet to adopt ‘not-quite-now’ technologies that their students already embrace.

Speaking at the Expanding Learning Horizons 2008 conference in Lorne this week, Nussbaum-Beach described a future that would take place in ‘immersive worlds that haven’t been invented yet’.

She explained that although parents and teachers have traditionally snubbed virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, these worlds could be platforms for learning skills such as networking, entrepreneurialism, and problem solving.

Nussbaum-Beach’s claims echo those of Gartner, which last year predicted that 80 percent of all Fortune 500 companies will be using virtual worlds by the year 2011.

“Immersive worlds are where our students are spending their time; we [educators] need to be there too,” she said. “The more options we make available to students, the better it [their education] is.”

But virtual worlds are only a small part of what is expected to be an upwards trend in the value of social and intellectual capital.

Labelling social and intellectual capital as ‘the new economic values’ in the global economy, Nussbaum-Beach highlighted the importance of leveraging collective knowledge through social networking and relationship building.

Blogs and microblogging sites such as Twitter and Plurk were mentioned as Web 2.0 technologies that could help students build networks of contacts -- as were the popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace.

Addressing concerns of frivolity, Nussbaum-Beach described MySpace as a ‘Lord of the Flies’ scenario in which unchaperoned children’s online personas had been ‘distorted by what kids perceive to be pop culture’.

She expects issues of privacy, safety and ethics to be lessened with digital education programs that teach students rules of etiquette, literacy, and street smarts that apply online.

“Between Facebook and MySpace, MySpace is considered the ghetto of the two – so MySpace is where we [educators] need to be,” she said.

“If you don’t know how to use these tools online, you won’t be able to give it [that knowledge] away to your students.”

“Nobody’s indoctrinating kids to be good digital citizens online,” she said. “No one is teaching these kids that their future employers are going to be Googling them, and this is what they will see.”

To groom students as critical thinkers, Nussbaum-Beach suggests that educators develop a holistic network of learning in which school is merely one node.

Informal education, performance, games, mentors, communities, and self-learning were mentioned as other avenues through which students can grow.

“I think that we’re seeing a change in the educational landscape,” she said. “We are the first generation of teachers who are preparing kids for jobs that haven’t even been invented yet.”

“The truth is, computers will never replace teachers, but teachers who are able to use technology to learn, build, [and] create are going to replace those who are not,” she said.

iTnews: Young Australians prefer blogging to voting, study finds

2008-08-29T17:45:00.001+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

The Internet could be the key to engaging young Australians who have turned their backs on traditional political processes, researchers say.

According to a study conducted by the Whitlam Institute, young people are more likely to exercise their democratic voice by blogging rather than enrolling to vote.

The researchers suggest that young Australians are not apathetic, but could feel alienated and marginalised by traditional, institutionalised politics.

“It is clear that young people want to 'make a difference'; the emphasis for this is reinforced by other findings,” said Eric Sidoti, who is the Director of the Whitlam Institute.

“The review finds that for young people, there's been a generational shift in Australian politics … It's no longer about political loyalties, it's about political choice.”

Sidoti explained that young Australians tend to be distrustful of politicians, and malcontent about the hierarchies in traditional institutions of democracy.

Current civic education programs may therefore be counter-productive in cases where students have little or no control over the processes and outcomes, he said.

Meanwhile, the relatively open platform of the Internet has been found to be far more popular with young, politically-minded Australians.

Sidoti named the not-for-profit Web site, ActNow, as an example of a site that allows young people to mobilise online around issues that concern them.

Other sites such as TheyWorkForYou.com and OpenAustralia.org have emerged as a means of holding elected politicians to account.

Also, during the lead up to the 2007 election, several Web sites emerged to compare candidates on issues -- including GetUp, which allowed voters to print their own how-to-vote cards according to the issues that were important to them.

“I'm no soothsayer but clearly the Internet is having an increasingly significant role to play,” Sidoti told iTnews. “It allows for far more voices to directly enter the public sphere.”

“There is a wide range of views online, covering all political persuasions,” he said. “The low cost of online publishing allows smaller groups/parties to compete with larger and better resourced organisations.”

Sidoti highlighted the difference between traditional Web sites and blogs, which allow politicians to engage directly with the online community through Web 2.0-enabled comments.

He noted that politicians so far have been entering the blogosphere cautiously, led by Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett and the Greens’ party blog.

Sidoti lamented a lack of research about how young Australians engage in the nation’s democratic process.

The project, titled ‘Young People Imaging a New Democracy’, is expected to help fill that void and produce a clearer view of the kind of democracy young Australians want.

iTnews: Australia lags behind Dell's APAC growth figures

2008-08-29T17:43:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Dell has reported a successful fiscal second quarter, boasting a revenue growth of 25 percent in Asia Pacific and Japan, and 11 percent worldwide.

Global revenue in Q2 was US$16.4 billion, which is said to be driven by a 19 percent increase in worldwide product shipments.

According to Steve Felice, Dell’s President of Asia Pacific and Japan, the company now takes second place Asia -- behind Hewlett Packard -- in the Asian PC market.

Despite the current economic slowdown, Felice is optimistic about Dell’s prospects and expects to continue expanding its coverage of products, countries and market segments.

“Clearly, GDP positions have come down from six months ago,” Felice said, adding that while revenue growth has not been as robust in recent times, Dell’s results still are ‘healthy’.

“In general, our outlook hasn’t really changed,” he said.

“Our statement has been cautionary in terms of economic change; these [economic] conditions can signal potential problems going forward, but we haven’t experienced any problems yet.”

In the Asia Pacific and Japan region, Dell has been most successful in India, which in Q2 reported a revenue growth of 59 percent and unit growth of 63 percent.

Dell’s China business also performed above the regional average, reporting a revenue growth of 33 percent and unit growth of 38 percent.

Australia lagged slightly behind the regional average, generating a revenue growth of 19 percent and unit growth of 15 percent.

However, Felice denied there being any particularly weak markets, commenting that Dell’s ‘strong’ growth in Australia is led by SMB and enterprise purchases.

“Australia has had a very strong quarter,” he said. “We’ve won quite a few government panel contracts that have driven that growth, and we’ve had quite a lot of general commercial business as well.”

Looking forward, the company is expected to invest in expanding its services offerings.

The recent launch of its new Vostro A range of notebooks and desktops also signals a focus on, and investment in, developing targeted products for emerging countries.

“In terms of aggressiveness, I think we’ve taken quite a bold step in introducing these products,” Felice said about the new Vostro A products that were designed based on customer feedback in Brazil, Russia, India and China.

As the global economic slowdown pressures businesses to reduce costs, Dell also will focus on reinforcing the benefits of simplifying IT.

Felice highlighted IT’s potential to increase productivity and cut costs, and expects the scalability of products like Dell’s building-block data centres to appeal to cost-conscious businesses.

“What we’re doing now, as always when customers have cost concerns, is stress the importance of scalability, and I think that’s why we’ve been so successful in the enterprise space,” he said.

iTnews: Ultra-fast, next-gen RAM could yield PCs that boot instantly

2008-08-22T17:52:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Scientists in Germany have developed next-generation Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM) that is said to operate as fast as fundamental speed limits allow.

By storing large amounts of data at high speeds and preserving stored data even when powered down, the technology could enable instant-boot computers and mobile devices, researchers say.

Today’s PCs typically operate on either Static or Dynamic RAM modules (SRAM or DRAM) that store digital information by means of electric charge.

SRAMs and DRAMs provide fast access to information. However, in case of power interruption, they lose their stored information, and are thus termed ‘volatile memory’.

“Volatile memories [such as] SRAM [and] DRAM lose their information upon power-off,” said Hans Werner Schumacher, who is researching MRAM at Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB).

“That is why you have to wait some time during your PC is booting. During that time the PC is reading the information from the hard disk and writes it into the non-volatile chips on your PC.”

Schumacher mentioned Flash memory as an example of non-volatile memory. Flash memory currently is used in some mobile devices such as phones, cameras, and an expanding range of ‘netbooks’ led by the OLPC and Asus’s Eee PC.

MRAM is another example of non-volatile memory. Current, first-generation MRAM modules use magnetic field pulses to program magnetic information, and are used in automotive and industrial applications.

Instead of using a magnetic field, second-generation ST-MRAM (spin torque MRAM) prototypes use a ‘spin torque’ current pulse to program magnetic bits.

A positive current switches the magnetization to one direction (digital state "0") and a negative current to the other (digital state "1").

Normally, the magnetization has to undergo several precessional turns before reliable magnetization reversal takes place, so ST-MRAM is estimated to be a factor of 10 slower than the fastest SRAM technology.

However, using a new technique known as ‘ballistic switching’, Schumacher and his research team were able to achieve reliable magnetization reversal in a single precessional turn.

Researchers expect future MRAM based on ballistic spin torque reversal to achieve write clock rates well above 1 GHz.

“In our work we show that one can optimize the programming of the bits by proper selection of the parameters of the current pulses used for programming the bits,” Schumacher told iTnews.

“This allows [devices] to reliably write the bits by pulses of only one-nanosecond duration. Using this technique future ST-MRAM [Spin Torque MRAM] could operate as fast as the fastest volatile memories.”

Compared to first-generation MRAM, ST-MRAM can be scaled down to very small sizes, thus promising high storage densities comparable to DRAM and Flash.

“In the future ST-MRAM has a very broad field of applications,” Schumacher told iTnews. “They are fast, have a high storage density, and are non volatile … present memories do not offer this combination of features.”

“Here, first gigabit prototypes have been produced. However these ST-MRAM are not yet in production.”

“Like in all new technologies some technological issues still have to be solved before market introduction,” he said.

iTnews: Has security become a non-issue for enterprise Open Source?

2008-08-21T18:51:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

A two-year-old piece of Open Source code is likely to have far fewer security flaws than proprietary code, according to security expert Bruce Schneier.

Now, at a time when Open Source is gaining momentum in Australia, Schneier’s perspective could contribute to increased uptake in the enterprise, education and government sectors.

The recent Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report portrayed a ‘very strong’, ‘rapidly growing’ local market for Open Source in both private and public sectors.

Produced by Open Source consulting firm Waugh Partners, the census listed property and business, education, health, retail and government as industries that are most serviced by Open Source currently.

Sixty-one percent of census respondents were found to service organisations of 200 or more employees, suggesting that Open Source now reaches beyond small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs), to larger organisations.

However, the report highlighted ‘lingering misconceptions’ about the availability of Open Source vendor support, which could contribute to slow commercial and government uptake of Open Source solutions in Australia.

According to Renee Hoareau, who is the Executive Officer of the Victorian Information Technology Teachers Association (VITTA), a lack of suitably-skilled network administrators has hindered the uptake of Open Source in schools.

“This is something the open source industry really needs to address,” she told iTnews. “More affordable training and certification for school network technicians is required.”

Skills shortage aside, however, Hoareau expects there to be ‘no technical reason’ why Open Source would be unsuitable for schools -- especially since Open Source software forms the basis of mission-critical environments in international companies such as Yahoo and Amazon.

Still, the security of Open Source software has been a talking point for some organisations in the past.

A report published last month by security vendor Fortinet suggested that enterprises are underestimating the security risks of eleven popular Open Source applications.

However, according to Hoareau, concerns about the public availability of source code seem to have vanished in the face of simple human management.

“Maintaining a secure environment involves following strict policies and careful procedures,” she said. “The most secure system in the world can be breached by a trusted person being careless with their password or security tokens.”

“Good school network security depends on good network management,” she said. “I would think Open Source applications pose no greater security risk for schools than any other type of software would.”

Russian security vendor, Kaspersky Lab, agrees that Open Source software is unlikely to be any more vulnerable to attacks than its proprietary counterpart.

Although Open Source code allows cybercriminals to find vulnerabilities more easily, vendors and developers are able to identify and fix flaws more easily as well, Kaspersky’s virus analyst Sergey Golovanov said.

To cater to clients who use Open Source operating systems on their servers and workstations, and those employing mixed corporate networks, Kaspersky Lab started developing security solutions for Open Source platforms ‘years ago’, Golovanov told iTnews.

“Obviously, in such a network all nodes have to be protected, so a security company must be able to offer the full range of solutions,” he said. “It is essential that we provide them with adequate protection for their IT infrastructure.”

But while Open Source could be a viable alternative to most proprietary software and applications, the effectiveness of Open Source antivirus and anti-spam programs is ‘a completely different story’, Golovanov said.

“There’s no way these [Open Source antivirus programs] can be effective today,” he said, noting the difference between Open Source programs that allow public access to source code, and free antivirus programs that are offered at no charge.

“The thing is that today antivirus is more a service than a complete product –- any antivirus [program] is almost useless without proper and regular updates. As an example, we provide updates approximately every 30 to 40 minutes, and we have to keep our antivirus labs working 24/7/365.

“And due to the fact that Open Source antivirus [programs] are created and supported by enthusiasts when they have free time, there’s no way an Open Source antivirus [program] can have regular and reliable support,” he said.

Max McLaren, who is the General Manager of Red Hat Australia, sings a different tune.

He highlighted SELinux, which was developed in collaboration with U.S. National Security Agency in 2004, and is distributed with commercial support as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 4 and all future releases.

While it does not perform antivirus tasks per se, SELinux -- or Security-Enhanced Linux -- enforces mandatory access control policies that reduce the ability of user programs and system servers to cause harm when compromised.

SELinux also is aligned with the U.S. Department of Defense’s Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria and involves role-based access control (RBAC), mandatory integrity controls and type enforcement architecture.

“We’ve had a number of Australian government organisations choose Red Hat because of that,” McLaren noted.

Currently, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been adopted in security-critical applications such as: the U.S. Army’s personnel records management system; the U.S. Navy’s IT environment; the IT infrastructure of Italian City of Marsala’s Town Council; and Europcar Australia’s desktop and server environment.

“The perception in the marketplace is that there is a concern about unsupported software,” McLaren said.

“I think customers feel confident [in Red Hat software] when they understand the difference between unsupported and supported Open Source,” he said, adding that Red Hat Enterprise Linux employs the ‘same level’ of testing as proprietary software.

McLaren described similarities between SELinux and Microsoft’s User Account Control infrastructure that has been introduced with Windows Vista, adding that ‘imitation is the best form of flattery’.

But according to Bruce Schneier, Open Source security is so far beyond that of software giant Microsoft that the comparison is moot.

”Comparing the security of Linux with that of Microsoft Windows is not very instructive,” he told iTnews. “Microsoft has done such a terrible job with security that it is not really a fair comparison.”

Echoing the comments of Kaspersky’s Golovanov, Schneier argues that Open Source code often undergoes a far more rigorous evaluation process than proprietary vendors can afford.

Proper evaluation requires the time and expertise of security experts evaluating a piece of code multiple times and from different angles, said Schneier, who is a globally-recognised security technologist and author.

“It's possible to hire this kind of expertise, but it is much cheaper and more effective to let the community at large do this,” he pointed out. “And the best way to make that happen is to publish the source code.”

“There's no reason to believe that open source code is, at the time of its writing, more secure than proprietary code,” he said.

“A two-year-old piece of open source code is likely to have far fewer security flaws than proprietary code, simply because so many of them have been found and fixed over that time.”

But if the industry consensus is that Open Source software is, in fact, secure, then why do public security concerns still exist?

Mani Padisetti, who is the Chief Operating Officer and Director of Open Source services and support provider Digital Armour, pointed a finger of blame at ‘smaller proprietary software manufacturers’ who he expects to be intimidated by the Open Source licensing model.

“There are bigger vendors like Microsoft who are okay with Open Source, but there are also some smaller proprietary software manufacturers that still have the concern that Open Source will kill them, and they don’t want there to be any uptake of Open Source at all,” he said.

"I’ve sat in on a number of meetings where proprietary vendors have said that Open Source is unsupported freeware and not secure, and that’s just not true,” he said.

Digital Armour was founded in 2000 as a Sydney-based IT support and service consultancy that catered to the SME market.

Two years into its business, Digital Armour decided to focus primarily on Open Source systems to better suit customer demands.

‘We have sold support primarily for Open Source systems and have also sold applications that are commercial Open Source,” Padisetti said, adding that Open Source systems often have technological benefits for specific requirements.

iTnews: Psychologists tout educational benefits of video games

2008-08-19T17:59:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Video games could benefit students by improving gamers’ problem-solving skills, dexterity, and scientific thinking, psychologists say.

At the annual convention of the American Psychological Association on Sunday, researchers discussed the effects of video games on high school and college students.

University of Wisconsin researchers highlighted a November 2006 study of nearly 2,000 online discussion posts about the popular multiplayer online game World of Warcraft.

In the study, discussion posts were examined against codes based on national benchmarks for scientific literacy to see what types of conversations took place, such as social bantering versus problem-solving.

The codes addressed different aspects of scientific thinking, including: reasoning using systems and models; understanding feedback; predicting and testing; and using mathematics to investigate a problem.

Researchers found 86 percent of participants to share their knowledge to solve problems, and 58 percent of participants to use systematic and evaluative process that indicate scientific reasoning.

“These forums illustrate how sophisticated intellectual practices to improve game play mimic actual scientific reasoning,” said Sean Duncan, a University of Wisconsin researcher who was involved in the study.

“Gamers are openly discussing their strategies and thinking, creating an environment in which informal scientific reasoning practices are being learned by playing these online video games,” he said.

The researchers suggest that game-based learning could supplement textbooks and science labs in fostering scientific thinking.

Separate studies conducted by Iowa State University psychologists have found players of ‘prosocial’ games to get into fewer fights in school, and be more helpful to other students.

But not all video games were found to have positive effects on players.

Researchers found players of violent games were found to be more hostile, less forgiving and more desensitised to violence, compared to those who played nonviolent games.

Meanwhile, students who play more ‘entertainment games’ were found to do poorer at school and be at greater risk of obesity.

“The big picture is that there are several dimensions on which games have effects,” said Iowa State University psychologist Douglas Gentile.

“[Dimensions include] the amount they are played, the content of each game, what you have to pay attention to on the screen, and how you control the motions.”

“This means that games are not 'good' or 'bad,' but are powerful educational tools and have many effects we might not have expected they could,” he said.

iTnews: Red Hat launches new Brisbane headquarters

2008-08-19T17:57:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Red Hat has launched a new engineering and support facility in Brisbane to sustain its expanding product line.

The new facility replaces Red Hat’s existing Brisbane premises, which served as its Asia-Pacific engineering and support headquarters for the past nine years.

According to Paul Gampe, who is the software vendor’s vice president of Engineering Services and Operations, Red Hat’s regional engineering and support business has grown over the past six months.

“We have increased staff in both engineering and support, so we are launching this new facility to accommodate for this expansion and scale for future growth,” he told iTnews.

The new facility accommodates approximately 110 staff and has created ‘a number’ of new positions, Gampe said.

Boasting an area of almost 1,500 square metres spread across multiple storeys, the new facility is triple the size of its predecessor and now is Red Hat’s largest engineering centre in the Asia-Pacific region.

“Many technology companies have moved their development and support functions from Australia to China and India,” Gampe said, noting that Red Hat has facilities in all three countries.

“But for Red Hat, the growth of these two economies has contributed to the expansion of our operations in Australia … Brisbane is the regional headquarters for Engineering in Asia.”

“Our Brisbane centre provides service and support to customers around the globe, with Australian and New Zealand customers benefiting further because support is available in their time zone,” he said.

Red Hat’s Asia Pacific engineering and support staff conduct software research and development, product engineering, project management and software engineering activities.

This includes core graphics engineering, and Red Hat’s main translation team, which is responsible for making products available in 13 languages including German, French, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese and Indonesian.

Gampe highlighted staffing and scaling Red Hat’s support organisation inline with its business growth as two core focus areas of the new headquarters.

“A number of significant announcements were made at the Red Hat Summit in June, particularly around open virtualisation and Linux Automation strategies,” he said.

“Hand-in-hand with these announcements, we’ve increased the local investment in ‘behind-the-scenes’ engineering functions as part of our commitment to these initiatives.”

The new centre was officially opened yesterday afternoon by the Honourable Desley Boyle, Queensland Minister for Tourism, Regional Development and Industry.

According to Gampe, Red Hat’s Queensland location was chosen nine years ago because of ‘overwhelming’ state government support through a Queensland Government grant, and the quality of local engineering talent.

To support and sustain local talent, and contribute to the open source community, Red Hat’s Brisbane engineering centre will drive several initiatives promoting open source innovation and collaboration.

This includes Red Hat’s ongoing sponsorship of Honours research students at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and a research collaboration with QUT that will investigate open source localisation.

iTnews: 'Web 2.0 University' to launch in A/NZ

2008-08-18T18:01:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Social media startup, acidlabs, has partnered with a U.S.-based consultancy to bring 'Web 2.0 University' to Australia and New Zealand.

Founded by Dion Hinchcliffe of the U.S. consultancy Hinchcliffe & Company, Web 2.0 University comprises a series of workshops that are targeted at enterprise and start-up companies.

Previously, workshops have been delivered to product managers, executives, and architects in Europe and the U.S., and focus on how to design next generation online products and services.

Workshops in Australia and New Zealand will be customised for the local market and will feature local case studies alongside tried and tested international content.

Acidlabs founder Stephen Collins highlighted application developer Tangler and implant company Cochlear as potential local case studies.

“I can imagine we might look at something like Tangler or Cochlear because they’re innovative local companies that may make the most interesting case studies,” he told iTnews.

Despite its name, Web 2.0 University is not a tertiary education institute, nor does it provide any accreditations.

Collins said that the Web 2.0 University brand of workshops has been registered in the U.S., and acidlabs has enlisted legal counsel to determine if their use of the word ‘University’ is permitted in Australia.

“We’re obviously not a real University and obviously don’t offer any accreditations,” he said.

“What we offer is headspace to show organisations how they can engage with clients using these tools, and [discuss] the uptake of collaboration inside the wall.”

“There’s a growing desire for organisations to understand these things. I think the demand is probably pretty high,” he said.

Collins expects to deliver two to three workshops per year at events, through hosting partner Web Directions, in addition to on-premise workshops that will be held as per organisations’ demand.

Web 2.0 University will make its Australian debut on 23 September, in conjunction with the Web Directions South conference.

The first Web Directions workshop will cost $450 to attend and subsequent workshops will be priced at ‘market rates’. For comparison, Web 2.0 University in the U.S. is priced at US$895 per workshop.

iTnews: Web shakes up contact centre industry

2008-08-15T18:04:00.001+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

The Internet has turned traditional concepts of brand loyalty, sales, and customer expectations on their heads, Genesys execs have warned.

According to Michael McBrien, who is the senior vice president of Genesys’s APAC Field Operations, businesses are challenged with meeting rising expectations of customer service.

Speaking at the G-FORCE APAC 2008 summit in Melbourne this week, McBrien discussed results of Accenture’s 2007 Global Consumer Survey that found that 33 percent of customers expect greater customer service than they did one year ago.

“[Doing business is] getting harder because of the internet,” he said, describing online ‘shame lists’ on which consumers name poorly-performing contact centres.

“It’s very easy for customers to vent frustration on the very open forum of the Internet,” he said.

While companies spend ‘millions of dollars’ on advertising and branding campaigns to attract new customers, existing customers are often neglected, McBrien said.

He described his experience with a U.S. bank that he contacted when making a large overseas purchase on his credit card.

Despite numerous calls to the bank’s contact centre, McBrien was unable to stop the legitimate purchase -- a surprise gift for his wife -- from being wrongfully flagged as a potentially fraudulent transaction.

Incensed, he returned the purchase and terminated his 20-year-old credit card account.

McBrien blamed the incident on a ‘disconnect’ between the bank’s contact centre and its fraud department.

When different departments within a company operate as separate silos, the result is a disconnected, unsatisfactory customer experience, he said.

According to Genesys’s 2007 Global Consumer Survey, 44 percent of defecting customers cite a poor contact centre experience as their sole reason for leaving.

“Customers don’t call ‘the contact centre’; they call ‘the company’,” McBrien pointed out.

Customer loyalty is expected to play a greater role in today’s world of economic uncertainty, with the credit crunch and U.S. presidential election likely to result in a ‘tough year’ for businesses.

According to Jason Stirling, who is the Vice President of Genesys Australia, India and New Zealand, the time is right to create opportunities by viewing the contact centre from a strategic, rather than a tactical, perspective.

“When you look at the contact centre today, our foundation is to reduce cost,” he said.

“[But] we can make or break customer satisfaction in one foul phone call,” he said. “We have an enormous amount of power.”

Instead of viewing contact centres as a cost, businesses could capitalise on relationship building and sales opportunities to transform the contact centre into a profit centre, Stirling suggests.

Describing the need for a multi-channel approach to cater to the technology preferences of individual customers, Stirling highlighted the importance of supporting customers online.

While Web sites have become increasingly popular for advertising and branding purposes, conversions to sales typically have been few.

Without the support of human interaction functionality like Web chat, Stirling warned that Web sites are likely to experience ‘leakage’ to competitors.

“I believe in two years, if we take a truly customer-centric approach, the Web is going to be our next contact centre,” he said.

“It’s time to really seriously consider opening the channel to the Web,” he said. “We’re neglecting our customers online.”

iTnews: Genesys enters Aussie partnership to build ‘Quality Conversations’

2008-08-14T18:05:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Genesys has partnered with Australian developer Kevin Panozza to address a need for soft skills among contact centre staff.

Announced today at the G-FORCE APAC 2008 summit in Melbourne, the collaboration has birthed a new training program called ‘Quality Conversations’.

The distance learning program comprises 26 training modules that are expected to improve the quality of interactions between customers and contact centre agents.

With Genesys estimating that a majority of investment in contact centres goes towards ‘putting bums on the seats’, the program is expected to help businesses justify and leverage the cost of contact centre staff.

“The quality of a conversation can make or break a customer situation,” said Jason Stirling, Vice President of Genesys Australia, Indian and New Zealand.

“Quality Conversations will ensure customer-facing staff are armed with critical soft skills required to handle service and sales environments,” he said.

The program involves highly interactive, animated educational material that comes in versions for customer service and sales agents.

It has been one year in development by SalesForce e-Learning company AFrame, and uses an animated ‘mentor’ to guide contact centre agents through each 20-minute training module.

Panozza is the ex-CEO of SalesForce and current Managing Director of Engagement Matters.

According to Panozza, the program encompasses ‘everything a customer service representative needs to know about working in a contact centre’.

Modules address topics that include: vocal skills; active listening; regulating attitude; questioning; and gaining trust.

iTnews: NAB upgrades contact centre technology

2008-08-13T18:14:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

The National Australia Bank (NAB) is adding natural speech capabilities to its contact centres in an effort to ‘join the dots’.

Dubbed ‘Smarttalk’, NAB’s natural language speech portal will be launched later this year to replace current IVR (Interactive Voice Response) technology.

Smarttalk combines speech recognition software and intelligent routing solutions to resolve customer queries efficiently.

NAB also will be introducing a new voice to reflect the bank’s updated persona.

“That’s going to be a big improvement on where we are,” said Steve Collier, who is NAB’s General Manager Sales Performance Retail Banking.

“The voice talent we use today in our IVR is lovely, but she needs to go into a nursing home,” he said. “It’s not the experience we’d like our customers to have.”

Speaking at Genesys’ G-FORCE APAC 2008 summit in Melbourne today, Collier challenged the perspective that ‘banks are anything but nimble’.

He described how NAB has been able to leverage its investments by building an IP solution based on existing Genesys assets.

By routing all incoming calls via one telephone number using Smarttalk, the technology also is expected to strengthen the bank’s brand.

Smarttalk joins a range of technologies that Collier has introduced since taking the reins of NAB’s contact centre operations.

Driven by the growth of Internet banking and customers’ demand for direct channels of communication to the bank, NAB’s contact centre technology has been developed to deliver a consistent multi-channel experience.

“The reality is that customers are demanding more and more of us over time,” Collier said.

SMS, e-mail and Web facilities have been introduced and improved to cater to the needs of modern, tech-savvy customers.

The NAB Web site has been designed to display a range of information according to customers’ lifestyle needs.

Using automatic data population, customers also are able to obtain an online, real-time conditional approval for credit card applications, from which NAB has reported an ‘exponential’ increase in sales and customer satisfaction.

NAB also has commenced two online chat pilots on its Web site. The first is a banker-assisted chat module that connects customers with sales and service specialists who may be working from home or remote branches of the bank.

The second chat pilot, dubbed ‘NAB Online Assistant’, involves greater technical complexity with the use of an automated chat agent that converses with customers with ‘humanised’, conversational responses and 24x7 availability.

Collier described the chat implementations as a ‘learning opportunity’ for the bank, adding that the bank has found customers to prefer chat over the bank’s call-back option.

“To be honest, I’ve learnt a lot,” he said. “These days, when a colleague in the leads area wants to do something, they come to us first.”

Communication within the organisation, a strong governance process, and the ability to leverage existing assets and business partners were highlighted as key factors for a successful technology implementation.

iTnews: EMC launches 'next-gen' storage architecture

2008-08-11T18:16:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

EMC last week introduced a new series of mid-range storage systems that it expects to be compatible with its previous and future products.

The new EMC Clariion CX4 series features enhanced support for virtualization, power-saving features, and the ability to be easily upgraded or integrate with hardware up to four generations old.

According to EMC's Director of Product Marketing ANZ, Clive Gold, mid-tier storage systems traditionally have been ‘fixed’.

He expects the CX4 series to deliver cost savings to customers by being compatible with hardware that could be up to eight years old.

The series currently supports dual-protocol Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage area network (SAN), and can be dynamically upgraded to add I/O ports to extend the flexibility of VMware environments.

Through what EMC has dubbed ‘UltraFlex’ technology, the series also is able to incorporate future connectivity technologies such as 8Gb/s Fibre Channel, 10Gb/s iSCSI and FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet).

The devices run on Intel’s Xeon processors that improve on the energy efficiency of their predecessors.

New support for solid-state disks (SSD) also is expected to improve the speed and energy efficiency of the mid-range storage systems.

SSDs are said to be more than 30 times faster than traditional drives and 98 percent more energy efficient on an Input/Outpot operations per second basis.

“This system has been designed with the ability to be a very low-powered device,” Gold told iTnews, estimating the CX4 series to be 30 percent more energy efficient than competitor devices.

EMC’s Clariion brand currently occupies the lion’s share -- 30 percent -- of the Australian storage market, Gold said.

He expects the CX4 series to drive the uptake of EMC products by offering improved performance and capacity at similar costs.

“This being a generational shift, we believe it’s putting more space between us and our nearest competitor,” he said.

“We’ve received some feedback on the pricing; there’s been a lot of surprise that it’s very competitive.”

“There’s also been a lot of interest around features like virtual provisioning, and [how] we’ve enhanced our ability to provide support for virtualisation as well,” he said.

iTnews: linux.conf.au 2009 shapes up

2008-08-08T18:19:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Hardware hacking, licensing and art were among a broad range of topics submitted to linux.conf.au (LCA) 2009 organisers by the time a call for papers closed today.

The annual Linux conference will be celebrating its 10th anniversary at the University of Tasmania’s Sandy Bay campus in Hobart next January.

Following previous years’ successes, LCA 2009 is expected to attract 700 delegates and influential speakers from international and local Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities.

It is expected that over 100 speakers will be chosen to present at the Hobart conference, which organisers have dubbed ‘March South’.

“Something that's struck me from the submissions is the amazingly broad range of topics that people have submitted which just goes to show the broad reach that FOSS has these days,” LCA 2009 senior organiser Ben Powell told iTnews yesterday.

“Suffice to say we've had papers from just about every field of endeavour from hardware hacking, to robotics, to legal issues and licensing, to art and multimedia -- and of course plenty of kernel presentations to boot,” he said.

Since the call for papers opened last month, organisers also have received ‘a large number’ of tutorial submissions that will comprise a ‘hands-on’ component of the conference.

Organisers also will be introducing an artistic element to the conference by inviting local artists to engage with the event. Powell hopes to produce ‘interesting results’ from the collision between the arts and technology communities.

Successful presentations will be decided in mid-September and the conference will be held from 19-24 January 2009.

More information is available from the LCA Web site.

iTnews: Researchers tout super-stretchy electronic material

2008-08-08T18:18:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Researchers have created ‘super-stretchy’ integrated circuits that could be used in intelligent surfaces for curved objects, or in movable parts such as the joints of a robot’s arm.

The circuits can be stretched by up to 70 percent without any degradation in their mechanical or electronic properties, according to the University of Tokyo researchers.

Stretchable electronics is a current challenge for material engineers, particularly for its application in large-area electronics such as bendable and rollable displays.

While soft materials currently tend to be more mechanically robust than rigid materials, stretchable electronics tend to exhibit poorer electronic properties such as performance, controllability and stability.

“Stretchability is an entirely different concept from the miniaturisation trend currently pursued by conventional electronics and has the potential to provide exciting opportunities,” said Takao Someya, lead researcher and Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo’s Quantum Phase Electronics Center.

“Large-area, flexible sensors and actuators are another emerging frontier, [but] although these achievements represent valuable advances, the utility of flexible electronics is limited to nearly flat substrates,” he told iTnews.

“Stretchable electronics can cover arbitrary curved surfaces and movable parts such as the joints of a robot’s arm, thereby significantly expanding the area of utilization of these electronics.”

Someya’s integrated circuits use a newly-developed carbon nanotube-elastomer composite material as a conducting dopant, which boasts a measured conductivity of 57 S/cm.

Researchers claim the conductivity of the new polymer to be two orders of magnitude greater than the conductivity value of previously reported single-walled nanotube (SWNT) composite polymers.

“Carbon-nanotube-based conducting materials have been produced previously [but] their conductivities are very low,” Someya said.

“One can say that the elastic conductors developed in this study are the world’s first chemically stable, highly conductive elastomers,” he said.

Researchers suggest that the stretchable circuits could enable ambient electronics, in which a multitude of devices such as sensor networks could be used to enhance aspects of security, safety, and convenience in daily life.

The technology also could by integrated with pressure sensors to yield a ‘rubber-like artificial skin’, or with an array of actuators to change the feel of a surface.

“This is an important step toward the production of intelligent surfaces that can be used as friendly human-electronics interfaces,” Someya said.

“In the future, such intelligent surfaces will be able to interact with people, objects, and the environment in new ways.”

iTnews: IBM virtual conference closes at cyber bar

2008-08-07T18:21:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

As IBM's Upload 2008 virtual summit came to a close, its virtual networking lounge bustled with greetings and introductions -- some shy, and some less so.

Stir-crazy exhibitors wound down with public offers of virtual vodka, cyber cocktails and iBeers amid a playful discussion of the weather in real-world Townsville and Hobart.

But it wasn’t just an imaginary bar tab that kept conference attendees at the event, which IBM estimates to have attracted some 350 delegates during its first hour.

Attendees who had accumulated enough points by interacting with exhibitors were given the chance to win real-world prizes that include: a 40-inch Sony HD LCD TV; a Flight Centre travel voucher; and an Apple iPhone.

“My boss suggested I participate, and to be really honest, the prizes kept me here,” Chantal Lawrence, NSW IT Coordinator of national construction company Hansen Yuncken, told iTnews at the virtual lounge.

Lawrence attended the summit with a particular interest in gold sponsor VMware, in the lead up to Hansen Yuncken’s forthcoming VMware implementation.

While the presentations were good, the delivery of VMware’s seminar was a little too muted for her liking, she said.

“Vmware wasn’t brilliant; it wasn’t that I didn't like something in particular, just that it was very reserved. A little fanfare is good,” she said.

According to Mark Wilson, Director of Marketing for IBM A/NZ, the conference was three months in the making, with conference sessions filmed throughout the U.S. and Australia, and put together by a virtual project team.

IBM hoped to attract 500 customers to yesterday’s ‘live’ event and another 500 during the following three months, when the recorded presentations will be available online.

The virtual platform is expected to allow IBM to reach a wider audience across Australia and New Zealand, and connect the audience with a global network of speakers.

Using technological reporting functions, the virtual setting is expected also to help IBM to identify specific customer needs.

“Customers can network, visit exhibition stands, attend conference sessions and receive all the same benefits they would reap from attending a physical conference,” Wilson told iTnews.

Another virtual feature that was reminiscent of a physical conference was the conference centre, which bore a fortuitous resemblance to the Sydney convention centre in Darling Harbour.

While Wilson said the virtual world was not modelled on the real-world centre, IBM was ‘pleased to note’ the similarities.

“When we saw the virtual conference platform for the first time, we were pleased to note it was very similar to Sydney convention centre,” he said.

“We were keen to go ahead and use it exactly as it was as we recognised it would give the event a nice local touch,” he said.

IBM reports having received ‘many positive responses’ to the virtual environment from exhibitors to date.

One exhibitor, PK Business Advantage (PKBA), had staff attending from its office in the Northern Queensland city of Townsville.

As most real-world functions tend to be hosted in larger cities to draw sufficient customer attention, the virtual world setting was said to be ‘a lot cheaper’ for PKBA.

“PKBA is a Premier Partner with IBM and were invited to participate,” PKBA Operations Manager James McClimont told iTnews at the virtual lounge this afternoon.

“As our Townsville location has an extensive experience and history with IBM, we felt able to utilise this to provide more info about the value we can add,” he said.

While he admitted that interactions in the virtual world lacked real-world cues such as body language and vocal tones, McClimont said PKBA has managed to attract ‘a great amount’ of interest and visitors to its exhibition booth.

“It was a great concept and has been put into practice quite well,” he said. “With more Virtual Expos I'm sure the experience could be much more [successful].”

iTnews: IBM Uploads its first virtual ANZ conference

2008-08-06T18:24:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

IT delegates from across the nation gathered online today for IBM’s first virtual customer conference to be held in Australia and New Zealand.

The Upload 2008 virtual summit aimed to address what IBM has identified as new business pressures brought about by the credit crunch, rising fuel prices and skill shortages.

Following a global study of 1,130 CEOs across geographies and industries, the summit brought together speakers from all over the world to discuss methods of accelerating change and doing business.

Attendees arrived at the conference via a free-to-use Web interface. Once in the virtual environment, each was greeted by video footage of Glen Boreham, managing director of IBM Australia and New Zealand.

“This event is a sign of things to come,” Boreham said in his opening address.

“Holding a virtual conference is just one of the hundreds of ways IBM is changing how we work in response to the new pressures facing all of our businesses.”

Boreham described pressure from the recent credit crunch to reduce costs, pressure from rising fuel prices to avoid travel, and pressure from skill shortages to achieve more within a working day.

“These pressures that were barely on the radar a few years ago have now come to the fore,” he said.

The virtual setting of Upload 2008 demonstrates one method of alleviating such pressures by allowing attendees and exhibitors to access the event via the Internet, thus avoiding the need for travel.

An interactive visual environment was coupled with hyperlinked text to create a welcoming, user-friendly blend of the Web and virtual world experience.

A virtual auditorium, exhibition hall, networking lounge, and prize centre were mere clicks away from each other, providing attendees with easy access to interactive seminars, vendor representatives, and networking opportunities.

Lenovo, Intel, Nortel, NetBox Blue and VMware were among twenty-three exhibitors who established a virtual presence in IBM’s exhibition hall.

Exhibition attendees navigated the hall either via a hyperlinked list of exhibitors, or by eyeballing the scene and exploring the hall in true virtual world fashion.

At each exhibition booth, attendees were greeted by a team of avatars –- and, in some cases, videos -- with whom they could interact via private or group chat.

“It is a very worthwhile experience,” said Anthony Groves, a spokesperson at Lenovo’s exhibition booth.

“It is a good way to learn about a number of products all without having to leave the office,” he told iTnews via the virtual world chat interface.

According to VMware System Engineer Wibowo Leksono, the virtual setting allowed exhibitors to respond to far more queries than what would be possible in a real-life situation.

“It's been great. I get coverage of a lot more people this way rather than a real life booth,” Leksono told iTnews via private chat at VMware’s exhibition booth.

“[In] the morning, [there] have been non-stop queries, but it is excellent. It has also brought to our attention what issues are out there in the field.”

While virtual environments often take some time to get used to, Leksono reported minimal difficulties in preparing the VMware team for the exhibition.

“To be honest, most of us attended just a bit of training in the morning, and were up and running in no time,” he said.

As part of the Upload 2008 summit, IBM also invited environmentally-conscious conference attendees to give their Green egos a boost with the use of a Web-based carbon counter.

Compared to a traditional conference held in Sydney, IBM estimates the virtual setting to save up to 0.001 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions for an attendee based in North Sydney, and up to 0.4251 tonnes of emissions for an attendee travelling from Perth.

IT infrastructure, management and security were key topics that were discussed in the auditorium by speakers such as Future Exploration Network’s Chief Futurist Richard Watson, IBM’s CIO Mark Hennessy, software architecture and engineering veteran Grady Booch, and compliance and risk management expert Kristin Lovejoy.

Live seminars will be held until 5pm AEST today, after which recorded presentations will be available online until November 6.

iTnews: Artificially intelligent news reader shuts down

2008-08-04T18:26:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

There isn’t space in the online media market for a personalising news aggregator to grow large, an Australian web entrepreneur has claimed.

In a blog post announcing the closure of intelligent news portal ‘tiinker’ this month, the site’s co-founder and developer Alex North mentioned difficulties in competing with branded news sources.

“It’s been great fun and we’ve learnt a heap, but it seems that there just isn’t space for a personalising news aggregator to grow large,” he wrote.

tiinker was launched in January 2008 as an online news aggregator that used artificial intelligence to learn the interests of individual users and select stories tailored to each individual.

The site targeted the 'average' Internet user who reads news online, joining an array of online news aggregation tools such as Slashdot, Digg, and Google News.

“The technology we developed was great and we're happy with how it worked,” North told iTnews.

“It did a pretty good job of recommending interesting stories for us and for many users who sent us good feedback.”

“We were aiming to reduce some of the information overload that Internet users face online,” he explained. “We did create some great technology to achieve this, but unfortunately weren't able to grow the market for it.”

tiinker shut down on July 15, after North and co-founder Oleg Sushkov decided that the site ‘wasn’t going to change the world for enough people’.

Despite identifying the online news market as a rapidly growing sector with great potential for improvement, tiinker’s founders were unable to win consumers away from familiar news sites.

“News consumers have a strong affinity for the big brands in news; they like the familiarity of the SMH or News online and it proved too difficult to drag them away,” North said.

North expects personalised news to be successful in the future -- but only once large news sources implement such features within their existing sites.

He mentioned discussions with ‘local large media companies’, who were said to be interested in the idea, but unwilling to experiment with the technology as yet.

“I think personalisation will have a great future once the big news players implement similar features inside their own sites - a personalised SMH, for example - but there's not space for an external aggregator to do it,” he said.

“There's great potential for improvement here, but traditional media companies are struggling to keep up as it is. We'll see news personalisation take centre stage in a few years time,” he said.

iTnews: Oracle embraces 'Enterprise 2.0' with new PLM module

2008-08-01T18:28:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Oracle plans to announce a new Customer Needs Management module for its Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software suite early next year.

The module will add ‘Enterprise 2.0’ functionality to Agile, which has been in the market for more than a decade and counts among its customers Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Philips Medical.

Since being acquired by Oracle in May 2007, Agile has received a small number of updates to do with integration and interoperability.

The Customer Needs Management module will incorporate elements of social software -- such as user-generated content and mass collaboration portals -- into the business software suite.

According to Oracle executive Hardeep Gulati, the popularity of Web 2.0 in the consumer space could make Enterprise 2.0 an inevitable progression for businesses.

“There is a lot of recognition in Oracle, all the way to top management, that Enterprise 2.0 is changing the business layout,” said Gulati, who is Oracle’s Vice President, PLM and PIM Product Strategy.

“Every company who’s in the business of building products needs collaboration, whether internally or externally,” he told iTnews.

Gulati expects Enterprise 2.0 to benefit PLM by facilitating collaboration between suppliers, manufacturers, and designers of software and hardware.

Enterprise 2.0 elements could also be an aid in ensuring that products are compliant with regulations such as the European Union’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS) by providing an overview of various processes.

Gulati expressed an interest in the Australian market for PLM, which is valued at $90 million and bolstered by a large number of companies that deal in Consumer Packaged Goods.

“PLM is an area we see as a demand. We have a very strong pipeline, and this [Australian] market is very important to us,” he said.

But although Web 2.0 has been highlighted by analysts as an industry-shaping trend, a lasting effect of Enterprise 2.0 on businesses is yet to be seen.

While North American businesses have been seen to embrace Enterprise 2.0 tools, Asia Pacific is approaching the technology with caution, Gulati observed, noting that the technology is less common still in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Intellectual property (IP) rights have been of particular concern to businesses who may be considering the use of public Web forums to obtain user feedback and discuss future technological directions.

Noting that IP is a ‘sensitive topic’, Gulati argued that collaboration and an open discussion with users promotes innovation.

To counter IP concerns, he suggests the tiered approach employed by Oracle and its partners, in which a broader community is open to the public, and a smaller, closed-loop ‘strategy council’ caters to selected partners and industry leaders.

“As a company, if you don’t embrace it, there’s going to be some Web 2.0 community out there about your product anyway,” he concluded, alluding to the viral, user-generated nature of the Web.

“You’d [The company] might as well be a part of that community,” he said.

iTnews: Ferromagnet imaging technique could enable 'spintronic' devices

2008-07-31T18:33:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Researchers have developed a new method of studying tiny magnets that could yield high-density memory based on the emerging field of spintronics.

By implanting tiny “ferromagnets” onto processor chips, researchers expect to create small electronic devices and computers that never need to boot up.

Ferromagnets are magnets made of ferrous metal such as iron, and are used in common items such as refrigerator magnets.

According to experimental physicist Chris Hammel, ferromagnets are central to incorporating memory directly into the basic logic elements at the heart of a computer.

“Ferromagnets offer high density memory -- that is a means of storing a great deal of information in a small volume without the problem that the information is lost when the computer is turned off,” said Hammel, who developed the new imaging technique at Ohio State University.

“This could mean computers that don't need to boot; or even more exciting prospect of being able to alter the way your computer operates on the fly and without the configuration being lost when the computer is turned off,” he told iTnews.

Historically, researchers have been unable to image the insides of tiny ferromagnets due to their size and the strong magnetic fields they emit.

The new technique combines three different kinds of technology: magnetic resonance imagery (MRI) similar to the technology used for medical purposes; and two related techniques, ferromagnetic resonance and atomic force microscopy.

Dubbed “scanned probe ferromagnetic resonance force microscopy”, or scanned probe FMRFM, it involves detecting a magnetic signal using a tiny silicon bar with an even tinier magnetic probe on its tip.

The probe captures a two dimensional cross-section of an object as it passes over a material, resulting in a curved bowl-shaped image.

Using the new technique, Hammel is measuring the properties of disk-shaped magnets that measure only two micrometres in diameter.

“MRI is fundamentally in applicable to ferromagnets because of the strong interactions between electronic spins that make the material magnetic,” Hamel explained.

“We became interested in applying this [scanned probe FMRFM technique] to the tiny ferromagnets that are used for memory or for spintronics,” he said.

Hammel and his team hope to contribute to the development of an instrument that could be sold and used routinely in laboratories.

Further developments need to occur before the technique enables new devices and spintronics-based technology.

“We need our technology to become commercially available and we need spintronics to merge with silicon,” Hammel explained. “This advance is underway and I expect significant progress in the next decade.”

“Spintronics and memory have been moving very fast; we believe that a new imaging tool such as we have discovered could hasten this progress dramatically.”

“I think we will see this technology impacting computing units included in niche applications such as cell phones within five to ten years,” he said.

iTnews: Telstra installs 3D TV for purpose-built advertising

2008-07-31T18:30:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

A 3D TV in Telstra’s newly-opened Executive Briefing Centre is said to be the first commercial installation of three-dimensional content and technology in Australia.

The 52-inch display allows viewers to engage with 3D content without having to wear polarising glasses, and is expected to attract the attention of consumers in busy retail environments.

Telstra’s 3D TV is located in the reception area of its Melbourne facility and displays a short loop made of 15- to 60- second purpose-built, 3D video clips.

Telstra CEO, Sol Trujillo, is said to feature prominently on the display explaining the benefits of Telstra’s Next G and Next IP network, as well as what the telco calls ‘Next Dimension Working’.

Other content clips include sponsor product launch clips, brand messaging, and Telstra education messages.

3D content is created and supplied by Telstra’s Retail Media Solutions partner, Prime Digital Media.

According to PDM Creative Director Julie Frikken, 3D content production requires scenes to be designed with differing views, using calculated image offsets to create a visual environment similar to that the eye processes everyday.

Images then are split into multiple views for replay on the purpose-built 3D display panels.

“The animator needs to be something of an ophthalmologist as well to understand and master these techniques,” she told iTnews.

“Background, mid-ground and objects projected beyond the screen surface effects are achieved by careful image placement, scaling, dimensional offsets and colour usage.”

“If structured well you will see objects in a true dimensional space,” she said.

3D viewers are nothing new, Frikken explained, noting the evolution of technology from red and green coloured glasses in the 1950’s to polaroid-filtered glasses that are currently in use.

The 3D TV achieves what she called the ‘holy grail of 3D’, which is 3D without the use of glasses.

The 3D effect is achieved by using a precision laser-etched lens to combine multiple images, in a similar manner to how a 3D postcard creates depth from having viewers move the picture to view separate images.

Frikken estimates the cost of a 42-inch 3D TV unit to range between $10,000 to $15,000 depending on features and manufacturer.

Due to the cost of content production, she expects the technology to remain in the realm of retailers, brands and organisations, and not be accessible to consumers for some time.

iTnews: Online study suggests new genre of search engine queries

2008-07-28T19:41:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

An academic analysis of users of Yahoo Answers has led to speculations of a new genre of online questions that are more tailored to social forums than traditional search tools.

By analysing one month of activity on the Web site, the researchers found that users of the Web site tend to favour constrained discussions with other people, rather than seeking information directly from the Internet.

“There are gobs and gobs of useful information on the web,” said Lada Adamic, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and first author of the study.

“Search tools allow one to, in principle, access a fair portion of it with relative ease. Yet, just as one may turn to a colleague for an answer to a question rather than search through a book, millions of individuals are flocking to online question/answer forums to seek answers directly from others. Part of the reason is the social aspect of online question/answer forums.”

Researchers examined the most popular 300 of approximately 1000 categories on the Web site, representing more than 91 percent of the content on the site. Topics studied include: jokes and riddles; philosophy, religion and politics; marriage and divorce; physics; programming; chemistry; and celebrities.

Inquiries that sought factual answers about topics such as biology, repairs and programming tended to receive fewer replies, while categories such as fashion and baby names received comparatively long answer threads that included advice and common-sense expertise.

Similarly, categories seeking opinion like politics and religion, for which there is no single answer, tended to attract many answers as well.

The study concluded that the span of knowledge shared on Yahoo Answers is broad, but generally not very deep.

"A lot of the use of Yahoo Answers is being driven by these constrained kinds of discussions," said Mark Ackerman, associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information who co-authored the study.

"People are working against the medium. They're creating a new response pattern. Perhaps there's a new online genre that's particular to Yahoo Answers."

iTnews: EMC faces cloud computing 'frienemies'

2008-07-28T18:54:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

As some of the fog surrounding the elusive cloud computing phenomenon evaporates, vendors are fast moving into the emerging territory.

Analysts attribute the cloud computing push to a rise of data-intensive applications, data centre pressures, and mobile and networking technologies.

And with technology behemoths such as Google, Microsoft and IBM leading the charge, cloud computing could be shaping up to be an industry-changing technology.

According to EMC’s Vice President of Technology Alliances, Chuck Hollis, cloud computing is not a fad -- it is the way of the future.

“Cloud is probably the most exciting thing happening in IT today, and also the most scary,” he said.

“For us, cloud is the natural evolution of the decomposition of IT.”

Speaking at the EMC Inform forum in Sydney last week, Hollis likened the current state of technology to how power was distributed among manufacturers in during the industrial revolution.

Just as manufacturers moved from using on-site power plants to nationwide power grids in the past, Hollis expects technology companies to move from on-premise solutions to cloud-based distributed computing power in the near future.

Already, consumers and businesses should be familiar with the concept of cloud computing through the Google search engine, which gives users access to Google’s powerful search servers via the internet, Hollis pointed out.

Enterprise uptake of cloud computing is also said to be enabled by the recently-popular concept of virtualisation, which enables organisations to dynamically balance server load and resources.

By providing a standardised service that looks and performs similarly for multiple users, cloud-based solutions are expected to produce economies of scale, reduce purchasing costs, and simplify IT maintenance.

“We believe that virtualisation in all its forms is fundamentally changing the economics of computing,” Hollis said.

“There is a business value created by giving IT organisations what they need, when they need it.”

“Whereas historically, we’ve thought in terms of buying technology, now it makes sense to consume it over the wire,” he said.

“We can’t go back to how things were before.”

According to Gartner Research Fellow and Vice President David Cearley, vendor dominance in the cloud computing market will be decided by which platform is most successful at attracting independent software vendors and developers.

Speaking at an Emerging Trends and Technology Roadshow in Sydney earlier this year, Cearley named Amazon, Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Microsoft, and IBM as vendors that are leading the charge towards computing in the cloud.

Just as Microsoft won a majority of the software market share by establishing Windows as the primary ecosystem for Independent Software Vendors to develop new software and applications, Web service providers currently are battling to establish dominance in the cloud computing market, he said.

“Vendors are battling for ultimate control of business computing in the next decade,” he said. “Proper use of the infrastructure stack and related Web services will be key for ‘megavendor’ success.”

But EMC’s Hollis expects competition in the cloud computing arena to be less of a winners-versus-losers game as it is an opportunity for competitors to support and build on each other’s successes.

Hollis named Google as a cloud computing market leader in the consumer arena, and Microsoft as a leader in the SMB market.

He described both Google and Microsoft as “partners” and “frienemies” in a “co-opetition” (corporative competition) for the cloud.

EMC could provide long-term information management for Microsoft’s cloud computing services, he said for example.

“In my view, it’s not going to be about which cloud; it’s [the future] going to be all the clouds,” he said. “I think there’s going to be multiple clouds for different markets.”

“Just like in the technology world where no one vendor has everything, in the cloud, it may not be the case of ‘ether/or’ as much as it is ‘and’,” he said.

Gartner predicts that by 2012, 80 percent of Fortune 1000 enterprises will be paying for some cloud computing services, and 30 percent will be paying for cloud computing infrastructure services.

But despite the potentials of cloud computing, industry spectators expect there to remain a demand for on-premise technology for certain business-critical applications.

Hollis described the difference between “core functions” and “context functions”.

Core functions were said to include: securing strategic advantage for an organisation; obtaining market differentiation; and protecting customers’ confidentiality.

Context functions were described as “basic IT housekeeping tasks”, such as maintaining databases and ensuring all systems are up and running.

“IT is getting clogged with all these things that have to get done and nobody wants to do,” he said.

“On that other [context] list, we think you’re going to get your cloud services to do that,” he told partners and customers at the forum.

According to Steve Leonard, Asia Pacific President of EMC, Asia is likely to lead the push towards cloud computing.

In developing markets such as India, Leonard expects the evolution of technological services to echo the development of telecommunications infrastructure.

India has leapfrogged the need for wired communications infrastructure by deploying wireless access points and mobile services instead, he explained.

Similarly, cloud computing could give start-up organisations the option to consume technology over the wire, bypassing the need for costly software and hardware purchases.

“We think that Asia generally would be leading this in terms of a trend,” Leonard said. “India will be a major provider and domestic consumer of cloud services in the next two to three years.”

If cloud computing takes off in the Asia Pacific region, the Australian economy could stand to gain by housing vendors’ data centres and positioning itself as an exporter of information.

Leonard highlighted market maturity and the opportunity to leverage an English-speaking market in an Asian location as attractions for organisations looking to invest in data centres in Australia.

“We certainly would see Australia as a potential exporter of knowledge,” he said, mentioning that EMC currently is “in discussions with governments” about potential locations for its data centres.

Hollis explained that EMC’s decision of where to locate its data centres relies heavily on government policies surrounding the export of information.

Likening current data transfer restrictions to European trade restrictions in the past, Hollis said cloud computing service providers require the ability for information to move transparently across borders to ensure uninterrupted, reliable service.

“Before we see mainstream adoption of cloud, you need to be able to trust that it’s going to be there when you need it,” he said.

“The cloud is not theoretical; there are people out there making money from it today,” he concluded. “The future is here; it’s just not evenly distributed.”

iTnews: Enterprise networking: are your decisions your own?

2008-07-28T18:34:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Enterprise network managers should regain control of their purchasing decisions, analysts say.

According to Gartner Vice President and Analyst Mark Fabbi, enterprises have become increasingly reliant on vendor recommendations when purchasing network equipment.

If vendors exert too strong an influence on enterprise purchasing decisions, organisations could lose sight of business requirements and waste money on unnecessary features, he warns.

“Over the years, we see a number of vendors across different industries increasingly control the decisions of their customers,” he said. “Enterprises really need to take back control of their own decisions.”

Gartner has produced a Vendor Influence Curve to determine how organisations approach technology purchases.

Five different approaches were identified: misers, who are influenced solely by price; tacticians, who consider a number of tactical vendors; leaders, who choose a vendor based on business requirements; optimists, who are influenced by a primary vendor partner; and followers, who treat a vendor as their trusted advisor.

Decisions made by misers were said to be of least benefit to the organisation and vendor. Leaders are expected to be of greatest benefit to the organisation and moderate benefit to the vendor.

Followers are of little benefit to the organisation and great benefit to the vendor, Fabbi said, adding that such organisations “pay dearly for the privilege of not having to make a decision”.

As networking equipment has increased in complexity during the past half-decade, Fabbi speculates that organisations have opted to “fly to safety” and hand over the reins of decision-making to large, influential networking incumbents.

If organisations continue to unconditionally trust their vendor advisors, Fabbi warns that hardware prices will become disproportionately high, and organisations are likely to end up with networking services and features that they don’t need.

“Enterprises will waste $130 billion buying the wrong network technologies and services during the next five years,” he predicts. “Literally, you can’t run your business that way.”

“The problem with enterprise networks is that they see networking equipment as highly complex and customised … the reality of the matter is that equipment is now standardised and we should expect to see vendor margins go down as they try to remain competitive.”

While previous networks have been built on the pillars of making connectivity “bigger” and “faster”, Fabbi said modern networks should be designed around location, users, applications, devices, and activity.

He urges organisations to take purchasing decisions into their own hands by understanding business requirements, reviewing multiple vendors and establishing a vendor bidding process to obtain the most competitive prices.

“The discipline of actually evaluating technology is a lost art,” he said. “We have to re-establish that.”

iTnews: Can 'soul-less' robots make us weep?

2008-07-24T18:56:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

A study of technology’s role in music therapy has found robot musicians wanting.

Researchers studied the electric brain responses of twenty non-musicians who listened to classical piano sonatas played either by a computer or a musician.

By investigating how the vegetative nervous system responds to music, researchers aimed to research music-therapeutic applications for the treatment of diseases.

Computerised music was found to elicit an emotional response during unexpected chords and changes in tonal key.

However, listeners responded far more strongly to recordings of human performances.

Stefan Koelsch, a psychologist involved in the study at the University of Sussex, attributed the difference in listeners’ responses to the ability of human musicians to perform with musical expression, which is evidenced by variations in loudness and speed.

Likening the study’s findings to how the brain forms meaning from language, Koelsch speculates that the brain could be looking for musical meaning from human performers and not computers.

“Humans played with expression -- variations in tempo and loudness – [while] computers played the notes without expression, which sounds like a robot or so,” Koelsch said.

“When humans play, then the meaning of the music does not only arise from the musical material composed by the composer, but also by the means of musical expression due to the performance of the player,” he explained.

While Koelsch noted that the researchers did not use computer software designed to emulate human performances in their study, he does not expect computers ever to be able to perform in a similar manner to musicians.

“Computers do not have a soul,” he said. “I believe that only the soul can give the music the full meaning -- but this is rather philosophical, of course.”

According to John Judge of Australian research organisation NICTA, musical expression is one of several challenges in the development of robotic musicians.

Judge recently led a collaborative effort between NICTA and the University of NSW to build a robotically-operated, computer-driven clarinet, which last month won first place in the international Artemis Orchestra competition.

The robotically-operated clarinet was eight months in the making, and involved a completely embedded computer system with the human interface achieved via a USB-attached keyboard, LCD screen and LEDs.

“There’s a few challenges for robotic musicians,” Judge told iTnews.

“The first barrier to overcome is to competently play the musical instruments. Once you can play the instrument competently, it’s [musical expression] another huge leap all by itself,” he said.

The Artemis Orchestra competition is an annual contest for technical students to showcase the capability of embedded systems.

Winning entrants from the 2008 event include a clarinet from NICTA/UNSW, an acoustic guitar from the Netherlands, and a piano from Finland.

“There was such a huge improvement [from entrants this year],” Judge said. “It was a larger improvement than we all expected; entries were actually quite pleasant to listen to.”

“The entrants into the competition last year may have been quite difficult to listen to for extended periods of time,” he explained, delicately.

Judge described 2008 competition entrants as “good amateur players”. To reach the level of human performers, a robotic musician would have to interpret the music in a human-like manner.

And while there is software that could mimic musical expression using artificial intelligence or by adding an extra processing set to interpreting sheet music, Judge expects such performances still to fall short of those of human musicians.

“When you go to the Opera House and listen to someone play, they’re not mechanically reproducing what’s on the page; they’re interpreting the music for performance,” he explained.

“I think there are some people who would regard human musicians as having a dialogue with the audience when they perform.”

“Can a robot ever play like a human? I don’t really know,” he said. “That gets a little too philosophical for me to answer.”

In the lead up to Artemis Orchestra 2009, NICTA is sponsoring final year engineering student projects from the University of Queensland and the University of Adelaide.

The NICTA/UNSW clarinet is expected to be one of four projects that will be considered by NICTA for entry into the international contest.

Engineers currently are working on improving the musical competency of robotic musicians.

In future, Judge expects that robotic musicians could be able to manipulate an unmodified instrument in more ways than is possible with a human, which could enable human musicians to investigate technical aspects of performance like fingerings.

“Building machines to play musical instruments allows us to investigate musical instruments in new ways,” he said. “It [findings] can actually feed back to human musicians.”

“No one’s approached this project with the assumption of replacing human musicians,” he said.

iTnews: BMC touts process automation for IT

2008-07-23T18:37:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

“IT is the last bastion of manual labour in the enterprise,” declared BMC Software’s vice president of software consulting, Mary Nugent.

In Sydney for BMC’s Business Advisory Forum this week, Nugent explained how a rise in demand for standards and regulatory compliance has created a market for process automation technology.

The rapid growth of the IT industry during the previous decades has contributed to what Nugent described as a siloing of processes, infrastructure, and functions.

Process automation could allow organisations to visualise and improve their infrastructure, and free up staff for more stimulating, innovative job functions, she said.

“There is kind of a refresh going on in IT right now; customers have taken the idea of management as far as they can, and now you can really see the momentum increase [for automation],” she told iTnews.

“There’s a lot of things that we can do in IT that are low hanging fruit for automation,” she said, highlighting workflow engines as an example.

BMC typically consults with organisations in the banking, telecommunications, and retail industries to determine how work is being done, the overall needs of the business, and the perspective of the IT department.

Consultants are then able to suggest and deploy process automation technology.

For example, Nugent described BMC’s recently-acquired Run Book Automation Platform, which uses “predictive intelligence” to promote a more efficient use of labour and drive alignment to business objectives.

The platform detects IT issues and assesses them against a dynamic threshold before notifying staff. The tool also is able to remediate certain issues automatically.

Citing a need for IT professionals to become more aware of the overall needs of the business, Nugent warned of the costs associated with indiscriminately “throwing manpower at a problem”.

While she noted a cultural aversion to process automation from IT staff who fear being made redundant, Nugent said such barriers could be overcome with team building exercises and by motivating staff with more stimulating tasks.

“When you look at business and IT, there’s a bit of a disconnect,” she said. “It’s been a long time since IT has really documented how things get done.”

“Throwing labour at it [problems] will run out of steam,” she said, noting a skills shortage in the IT industry currently.

“It’s [process automation] not about putting people out of their jobs; it’s about freeing up manpower for innovation,” she said.

iTnews: Can Australia lead global R&D?

2008-06-23T18:58:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

The Australian technology industry needs the support of the Government to secure an innovative advantage for the country, according to the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA).

Discussing a recent study of scientific research and development by U.S. think-tank RAND, AIIA Chief Executive Officer Ian Birks said leadership in scientific innovation would be “critical to the future of the Australian economy”.

“It is very important that Australia is competitive in the emerging global information economy,” Birks told iTnews.

“It will be our ability to establish ourselves as a centre for innovation and technology excellence that will to a large degree determine our success,” he said.

But in the global arena, Australia may be lagging behind in generating sufficient opportunities to attract and retain the world’s top talent.

According to the RAND study, which was sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government, the U.S. currently is considered the dominant world power in science and technology.

RAND researchers James Hosack and Titus Gallama found the U.S. to account for 40 percent of global spending on scientific research and development (R&D), 70 percent of the world’s Nobel Prize winners, and three-quarters of the world’s top 40 universities.

By analysing wage data about foreign-born science and engineering workers, the researchers concluded that the U.S. has become “increasingly reliant on foreign-born workers” to build and maintain its lead.

AIIA’s Birks attributed the historical success of the U.S. in attracting foreign talent to the country’s ability to finance a supportive policy environment.

“The reality is that talent gravitates towards the most interesting work and the best packages on offer,” he said. “Silicon Valley is an excellent example.”

Phil Robertson, Chief Operating Officer of NICTA, agrees.

“There is no doubt that the US is an example of a country that has used sustained long-term funding programs, such as DARPA and NASA, to underpin long-term research programs and fund the attraction of people from other countries to work in the US,” he told iTnews.

Noting the importance of technology as a driver for change across society and economy, Robertson expects countries that have invested in ICT R&D to reap dual benefits from being technology producers, as well as being on the forefront of technology use.

While Australia previously has settled for being a user -- and not a creator -- of technology, the situation is changing, Robertson said.

“We are now recognising more widely the importance of building an Australian ICT industry,” he said.

“By creating technology that is used across the world we will make greater economic gains than just productivity gains.”

“Government, research and industry need to work together to achieve this vision and I think there is growing momentum behind this,” he said.

In the U.S., economic fluctuations and tightening immigration restrictions could create a window of opportunity for other countries to take the lead in dominating the technology industry.

In an interview with iTnews, RAND’s Hosack said that the U.S. government’s recent decision to reduce the availability of H1-B skilled immigration visas from the current 195,000 limit to 65,000 is “not a step in the right direction”.

And with the U.S. economic recession yielding unexpected reductions in federal and corporate revenues, Hosack expects R&D spending to be on the decline.

“We view this as a globalised market for science and engineering development. Any country with a serious interest in scientific development is going to be a competitor,” he said, mentioning Europe, Brasil and China as competitors.

But according to NICTA’s Robertson, nations should approach technology R&D as a global collaboration and not a competition.

“The technology research industry is a global one, so we should no longer be thinking in terms of ‘brain drain’ or ‘brain gain’,” he said.

“What matters is the total amount being done in this country, and researchers will have a healthy flow between countries.”

Much of NICTA’s research is conducted in collaboration with research institutes around the world.

An estimated one-third of NICTA’s researchers are from overseas, the attraction of whom Robertson attributes to the organisation’s well-defined research areas, vibrancy, and funding certainty.

On a global scale, however, Australia’s funding of ICT R&D is low when compared with OECD peers.

According to statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, overall funding for R&D is 1.76 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is below an OECD average of 2.26 percent and the European Union’s 2010 target of three percent.

Applied research in ICT accounts for a mere 1.6 percent of the Australian Government’s total expenditure of more than $1.3 billion on applied research across all industries.

“I think there is a growing awareness in Australia that international competitiveness in support for R&D is linked to our future economic success,” Robertson said. “We need to turn this awareness into increased funding for ICT R&D.”

“If Australia offers an environment to tackle new and exciting problems in a strategic way we will attract research talent with the drive to make a difference,” he said.

AIIA’s Birks pointed the finger of responsibility at government and industry bodies, which have the opportunity to create an open environment that attracts the investment of global companies.

As in the RAND analysis of the U.S. environment, policy initiatives that stimulate and support infrastructure, workforce and education will be critical to Australia’s success, Birks said.

R&D taxation incentives and industry development programs such as the recently discontinued Commercial Ready scheme also were mentioned as important components in developing an innovative environment.

“While there are many things that we are doing well, I think we are still in middle of the pack in these areas,” Birks said.

“Australia has a recognised talent base and a strong spirit of entrepreneurship that both promote international investment in science and technology leadership in this country.”

“What we need to take advantage of current opportunities, however, is consistent policy and government support across the board to stimulate that investment and Australian innovation in general,” he said.

iTnews: The technologist's guide to the near future

2008-06-16T19:00:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Technological convergence has shaped many aspects of today’s world, from the creation of medical technologies to devastating events like 9/11, according to U.S. physicist and science fiction author Stanley Schmidt.

In his newly-released non-fiction book titled The Coming Convergence, Schmidt investigates how today’s rapid pace of innovation will produce technologies that could either greatly benefit human lives, or lead to an Orwellian dystopia.

Schmidt spoke with iTnews about the book, his expectations, and the approaching technological “singularity” that has been predicted to herald the end of the human era.

What does the title of your book, 'The coming convergence', refer to?

Much of what happens in our world, from lifesaving medical technologies like CAT scans to disasters like the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, results from seemingly unrelated technologies coming together to do things that none of them could do alone.

This has happened in the past, but is now happening faster and producing more dramatic changes in how we live than ever before. The major “streams” now rushing together include biotechnology, information technology, nanotechnology, and cognitive science.

What will the technological convergence produce? How will it change businesses? How will it change lifestyles?

Nobody can say with certainty what it will produce. What we can do -- and must, if we are to reap the huge potential benefits while avoiding the equally great potential dangers -- is to imagine as many of the possible changes as we can, and try to steer our future toward the ones we like.

For just a few examples: We already see a great deal of business moving out of factories and stores into the internet and homes. We can expect this trend to become much more pronounced, and some manufacturing may move into space, or be done by in-home appliances called “synthesizers” that can make and recycle a wide range of goods.

In a best-case scenario, virtually everybody can live a longer, healthier, safer, more independent life than ever before. In a worst -- but just as possible -- case, we could get something much like George Orwell’s 1984, because any would-be Big Brother already has means at his disposal beyond anything Orwell imagined. On the other hand, so does the resistance.

Is there a point of convergence that we are working towards, or are we moving along a continuum? When can we expect to see a world in which the human brain is directly linked to machines?

It’s very difficult to say when or even whether any particular thing will happen, as many converging factors determine that -- as well as what catches on and what doesn’t.

If the right technological and social factors had come together, we might have had holographic television and flying cars by now, but we don’t. On the other hand, we do have the internet, which has already changed the world in ways far beyond any imagined in earlier science fiction.

We don’t know of any endpoint for what’s happening, but some writers, notably Vernor Vinge, have speculated that as different technologies push each other along, the curves of change will grow steeper and steeper, and may eventually reach a “Singularity.”

That’s a condition where change is so fast that civilisation is transformed almost instantly into something so radically different from what we now have that we would find it hard even to recognise.

How has convergence of past technologies shaped today's world and current technological advancements?

A vast amount of the world we live in results from such convergences. In the CAT scan example I mentioned earlier, we have a lifesaving diagnostic technique that depends on the combination of medical understanding, x-ray imaging, and high-speed computers that can work with very large amounts of data.

The 9/11 example resulted from big-building technology and aviation coming together in ways their inventors never anticipated.

And, of course, in most such cases we can’t point to a single person and say, “He invented big buildings” or “She invented airplanes.” Each of these phenomena is itself the result of earlier convergences.

Similarly, the technologies leading current change, such as biotechnology, depend on earlier technologies coming together, as x-ray diffraction, computing, and several other fields did to decipher the structure of DNA and the genetic code.

What is driving today's innovation? What reasons do we have to expect direct communication links between the human brain and machines, for example?

Sometimes it’s commerce, sometimes it’s military, sometimes it’s simply the desire to learn how nature works and what can be done with it. If somebody sees a way to make a profit by doing something new, he or she will. The public will decide whether it succeeds by deciding whether or not to buy it.

Most of the extrapolations I talk about in the book are just that: possibilities that we can see because we’ve already seen their early forms. I’ve already read, for example, news reports of experimental prosthetics being controlled directly by their wearers’ nervous systems. There was even one case of a monkey directly controlling a “robot monkey” located on the other side of the world.

Who is responsible for directing and driving technological advancement? What is your advice to these parties?

Everybody! It might seem that the topics I talk about in The Coming Convergence would be of interest only to techno-geeks, but in reality they’re going to profoundly affect the future lives of every one of us.

So anyone who votes, shops, travels, teaches, raises children, or otherwise participates in our civilization needs to become aware of the possibilities and how he or she can affect which ones become realities.

Citizens can and must affect what governments do; consumers can and must affect what businesses do. Let’s try to do it wisely, and make the future as good as it can be.

iTnews: To code or not to code?

2008-06-06T19:02:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

The rise of Open Source software adoption has brought with it increased awareness of non-proprietary programming technologies.

Free and open languages such as PHP and Ruby are catching up fast with the likes of Microsoft’s .NET and Oracle.

And while the myriad programming languages may resemble the Biblical confusion of tongues, technologists agree that there is a time and place for each of the languages -- whether proprietary or Open Source.

“Open Source is great for many customers,” said Jeff Doyle, Product Manager of HP’s Exstream software brand. “However, sometimes proprietary languages are better suited for particular applications.”

Doyle expects the exclusion of proprietary features to allow Open Source languages to be used freely and with greater flexibility.

However, he noted that the revenue generated by proprietary languages encourages vendors to make frequent improvements to their products, which in turn attract users.

“Proprietary software vendors are very motivated to add features and functions into proprietary languages because proprietary languages generate revenue,” he said.

“Therefore, I do not see a complete replacement of Proprietary languages by Open Source products for a very, very long time.”

According to Kan Kawashima, Exstream’s Japan country manager, Exstream developers tend to be well-versed in a range of platforms and languages, including .NET, Java, Perl and PHP.

Versatile developers are expected to enable Exstream to integrate its products with various systems and be flexible to meet demands and aggressive development schedules.

Meanwhile, Melbourne-based consultancy Shine Technologies has built its business on the Ruby on Rails Web application framework, which is based on the Open Source Ruby programming language.

Operating on a belief of not promoting technology for technology’s sake, Shine aims to evaluate technology based on its ability to deliver a business benefit.

According to the consultancy's principal, Mark Johnson, Ruby on Rails was chosen for its value proposition in certain situations.

“For web-based applications, Ruby on Rails offers much faster speed-to-market, yet flattens the learning curve for both us and our clients,” he said.

“The resulting code is smaller, easier to manage and the release process is extremely efficient.”

Open Source technologies appeal to University of New South Wales academic John Shepherd because of cost advantages and the ease of access to the technical mechanisms behind Open Source platforms.

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 Shepherd admitted that proprietary technologies such as Oracle and .NET are more prevalent in the industry, he expects Open Source systems to be more conducive to teaching programming concepts that will better equip students to adapt to new versions of existing technologies.

“As far as we’re concerned, programming languages are really just a vehicle for teaching the underlying ideas,” Shepherd said.

“We’re not teaching a particular system; we’re teaching the ideas behind the system. We know that systems are going to change in two years, and what’s the point in training someone in the gory details of some system that is going to be replaced by version two in three years time.”

UNSW’s Computer Science and Engineering students are taught the C programming language in their first year, to teach basic procedural programming. Second year students are taught Java in the context of Object-Oriented design.

In later years, students are taught whichever language lecturers deem most appropriate for the topic area that is covered.

“I happened to choose PHP because it’s simple and easy for students to pick up,” Shepherd said.

“It’s a higher level of abstraction than C; if you want to be doing the same thing in C, you’re writing five times as much code. And some of the constructs – hash tables and the huge number of libraries it provides - is convenient.”

Cost considerations aside, Shepherd said that the accessibility to Open Source source code has teaching advantages also.

“With open source, I just like the notion that you have access to the source code for systems that you’re running, and even better, if you find bugs in it, you can fix it yourself and post your fixes to the Web site for that open source system,” he said.

“Oracle is not going to give you the source code, so you go with an Open Source database like PostgreSQL and MySQL.”

According to IT services and solutions provider Dimension Data, however, Open Source options may not always be the most cost-effective in the industry.

Dimension Data’s General Manager for Application Integration, Peter Menadue, described dealings with a large Australian bank, which required a specific application to be written by the IT department for an internal customer in commercial banking.

The IT department researched technologies including ColdFusion, PHP, Java and .NET, and achieved a mix of quotes ranging from $150,000 for Java development, to $60,000 for a .NET development.

But the most effective solution turned out to be Microsoft’s SharePoint, with which the IT department was able to satisfy the bank’s requirements for about $20,000.

“The customer was extremely happy; they got a result really quickly, they really liked it, they didn’t have to get anyone to maintain any code,” Menadue said. “That is a flavour that we’re seeing more and more of.”

“Clearly there’s still a lot of development going on, but I think it’s more targeted. People are looking at more of these platforms to, in some cases, avoid code, or at least, avoid the first block of development if you like, and only do the development where they are really adding high value.”

“It’s just a way of reducing ongoing maintenance costs, and means that you buy into a platform and keep riding that wave,” he said.

Describing the shift towards leveraging existing platforms as a trend towards “non-programming”, Menadue noted that the most useful programming languages are those that are most compatible with the platforms being extended.

SharePoint-based projects thus require expertise in .NET, he said, noting that Dimension Data tends to prefer the C# language within the .NET environment.

“I think the basic premise is this: if you’re writing a specific application, either you write the code yourself, or you leverage some functionality that’s already been written,” he said.

“Five, ten years ago, the default action would have been to develop something.”

“I think people are trying to really define exactly where it makes sense for them to do it, rather than just leverage something where somebody has already made some sort of developmental investment,” he said.

iTnews: Robotics handbook explores past, present and future

2008-06-02T19:04:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

The dream to create machines that are skilled and intelligent is now becoming part of our world’s striking reality, according to robotics expert Bruno Siciliano.

Together with Oussama Khatib, who is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, Siciliano has edited and launched a "Handbook of Robotics" that aims to make the increasingly complex field of robotics more accessible to engineers, doctors, computer scientists and designers.

Siciliano, who is a Professor of Control and Robotics at the University of Naples, Italy, as well as the President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, spoke with iTnews about the book and its topics that range from the foundations to the social and ethical implications of robotics.

Who is your target audience for the "Handbook of Robotics"?

The handbook was conceived to provide a valuable resource not only for robotics experts, but also for newcomers to this expanding field [such as] engineers, medical doctors, computer scientists, and designers.

Why do we need such a handbook?

The undertaking of the project was motivated by the rapid growth of the field.

With the ever increasing amount of publications in journals, conference proceedings and monographs, it is difficult for those involved in robotics, particularly those who are just entering the field, to stay abreast of its wide range of developments.

This task is made even more arduous by the very multidisciplinary nature of robotics.

How prevalent are robots in everyday life?

Robots today are making a considerable impact on many aspects of modern life, from industrial manufacturing to healthcare, transportation, and exploration of the deep space and sea. Tomorrow, robots will be as pervasive and personal as today’s personal computers.

What are the potentials of robots in the near future and how will this compare with robots of today?

In the 1990s, research was boosted by the need to resort to robots to address human safety in hazardous environments (field robotics), or to enhance the human operator ability and reduce his/her fatigue (human augmentation), or else by the desire to develop products with wide potential markets aimed at improving the
quality of life (service robotics).

A common denominator of such application scenarios was the need to operate in a scarcely structured environment which ultimately requires increased abilities and a higher degree of autonomy.

By the dawn of the new millennium, robotics has undergone a major transformation in scope and dimensions.

This expansion has been brought about by the maturity of the field and the advances in its related technologies. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics has been rapidly expanding into the challenges of the human world (human-centered and life-like robotics).

The new generation of robots is expected to safely and dependably co-habitat with humans in homes, workplaces, and communities, providing support in services, entertainment, education, healthcare, manufacturing, and assistance.

What is the global landscape like for robotics currently?

Even though the first industrial robots were designed and built in the 1960s in the USA, during the course of the following decades they have matured elsewhere.

Mostly due to the needs of their automotive industry, combined with high costs of labour, both Europe and Japan have taken over global technological leadership in industrial robotics in the past decades. In the US, most of robotics research is currently funded through military, space and security programs.

In Japan, robot manufacturers can rely on public opinion that robots are widely accepted by society. They are seen as useful helpers (co-workers to their human counterparts) and not as job-killers, they have a strong home market with the highest density of robots, cover a larger spectrum of robots, and are typically part of huge vertically integrated industrial conglomerates that can build up massive R&D and commercial power.

In Europe, by contrast, the robotics industry is strong, but still quite fragmented and dispersed. Industry observers agree on the following global trends in the industry: due to saturation in the classical (automotive) markets, all major manufacturers will need to identify new areas to maintain growth and (ii) the rapid development in technology areas that are the basis for robotics – mechatronics, computers, sensors, programming, human interfaces – bears huge potential for totally new application scenarios.

Clearly, these developments may also result in a dramatic re-distribution of the market share of robot manufacturers in future application scenarios.

Will robotics ever become an issue for policy makers? How so?

Robotics is rapidly becoming one of the leading fields of science and technology, so that very soon humanity is going to coexist with a totally new class of technological artefacts: robots. It will be an event rich in ethical, social and economic problems.

It is the first time in history that humanity is approaching the challenge to replicate an intelligent and autonomous entity. This compels the scientific community to examine closely the very concept of intelligence – in humans, animals, and of the mechanical – from a cybernetic standpoint.

In fact, complex concepts like autonomy, learning, consciousness, evaluation, free will, decision making, freedom, emotions, and many others shall be analysed, taking into account that the same concept shall not have, in humans, animals, and machines, the same reality and semantic meaning.

From this standpoint, it can be seen as natural and necessary that robotics drew on several other disciplines, like Logic, Linguistics, Neuroscience, Psychology, Biology, Physiology, Philosophy, Literature, Natural History, Anthropology, Art, Design. Robotics de facto unifies the so called two cultures, Science and Humanities. The effort to design Roboethics should take care of this specificity.

What are Roboethics?

Roboethics is an applied ethics whose objective is to develop scientific, cultural, and technical tools that can be shared by different social groups and believes. These tools aim to promote and encourage the development of Robotics for the advancement of human society and individuals, and to help preventing its misuse against humankind.

This means that experts shall view robotics as a whole - in spite of the current early stage which recalls a melting pot – so they can achieve the vision of the robotics’ future.

When do you expect robots to be an unavoidable part of life? What needs to be achieved before this happens?

The dream to create machines that are skilled and intelligent has been part of humanity from the beginning of time. This dream is now becoming part of our world’s striking reality.

Reaching for the human frontier, robotics is vigorously engaged in the growing challenges of new emerging domains. Interacting, exploring, and working with humans, the new generation of robots will increasingly touch people and their lives.

The credible prospect of practical robots among humans is the result of the scientific endeavour of a half a century of robotic developments that established robotics as a modern scientific discipline.

Today, new communities of users and developers are forming, with growing connections to the core of robotics research. A strategic goal for the robotics community is one of outreach and scientific cooperation with these communities. Future developments and expected growth of the field will largely depend on the research community’s abilities to achieve this objective.

iTnews: Cyber security author discusses economics of protecting cyberspace

2008-05-23T19:07:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

U.S. economists have launched a book that claims to document the first systematic analysis of the economics of protecting cyberspace.

Titled ‘Cyber Security: Economic Strategies and Public Policy Alternatives’, the book explores private sector security decisions, as well as the role of governments in facilitating and encouraging proactive cyber security investment strategies.

Besides individual concerns about identity theft, authors Michael Gallaher, Albert Link and Brent Rowe warn against larger threats such as a potential attack on national energy infrastructure.

Rowe, who is a research economist at research institute RTI International, spoke with iTnews about the book and its recommendations for private and public sector managers and strategists involved in cyber security.

Why is cyber security important?

Cyberspace is the nervous system of business today -- it links our critical infrastructures across both public and private institutions in sectors ranging from food and agriculture, water supply and public health, to energy, transportation and financial services.

This information control system is composed of hundreds of thousands of interconnected computers, servers, routers, switches and fibre-optic cables that allow our critical infrastructure to work. When this infrastructure is breached, the costs can mount very quickly.

Cyber security breaches are costly to businesses in terms of direct damages and future lost opportunities associated with stifling innovation, as well as to individuals in terms of identity theft.

In what way is cyber security a matter of national and homeland security?

In addition to time and monetary costs imposed on businesses and individuals as a result of cyber security breaches, a cyber attack could be aimed to have much more calamitous effects than described above.

For example, a complex and coordinated attack could be focused on the U.S. energy infrastructure, which has been shown to be relatively insecure, and potentially knock out power for days or weeks.

When did cyber security become an issue for private and public institutions? What has changed to make it an issue?

While there are no consistent estimates of the annual cost to the private sector or the public sector from security compromises, a rough estimate is that in 2006 cyber security breaches accounted for nearly US$1 billion in the United States.

Such costs have risen over the past decade to the point where organisations are focusing more on their information security investments. In many cases, information security officers in major corporations now have much more significant roles in company planning activities.

Companies are facing large costs, individuals confronting issues such as identify theft, and experts believe that larger threats -- for example, a potential attack on the U.S. energy infrastructure -- are looming.

What are some common mistakes that public and private sector organisations make in securing their IT infrastructure?

From a social perspective, organizations under-invest in cyber security because they are not penalised when their lacking security allows attackers to use them as a staging point or to compromise hosts and create botnets.

However, private sector organisations do not have the information they need to make efficient decisions from a private perspective -- what’s in their best interest -- or a social perspective -- what’s in the best interest of society. They collect what information they can with given resources, and then make decisions based on their budget constraints.

In some cases, they may underestimate the costs imposed by security breaches, however, there is no research to support the assertion that they are not acting in their best interest given the information they have available.

What is the Government’s role in cyber security?

As for government’s role, our research suggests that there are at least two barriers that prevent organisations from investing in the socially desirable level of cyber security; government’s role should be to help remove these barriers.

These barriers are also referred to as market failures and include: limited reliable, cost-effective information upon which an organisation can make informed cyber security investment decisions; and the cost externalities that spill over to other organisations and to consumers as a result of a security breach.

As a result, any cyber security investment that an organisation makes, particularly of a proactive nature, will likely generate social benefits in excess of private benefits. Thus, government would like to encourage such investments by removing or lessening such barriers.

In the past, government has attempted to develop and motivate the use of new technologies or standards that would improve security. Moving forward, new strategies are needed; for example, as suggested in our book, external public information is likely to motivate the adoption and implementation of proactive cyber security investment strategies.

How much investment should be made in cyber security?

According to our estimates, on average, a little less than 6 percent of their IT budgets on cyber security. However, as I offered in my previous answer, organisations are investing what they perceive to be an optimal investment given the information they have and their resource constraints.

There is no perfect level or type of cyber security investments that all organisations should make; this again points to the information problem that exists. The world of cyber security threats and solutions is constantly changing.

What were the most surprising results of your analysis of the economics of cyber security?

We identified several very interesting relationships that we believe should motivate the government and the public policy arena more broadly to act.

First, we were surprised by how much small businesses relied on outside contractors, and how unaware they were of the implications of their actions on their business and others.

Small businesses shared a focus on the bottom line as the main driver for any internal investment decisions, resulting in a lack of spending on proactive spending.

Overall, despite significant spending on security as a portion of their IT budgets (approximately 10 percent), our research suggests that small businesses are making the most strikingly socially efficient security investments of any industry group with which we spoke.

Second, of particular importance from the perspective of informing public policy, we found a relationship between organisations that rely on external public resources (e.g., surveys, ISO and NIST recommendations, etc.) when making cyber security investment decisions and the proactive nature of their cyber security strategy.

Since pursuing a proactive, preventative strategy is likely to reduce computer system breaches and hence the flow of attacks through an organisation to other organisations, it follows that one important role for government is the provision of information on state-of-the-art technologies and procedures that promote proactive cyber security approaches.

iTnews: CeBIT 08: Senator Lundy lobbies for Open Source change

2008-05-21T21:28:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

The recent change of government could be an opportunity for the Australian Open Source community to bring their “free and open” philosophy to the public domain.

Speaking at the Open CeBIT conference in Sydney today, Senator Kate Lundy said that the newly-appointed Rudd Government represents a creative peak in public policy, as evidenced by the Australia 2020 Summit that was held in April.

“I’m really glad to be off the opposition benches and on to the government benches,” said Lundy, who is Senator for the Australian Capital Territory.

“The fact is, we got some really creative ideas from the 2020 Summit,” she said.

So far, suggestions to the Government have included: more resources for the use of Open Source in the education sector and Not-for-Profit organisations; government uptake of open standards; amendments to copyright laws; and the use of IPV6 as a platform for innovation.

Lundy also described debates about allowing open access to Crown copyright material, open access to government-funded research, and Open Source licensing of software that is developed with taxpayers’ money.

“Governments tend to want to hold onto that [software] as an asset, and a lot of opportunities for innovation are lost that way,” Lundy said.

An open philosophy could benefit Australia by providing the foundations for innovation, digital knowledge and open technology, Lundy said.

Already, the philosophy is gaining momentum through a business uptake of Open Source software, from the backend database layer to business applications.

According to a 2008 IT spending and priorities study by Australian analyst firm Longhaus, Open Source is likely to become a fully-integrated dimension of the overall software market by 2012.

While 14 percent of IT decision makers in medium to large organisations claimed to have no intention of using Open Source solutions, Longhaus Research Director Sam Higgins said that these were simply “organisations in denial”.

“There are many proprietary distributors that are filling the distributor role [for Open Source software],” Higgins explained.

“Open Source is one of those inevitable features that is becoming inherent in enterprise technology,” he said.

Defying conventional expectations about Free and Open Source Software, the Longhaus study found the major drivers for Open Source adoption to be licensing and convenience, and not cost.

“When we talk about ‘free’, it may not necessarily be about cost; today, it’s much more about freedom of choice,” he said.

But for the business uptake of the Open Source philosophy to spread to policy makers, stake holders must play an active role in lobbying for change, Lundy said.

Describing a governmental bias towards the risk-averse position of inertia, Lundy encouraged the Open Source community to work together to present a strong, compelling position to the Government.

“We’ve got all the evidence we need; I think the next step is to grasp the political agenda,” she said.

“Part of this challenge is to get these ideas into a cohesive summary and present it to policy makers. Unless we can do this as an Open Source community, it’s going to be really hard to bring about change,” she said.

“My own view is that Australia is quite a lot greater than the sum of its parts. Let’s not deny ourselves the tools that will help us achieve our potential,” she concluded.

iTnews: Researcher discusses iPod supercomputer

2008-05-09T19:10:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Microprocessors from portable electronics like iPods could yield low-cost, low-power supercomputers for specialised scientific applications, according to computer scientist John Shalf.

Along with a research team from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Shalf is designing a supercomputer based on low-power embedded microprocessors, which has the sole purpose of improving global climate change predictions.

Shalf spoke with iTnews about the desktop and embedded chip markets, inefficiencies in current supercomputing designs, and how the Berkeley design will achieve a peak performance of 200 petaflops while consuming less than four megawatts of power.

How do mobile devices come into play in your supercomputer design?

The motivation is that we’ve gotten to the point where the cost of power that goes to new supercomputing systems is getting to be very close to the cost of buying them.

When you move from the old [approach to] supercomputing, which is performance-limited, to supercomputing where the limiting concerns are power and cost, then all the lessons that we need to learn are already well-understood by people who used manufacture microprocessors for cell phones.

A lot of [current] supercomputers have USB ports and sound chips -- they will never be used and yet they consume power. They [manufacturers] call it commodity off the shelf [COTS] technology, where if you want to have things cheap, you leverage the mass market.

Now, the market has moved away from desktops down to individual cell phones, it’s going to change the entire computing industry I think.

In terms of investment in microprocessor technology, it used to be dominated by the desktop machines, but now the iPhones and iPods are where all the money for research into advance microprocessor designs is going. We’re leveraging that trend, and we’re kind of like the early adopters of that idea.

How will the Berkeley design require less power than current approaches to supercomputing?

The desktop chip market or the server market, that we’ve been basing our supercomputer designs on, emphasise serial performance. That is to get high clock frequencies, and to make things that aren’t parallel -- like Microsoft Word or PowerPoint -- run as fast as they can.

However, when you look at the Physics of how power consumption is related to clock frequency, voltage squared is related to clock frequency. So if you reduce the clock frequency modestly, we get a cubic power efficiency benefit.

If you compare a high end server chip that consumes 120W running at 2GHz, if we just drop the clock frequency to 600MHz we can get the wattage down to 0.09W.

Another way to reduce power is to remove anything that you don’t need for that particular device from the processor.

[Partner company] Tensilica can create 200 new microprocessor designs per year. Their tools allow them to tailor-make special processors for each new thing they want to do, and they can do it very fast.

We’re using their design tools to make a microprocessor that removes everything that we don’t need for this climate application.

Can the same concept be used in general purpose supercomputing? Are general purpose computers a feasible concept?

In order for this [the Berkeley approach] to work, you need a problem that runs in parallel, because you need more of these [low clock frequency] processors to match the performance of a really big one. It happens that scientific applications already have plenty of parallelism available.

While the desktop chips –- the Intels, the AMDs -- can’t really play this game because things like Microsoft Word aren’t running in parallel, we can exploit this way beyond the ability of the desktop chip.

I think they [general purpose supercomputers] are a realistic idea, and there’s still a place for general purpose supercomputing systems. In terms of general purpose supercomputing, there will be large systems that handle a broad array of applications.

We’re saying for certain computation problems, ours is the correct approach, but it doesn’t supplant the need for general purpose computing because there are many problems that are much smaller than the petaflop or the exaflop.

What is your research team working on currently?

We’re currently doing this iterative process where we adjust all the aspects of the processor -- how much memory it has, how fast the memory is, how many instructions it does per clock cycle – all these things fixed in a conventional desktop chip, but we can adjust everything about the microprocessor design.

We have something that automatically tunes the software after we make a hardware change, then we benchmark it, measure how much power it takes, then we change the hardware again. We keep on iterating to come up with the optimal hardware and software solution for power.

When do you expect to achieve tangible results?

We want to demonstrate the first prototype in November, but that would just be one processing element in the system. The way that we’re able to do that is using something called RAMP [Research Accelerator for Multiprocessors] at U.C. Berkeley, which is a system that allows us to prototype new hardware designs without actually building them from scratch.

If we were to actually get enough money to create some chips, it would take us an additional six months or so to get chips out.

How much will the Berkeley supercomputer cost to build?

The cost of putting all the components in the same place is probably in the $30-50 million range. A lot of that cost is just the cost of memory chips.

However, I’d point out that that’s the typical cost of buying, from IBM or Cray, a supercomputing system. So it’s on the same order of cost that we currently put into systems that are one thousandth of the performance that we need to solve this problem.

Are any other groups taking the same approach to supercomputing as yours?

There is something called MD-GRAPE which is in Japan [and used for] molecular dynamics. They [researchers] showed that by designing a custom chip for that application, they could do something that was 1,000 times more efficient than using conventional microprocessors.

It cost them a total of $9 million to do that.

Another group is D.E. Shaw Research that has built a system called Anton. They are also using Tensilica processors, and that system is 100 times to 1,000 times more powerful than is achievable using conventional microprocessors.

MD-GRAPE is an older system. Anton, they just booted up the first nodes a couple of months ago, and they’ve been testing that out, demonstrating that it works.

How does the Berkeley approach differ from the other projects?

It’s [Climate change] a new area and also we’re more leveraging off-the-shelf design tools and less dependent on fully customised hardware that requires a lot more energy and more time investment.

Do you foresee there to be any commercial opportunities for the technology?

People have spent such a long time saying you can’t compete against the big microprocessor companies to create an efficient machine for science, and that was definitely true when power wasn’t a limiting factor. But now, we need to show the feasibility of this approach so that it can change the way that we design machines for supercomputing.

If we’re successful as researchers, IBM or Intel -- if they see a market for this -- will turn around and do this.

iTnews: Spintronics professor wins grant, discusses technology

2008-05-07T19:12:00.001+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

The U.S. Department of Defense has invested half a million dollars in a grant that aims to further the emerging field of quantum spin-based electronics.

Last week, spintronics researcher Ian Appelbaum was awarded US$484,370 by the government agency’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (DEPSCoR).

Spintronic devices are expected to be faster, smaller, and smarter than present-day gadgets. Potential devices include instant-on computers, cell phones and other devices that require much less power to operate.

Appelbaum, who is an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Delaware, spoke to iTnews about the potentials of spintronics and his research into the semiconductor silicon to enhance the speed and design of integrated circuits for spintronics.

What first drew you to researching spintronics?

This is a new field where several fundamental challenges were, and still are, begging for solutions. The opportunity to personally make an impact on a field which has the potential to transform technology, and have fun doing it, really excited me.

How does spintronics work?

Electrons carry electric currents because they have mass and electric charge. In addition, they also have an intrinsic magnetic moment, called "spin".

However, the orientations of these electron magnetic moments are random in nonmagnetic materials, so the presence of spin can for the most part be ignored in traditional electrical engineering applications.

The field of semiconductor spintronics aims to utilise "spin-polarised" electrons, where the magnetic orientations of electrons are more or less aligned to each other, for information processing using semiconducting materials, whether it is binary or quantum logic, or for constructing better interconnects between electronic devices.

Could you please briefly explain the research that has led to you being awarded the DEPSCoR grant?

My group was the first to demonstrate -- last year, in the journal "Nature" -- spin-polarised electron injection, transport, and detection in the semiconductor silicon.

This is significant because silicon is technologically and economically the most important semiconductor, since it is the materials basis for microelectronics.

Moreover, silicon is an ideal material for spintronics because electrons in this material maintain their spin orientations for much longer than other semiconductors.

With this new grant, we hope to bring semiconductor spintronics closer to a pathway out of the lab environment and in a direction toward actual applications.

What do you feel is the most exciting possible outcome of spintronics?

Spintronics is touted as having the potential to enable low-power, smaller, faster, etc logic technologies. However, if you make a comparison to the history of many other technologies, I think the most exciting things to come out of the field will invariably be the ones not predicted a priori.

Are there any competing technologies to spintronics?

The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) has identified several competing technologies for future logic applications, like molecular electronics and single-electron devices.

Both of these alternatives are securely in early research stages. It's impossible to predict what technology will emerge as the best to supplant present-day microelectronics technology.

How long will it be before spintronics-based devices reach the market?

Strictly speaking, there have been spintronics devices on the market for over ten years: the magnetic read head in hard drives utilises spin-polarised currents in metals and, more recently, metal/oxide tunneling devices.

The science behind this technology won Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg last year's Nobel Prize in Physics. How long until a semiconductor spintronics device reaches market? I don't know, but I hope my work brings us closer to it.

iTnews: Recruiters expect temporary slowdown in IT vacancies

2008-04-30T21:16:00.000+10:00

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.”

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

2008-04-29T21:12:00.000+10:00

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.”

iTnews: Nominations open for OSCON Open Source Awards

2008-04-29T21:03:00.000+10:00

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.

iTnews: Teradata announces new data warehousing platforms for enterprises

2008-04-28T21:12:00.000+10:00

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.

iTnews: University of Ballarat touts Nortel network upgrade

2008-04-28T19:39:00.000+10:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

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.”

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

2008-04-24T21:25:00.000+10:00

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.

iTnews: Protecting human values from Human-Computer Interaction

2008-04-24T19:20:00.000+10:00

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.

iTnews: TED talks come to Australia, innovatively

2008-04-23T21:07:00.000+10:00

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.

iTnews: Google announces Sydney Developer Day event

2008-04-22T21:20:00.000+10:00

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.

iTnews: HP launches largest ever Print 2.0 range

2008-04-21T19:47:00.000+10:00

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.”

iTnews: Green search engine lays down Australian roots

2008-04-15T19:49:00.000+10:00

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.”

iTnews: Microsoft Australia touts start-up innovation

2008-04-15T19:43:00.000+10:00

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.

iTnews: Do search engines encourage suicide?

2008-04-14T21:10:00.000+10:00

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.

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

2008-04-11T21:24:00.000+10:00

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.”

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

2008-04-11T21:17:00.000+10:00

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.

iTnews: Australia’s first Open Source Census published

2008-04-10T19:44:00.000+10:00

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.

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

2008-04-09T21:17:00.000+10:00

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.

iTnews: AIIA backs Swimming Australia in Facebook photo removal

2008-04-08T21:05:00.000+10:00

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.”

iTnews: Virtual world to help children cope with cancer

2008-04-05T19:49:00.000+11:00

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.

iTnews: Computer system makes best sports bets

2008-04-05T19:34:00.000+11:00

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.”

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

2008-04-04T19:33:00.000+11:00

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.

iTnews: Rising interest rates may drive online sales boom

2008-04-03T21:31:00.000+11:00

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.

iTnews: New music format thousands of times smaller than MP3

2008-04-03T21:06:00.000+11:00

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.

iTnews: Virtual business

2008-04-02T19:21:00.000+11:00

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.”

iTnews: IT recruiter signs international hire agreement

2008-04-01T19:36:00.000+11:00

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.

iTnews: Virtual law and you

2008-03-27T19:23:00.000+11:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

Businesses in recent years have increasingly turned to virtual worlds for opportunities in advertising, recruiting, and online expansion. As real-world money and people migrate online, new questions are being raised about the legal implications of virtual behaviour.

In a forthcoming book titled “Virtual Law”, cyberlaw scholar Greg Lastowka explores the future of virtual crime and how real-world legal cases involving property rights, criminal activities, contractual duties, copyright and trademark laws, have emerged from disputes in virtual worlds such as Second Life.

An associate professor at the Rutgers-Camden law school, Lastowka spoke with iTnews about his book, and what virtual law might mean for businesses.

What are the business potentials of virtual worlds?

Today, most virtual worlds are marketed as entertainment services. However, there seems to be an increased interest lately in virtual worlds that are oriented toward less structured and more social experiences.

In environments like Second Life, users have much more control over the world and there are no game goals that guide participant behavior. Virtual worlds like Second Life are not marketed as games, but as platforms where individuals and companies might pursue their own goals and businesses.

For instance, in Second Life, people sell personal services, engage in advertising, and seek profits from transactions in virtual property, all using a virtual currency that can be exchanged for real currency. So it seems the business opportunities in virtual worlds vary depending on whether you have a game world or a more social world.

Game worlds are primarily businesses for their creators and are usually built around a monthly subscription model and the sale of "expansion" software and additional services. Often, game worlds prohibit third parties from creating businesses on their platforms.

More social worlds might pursue subscription models as well, but they might also sell players virtual property, like the furniture that is sold to players in the world of Habbo Hotel. They also pursue advertising revenues.

The Second Life model of an open virtual world is perhaps the most interesting. Second Life sees itself as a platform on which third parties will make investments and try to build their own businesses. So the business model of the provider is tied to the business models of the participants.

What are the legal risks of virtual worlds for businesses?

Most subscribers to game worlds have rather small-scale monetary investments in them, so it seems doubtful that players would resort to litigation. But some do, and providers of game worlds generally design end-user license agreements and terms of service as a first line of defense.

Players must click through the agreements before installing the software and the game companies claim this is a binding contract. So far, game companies have been very successful in defending these licenses and contracts in litigation.

Providers of more open worlds, like Second Life, face potentially more significant legal risks because they attract greater and more concentrated investments. When a company or an individual has invested several thousand or more dollars in doing business in a virtual world, they will be more likely to bring a court challenge if they feel the game company has jeopardized their investments.

Additionally, because the virtual world acts as a host, it may find itself in the middle of disputes between competing investors. For instance, one business operating in the virtual world might claim that another business in the world infringed its trademarks or copyrights. In that case, they may want the platform owner to assist them in stopping the infringer. This might put the platform owner in a tricky position.

Finally, those who invest in more open virtual worlds may be taking substantial legal risks. As I said, the contract terms drafted by virtual world providers are generally very favorable to their interests. They make it difficult for third-party investors to make claims if troubles occur.

Obviously, if you are making business investments on a platform that you do not control and where the owner offers no real assurances, this can be risky.

Have there been any past legal cases relating to virtual worlds?

Yes, there are some cases now on the books, although the number is small, given the novelty of virtual worlds. I know of fewer than twenty lawsuits, though I imagine the number may be somewhat larger than that given that many suits have not been reported.

The cases I know of have dealt with various disputes: intellectual property issues, computer abuse issues, and enforcement of contracts, for instance. There was even one case that dealt with the issue of whether player volunteers should be understood as game company employees.

What happened in the most significant of these cases?

I do not know which case is really the most significant, but the recent case of Bragg v. Linden Research has attracted a good deal of attention. The Bragg case involved a participant in Second Life who happened to also be a lawyer. He sued Linden Research, the owners of Second Life.

Bragg alleged he had lost several thousand dollars worth of virtual property investments when the platform owner cancelled his account. He alleged that the company had essentially stolen or destroyed his personal property and he deserved compensation.

The owners of Second Life countered that their contract provisions controlled the dispute. According to the terms of the contract, the dispute needed to be submitted to arbitration in California.

Also, the contract drafted by the company seemed to say, essentially, that Bragg had no real interest in the virtual property. Linden also claimed that Bragg had exploited their software in order to purchase part of the property he alleged was confiscated. So they brought a counterclaim alleging that Bragg violated computer hacking law.

The suit was settled after Second Life brought a motion asking that the arbitration provision be enforced. The court denied that motion. The court stated that the term would not be enforced because it was "unconscionable". In other words, the court found the provision procedurally and substantively unfair to Bragg.

It is interesting that the court also seemed interested in reaching the deeper issues presented by the case. In its opinion on the arbitration provision, it said: "Ultimately at issue in this case are the novel questions of what rights and obligations grow out of the relationship between the owner and creator of a virtual world and its resident-customers."

What are some topics your book will cover - can you give us a preview of your favourite of these topics?

The book is going to tackle several issues. There will be some general material on the basic structure and types of virtual worlds, the history of the technology, and how virtual worlds work as businesses. There will be some more theoretical material on how law adapts to new technology and particularly internet technologies. I will also have discussions of virtual world litigation and how it has raised interesting questions in various legal fields, such as criminal law and intellectual property law.

One of my favorite topics is the question of how legal rules relate to rules of games. Strangely enough, the law seems to recognize and give some deference to private and traditional game rules. There is even a United States Supreme Court that, in deciding the interpretation of a federal statute, makes a serious distinction between the essential and non-essential rules of golf.

I find that real interesting. In the case of game-like virtual worlds, understanding the idea of a "jurisdiction of play" might be one key to making legal sense of these environments.

What has drawn your interest to the legal implications of virtual worlds?

One of my first experiences with a computer was when I was in elementary school in the late 1970's. As part of an enrichment program, I was allowed to play the text-game "Adventure" on an old mainframe computer that was programmed with punch cards. That game was the inspiration for a host of early virtual worlds.

I started programming similar games on an Apple II computer before I was a teenager. So you might say I have had a long fascination with virtual worlds.

As a law student, I was generally interested in questions about the interface of law and technology. In law school, I wrote a student publication on the new legal issues arising around search engines.

When I realized that there were also interesting issues being raised by online games and virtual worlds, I was eager to write about that as well. Luckily, I met Professor Dan Hunter (who is teaching now at the University of Melbourne), and we co-authored one of the first law review articles on law and virtual worlds.

In the past few years, I have explored about a dozen virtual worlds. Still, I think I am still something of a "noob". While really enjoy exploring the environments and learning about them, I am not a dedicated participant in any of these worlds at present. My family simply would not let me spend twenty hours a week in a virtual world – like many participants do.

What do you expect of the law and virtual worlds in the near future?

I expect the law in this area will get more interesting. Virtual worlds are interesting because they combine together aspects of creative fiction, games and real communities. Many of the rules of these environments are going to be flexible as both a matter of law and technology.

As bandwidth and participation both increase, we are going to see more interesting legal issues being raised. If we see the development of more virtual worlds that operate as open platforms for third-party investments, I imagine litigation activity will increase as well.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, I think few people realized how important e-commerce and internet law would turn out to be. I am not certain that Amazon.com will be replaced by a virtual bookstore (two dimensional space is sometimes easier to navigate), but we can be fairly confident that, over the next few years, we will see more courts and legislatures looking more carefully at disputes taking place in virtual worlds.

iTnews: Mobile Internet: the wireless convergence

2008-03-19T19:23:00.000+11:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

The national telecommunications industry has experienced some strife in recent days. Weighed down by regulatory issues to do with a once-government-owned incumbent copper network, international comparisons of Australian broadband pricing and availability have proved to be embarrassing at best.

But while Telstra and the recently formed Group of Nine tiptoe through a tangle of broadband regulations and negotiations with the ACCC, other telecommunications service providers are treading into a brave new world of wireless communications.

Since the launch of Hutchison's third-generation mobile network in April 2003, mobile telecommunications service providers have expanded their offerings from traditional voice calling to include video calls, multimedia downloads and Internet access.

According to 2007 survey results from the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association's (AIMIA) Australia Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index, 30 percent of survey respondents reported using 3G technology, reflecting an 11 percent growth in 3G penetration from previous years' results.

While voice calls and SMS were found to be the most frequently used services, survey participants also reported having used their phones for MMS, content downloads, and video calling. Seven percent of survey respondents used their mobile phones for sending and receiving e-mail.

Speaking at a wireless discussion organised by the Australian Telecommunications Users Group (ATUG) last week, AIMIA's Head of Mobile Claudia Sagripanti said that while 11 percent of Australians are reportedly accessing the Internet via their mobile phones, public uptake of the technology remains deterred by cost.

"Data charges are a big issue for consumers because they [consumers] don't know exactly how much they are being charged," she said.

But cost is not likely to be an issue for long, as service providers race to deliver networks that are faster, cheaper, and more accessible than ever before.

When Telstra launched its $1 billion NextG network in October 2006, the network claimed to reach 98.8 per cent of the Australian population, delivering voice and broadband services at speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps. The network has since been upgraded to deliver speeds of up to 14.4 Mbps, and is expected to reach speeds of up to 40 Mbps by next year.

Hutchison too upgraded its 3G mobile network in February last year to incorporate High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) technology, increasing the network's maximum download speed to 3.6 Mbps.

Mobile telecommunications are expected to heat up as Optus and Vodafone prepare to launch their own 3G networks by the end of the year.

Optus is working with Huawei and Nokia Siemens Networks to build a national network that operates in the 900 megahertz (MHz) and 2100MHz frequency spectrum.

Meanwhile, Vodafone has earmarked Christmas 2008 for the launch of its $500 million 3G mobile broadband network that is set to cover
95 percent of the Australian population.

At first glance, mobile Internet speeds pale in comparison to ADSL2+ wired broadband offerings that operate at speeds of around 20 Mbps.

When compared with average Australian broadband speeds of 1 Mbps as reported by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) last year, however, HSDPA may present a reasonable alternative to wired services.

But with network rivalry comes cost reductions for businesses and consumers.

"Wireless services are now competing with the incumbent copper wire line service," said Grant Stepa, Australia and New Zealand Managing Director of Airspan Networks, while expounding the merits of WiMAX technologies at last week's ATUG wireless discussion.

"Hence price points mirror – and in many cases are lower than – those of traditional telephone services."

"This is a threat to the incumbent's fixed and mobile pricing regime, and the end users are at an advantage," he said.

World Wide WiMax

WiMax is a wireless telecommunications technology that is based on the IEEE 802.16 standard. Governed by the WiMax Forum, which was formed in June 2001 to promote the development of a WiMax standard, the technology has applications in high-speed data and telecommunications, as well as presenting a wireless alternative for last mile broadband access.

Already, the technology has received great attention in developing nations and countries such as China, Russia and Tanzania.

Last October, networking giant Cisco announced two initiatives aimed at bringing high-speed broadband access to consumers and businesses in emerging countries.

Called "Country Transformation" and "Digital Inclusion", the projects are expected to make use of the company's wireless portfolio of Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi mesh and mobile WiMax products to drive the provision of wireless broadband in developing areas.

Canadian broadband and wireless product and services vendor Redline Communications has launched a Tanzanian WiMax network in a partnership with African service provider, Hotspot Business Solutions. The network debuted in November 2007 to service the Tanzania's commercial centre in Dar es Salaam, and is expected to be expanded to cover six major cities nationwide.

In Taiwan, officials announced in October last year that the island will spend $664 million in a WiMax development program in efforts to garner the lion's share of WiMax manufacturing.

Also in motion are plans for an island-wide Mobile WiMax network, called the M(mobile)-Taiwan program.

As voice and data telecommunications services converge, Airspan's Stepa expects WiMax to be a convenient, portable alternative to the local loop copper network in Australia.

"What we're seeing in Australia is a proliferation in the deployment of fixed and nomadic wireless broadband services," he said.

"Once a wireless service is in place, it is an easy next step to deliver a converged suite of services that include traditional Internet and VoIP."

The penetration of WiMax in Australia is championed by Internet Service Providers such as Internode and Unwired.

In January this year, Internode launched what it claimed to be the first region-wide wireless broadband service in Australia to use WiMax. The service delivers speeds of up to 6 Mbps in specific areas near Adelaide, and is targeted towards people unable to get ADSL because they live too far from a telephone exchange.

Unwired's Sydney-based wireless network was launched in 2004. In August 2005, the company received a $37 million investment from Intel for the promotion of mobile WiMax in Australia. Unwired currently is working with Intel, Samsung, Motorola, Navini and Alcatel to bring Mobile WiMax technology to Australia.

HSPA's battle

Meanwhile, Hutchison and Telstra, along with mobile manufacturers Ericsson and LG, have snubbed WiMax in favour of HSPA and other 3G technologies.

According to Klaas Raaijmakers, who is the Head of Broadband of Hutchison's 3 Mobile, the telecommunications company now is servicing a larger, more diverse market than ever before.

"We're moving away from the traditional tech-savvy users; we're seeing more female customers, for example," Raaijmakers said, citing greater affordability, convenience and portability between home, work, places of study, and overseas as customer-reported benefits.

Meanwhile, Airspan's Stepa said that 3G and WiMax may not necessarily be competing directly for market share.

"We're not fighting 3G", he said, noting that vendors and network carriers tend to "choose their horses" when it comes down to delivering a service in any particular area.

Motorola and Samsung are two examples of vendors that manufacture mobile phones for both WiMax and 3G networks.

Rob Inshaw, Nortel Network's Australia and New Zealand General Manager of Carrier Solutions, agrees.

"3G and WiMax service different markets," he said, forecasting that WiMax is likely to appeal to more tech-savvy users who value mobile access to the Internet more than traditional telephony services.

Inshaw cited increased and improved communication applications, a hyperconnected environment in which people are using multiple devices to connect to other people and other machines, as well as the availability of what he called "true broadband" as driving forces behind the development of more advanced wireless technologies.

Currently available HSDPA networks support speeds of up to 14.4 Mbps. Future incarnations of the technology, dubbed HSPA Evolved, are expected to deliver speeds of 42 Mbps, and will involve antenna array technologies.

Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks are next on the 3G roadmap. LTE networks are expected to achieve downlink speeds of up to 200 Mbps and uplink speeds of up to 100 Mbps.

"What is true broadband? I think it's being able to do what you want, when you want," Inshaw said, estimating that Web services should ideally take a maximum of four seconds to load before the average user tends to lose interest.

Forecasting spectrum capacity problems to hinder the speeds deliverable by 3G technologies, Inshaw said that future developments in the 3G space may bring the services available to 3G networks closer to those offered by WiMax.

"3G will continue to evolve over the next four years, and will eventually offer similar services to WiMax," he said.

iTnews: Angels give wings to Australian start-ups

2008-01-30T19:29:00.000+11:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

As a nation that is home to a well-developed education system and world-class research institutions, Australia is often lauded as fertile grounds for innovation. But the outlook for young entrepreneurs may not be so rosy.

The technology industry is rife with anecdotal evidence that although ideas may be born down under, start-ups often move to larger markets such as the U.S. or Asia to grow.

"Australia does have good innovation networks, markets for development, access to capital and funding," said Rob Fitzpatrick, who is the Director of Commercialisation at national research organisation, NICTA.

"The biggest challenge for start-up companies," he said, "is in Angel funding, which is just not well organised in Australia."

Angel funding is one of the few avenues for start-up companies in their very initial stages to obtain seed funding to further grow their business. In return, Angel investors receive a percentage share in the start-up company.

It is a high risk, high return investment, and one that is not particularly common in the Australian culture.

In the U.S., however, it's a different story. According to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire, Angels are the largest source of seed and capital funding in the U.S. As of 2007, there are more than 250 angel groups in the U.S., which is approximately equal to the total number of angel groups in all other countries combined.

Thankfully, globalisation is allowing U.S. Angels and other similar groups to spread their wings over start-ups in other countries too. TechStars is one U.S.-based group that extends its start-up funding and incubation program to companies across the globe.

The program offers up to US$15,000 in seed founding to ten start-up companies each year, in exchange for five per cent equity. Over the course of three months, selected start-ups will be given access to legal advice, office space, and experienced mentors.

Start-ups in the program will also be required to spend most of the three months at TechStars's offices in Boulder, Colorado – a potentially expensive relocation that might offset the seed money altogether.

But it's not just about the money, according to Techstars founder and Angel investor David Cohen.

"If you're thinking about the money, you're not thinking about the right thing," he said.

"The funding we provide is simply enough to keep you alive while you are here - that's all a motivated first time entrepreneur should need."

"The value of the mentorship and connections we provide should be the true motivator," he said.

Of the ten start-ups enrolled in TechStars's 2007 program, eight companies are now venture - or angel - backed and profitable, Cohen pointed out, with some companies even receiving credible acquisition offers.

Credibility is traditionally a big issue for start-up companies, which Cohen said could be mitigated by the support of established backers like TechStars.

"If you're two people, a dog, and an idea, it's hard to convince customers or partners that you're capable of delivering something interesting and worthwhile," he said.

"The other major problems are lack of market (startups doing things nobody wants) and team problems (founders who can't stick together)," he said. "I would specifically exclude access to funding - it's very easy if you have a great team, execute well, and are building stuff people want."

Admittedly, the atmosphere for start-ups in the U.S. could be the strongest in the world, with early stage capital widely available for good ideas and teams.

While saying that he tends to focus mostly on his local area, Cohen speculated that there seems to be a reasonable amount of start-up activity in Western Europe and Australia also.

"We get lots of interest in TechStars from Australia," he said. "Last year we did have one founder from Sweden, but otherwise they have all been US-based."

"Last summer was our first [year in operation]. There were ten companies consisting of 26 founders. One of those founders was from Sweden. Ultimately, they incorporated in the USA, [after] intense debate."

According to Sydney-based venture capital company OneVentures, however, the Australian market does offer some advantages over the larger, more established U.S. market.

"U.S. companies do get advantages of immediate access to a much larger market but often this is highly competitive and market entry is costly," said Michelle Deaker, the company's founder and CEO.

"It is traditionally difficult to raise capital for emerging high growth technology companies in this [Australian technology] market, but I would like to say that entrepreneurs shouldn't give up hope."

Besides assessing capital and resource management, Deaker highlighted company structure, market entry, team building and strategy as issues that plague start-ups. Formerly the co-founder and executive director of her own start-up, E Com Industries, Deaker said that Angel investors can sometimes help in providing professional networks as well as capital to help entrepreneurs.

In addition to leveraging any opportunities in the local market, Deaker also recommends looking offshore for opportunities to grow a start-up business.

"The AU market is small," she said. "Stepping offshore can be daunting but maybe necessary to make the business into an entity that an investor would be interested in and allow the company to capture a bigger market or seek capital from offshore investors."

"The government supports offshore activity with Export Market Development Grants for example. We [OneVentures] do our best to help smooth the way for this process."

NICTA's Fitzpatrick agrees that the market for technology companies goes beyond any international boundaries. He cited a NICTA project in the mobile telecommunications application area that currently is in negotiations with developers in China.

"Most of our start-ups are now born global," he said.

iTnews: Nortel and TAFE sign training agreement

2008-01-22T21:22:00.000+11:00

As a journalist at iTnews:

In a bid to address the high demand for local technical skills in the Australian ICT and telecommunications industries, telecommunications vendor Nortel has announced a new training agreement with TAFE New South Wales.

The agreement places Nortel's Technology Solutions Academy courseware as part of the 2008 curriculum in nine TAFE NSW Institutes across the state. Nortel’s courseware includes three books - a lab guide, a student guide and a resource guide – that all focus on the generic VOIP technology.

On completion of an accredited course at TAFE, students have the option to sit an exam for Nortel Professional certification. The course consists of between 80 to 100 hours of theoretical work and 20 hours of lab work, and can be either taught as a stand alone, or incorporated into a current curriculum.

"Our main challenge at TAFE is to meet the skills requirement of industry, and at this particular time in Australia we're faced with incredible demand for technology and telecommunications skills," said Susan Hartigan, relieving general manager of TAFE NSW’s Business division.

"By adding Nortel technology training solutions to our teaching and learning resources, TAFE NSW will not only become more attractive to prospective students, but will also provide our current students with a competitive advantage in the workforce."

TAFE NSW is also partnered with a number of different companies across various industries to provide its students with a mix of theoretical and industry knowledge, with a focus on gaining experience with current technologies, Hartigan said.

"This agreement with TAFE NSW is another major milestone for us,” said Mark Stevens, managing director of Nortel Australia and New Zealand, “especially at a time where graduates are faced with managing the unprecedented growth in corporate networks and the onset of new communication and transmission technologies like unified communications, WiMAX and Metro Ethernet networks."

Although Nortel’s Technology Solutions Academy program is available to all colleges and universities that offer IT courses, TAFE was the first Australian institute to sign up for the program, according to Frances Lambert, Training Program Manager of Nortel’s Knowledge Services Asia.

The certification gained from completing the TAFE course will not be any different from the certification gained from completing an independent Nortel course, Lambert said.

The first course to be offered through the new agreement will centre on VoIP technologies and will be available from March 15. Other upcoming courses include BCM 50 on March 25, Basic Data Networking on April 15, and Real Time Networking on May 1.