Australia’s evolution towards becoming a high-speed broadband society will bring disruption for a wide range of sectors and jobs. But will also bring a huge range of new opportunities. So how can business take advantage of the new network?

It turns out that while the NBN will be many years away for a lot of small Australian businesses, there is still plenty they can do today to capitalise on what is already there, and put themselves in the best position for what is to come, as I try to show in this article for the recently launched Bit.com.au site.

For the past year I’ve been fascinated with 3D printing. The ability to create a solid object on demand in minutes is probably the closest we are going to come for some time to Star  Trek’s transporters, but its potential is only just starting to be realised.

While 3D printing has enormous potential in the manufacturing sector, it is also poised to wreak chaos on the design community. Pirate design files can already be found online, enabling you to print your own designer jewellery, figurines, and other copyrighted items. Indeed, despite the best intention of 3D printing companies, as prices of printers come down and quality rises, the design industry could find itself victim of similar acts of piracy as those that hit the music industry over a decade ago.

But we are a long way from that scenario today, and right now 3D printing presents a wealth of opportunities, which I explore in this article for various Fairfax publications.

Travel a few tens of kilometres outside of a major population centre in Australia and you get a very different picture of the importance of broadband. It’s a perspective that few city dwellers seem to consider.

What’s even more rarely considered however is that even with the deployment of the National Broadband Network – which is in itself a significant booster of rural broadband – the gap between what city dweller and country residents will experience will grow even wider. And it is arguable that, as isolated as many of Australia’s regional residents are, access to high speed broadband for them is even more important.

Recently I had the opportunity to deliver a series of presentations on the digital economy to residents of Western Queensland, as a guest of RAPAD. I’ve tried to capture the essence of what I learned in this column for the ABC.

SmartCompany has unveiled its list of the hottest Australian entrepreneurs aged 30 or younger. Congrats to everyone who made it – including Jonathan Barouch, Tim Fung, Taryn Williams and many more. You can check out the complete list by clicking here.

It’s truly amazing what a topic of contention the National Broadband Network has become. I’ve started writing a column for the ABC on broadband, and it’s highly likely that the NBN will be regularly featured. I’m curious to see whether future columns elicit the same response as this first one. What started as an attempt by me to point out some potential uses of high-bandwidth networks quickly turned into a debate on the merits of the network itself. What worries me however is the lack of vision and leadership in some segments of the Australian community. Anyway, please read my first effort here, and let me know what you think.

Often we pundits in the media are far too quick to predict the demise of entire industry sectors at the hands of the Internet. In other instances, entire segments disappear without anyone really noticing, with the change only to be identified in hindsight. In this article for SmartCompany I chose four sectors that have been at some stage declared dead, and had a look at what those involved are doing to delay – or possibly avoid – that fate.

IT used to be easy. Well, at least easier. The CIO would set the policies for their organisation – which hardware to use, which software programs to load, etc – and users would do as they were told. After all, it’s not as though they could do much about it.

Some time in the 1990s the Internet began to change all of that. Web browsers gave users access to services that weren’t installed on their PCs, and enabled them to do things that weren’t just related to work. Some opposed giving workers access to the Web for fear of them spending their time surfing real estate and news sites. They were possibly right to be fearful – not of the lost productivity, but that they were opening the doors to a floodgate of other user demands.

These fears were realised when the first senior executive walked into their CIO’s office and demanded they be allowed to use their iPad at work.

Now CIOs find themselves responding increasingly to the demands of their users. Indeed, many of the biggest trends in IT today – cloud computing, bring-your-own-device policies and social media – are consumer-driven. It is the workers that have bought these concepts into the workplace, and it is the CIOs and IT system suppliers that have had to accede to their demands.

As this story for The Australian explains, perhaps it is the users of IT who are the real influencers in the IT industry today.

Influence can be measured in many ways. There is the overt form of influence, which is represented by the buying power you have (and none can top NBN Co’s Mike Quigley, pictured), the number of people you command, and the loudness of your voice. Then there are the most subtle forms of influence that emerge through powers of persuasion, leadership and relationships, which are harder to spot, but can be all the more powerful for their subtlety.

In this feature for The Australian we looked at influence from all angles, to pull together a list of candidates who play a vital role in shaping the way that the Australian ICT sector is developing. Some may be obvious, some not so, and no doubt there are some names missing that might have otherwise considered themselves to hold a place.

Needless to say, they’ll have another opportunity to demonstrate their level of interest 12 months from now …