Live from Cisco Live Melbourne 2011 #clmel11

Posted on by

Am currently attending Cisco Live, a gathering of 2600 partners and customers being hosted by the giant network equipment maker Cisco. The event kicked off today with a keynote presentation from Padmasree Warrior,

Warrior talked about a number of technology trends, focusing on collaboration and use of video on the Internet, along with the architectural shift that we are seeing technology models brought on by virtualisation and cloud computing. Many of her comments echoed themes that are discussed in A Faster Future, particularly in how we work.

“In the future, people will not be going to work, they will simply do work,” Warrior said.

She also talked about the merger of the Internet and mobile technology. She said the network is no longer about data transport, it is about enabling compelling experiences, and hence requires a lot of technological transformation as it moves from being a messaging platform to a real-time collaboration platform. Amongst the areas that Cisco is focusing on are enabling connectivity between data centres and other infrastructure resources, providing awareness of the context of end users, driving resource awareness within networks and better providing and managing service level agreements. Much of this supports the drive to cloud computing and is designed to help organisations innovate at the top layer rather than worrying about the infrastructure.

There was also a demonstration of the Cius, Cisco’s entry into the tablet computing marketplace. including a demonstration of how the device might be used in a hospital situation.

The most interesting comments however related to Cisco’s evolution from a products companny to an ‘architecture’ company focused on delivering complete outcomes for companies. It’s a big shift for an organisation whose considerations used to be about building faster and more powerful devices. Now it is more focued on how customers use these devices, lookingless  at the outcome of the device’s implementation and more at what the business was trying to achieve in the first place. She said the company is experiencing strong growth for this concept in the small business arena, where businesses don’t want to worry about architectures themselves, but just want to get on with the job.

 

ZDNet Patch Monday podcast – Trends for a broadband-enabled future #AFasterFuture

Posted on by

The article I penned for SmartCompany (below) on technology trends identified in A Faster Future caught the eye of a few folk, including prominent Australian writer and podacster Stilgherrian. Hence this week I was the subject of his weekly Patch Monday podcast for ZDNet, talking in more detail about some of those trends – particularly the rise of video and the need to equip both business and society with the tools to take advantage of the changes that are coming. Anyway, you can listen to the interview by clicking here or downloading it into iTunes.

SmartCompany – Brave new tech: the next 10 trends for SMEs

Posted on by

While researching A Faster Future Janelle and I uncovered a great number of technology-driven trends that are sure to impact business in the coming years. Some are obvious, such as the rise of collaboration tools and video, others are more subtle, such as the increasing desire of consumers for instant gratification.

In this article for SmartCompany I highlighted ten of the trends that business needs to be thinking about, illustrated with quotes from some of the many speakers in the book.

Me featured as Australian Business Traveller’s Frequent Flyer

Posted on by

In the space of just a few months Australian Business Traveller has become an indispensable resource for many regular travellers, myself included. David Flynn and his team do an excellent job of pulling together useful and timely information relating to business travel, from news of service changes and safety advisories through to useful advice for seasoned road warriors.

Hence it was a great honour to be asked to feature in the site’s Frequent Flyer column, talking about my own life on the road. You can read more by clicking here.

A Faster Future featured on iTnews.com.au #AFasterFuture

Posted on by

For anyone not lucky enough to have seen Robert Tercek at Digital Dirctions 2011 or X Media Lab, you’ve missed hearing from one of the world’s leading thinkers on digital media. Tercek’s career includes being involved in numerous ‘firsts’ when it comes to creating interactive entertainment, as well as a stint as president of digital media at the Oprah Winfrey Network, and in 2008 he was named a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts in recognition of his achievements in social media for the benefit of society.

That list barely does him justice.

Tercek was one of the key speakers in A Faster Future, providing insights into both the digital entertainment industry and the changes being wrought by digital commerce generally. In this extact published on iTnews.com.au, he talks about how the Internet has made certain products such as music and filmed entertainment ‘weighless’ by reducing them to just information, and warns that many other industries face this same fate.

B&T – The ABC of DSPs

Posted on by

Demand-Side Platforms (DSP) are one of the most confusing concepts yet to appear in online advertising. An DSP essentially enables a media buyer to operate its own virtual advertising network, acquiring inventory on a real-time basis to fulfill the needs of its clients.DSPs work symbiotically with another new phenomenon, ad exchanges, which enable the real-time buying and selling of the advertising inventory that is used by DSPs.

Confused yet? The March 4 edition of B&T carries my cover story on DSPs and tries to explain what they are all about. While the story is not yet online, it should still be in newsagents for a few more days.

While this may not seem like the most stunning topic, DSPs and ad exchanges are part of a broader movement that I’m referring to as the Era of Big Data. What makes DSPs effective is the consumer behaviural data that is fed into them from a myriad of sources such as BlueKai (whose chief executive Omar Tawakol is quoted in A Faster Future). Services such as BlueKai enable the buying and selling of anonymous browser data, helping advertisers know a little more about how to make the placements effective.

It is this kind of technology that drives the effectiveness of online advertising, and is helping planners make much more strategic decisions about where they spend their media budget. In some ways it brings elements of the one-to-one advertising model created by search advertising to the display market.

As Tawakol says in A Faster Future; “We believe that data is becoming more valuable than media”.

CarGrabber.com.au wants to level the playing field

Posted on by

Today I caught up with digital media entrepreneur Chris Noone. I first met Chris some years back when he was running the mobile division at ninemsn. After stepping out to set up local arms of international mobile games companies, he has now turned his attention to shaking up the online market for used cars.

CarGrabber.com.au takes information from dozens of other used car sites and displays the results together on one page. Hence a search for Nissan Hilux vans can bring together the results from many other sites. It’s great for the consumer, who now doesn’t need to keep track of the listings of different sites.

It may not be so great for some of the car sales sites, particularly the larger ones, whose legals teams have been pestering Noone since CarGrabber.com.au’s launch back in November last year.

The reason is simple. Larger car sites tend to attract more traffic, and hence charge more for listings. However, Noone’s site enables cars from a small site to be displayed alongside those from the premium sites. Should CarGrabber.com.au grab enough traffic it essentially levels the playing field and reduces the premium site’s ability to charge a higher price.

Noone is not yet ready to reveal how he is going to monetise CarGrabber.com.au, but expect an announcement around the middle of the year. That is of course if others in the industry don’t find a way to shut him down first.

BRW TV features A Faster Future #AFasterFuture

Posted on by

The latest edition of BRW TV sees co-authors Brad Howarth and Janelle Ledwidge interviewed by BRW’s Jean-Vida Douglas on the topic of the future of sofware innovation in a broadband-enabled society. In the interview we talk about the impact of broadband and the way that more and more of the actions we perform and the services we use are being mediated by software, and about the rise of collaboration software that is reshaping the way that businesses interoperate and manage themselves.

Other topics include online outsourcing and mobile broadband communications, and exploration of the opportunities for new entrepreneurs to enter the market. For the full interview, click here.

A Faster Future is also referenced in Jean-Vida’s story “It’s the maganificent seven” in the March 10 edition of BRW, along with profiles of A FasterFuture-featured companies Aconex and MyCyberTwin.

Notes from FST Media’s Future of Security conference

Posted on by

The third annual FST Media Future of Security in Banking and Financial Services conference took place this week in Sydney and Melbourne and featured a wide variety of speakers from across Australia’s financial services organisations.

The opening address was from ANZ Banking Group’s head of alliances and emerging payments, consumer cards and unsecured lending retail products, Greg Drumm, whose presentation covered the issues of securing financial transactions and information in a mobile environment. After running through a brief history of the mobile industry to set the context, he described a world where mobile devices have become a mainstream mobile financial services tool. The newness of mobile payments mean few risks have yet emerged, but Drumm said you can guarantee that they would, especially as fast and reliable identification methods are not yet available in the wider world. He also cautioned that identity fraud costs Australia $4 billion each year, while in the US it is apparently more lucrative than the drug trade. Voice verification shows promise as an authentication tool, but is still not a perfect solution in all situations. Drumm also called for a re-energizing of the partnership between the private sector and government to ensure that issues of security are handled in an effective manner.

The second session was presented by IBM and delivered by Paul Watters, a research director for the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL). Watters led the audience through a thought experiment where he asked them to put themselves in the shoes of those on the ‘dark side’, to think about how criminals actually run their business. His presentation demonstrated how cybercrime organisations have many of the same attributes of legitimate businesses in terms of having budgets and targets. They will go after the richest targets but follow the path of least resistance, and many have developed specialisations. They also tend to keep business hours as well.

The third session was the Leaders Panel, where four industry specialists discussed trends relating to electronic security and fraud, under the leadership of Fortify founder and CTO Roger Thornton. Amongst the numerous discussion threads was the notion that cyber-criminals will tend to be opportunistic and will move to different markets and organisations as weaknesses are detected and remedied. They will always target the path of least resistance, but as the defences become more complex, so too do the complexity of the attacks. Threats are also evolving quickly, leading financial services companies to have to increase their research and intelligence work to better anticipate what is coming. But even relatively unsophisticated attacks can get past complex security systems in the right circumstances. While fraudsters are getting cleverer, the panel agreed that to date the good guys are one step ahead, and may have even increased the gap slightly in the past year.

After the morning tea break Suncorp’s executive manager for group financial crimes, Marty Latimer, talked through the details of how Suncorp deals with online fraud. Latimer said that in almost every case the fraud involves a new IP address and a larger than normal amount transferred into a new account. But recent attempts are becoming more complex. He said his team was constantly battling ‘speed’ in responding to new threats, while man-in-the-middle attacks are emerging that get around two-factor authentication, and social media is also becoming a more prevalent attack vector. The big question is whether fraud detection systems can keep up, as he pointed out that the next generation of users live their entire life online. He said the key was in developing fluid analytics that could model on-the-fly to intervene only in high-risk transactions, with real time intelligence sharing to detect more complex fraud indicators such as authentication bypasses.

The final presentation was from Zlatko Hristov, regional head of IT security at MF Global. He opened with the statistic that 65 percent of web surfers had fallen victim to cybercrime, and then took the audience through a possible scenario involving a business user being infected while on a public WiFi network, demonstrating how the malware package could perform functions from key-logging bank details to acting as a router when it connects to a business network and alerting a command and control host to create a breach through which an attack could be launched. He also took the audience through a live hacking demonstration, where a computer was exploited and a malicious payload uploaded. What was most surprising was how easy he made it appear. “User awareness is the most powerful weapon, but it is the most difficult to implement,” Hristov said.

Cisco’s Connected World report shows the new nature of working

Posted on by

Today saw the launch of Cisco’s Connected World report, which examined the needs and expectations of the global workforce. The report surveyed 2600 workers in 13 countries, including Australia. There were some interesting gems amongst the findings, including that 74 percent of Australians would take a pay cut in order to get a more flexible working life – higher than the 60 percent reported on average around the world – and reflecting the importance that many Australians place on lifestyle over just earning money.

More than one third of respondents indicated that being able to work remotely was more than a privilege – it was a right.  The report also found however that 43 percent of Australian workers still believed it was necessary to be in the office to make decisions more effectively and efficiently.

Cisco’s vice president for Australia and New Zealand Les Williamson opened with the assertion that technology has already delivered the ability to create a more flexible working environment.

“Technology is by no means the the issue that we have … we can safely deliver on the vision,” said Williamson. “Its the cultural, business process, and governance aspects that we should be focusing on.”

The report was launched with a panel discussion featuring futurist Ross Dawson, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration and Multicultural affairs, Senator Kate Lundy, the general manager of the distributed contact centre organisation Salmat@Home, Jacob Murray-White, and the national chair of the Australian Psychological Society’s College of Organisational Psychology Fernanda Afonso.

Dawson discussed how the business environment is changing with new pressures and competition.

“The organisations that will be successful will have to look dramatically different to the ones of today,” Dawson said. “They will have to build the responsiveness and adaptability to fit into their environment. What is required is flexible work structures which bring out the talent of the people working in those organisations.”

Fernanda Afonso said there was work to be done in thinking terms of managing diversity in the workforce.

“Human beings tend to think the way they are wired is the way that everyone else is wired,” Afonso said.

Senator Kate Lundy discussed how the government’s decision to invest in a high bandwidth network would further enable this flexibility in the workforce.

“The profound thing for Australia in closing the digital divide is that people will have choice about where they work and how productive that work will be,” Senator Lundy said. “And the timing of it sets Australia to be a fascinating test bed for changing work practice around the world.”

Murray-White’s business already uses a distributed workforce, which he said enabled him to select from a broader talent pool.

“It enables people who have made a lifestyle choice about where they want to live to make a choice,” Murray-White said. “We get incredibly well qualified people … that have no other way of participating in this workforce.”

Dawson also pointed to significant opportunities for sectors such as professional services, while Senator Lundy talked about the opportunities in digital media production, and creative industries.

“Standard process work and data processing is still a huge part of the workforce,” she said.