Category Archives: Technology

Developers Converge on Open Source Hackfest

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Unlimited Potential strikes gold again for the ICT Capital with the Software Freedom Day event. SFD ’08 is for I.T. professionals who worship open source technologies or who simply love the joy of writing software code.

Software Freedom Day looks set to become an annual event and will be hosted this year by Nathan Torkington, author, Perl programmer and former web 2.0 provocateur for technology publisher O’Reilly Media. The event comprises a “bar camp” or “unconference”, at which participants set the speaking agenda, and a “hackfest” where developers will be set a task or can work on their own open source projects. There will also be the opportunity for users to upload and test various open source applications.

There is a great bunch of supporters bringing this event to Wellington, but special mention needs to go out to Don Christie and Catalyst I.T. Don, who is a founding director of Catalyst and president of the Open Source Society, has emerged as a leading light in the New Zealand technology scene through his public commentary, industry leadership and general willingness to pitch in and help out with events such as SFD. In fact without volunteers like Don, software industry networks would not be in the healthy state that exists today. Why does it matter? Well, arguably the best jobs, the coolest projects and the smartest new ventures get discovered and supported by way of networks. So making an effort to get involved can reap rewards. Places are limited, so hurry and register.

Being users of various open source products and services ourselves, the ideegeo crew will be present at the event throughout the day hacking code as well as helping out the event organisers wherever we are needed, so please stop by and say hello. Just look out for the ideegeo orange banner. We’ll also be blogging and twittering live from SFD ’08 and showing off our new i-Phone app to anyone who’s interested.

Almost Free Software – Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

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The debate over whether or not software should be made freely available has been around for a long time. Can we afford such idealism? Perhaps there is a middle ground.

There are two different threads when we talk about “free software”. The first involves releasing actual code for public use; the second discussion is about providing free access to an application but without giving away the code. The latter is obviously a lot more manageable these days because of the SaaS model. But why would you bother? If you have to pay for employees, premises and some hosting, you better make sure there is some revenue coming in.

On the other hand, the fact that I can even publish this article here today is a direct result of the “crowd sourcing” approach that has spilled over from the open source community into the development of social media. Also, I’m sure we can all think of plenty of businesses which gave away their software and then built a lucrative consulting revenue stream around it. So there are clearly some tangible benefits to encouraging the open source philosophical movement to flourish and grow.

There was a great discussion thread about the (non)monetisation of Web 2.0 over on Diversity recently. Giving your product away, before you can figure out how to make money out of it, is the quickest way to destroy value in any business argues Ben. I agree. Using venture capital to prop up an ultimately unsustainable business model with over-inflated valuations is an abomination only one step removed from pyramid selling. But, maybe it’s how you go about giving away your software that matters.

We have a couple of products in the pipeline at ideegeo but with two completely different marketing and monetisation strategies planned. The first is a mobile application targetted at a niche audience which we will sell for quite a low margin through an online store. I will be overjoyed if we break even on the time spent developing it. However, it will raise our profile and demonstrate capability. The second product will be given away completely for free through our own website. The hook is that we get paid a small amount every time someone actually uses it (which is often). The clients will happily pay because the application demonstrably drives more business their way. If the application needs improvement, we will also get very rapid feedback.

My point is that the Internet has completely revolutionalised both software development and marketing. If you develop “almost free” software and then make it available to a very large number of users at only a very modest cost, everybody wins.

Next month Unlimited Potential are proudly hosting Richard Stallman as special guest speaker in the lead up to the Geeks, Games and Gadgets ’08 event.

Stallman founded the GNU Project an open source software development project that contributed substantively to the genesis of the Linux operating system. At times controversial, the title of “open source guru” seems quite aptly applied in the context of Stallman’s thought leadership. Social media and especially Wikipedia had not even been conceived of at the time of this 1996 interview, but it illustrates his visionary abilities.

Whatever your position on open source or the debate around competing public licensing systems, this seminar is likely to be a thought provoking one. Registration is highly recommended for what will no doubt be a popular session.

Can Business Get Its Head Around Social Media?

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Developer meeting held in SmallworldsFrom virtual worlds to dating sites to online gaming, there’s no denying that people are spending more time than ever before engaged in digital social media of some form or other. It comes as no surprise then to learn that, in the first half of 2008 alone, venture capital firms invested US $345 million in virtual worlds or related enterprises. As more sophisticated business models emerge around virtual economies, it has become clear that there is now real money to be made online.

In a world where travel costs are spiralling ever upwards, more and more people are opting to stay at home for entertainment. Does it mean that shopping malls, movie theatres and public bars are sunset industries, to be replaced by bits and bytes residing on a remote server? Perhaps not just yet, but rarely a day goes by that we don’t hear about the launch of a new web community, social mash-up or cool online game of some sort. 

Unfortunately research suggests that about 75% of these communities will never even achieve 1000 users. We set up ION almost six years ago and only recently celebrated our millenial sign-up. In any event there must be a limit to the proliferation of online social networks because once users become uber connected there is far less incentive to keep signing up to new networks. As network density increases, the advantage gained by the user decreases.

So when even Bill Gates gives up on his Facebook account, it really makes you question how much value large corporates see in social networks and virtual worlds. Some people continue to question whether or not virtual spaces will ever become meaningful in an enterprise setting. Although businesses have been using applications such as Sharepoint and Lotus Notes as knowledge management tools for years, corporates are still struggling to make the quantum leap into virtual communities and interactive game type environments as forms of collaborative business tools.

On the other hand corporate dinosaurs are belatedly waking up to the power of social media as a marketing tool. This videocast from the Harvard Business School offers advice to large companies about managing the change processes around implementing social media strategies. Now – I’m pretty sure I don’t need to belong to a web community for kitty litter or some other weird or random social network. I would however join a business network or film club that had an online community component for example. Whatever spins your wheels, I suppose.

New Zealand has a couple of promising virtual world ventures of its own. Smallworlds launched recently with a high quality browser based world for young adults that leverages advances in Flash based functionality and graphics. Socialise was an early entrant with a dating and friendship focus. Socialise is a regional community that has secured advertising sponsorship as a revenue stream, whilst Smallworlds is pitched at a global audience and intends to establish a virtual economy within the site.

Smallworlds users create and populate their own individual home spaces, which raises the question of identity portability. If players participate in several communities, plus own a Facebook or MySpace page, how can they manage their global identity? For dedicated social networkers with multiple sites to share and manage, aggregating all those links at one web address would seem to make sense. That’s a problem that we hope to address in a creative way very soon at ideegeo.

Global Market for Mobile Digital Innovation Booming

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Will the iPhone create a mobility revolution of Epic proportions?Reports of an emerging mobile advertising revenue market globally worth $US 150 billion by 2011 seem outlandish until you realise that the number of mobile social networking users is predicted to grow to almost a billion worldwide. Now with the launch of the much anticipated iPhone, user expectations of application mobility have been raised further, so providers of mobile applications will be searching for new and creative ways to drive revenue models to support those aspirations.

New Zealand undoubtedly has a chance to position itself as a global leader in mobile applications development. We already have pockets of creativity emerging. Zodal in Christchurch has arisen as both a market leader and industry evangelist on the mobile games and marketing front. In Wellington, Instinct Entertainment and Run the Red are successfully pursuing  their own particular niches and ideegeo is developing an Internet domain asset management tool that will have an iPhone interface. Open Cloud also grew up in the ICT Capital and, after a successful VC fund raising effort, is off to conquer the world with its acclaimed application server platform for provisioning Java based telco services. With mobile devices becoming even more ubiquitous than computers, it seems like we should be doing all we can to promote businesses like these as part of “transformative” efforts to improve the breadth of the economy.

On that note the next Unlimited Potential event is the annual “Geeks, Games and Gadgets” (GGG) showcase to be held in Wellington on 13th August. Because we are into promoting homegrown innovation, we’d love to have New Zealand mobile developers front up to demo and talk about their applications, especially games or edutainment. GGG ’08 will be bigger, brighter and marketed to a much wider audience than ever before. There will also be some surprise guests and lots of giveaways from our friends.

If you would like to share your clever games and gadgets, or position as an event sponsor, please get in touch as soon as possible. Post a reply on this blog article or use paul [at) up (dot] org [dot] nz.

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Events Epilogue

The roaring success of last week’s  Start-Up.co.nz / Silicon Welly launch event underlines my comments about how Unlimited Potential is rapidly emerging as the event manager of choice within the Wellington technology networking scene. Building social capital within knowledge sharing communities is something I am personally very passionate about because of the natural multiplier effects of networks that especially assist new or smaller ventures to grow.

The underlying reason for these effects is explained by research suggesting the importance of social networks in supporting entrepreneurship and innovation through facilitating capital flows, enhancing technology transfer and sourcing talent. In particular, networks assist with the settlement and retention of skilled migrants. At a time when New Zealand’s ICT businesses are constrained by a shortage of human resources, networks have a critical role to play. On that point….watch this space for further developments.

Speaking of social events, I was roped into helping run the bar at the aforementioned Unlimited Potential event last week and noticed that Epic Beer was the most popular drink in the house. We gave away several dozen within minutes. Thanks Epic for your support! Kind of appropriate when you consider the entrepreneurial story of Epic brewer Luke Nicholas and how he is developing the brand through Web 2.0 marketing techniques. We smell success in the wind.

Why ICT Underpins Innovation

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GITRA recent global report on information technology places New Zealand about the middle of the pack in terms of “network readiness”. But the index only accounts for part of the story about why the country is struggling to remain competitive through innovation.

The information technology report from INSEAD university and the World Economic Forum offers some very clear indications around what New Zealand has to achieve in order to boost innovation and raise competitiveness. The annual report ranks all countries in terms of ICT readiness by assessing a basket of factors that influence business, government and individuals. Quality of phone, broadband and server infrastructure, regulatory environment, quality of science education, R&D spend by firms and availability of venture capital are amongst the variables assessed to establish a “network readiness index” (NRI).

High network readiness alone does not guarantee success however. In fact highly competitive nations such as Finland, Israel and Taiwan rank slightly below New Zealand on the network readiness index. But if we consider a bunch of other factors that allude to innovative capacity, it paints a much different picture. Innovation factors (IF) include quality of scientific institutions, extent of university-industry collaboration, availability of scientists and engineers, number of patents issued per capita. These factors tell us whether or not a nation has the capacity to innovate through novel research, which is a far stronger value proposition than simple imitation. The fact that New Zealand ranks about the same as Zimbabwe is probably reason for some concern.

What we do know is that countries which rank highly on both counts, tend to be innovation powerhouses with rapidly improving GDP per capita. By this we mean nations such as Denmark, South Korea, India, Singapore and Malaysia. Unsurprisingly, all of these countries embarked some time ago on aggressive improvements to their ICT infrastructure. So exactly why does ICT appear to underpin innovation?

There are at least five good reasons why a sound ICT environment supports innovation processes:

  • Knowledge identification eg. market research, locating human resources, accessing science research, knowledge sharing platforms.
  • Developing creative capacity eg. computer aided design and 3D graphics.
  • Enhancing exploration eg. simulation and prototyping.
  • Shortening the design-test cycle eg. making failure inexpensive.
  • Improving capacity for commercialisation management eg. knowledge management, Web 2.0 e-marketing, virtual collaboration.
  • Empowering customer feedback into the design process.

The human genome project is a good example of a piece of innovation work that, a decade ago, could not have even been imagined anywhere in the world. Could such a project be done in New Zealand today? Although we now have a high speed research network and at least one homegrown firm offering suitable enabling software technology, it hasn’t happened because we are still struggling with a number of the innovation factors mentioned above. R&D spend is low, collaboration seems problematic rather the accepted norm and the education system is failing to inspire a new generation of scientists and engineers.

This shows that, as an enabler of innovation, we cannot consider ICT in isolation. There has been much debate over the need to rollout better broadband across New Zealand. But the economic case for substantial publicly funded investment in the project has yet to be properly made. Most people grasp that more and better ICT would be a good thing, but few are clear on exactly why. We need to benchmark ourselves more fully in order to better articulate the need.

X|Media|Lab Delivers Quality ConneXions

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xmlHeld last month at Te Papa, X|Media|Lab proved that we can all be global influencers for digital innovation. Not only that, but by utilising knowledge networks, we can leverage the creativity that already exists in our own back yard to help build successful global businesses. Some quick notes from the conference day:

The speaker session opened by addressing the concept of “ideation” – finding good ideas. Former Sony Entertainment president Chris Deering focussed the audience’s attention with the observation that online entertainment services would likely overtake revenues from TV and cable in the very near future. With MySpace (reportedly) approaching already 100 million sign-ups and phone handset sales ballooning he also predicted a future market for mobile communities in the vicinity of 400 to 800 million users by 2012. With numbers like that it was easy to see where the smart money was headed he said.

sachinIn a room full of game developers and creators of virtual worlds, those remarks really set the tone for the day. Continuing the theme, Virgin Comics and Animation CEO, Bangalore based Suresh Seetharaman, noted that in India alone there were 550 million under 20 year olds and that the mobile phone has become far more ubiquitous than the computer. He explained that his business was developing new creative streams, starting with fantasy comics because many of the largest grossing feature films have sprung out of comic book stories. Virgin Comics are creating a new pop culture by drawing on both mythology and modern media. A curious example of this is their Sachin Tindulkar super cricket hero storyline.

Local lad made good Richard MacManus prophesised on technology trends, later posting the presentation on his  highly rated Read Write Web blog. Moves towards the “intelligent web” were to the fore in his discussion as was the ongoing battle of Google versus Facebook. Keynote speaker Noah Falstein then spoke about the essentials of brainstorming and how to promote ideas instead of egos. Afterwards he went on National Radio and took part in a panel discussion about the future of online gaming.

Tom Duterme enthused about new venture development and the importance of establishing a good team behind the product. As Google’s talent scout for purchasing new businesses, I noticed he was much sought after during the intervals. Gao Li lead a team from the controversial but now profitable Suzhou Science Park (near Shanghai) and shared with us the staggering scale of China’s investment in research, science and technology. In her home province alone there is a $US 2 billion VC fund and some 3.8% of regional GDP is reinvested back into RS&T, putting New Zealand thoroughly to shame.

AlvinAlvin Wang Graylin expanded on the China story by mentioning that there are already nearly 600 million mobile phone users but with SMS being the predominant use, he cautioned that revenue per user remains low. In an effort to grow this market his company sets up mobile phone marketing services. He suggested that whilst carriers were keen on securing new revenue streams, this was limited by network capability for the time being.

Perhaps the speaker I enjoyed most was Hugh Mason from the U.K., a politely spoken and knowledgeable investor and entrepreneur in the creative sector. He had a very simple mantra for creating value with a winning start-up business team. “You need a finder, a minder and a grinder” on your team he said and try to have your product solve a problem that makes the world a better place. I took some comfort in the fact that we have formed our latest venture around just such a model.

I also enjoyed the networking session kindly hosted by Park Road Post the evening before but I found myself asking, as a “veteran” of the Wellington technology business networking scene, why was it the first time I had set foot in those hallowed halls. X|Media|Lab stands for cross-media connection. Why then do we hear so infrequently from our friends in Miramar? How about we run a local XMedia event each year and challenge film, software and graphics entrepreneurs to bounce new ideas around together.

According to Tim Berners-Lee, the new imperative for the Web is now creative connectivity. But as one of the XMediaLab speakers mentioned, “I do business with people that I like – but I first need to get to know them in person to like them”. Creativity and good ideas arise from the interstices between communities and hence it is very important to overlap from time to time. I feel that lately we have not been achieving this often enough. New Zealand Trade & Enterprise are to be congratulated for supporting this event and let’s hope there will be others in the future. In the meantime local networks like Unlimited Potential and ION will continue to add value by building social capital and sharing knowledge amongst the technology sector community.

Smallworlds Launches Virtual Playground

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swNew Zealand developer OutSmart go public with their virtual world offering this week. The Smallworlds team can be rightly proud of what they have achieved in terms of leveraging Kiwi creativity and generating a bankable global business opportunity. I was invited to be a beta tester on the site earlier this year and consequently got my son (7) and stepson (10) to try it out. The fact that they were so enthusiastic about it augurs well for the future.

Not only is Smallworlds safe and child-friendly, but it requires only an Adobe Flash plug-in to run within a browser. No expensive software downloads or monthly subscriptions. The site is hosted around the globe on Amazon’s EC2 cloud server array.

But Smallworlds will have wide appeal to young adults as well. You can personalise your avatar, set up and furnish your 3D virtual home and create a virtual pet that trots around after you adoringly. Then you can invite friends over to play pool or listen to music. And it’s all free to access. Have fun with it.

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Entrepreneur’s Epilogue

It was with much relief that we overcame the roadblocks that beset our baby start-up last week. Our internal wiki and email is in good health again and our funky web design expert is back home from the wilds of Bosnia (where Internet access is still a challenge to say the least!). So we now have a cool new logo and the makings of a website at last.

My CTO proudly showed me the server rack he acquired on TradeMe. It looks very impressive, all black and shiny with impressive LED displays. You know that you really do have an Internet business on your hands when your company owns a server rack. But can we spin some gold from all that silicon?

By the way, speaking of cost effective infrastructure for start-ups, Helen Baxter* links here to an interesting article on how the real cost of starting a business continues to fall as technology and connectivity improve. Food for thought.

* It was great to finally meet the effervescent Ms Baxter who was in town mentoring at X|Media|Lab last week. XML was the best event I’ve been to in years and I will devote some space to sharing about it very soon.

Start-Up B. Goode

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Paul Graham, from high profile Silicon Valley investor Y-Combinator, extols the virtue of “doing good” in this clip as he speaks to an audience of young entrepreneurs at the Start-Up School ’08 conference held recently at Stanford.

Graham is the kind of guy you sit up and pay attention to. His company currently funds and mentors over 50 start-ups, many of which are Web 2.0 ventures. He believes projects that do good gain a lot more traction when it comes to attracting customers and winning funding.

He cites Google which launched in 1999 as a hacker response to the lack of search functionality on the Internet. When Google began it had neither revenue nor customers, but it was those early years that saw the fastest appreciation in its share value.

By the way there is a whole bunch of stimulating material from the conference featured on Omnisio a very cool video presentation sharing site that is being backed by Y-Combinator and was co-founded by Ryan Junee. Seriously, I could happily spend hours surfing Omnisio which, unlike YouTube, actually hosts informative material worth watching.

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X|Media|Lab Event – Commercialising Ideas – Fri 30th May – Wellington

Don’t forget that the XMediaLab event hits town on Friday. If you are involved in anything remotely connected to mobile content, virtual worlds, Web 2.0 or digital media innovation in general, then you really need to be at this event. At $99 a head it has to be the best value outing of the year. Attracting global leaders in innovation to engage with NZ firms is one way we can overcome our remoteness. GeniusNet supports this event because we strongly believe that a lot of creativity and opportunity arises when you cross fertilise between different disciplines such as film, animation and software. See you there!

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Entrepreneur’s Epilogue

We hit our first speed bump this week. It was bound to happen. Our office server fell over for several days meaning we had no internal email and we lost our virtual whiteboard facility. With our people currently spread around Munich, Melbourne and Wellington, these tools are essential. So everything simply stopped happening. Very frustrating.

Then on Thursday night I made the mistake of venturing into the central city at 5pm. It was gridlock. As an organisational researcher I’m always interested in analogies between business theory and real life and it didn’t take me long to make the connection. In project management terms it’s called event chain methodology.

So I quickly realised I needed to find a sub-critical pathway to get my damn car out of the middle of the Willis Street / Manners Street intersection! The point is that we had encountered the exact same problem within the business. A critical feature had failed, leaving us with flow-on effects and time delays. Back to the drawing board to find a way around the problem. All good learning.

ICT Investment for Health

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It’s no coincidence that David Cunliffe was allocated both the role of ICT Minister and that of Health; he’s both comfortable with technology and adept at relationship building. But in his speech to a recent health leadership forum, he made only passing reference to the role of ICT in the health sector.

Given that New Zealand companies have developed and exported some of the smartest health sector business applications around, it seems curious that we still have not yet invested in an integrated health I.T. infrastructure of our own. Apart from the obvious cost saving benefit, there is the alluring prospect of showcasing our homegrown technology to the world. Most importantly, such a system might save lives and alleviate suffering. Furthermore, the health sector has long been touted as a beneficiary of better broadband, yet we don’t seem to have made the connection yet.

The recent case of a patient whose lung cancer remained undetected is surely a prime example of a medical misadventure that might have been avoided through the use of technology. The gentleman concerned presented with a bowel problem. He then received an x-ray which incidentally alerted the attending physician to the presence of a suspicious mass in the patient’s lung. However no follow-up was done after the man returned home and four years later the tumour is now inoperable. With a high speed nationally integrated system, the query by the house surgeon would have been flagged on a universal patient file and the digital x-ray image could have been accessed by a specialist and the patient’s GP at any time. Why haven’t we implemented such a service yet?

The most obvious reason involves having the political will to allocate funding when there are competing needs within the health sector. The other reason is that it would be a lot easier to do if all health providers were linked by a proper broadband network. In fact if there ever was a compelling case for extending the reach of high speed networks then this it. There is one other hurdle. District Health Boards make independent funding decisions. Getting unanimity across the country on any such project would be almost impossible. But if anyone can help form a consensus in the health community, it is Minister Cunliffe. The only question then is whether or not he will get the opportunity to do so after the election result.

Entrepreneur’s Epilogue

It has been a busy week, with many hours logged slaving over a hot laptop. One of the first tasks was to set up our office server with a suite of nifty collaborative tools – essential because some of the team are offshore based. We also checked in with our very helpful accountant friends at Openside CA, we plugged away at the business plan, protected our trademark and completed the incorporation process. By the way, my co-founders assure me that despite the slightly clunky interface, the Companies Office website is light years ahead of anything in Europe where bits of paper and numerous trips to several different offices are required. They should know what they are talking about because they write application interface logic in their sleep. But more about that later…

Why Email Must Die

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Talk about the death of email may still be a little premature. But the fact that some very high profile web entrepreneurs are even having this discussion is portentious.

When we think about the loss of productivity and the damage that has been wrought by bogus email and embedded nasties over the first fifteen or so years of existence of the Internet, it is surprising that nobody has entirely solved the problem of wayward emails. Even more surprising is that desktop software providers have retained email client applications within their offerings, because the writing is on the wall – email must die.

As long as email remains free of any cost, and networks are largely unfettered, there will always be some idiot quite happy to steal your address and use it as a proxy to send out a million ads for pharmaceuticals. The Internet has always been a double-edged sword in this respect. It offers huge potential to scale a business for both good and bad purposes.

So what are the alternatives to email and are they safe? When I set up my consulting business in 2002 I found an ISP that could both host my website and offer me a webmail service – great. I’ve never used Outlook since. What was not so great was that during 2007 my ISP had a major server meltdown and somehow managed to lose 5 years worth of my email. Had they not heard of system back-ups? Fortunately I have heard of backing up and had long sent all my active mail and a list of email addresses to a separate account. So the loss was minimal, but the nuisance factor was considerable.

That episode got me thinking about how trustworthy all sorts of hosted applications and automated services really are. Banking, sharemarket, any e-commerce or eftpos transaction, even this blogsite…we trust that the provider has sufficient resource in place to deal with our precious data. But how can we really be sure? When we consider where email is likely to go in the future, there is still some cause for concern.

Some young people don’t even use regular email any more. Why would you do so when you can create your own social network online and be specific about who you choose to invite aboard? It is surely only a matter of time before someone builds a really useful networking site targetted at enterprise. Gmail is great and I have to admit I have yet to see a single piece of spam through my Gmail account. So why can’t I have a secure, low cost Gmail style hosted email system that only lets in only those who I invite but which can be personalised to fit my business brand?

 Bookhabit Authors Competition – Last Orders Please

Speaking of leveraging the Internet for good purposes, we are entering the last weeks of the Bookhabit.com authors competition. Know any budding authors out there? Have them upload their unpublished work onto the site in time for a crack at $5,000 in prize money. Popular selections from each week go forward to the final panel. For readers there are now over two hundred e-books to choose from, selling for as little as $2.50. Bookhabit is further evidence of how the Internet is continuing to change the way we live our lives and that a sensible idea well executed is worth a great deal indeed. Enjoy!