ginger's thoughts

Beloved Shuttle Box

Six weeks ago, on a fatal Saturday, both my washing machine and cute little Mario died in one day. The washing machine was quickly repaired, but there was no hope for Mario, as the burnt smell of electronics indicated. It wasn’t going to start up again.

Mario had been the first server to run the code developed at Vquence. It was our development and testing server for more than 8 months until we moved to a server at The Planet – later to Voxel and now ultimately to Amazon.

After it was relieved off Vquence duty, Mario became what it was originally bought to become: a media server. Running Linux and MythTV, it was the beloved center of our living room for the last 2 years. But it seems the heavy duty VCR work as well as running Linux exhausted him.

Well, it is now replaced by an ordinary HP machine – I will miss the cute little shuttle.

If anyone wants the remains, let me know.

I have spent a lot of time recently researching Sydney-based agencies to invite to the upcoming Launch of our Vquence VQmetrics service. This involved finding their websites, finding out about their target business (do they do online video?), finding a relevant contact, and emailing an invitation to them.

I am close to institutional confinement!

I do understand that agencies need to show off their creativity on their Website. The result of this is that most agency Websites are completely written in Flash. Fortunately I have the latest version of Flash installed, so I can load them all. But my Web browser and MacBook do not deal well with having more than about 5 tabs open with Flash content – my machine almost grunts to a halt. So, there goes the idea of opening multiple tabs at the same time while waiting for the lengthy Flashs of the sites to load…

Then, once the pages are loaded, it is always a surprise to see what the agency has come up with. At the beginning of the exercise it was a surprise. Later it became a nuisance. Now, I am utterly terrified before opening another agency Website. Will it break my browser? Will it start playing a video? Will it start playing music so loud that it blasts off my ears? Will I feel really stupid because I cannot navigate the site? Will I be able to locate the “Contact Us” section? Will they have bothered to publish an email address or do I have to fill in a stupid contact form that I know nobody will look at? Will the contact email work or just bounce?

It almost feels like the creation of the Website is a competition between the agencies as to who can create the maddest, most unusual, and most unusable Website.

Please, please! Can I just have a simple, usable site with obvious navigation, a simple and fast loading list of reference work, and a list of key people working at the agency with their email contacts?

Oh, and Mumbrella has just published a post that gives me scientific proof that this is a conspiracy against me by the agencies! No, stop that – I am not ready to be locked up yet!

Today I logged back into a Bebo account that I hadn’t used in ages. The first thing it asked me to do was to add friends – and like so many other social networks it does so by logging into one of your email accounts and finding email addresses. Since their terms and conditions say they won’t store your gmail password and just retrieve email addresses, I tend to use this service to add a few select friends.

But Bebo is really f….d up in this respect. Parden my words, but today I have spammed each and every one of my contacts and all the mailing lists I am subscribed to, I have been blocked from multiple mailing lists and my email has probably been marked as spammer by many, so that I may ultimately have to change my mailing account.

It was unintentional and I apologise to all of you who had to suffer.

I usually regard myself as fairly intelligent, but Bebo’s system totally tricked me. So, when you sign up with Bebo, make sure not to fall into the same trap. It looks like this is a pretty common complaint. Here are links to at least three others that had the same issues:

• http://www.thewavingcat.com/2008/03/13/on-bebocom-and-why-its-important-to-make-everything-opt-in/
• http://b.rox.com/2008/10/14/frustrated-with-bebo/
• http://www.nishug.com/2009/01/06/cheapness-of-aols-social-network-bebo/

If you look at the second post, it has screenshots. My screen was indeed slightly different to that. I had three sections with contacts – one already on Bebo out of which I selected a hand-ful, ones suggested as contacts through contacts which I completely unselected, and a third one with all my email addresses. Each of the sections had a submit button. Naturally assuming that only the ticks in the particular section would be submitted with the button underneath that section, I clicked ok underneath the hand-ful of selected contact. Half an hour later I am now totally shattered and don’t know how to apologize.

The only interesting effect out of this faux pas is that within the first I hour I made 22 friends! An amazingly fast way to get to a lot of friends in a social network. Unfortunately, Bebo has broken my trust and made it to the bottom of my social networks, so if you’d like to be in contact with me, try me on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Pia posted details about a OLPC rollout to PNG for February 2009. If you are interested in volunteering for this and other OLPC rollout projects you should hop on over to OLPC Friends wiki page and leave your details. It’s an amazing opportunity to make a difference.

In September, as reported, Terry Cutler delivered an extensive review on the Australian innovation system and what should be done. But then, the worldwide economic downturn hit us, and nobody seems to think about creating incentives for Australian innovation any longer.

Where did it go? Nothing is happening on the innovation website.

In particular as a small business owner, I ask: what happened to incentives to innovate for SMEs? Before the review, the government as a precaution scrapped the existing Australian grant system for innovation – in particular the Commercial Ready grants. The idea was to have some leeway with building a new system. That seemed fair enough at the time – but it seems more and more that there will be no replacement for this scrapped funding. Is the government simply forgetting what they promised in view of other, more pressing needs? Do we need to remind them?

Terry Cutler in a recent interview with SmartCompany paints a dark picture for the Australian future. He is aware that commercial innovation originates from SMEs and is fearful that by dropping all support for SMEs, the whole SME technology sector will be wiped out, with a negative influence also on larger companies and Australia will fall so far behind in innovation that it may be hard to ever catch up (remember what we did with our advantage in creating computer hardware at the time of CSIRAC?).

The Commercial Ready grants and other innovation funding were abruptly scrapped in May 2008. It is now more than 6 months later and we haven’t seen an indication of anything new to replace them. In the midst of the global crisis, how can we make this important cause heard?

Yesterday was a long and fascinating day of discussions about innovation in Australia.

At this year’s Pearcey Medal and NSW Pearcey State Award event, the focus was on the recently released innovation report from Terry Cutler with a focus on the effects on ICT (Information and Communication Technology).

If you only look at the summary report, you will miss the structure of the full report, which is why I have outlined it here:

• Chapter 1 stalling not sprinting
• Chapter 2 the national innovation system
• Chapter 3 innovation in business
• Chapter 4 the case for a public role in innovation
• Chapter 5 strengthening people and skills
• Chapter 6 building excellence in national research
• Chapter 7 information and market design
• Chapter 8 tax and innovation
• Chapter 9 market facing programs
• Chapter 10 innovation in government
• Chapter 11 national priorities for innovation
• Chapter 12 governance of the innovation system

I took home a few very interesting observations from reading the reports and from the discussions at the Pearcey event.

But before I can comment, I have to state which organisations I see as ICT innovators in Australia.

• The government-funded ones are the Universities, NICTA and CSIRO (CRCs fall in the same general class).
• The big drivers of transforming new research outcomes into business are start-ups and the SMEs.
• Further innovation happens in large companies and multi-nationals with a stronger focus on incremental innovation rather than disruptive innovation.
• In ICT, we need to add another big driver of innovation: open source software. I’ll explain this later in more depth.

The following observations on VenturousAustralia and what I took away from the Pearcey awards are on these topics:

TOPIC: ICT and innovation

At the Pearcey awards, we had long discussions about whether ICT was appropriately represented in the report and whether the recommendations are pushing ICT further into a supportive role while missing our opportunities to innovate and lead in core ICT.

It is generally accepted that ICT has a major effect on the productivity increase of almost all Australian industries. DCITA reports show that in service industries, between 35 and 65 per cent of productivity growth is estimated to have been driven by technological factors—mainly ICT related. In manufacturing, the range was between 45 and 75 per cent.

And yet, we only spend about 0.55% of our government outlays on R&D and very little of this on ICT R&D, putting us third-last in the OECD (p. 65 of VenturousAustralia). These are shocking numbers. Does the report recommend anything to change this situation and help Australia stay at the forefront of ICT R&D and innovation?

Checking in the 228 page full report (see VenturousAustralia), we find that the recommended innovation priorities for government are:

• Agricultural and food security
• Climate change mitigation and adaptation
• Population health
• Tropical solutions
• Broadband applications

while complementary recommended private innovation activities are:

• Resource industries
• Space and astronomy
• Finance and risk management
• Marine industries

Is ICT reduced to a need for broadband and support in the other industries? Are we as an industry underrepresented?

As much as I was looking, I found no recommendation relevant to fundamental ICT research in the report.

So, it does burn down to broadband. At least, the one paragraph that refers to broadband applications as a goal suggests not to invest more in the National Broadband Network itself, but into the development of relevant applications – specific to local needs. This includes applications in health, education, open democracy, traffic systems, and public national collections of information and knowledge.

It is a shame that there is no explicit recommendation to support Australian research and commercialisation that will push the technical boundaries of important fundamental ICT technologies such as networking, mobile devices, digital media, information analysis, system complexity, or robotics.

TOPIC: Commercialisation of ICT innovation

As everywhere else, in Australia, too, the powerhouses of commercialisation of fundamental ICT R&D and innovation are start-ups and SMEs. Interestingly, the CSIRO and NICTA find it very difficult to turn their inventions into new companies or get existing companies to pick them up.

It has been identified that this has much to do with individuals and their drive (or lack thereof) to see their invention through from creation to commercialisation.

Interestingly, much original R&D is and has to be done in start-ups themselves. This is because the fundamental research performed in organisations like the CSIRO and NICTA may be independent of a current need of the market, while actual current needs in the market for research are not addressed.

I think, while VenturousAustralia talks a lot about the need for more education, this critical point of bridging the gap from R&D to commercialisation – a critical step to make an innovation useful – is not supported enough.

I have been thinking about this issue a bit (since I have come out of the CSIRO and now run a start-up) and have a suggestion.

There are some projects that support the placement of PhD students from universities into large companies to mentor them through their projects. However, I do not think we have any government supported placement projects for SMEs.

If the government would pay for a intern or a PhD student or a CSIRO/NICTA researcher to be placed in a start-up and do a research project there that has a direct use in the company and the IP would belong to the company with the researcher getting a share in the company and publications be done for the University/CSIRO/NICTA, then a commercialisation path would be built. It would help do more fundamental research, would help bridge the gap into commercialisation, would help the SME to do R&D, and would possibly help the researcher discover a more commercial side of his personality.

I had hoped for some recommendations like this in the report, but found nothing that directly focused on bridging this commercialisation gap.

TOPIC: Enabling SMEs to succeed

We were all positively surprised to see some of the recommendations in VenturousAustralia that will really support SMEs’ efforts in ICT innovation.

For example, the recommended tax credit would in my own (probably flawed) calculations be able to give us at Vquence a 50% larger tax rebate.

I was further surprised to see recommendation 10.6:
“The Australian Government should recognise its role as an active participant in facilitating innovation through procurement practices.”

This recommends a similar requirement for Australian governments as exists in the USA to spend a percentage of procurement on testing and using Australian innovative products and services.

Another recommendation that initially really excited me is recommendation 10.2:

“An advisory committee of web 2.0 practitioners should be established to propose and help steer governments as they experiment with web 2.0 technologies and ideas.”

It sounds like the recommendation means that we should push the boundaries of Web 2.0 more in Australia. However, when reading the report, it becomes clear what this recommendation means: the government should use Web 2.0 technologies that have been proven elsewhere to enable a more open communication, discussion, and collaboration between government departments and the public. As awesome as this is – and as much as it fits with the principles that we have been pushing in open source for many years – it is also limiting ourselves to the use of existing technology rather than pushing the boundaries by developing new technologies.

TOPIC: Regard for the contribution of Open Source

There is an enormous amount of innovation happening in the open source community and Australia is one of the big contributors to open source software internationally. However, the open source communities are often overlooked as innovators in ICT because commercial success from them is only visible indirectly, e.g. through a successful project in government, a successful new start-up, or a process optimisation in a multi-national.

In this report I am slowly seeing a recognition of this and the advantages of open technologies and open content.

In recommendation 8.7 you can read (extracted):
“Further exploration may be warranted to see if there are practicable ways of expanding the definition of eligible activities to include some of the less technically risky activities involved in innovation in services. In the immediate term, R&D on open source programs should qualify for the multiple sale test.”

This will enable Open Source work and services to be used for Tax Concession and Tax Credit – a big step forward.

Yet, the undertanding is still limited, I think.

Looking at recommendation 7.14:
“To the maximum extent practicable, information, research and content funded by Australian governments – including national collections – should be made freely available over the internet as part of the global public commons.”

I like the drive for opening up public content repositories in this. But I’d like to focus my observations on the part that states that “research funded by Australian governments should be made freely available over the Internet”. In my view, this is a great push towards supporting the open publication of research outcomes by Universities, NICTA, CSIRO, and CRCs. But I seem to be misunderstanding this bit, since there is no such mention in the Cutler report – it only focuses on content.

CONCLUSIONS

After all this criticism I have to say that I was rather impressed by the breadth and depth of the report. I was not able to cover all the good bits, which also include more support for investment activites. My criticism is only on the rough edges and I’ll take some time to feed it back, because I have a real belief that the feedback will actually end up in the final report.

Why do I think that constructive feedback will still make it into the report?

First of all, I think the committee has tried and mostly succeeded in succinctly putting into the report all the input they have received. I don’t think we have ever seen such a comprehensive analysis of the Australian innovation landscape beforehand.

But more importantly, I was at the Pearcey awards event, I heard some of the committee members speak about the process and respond to some of the feedback, and I heard Terry Cutler speak about it. I got the feeling of overwhelming support for ICT innovation and I hope we see a lot of the recommendations turned into reality.

I’ll end this lengthy discusion with Terry Cutler’s final words of the evening: “ICT is innovation”.

UPDATE: Charles Lindop just published the audio recordings of the event on his blog.

…because of your outstanding contributions to Australia’s computing sector, but haven’t had the chance to put yourself out there? Or you have a friend who really deserves an award for his excellent work? Here’s your chance.

This year’s NSW State Pearcey Award is open for applications and nominations. It is one of the only Australian awards that singles out individuals and their contribution to the Australian ICT profession early in their career (where “early” is used rather flexibly to mean anyone who has not yet reached the end of their career).

If you have made any outstanding technical innovations or created novel commercial businesses in IT in NSW, you should consider sending in your CV.

Previous award winners can be seen here. There are some excellent people – even some from the open source community. In 2006, James Dalziel of MELCOE won the award. Jeff and Pia Waugh won last year. And I was myself highly commended in 2006 for the Annodex work we did at CSIRO.

You’ll need to send in the completed nomination form and your CV before the end of August. Good luck!

I don’t usually complain about companies and their sales approach, since I know how hard it is to sell things. But today I had a house call by a Telstra person and his sales practice was so dodgy – it’s just not something I would have expected by such a respected company as Telstra.

He came with a clipboard, had a name tag, and was on the verge of running away again when I got to the door – he really made the impression of a busy technician and took notes in his clipboard while we were talking.

He asked me whether I was with Telstra and I said no. He further asked who my phone line was with and I said iiNet. He then asked whether iiNet was looking after our physical phone line connection and I said probably no, but rather that it still belonged to Telstra – I found that a strange question to be asked by a technician who should really know, but then he might be new from India and not know everything yet.

He then said that in this case his information would be interesting for me and said that on Monday and Tuesday between 9am and 5pm Telstra would be undertaking work on the phone cables in my street and that I would be without connection, both Internet and Phone. I said ok, if it cannot be helped and thought that was it.

But that wasn’t it. Out of seemingly personal curiosity, almost as if he was making a decision for his own personal home, he asked how I was going with iiNet. I said good. He asked how much I was paying and how many phone calls that would include. I stated the rough amount and that my phone charges were really low and that amount almost covered all my phone calls and Internet connection. He then went on asking how much bandwidth I had. I stated the summary of peak and off-peak bandwidth to which he asked how much was peak and how much was off-peak. At this point I was getting slightly annoyed, since he could as well look up all these details on the Internet and really doesn’t need to get them from me.

But then came the really weird part. He then said that with this bandwidth I could barely surf the Internet and my phone line would be really crappy. He then started trying to sell me a Telstra ADSL service. This is where I got really annoyed and almost loud. I said that I knew what I was doing and that for what I am getting from iiNet I would have to pay 10 times as much with Telstra and that under no circumstances would I switch back to Telstra services.

He seemed to understand that he wasn’t going to sell me any phone or Internet services today, so he switched topic: what about a Foxtel account then? I said no thank you and good bye and closed the door.

So, now, I am actually wondering whether his initial statement that our street will have an outage on Monday and Tuesday is actually correct or whether that was just a way to get his foot in the door. I am really pissed off with Telstra for such dodgy sales practices. Unfortunately, their complaints department does not answer calls on a weekend and their technical department was not willing to confirm an outage on Monday and Tuesday since I am not a Telstra customer.

Telstra: I really wished your sales people would play fairly in the market. I could see so many neighbours talking to your sales guy and considering his offers that I almost felt like going over and uncovering his lies. He is making false claims about other Network’s services, he is making false claims about technical details and he is trying to open the door with a possibly false claim on a technical outage. Plus: I have to wait until Monday before I can tell you about it. How much worse can it get?

I have spent this weekend giving my Blog a work-over and extending the page set about myself – something I have been putting off for 5 years!

I now have a proper Website for Gingertech and I finally have the list of my publications up.

I have quite an extensive list of publications, so have been wondering for a while how to publish them such that it will be easy to manage. I have used a nice little Wordpress plugin called “List Subpages” to get the hierarchical set of pages onto the site in a nicely structured way. I’m actually missing a RSS feed of these pages, but that’s not a major problem. I’m happy with what this provides for now – it’s a good start. It will make those people happy that have been bugging me for my publications and to whom my sad reply has always been to send them an extract of my CV.

I still need to add some of the abstracts of the publications into the posts, and complete the links to where you can download them. More work for further weekends. This is a good start for now and I am happy with it.

When I was a child, my dad used to take me to classic music concerts – piano concerts, cello concerts and the like. I really loved the music but hated having to sit still for so long. I got used to the tradition in classic music concerts to sit still on your chair in an orderly fashion and try not to sneeze or in any other way disrupt the dignified performance.

As a teenager, I loved going to rock and pop concerts, when they came anywhere close to my home town (which was not very often, since I grew up on the German countryside). I loved the party that a concert represents, with drinks and dancing and screaming and generally being wild.

But it seems that the Rock stars of my time have grown old and their concerts have turned into “classical music”.

I recently went to a Rolling Stones concert in Homebush and last night to an Eric Clapton concert in the Entertainment Centre. Both times , I sat in a far away corner from centre stage and was not able to see much of the stars. I still enjoyed their great music.

In last night’s concert, I dared get up and stand in one of the large hallways that connect the rangs – and of course I started to dance, ’cause that’s what Eric Clapton music does to me! To my enormous disappointment, I was asked by some dorky security guard to get back to my seat.

What bad can a little dance do? Why is it not allowed to have fun at a Rock concert of old stars? It gave me 100 times the enjoyment of the music in comparison to being nailed down in a seat! And I’m sure, if more people were allowed to show their joy this way, the musician would also have more fun in the concert. To me, it seemed like Eric was rather disappointed with the Sydney crowd. Well NO FU….. WONDER!

I think, in future I will stick to the concerts of younger and local musicians and crowds – such as Missy Higgins or Xavier Rudd, where you are actually encouraged to enjoy the music with your full conscience and body. Those classic music concerts just made me feel old and joyless…