Wayne Bucklar's Blog

Software that automatically scans emails to create a personality profile for each member of staff

wayne@ebspl.com — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:00:00 GMT

INNOCENT emails sent in work time could soon be used to decide if workers are potential thieves, industrial spies or troublemakers. Designed to tackle workplace cybercrime, the program is the brainchild of computer experts working for the United States military and soon may be available for any company or institution to download free from the internet.

The software scans through every email sent by a worker and looks for patterns of words – or absences of words – that reveal clues about their personality. The system relies on the assumption that the riskiest employees for crime are those who are disgruntled, alienated and fed-up.

The spyware is controversial because it brands employees as potential threats before they have done anything wrong. Privacy provisions are relevant in Australia but in most parts of the US, it is legal to scan emails using software.

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23040447-5013522,00.html, 22/01/2008

The potential for the erosion of employee privacy via email scanning (and web browser scanning) may concern some staff.

International Internet Access Boosted

wayne@ebspl.com — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:00:00 GMT

BRISBANE telco Pipe Networks is poised to unveil a $200 million submarine cable link to the US island of Guam, designed to capitalise on booming internet traffic and cut broadband costs for Australians. Pipe Networks will be in direct competition with Telstra and the Southern Cross cable owned by Telecom New Zealand-SingTel Optus. The group is using Guam because it has multiple links connecting the island to Hawaii, the US West Coast and parts of Asia. Last March, Telstra announced it would build its own new submarine cable to Hawaii at a cost of about $300 million. Until now, Southern Cross has had a tight grip on the market for US-bound internet traffic.

2010 – the impact of the internet

wayne@ebspl.com — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 07:34:00 GMT

Everything with batteries will be a web server, able to be interrogated and controlled over the net – bathroom scales, clocks, microwaves, fridges, door bells, air conditioning, motor cars... everything!
Identity theft will be endemic and personal ID tokens will be as common as keys.
Televisions and computers will have merged into home information displays.
YouTube content will be on television with the same sort of audience as talk back gets today.
Black and white will be an anachronism – everything will be colour.
What we now call broadband will be as laughable as calling a Model T Ford a sports coupé.
Radio will be a webpage with sound much like television was described as radio with pictures.
Social recommendation engines that suggest what we eat and what we do and what we watch based on what our friends are doing will be everywhere.
Cyber bullying will mutate into cyber mugging. "Give me your lunch money" will become "EFTpos me your lunch money"
John Howard will still not get it.

Starking - I stark - You stark

wayne@ebspl.com — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 04:26:00 GMT

Roly Sussex invented a new word to describe stalking for an empty car space in a car park - Starking.

eBusiness Strategies Services Catalog

wayne@ebspl.com — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 03:34:00 GMT

From www.ebusinessstrategies.com.au

eStrategy - position your business to take advantage of emerging trends

Strategy, in simple terms, is a process to position your business to take advantage of future opportunities. In all businesses large and small, managers make strategic decisions on a day-to-day basis that cover all aspects of their business to ensure that the business can thrive and grow as operating circumstances change. Some strategic matters like finance, marketing, human resources and equipment have a long history and there are many years of business experience to support and back up business managers. Our consultants explain the Internet, its implications for your business and help formulate eStrategy to ensure that your business is not disadvantaged and does not lose its competitive edge.

eDevelopment – custom software to meet your real business needs

Software that meets your business needs is a critical component of your IT system. Sometimes, it is more efficient to create software from scratch as it exactly meets your requirements. Often however, someone else has already created software that can be configured to also exactly meet your requirements at a fraction of the cost. The development team can assist you with business analysis to identify the business rules that your software will follow, and using experienced developers build software to do precisely the job you require. The team also has expertise in identifying existing products including very common applications like Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft SQL and Microsoft Word or less well-known products like Star Office or MySQL, and can often modify and configure the existing software to meet your needs.

eMaintenance – keep your computer systems and staff working happily

Computer systems need maintenance. Just as you have your car serviced to ensure efficiency and reliability, you should have your computer systems serviced for the same reasons. Without maintenance, computer systems will slowly grind to a halt causing data loss and downtime. The maintenance team, which works either on an hourly rate on demand or under a maintenance agreement will service and maintain your computer systems to ensure they are always operating efficiently. Routine tasks include checking backups, ensuring anti-virus and e-mail checking software is working and up-to-date, installing service patches and updates as they are released by vendors, updating drivers for peripherals such as modems and printers and checking hard drives and other hardware to ensure that there are no early indications of failure. The maintenance team also provides a telephone helpdesk facility with remote access support. Remote access allows the team to see your computer screen and even take control to solve a problem without the need to be on-site. This saves both time and travel expenses.

eVOIP – telephone systems over the internet

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is an effective way to reduce the cost of telephone calls by converting the calls to an Internet signal and transmitting them via the Internet to the called number. Untimed VoIP calls to capital cities in Australia start at about $0.09 to $0.15 per call. This can create dramatic savings in your phone bill. The technology is now reliable enough and mature enough to be in common use in most businesses and we can assist with installations as simple as a single handset through to 50 extensions using our Asterisk PABX solution and a variety of third-party VoIP service providers. The Asterisk PABX is a software PABX that runs on its own Linux computer and provides all of the features of a major commercial-grade PABX, including call queues, ring groups, digital receptionist, call recording, and all the other features that you might expect. Asterisk PABX is a very cost-effective solution for businesses of all sizes and particularly seats businesses with less than 10 handsets. It can also be configured to use existing "real" telephone lines.

eCommerce – simple, easy-to-use on-line stores

The idea of an online store which is open 24 hours a day and doesn't require any sales staff has to be appealing to every retailer. In the mid-1990s, running an online store was an expensive exercise, often costing tens of thousands of dollars. In the last 10 years, the cost of an online store has been steadily fallen and is now hundreds of dollars rather than thousands of dollars. Furthermore, once set up, these stores are easy to maintain and operate. With proper management and strategy, any issues you may have with trading online can be safely managed and even a micro business can have an effective 24-hour online store selling its products and services without any sales staff, all day, every day.

eMarketing – make your marketing spend work for you online

"Build it, and they will come" seemed to be the catch cry of the Internet age prior to the dot com crash of 2000. If you have a web site, you already know the absolute truth, they only come if they know where it is and if they are motivated to find it. Marketing is a critical part of any Internet solution. A web site without users is of no use to you at all. It doesn't matter how amazing the creative content or how spectacular the graphics are, if no one sees your web site, it will serve no purpose. Our eMarketing team members are experts in Internet marketing and can advise, create, commission and implement an eMarketing plan to ensure that your web site meets your expectations. Their expertise in search engine optimisation and online paid advertising will ensure that your website is easy to find and that visitors to your web site come there with an expectation of buying goods and services from you. The team has expertise in service marketing for industries like government, legal and real estate, and in retail outlets selling all sorts of products. As much as anything, a consultation with our team will ensure that you at least understand how the marketing works and what has to be done to improve the market visibility of your products and services. Once you understand, you are then in a much better position to make a decision about how to better market your web presence or to engage consultants to do it for you. You can check out the effectiveness of out eMarketing team very simply. Go to www.google.com.au and search for our principal, "Wayne Bucklar" (with or without the inverted commas) and you should see many pages relating to Wayne Bucklar with his primary commercial page www.wayne.bucklar.net at the top of the list.

ePortal - use modular web site design to create an effective commercial-grade website at surprisingly little cost. Basic sites are less than $10 per month and allow you to edit and create your web pages with no additional software. Editing is as simple and point and click. Additional modules can be purchased to upgrade your portal to a full ecommerce store, blog site or discussion forum. All the power of the biggest and best web sites in the world in a simple and easy-to-edit package for a tiny cost.

The E-traveller - Advice for travelers in the information age

wayne@ebspl.com — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 03:25:00 GMT

A perennial problem when traveling has been what to pack. In the information age, the problem is what electronics to pack. Whether or not to take your laptop on your next overseas jaunt needs some careful consideration.

Radio Waves Goodbye - The future of Radio

wayne@ebspl.com — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 03:21:00 GMT

Since the Internet made its appearance in the early 1990s, traditional media has pondered its impact and often reacted too slowly to emerging trends in Internet use. In amongst this it has failed to recognise behavioural changes that occurred in the general media-consuming public, even though these changes were foreshadowed by Generation Y.

Radio is a good example - it has struggled to maintain its relevance with a listening audience since the visual medium of television entered its marketplace, initially as radio with pictures, before developing its own unique communication style.

Between them, radio and television educated an audience to pay attention in very short time spans. The Internet allowed this shorter attention span to follow diverse paths which are now seen in the Internet phenomenon of browsing.

Media consumers who use the World Wide Web move from topic to topic following some inner desire with no regard to the sequence of consumption envisaged by the media's producer. With the speed of a mouse click, users change topics in a diverse range of content. The more competent and comfortable the Internet user, the more rapidly they will allow their attention (or even drive their attention) to flicker from topic to topic in an endless sea of relatively meaningless web pages, seeking to be entertained, amused, enthralled, and delighted.

Watch a teenager using YouTube in lieu of television, and you will see a media consumer enthralled by possibilities as they sample the first few seconds of thousands of diverse video stories.

It seems that the potential of the video clip is more entertaining and more fascinating than the content of the video clip. The same shortening of attention spans has been apparent in traditional radio for many years. One hour-long radio quiz shows have given way to an hour's worth of programming containing eight or 10 segments, which in turn have given way in turn to talkback radio containing many segments.

The radio consumer has no choice as to the sequence of content, but rather appears to selectively pay attention to those segments which appeal; radio producers, having no option but a single broadcast stream provide a shotgun scattering of content in pursuit of the elusive attention of their listeners.

Often, older media consumers long for a more connected narrative, for the more complete story. Programs like Andrew Denton's "Enough Rope" or Richard Fidler's "Conversation Hour" probably derived some of their success from meeting this need for a longer, more complete, extended-focus narrative. The first-person storytelling style of "Australian Story" without the interpretive voice of an interviewer has also enjoyed spectacular and extended success.

Radio programmes strive for direct engagement and interaction with their consumers. Traditionally the talkback radio and the phone-in competition segments have been the bread-and-butter of audience engagement and interaction. Recent television shows like "Australian Idol" and "Big Brother" extended the idea of audience engagement and interaction into television, empowering the audience through mobile phones to become judges and producers (and provide funding for the program) in ways that were unimaginable a decade ago.

Generation Y is also spectacular for its apparent lack of trust in the media. Cynical as they are, 20 year olds may still be shocked to learn of cash-for-comment or paid product placement when their favourite media stars endorsed the product. Perhaps they shouldn't be. After all, this is a generation that grew up on the infomercial. While previous generations may have seen their media stars as unimpeachable sources of consumer advice, the current teenage generation believes that anything that appears in the media is contrived or heavily influenced by commercial interests and that the anonymous endorsement of a thousand disinterested, unknown individuals is more credible than an endorsement by any authority figure or star.

The success of eBay and the millions of dollars paid by this generation to anonymous vendors every hour of everyday is a testament to the marketing power of the unknown anonymous disinterested endorsement. It is based on no more consumer confidence than good vendor feedback. ‘Feedback' of course is the endorsement of a thousand unknown disinterested anonymous people. While this has implications that are broad and far reaching in commercial media, it also has implications in public broadcasting.

The amount of time that consumers spend receiving electronic input or screen time (if you'd like) is increasing. But the percentage of this time being spent on traditional media is decreasing. Radio might now be more accurately described as television without pictures, and ought to be included in this changing choice of media channel.

Teenagers watching music shows on television are accustomed to listening to the same show simulcast on radio. Literally, television without pictures.

Social recommendation

In designing radio broadcast processes to attract and meet the needs of an emerging audience over the coming decade, the challenge for commercial broadcasters will be how to prevent consumers from avoiding commercial messages. The challenge for the public broadcaster will be how to engage the audience and allow them to pursue their own personalised attention path, extracting the same sort of media consuming experience they seem to crave on sites like MySpace and YouTube in a medium which has only a single broadcast stream.

Public broadcasters in Australia, have developed online web sites and broadcast streams over the Internet and pod-cast programs. It appears that their attempts at convergence have often been little more than flirtations with technology. They have transported the radio broadcast experience to the Internet, literally allowing users to listen to the radio without geographical constraint. Pod-casts are the same process without time constraint.

It is time now that this convergence be extended well beyond the existing, clearly separated channels of television, radio, newsprint. The emerging media consumer expects their convergence experience to be greater than the sum of its parts. Much as television had to progress beyond radio with pictures and instead become a different consumer experience that involves video journalism as a unique storytelling process, so radio must progress to include those features of the World Wide Web to provide a self-selecting, personalized experience so sought-after by YouTube consumers. The ability of the consumer to select the depth of information they require and to explore the related and opposing views needs to be incorporated into the radio experience and of course the consumer will demand that their experience not be bound by geography or time.

The radio studio of the future must be a more sophisticated research and editorial facility rather than just a DJ with the guest and a microphone. Radio station web pages must become more than glorified résumés of presenters. The radio station of the future will be inextricably linked to its Internet presence. It is indeed strange that most consumers can read the text of television programs, even live broadcasts such as Parliament on the foot of the screen but cannot read the text of a radio interview in similar timely fashion.

Were the transcripts of Parliament to find their way to a web site like Wikipedia (which by the way is probably the most popular encyclopedia in the world despite having the least editorial authority), then the Parliamentary transcript would automatically contain embedded hyperlinks to other web pages within the encyclopedia that expanded and defined words and phrases found within the transcript. The idea of allowing a computer to select which part of a transcript is important and to link those parts to explanatory pages elsewhere may be anathema to many journalists, but remember that Google News is selected and edited entirely by computer and is probably the most read news on the planet.

Many commercial radio stations rely on playing music tracks as their primary content to carry commercials, which in turn generate the income. The music is interspersed with information and news usually voiced either by the presenter or a centralised news room. Networking of radio stations has facilitated the decline of localised information. While this made economic sense in a pre-Internet world, networking of music content on a global basis may spell the end of commercial radio stations, particularly where their audiences have been desensitised to the need for localised content.

Rhapsody is a U.S.-based music service, which for $10 a month allows subscribers to select from a database of hundreds of thousands of current music tracks and play them through their PCs on demand. This service now provides Sonos, a home-based stereo system which relies on Rhapsody and other music services to provide broadcast quality content throughout the household. A portable music player is also available. One of the features of this sort of service is their ability to generate playlists based on what the individual listener's social network prefers. We have seen this social recommendation engine technology used effectively in Amazon and on the TiVo for books and television respectively. At the risk of offending music programmers everywhere, I suspect that generation Y will be more in tune with a playlist created by a social recommendation engine, rather than a playlist generated by a music programmer.

Web pages with sounds

Just as television was once described as radio with pictures, future historians will shortly be describing radio stations as being web pages with sound. These threats to radio beg the question of what will happen to the advertising investment that currently finds its way into the coffers of radio stations, record companies and artists. I think only an optimist with a long history of employment in commercial radio would believe that advertisers will be loyal to the medium. Realists are more likely to see that advertisers will follow the consumer and that their advertising spend is likely to migrate from traditional radio to web pages with sound.

Digitisation will facilitate both globalisation and localisation. It is possible to tailor commercial online music content to suit the exact demographics of each listener on an individual basis. This is already done by many web sites for other sorts of content including Google News, MySpace, Amazon.com, and many others.

For both public broadcasters and commercial radio, the foundational question is how to leverage their assets to retain an audience. I suspect that they may either become victims of the web page with sound or creators. The valuable assets of a radio station are many, including local knowledge, audience loyalty, deep experience with the audience, presentation staff, news gathering and editorial capability. The less valuable assets include broadcasting capability, including frequency allocation, music libraries and playlists generated by music programmers.

Since the advent of the printing press led to the birth of mass media and from that, mass marketing, the environment has been dynamic and technology has always been a major driver of new media experience. The Internet is just another technology that will give birth to a new media experience every bit as revolutionary as each of its predecessors.

January 23, 2007

Further information or clarification is available from the author.

Wayne Bucklar
P.O. Box 857
Fortitude Valley 4006

Braeside Homestead - a history wrapped in luxury

wayne@ebspl.com — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 21:11:00 GMT

I recently spent the night as a guest at Braeside Homestead. It is a working cattle property situated at the start of the Granite Belt. After extensive refurbishment they now offer luxury accommodation in the Stanthorpe - Warwick region. Established in 1874, steeped in history and true Australian bush character, your stay at Braeside side will be a memorable one.

What a great way to expereince the Australian bush - first class luxury and syle.

The homestead has been magnificently restored by Lloyd Ernst and is a tribute to heritage preservation, style and luxurious comfort.

The house itself is the model of an Australian heritage homestead with huge rooms and 7 metre ceilings and huge fireplaces. Wide verandah for comfort in the summer heat and blazing fires for the Warwick winters.

I was impressed with the first class beds and the quiet darkness. Being a city dweller, I had forgotten just how many stars there are.

I met the garden architect, Clint Kenny, who has recreated the homestead's gardens in heritage style. Next door on the adjoining farm, Braeside Mountain, he has turned a mountain top into a garden wonderland with 270 degree views to the horizon and garden "rooms", each with a different style and each offering new discoveries.

If you get the chance, check it out - http://www.braeside.com.au and by the way, I have no commercial interest in the place - I was just impressed with the hospitality and style of this little slice of history.

Dot Net Nuke - More free software

wayne@ebspl.com — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 12:01:00 GMT

More free software – this is a magic way to run websites that are easy to maintain and POWERFUL.

Trixbox - A free VOIP PABX for business of any size

wayne@ebspl.com — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 11:56:00 GMT

VOIP! There, I have said it – it’s the word of the month – VOIP – and everyone seems to be talking about it but most of us find it pretty confusing. I have spoken about VOIP in my ABC radio spots but it’s a simple concept that’s confusing to implement.