MinimalStateAuthor Archive
Internet censorship: not dead, just sleeping
With the Australian government delaying introduction of its internet censorship legislation, there’s been some speculation that the policy may be dead. The more likely scenario however is that the policy has simply gone in to hibernation until after the Federal election. Despite the media and blogosphere cries of “backflip”, this is a smart tactical move. Tactically, delaying [...]
DSL Downtime
A brief apology for the lack of recent posting. My DSL connection has been unusable since Thursday 23rd and is continuing to experience slow/no data flow issues. Blogging will probably be quite light on until the issue is resolved.
First impressions: Motorola DEXT & Backflip
The Android invasion of Australia is set to ramp up with this month with new handsets being launched by both Telstra and Optus. Telstra will be launching the HTC Desire on April 27th, followed by the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 on May 4th. Optus meanwhile, has already hit the market with the Motorola DEXT and [...]
T&J Towing Diggs a hole
“To sue, or not to sue: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous online reviews, Or to take suit against a sea of social media, And by opposing end them?” – HeathG with apologies to Shakespeare It seems that some business still don’t appreciate [...]
Kaggle, competitions and competitive intelligence
Today, economist and blogger Nicholas Gruen announced that he had become chairman of Kaggle.com. Kaggle is a service that allows companies to run data-modelling and prediction competitions. Two type of competitions are supported – competitions to predict the past and competitions to predict the future. “Predicting the past requires contestants to build models that are evaluated [...]
Smarter searching for all – Part 1
For most people , putting a few words into the standard Google search box is about as sophisticated as their searching gets. But in certain jobs, like competitive intelligence (CI), being able to go beyond basic searching is a critical skill. Earlier this year, smarter searching was one of the topics discussed at a get together [...]
Racist speech – Don’t ban it, expose it
This week the West Australian government announced plans to introduce laws that could see people prosecuted for racist bumper stickers. The move was welcomed by West Australia’s Equal Opportunity Commissioner, who claimed the legislation was “overdue”. But is using the threat of legal penalties really the best approach to dealing with this kind of racist [...]
Publicity via controversy: Kick-Ass vs VicRoads
This week has seen a couple of examples of organisations generating publicity via controversy. Sometimes controversy works as a publicity tool and other times – one has to question whether it risks diluting or obscuring the real message. For the promoters of the film Kick-Ass, upsetting groups like ‘Focus on Family‘ is probably great publicity. [...]
In CI – better answers start with better questions
Competitive intelligence (CI) is a discipline with the potential to provide organisations with valuable insights in to how to perform better. But like most things, the quality of the output is influenced by the quality of the inputs. In CI, one of the key inputs is the questions that it is expected to answer. If [...]
iiNet takes Netspace: The benefits of scale
Having recently reached 460k broadband subscribers, TPG appeared to have snatched third place in the fixed broadband market. But any glory was short lived, with iiNet reclaiming its number three position by announcing the acquisition of Melbourne based Netspace. In exchange for $40m, iiNet has added ~70k broadband subscribers , bringing it to 520k broadband services in [...]