LagrangePoint - Brad Howarth

FITT " 2.0 CIO - Power to the People!" seminar now online

Last week I had the pleasure of hosting a lunchtime gathering for the Females in Information Technology and Telecommunications, including moderating a panel discussion with Gartner's Mary Ann Maxwell and ThoughWorks' Cyndi Mitchell. The topic of the day was 2.0 CIO, and Maxwell and Mitchell delivered interesting presentations on the changes that web 2.0 technologies are bringing to the workplace, and how to benefit from them. The folk at Viocorp recorded the whole thing, and you can check it out by clicking here.

SMH Online Innovation series - Put social networking sites to work

The fourth in my series on Australian IT innovation for the Sydney Morning Herald is a look at the emerging Aussie widget industry. For me it was a chance to delve into another emerging sector (albeit it a very small one in Australia right now) and find interesting companies such as Perth-based TheBroth, which is turning a love of online collaborative art into a business. What I love about this is how the technical barriers are bring torn down when it comes to application development, making it progressively easier for anyone with a good idea to turn it into an application. For the full story, click here.

SMH Online Innovation series - A personal connection

The third in my series on Australian IT innovation is now online at the Sydney Morning Herald. This one talks to Rhys Cooper, an entrepreneur with a dream of solving the communication difficulties of many disabled Australians through a revolutionary new kind of mobile phone. You can read about Rhys and his idea by clicking here.

RSVP now for the Melbourne Domain ....

Just received word that from Michelle Milton that places at The Domain event to be held in Melbourne's Docklands on the evening of August 28 are filling fast ... If you want to catch the opening of LifeLab and my interview with Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler, follow the link here ...

It's official - Melbourne is more entrepreneurial than Sydney

Interesting article picked up in SmartCompany today that showed my home town of Melbourne to be the world's third-most entrepreneurial city, ahead of my adopted home of Sydney, which rated sixth. But when you found a city on the flat marshy plains just north of one of the world's most boring bodies of water, you have to be innovative ... The survey looked at 27 OECD cities, and let's not mention that Auckland came in at number one. Anyway, you can read the full story in SmartCompany by clicking here.

SMH Online Innovation series - The next big thing

The second of my series on Australian ICT innovation has now gone online - you can check it out by clicking here. This story was an exploration of general themes around technology innovation, and a good chance to chat to some of the prominent thinkers on tech innovation in Australia, along with one of the founders of our latest technology success story, Omnisio, which was recently purchased by Google.

SMH Online Innovation series - Innovative one day, dividends the next

I was recently commissioned by the Sydney Morning Herald's online division to write a series of articles around the broad topic of innovation in the Australian information technology industry. The first is now up online, talking about the work done by Queensland software vendor TechnologyOne to revamp its software, and you can see it by clicking here. A second story, that looks at IT innovation in Australia generally, should be up shortly, and the remaining six stories should be online across the next four weeks.

Stories in development - virtual worlds, consumer social networks, Aussie tech hardware and genuine IT innovation

I've been engaged to write a series of articles around the topic of innovation in Australian information technology. The brief is broad, but I've been breaking it down into various subcategories that should make their way into print over the coming months.

Right now however I'm seeking examples genuine Australian-born innovation in the use of both virtual world technology and consumer social networks. I'm leaving the definition pretty open here, but if you know of anyone that has done anything particularly innovative in either realm (either in developing new technology, or using what is there) please drop me an email, ASAP ...

I'm also looking for good examples of Aussie tech innovators working in IT hardware. It's something that we were once told by our political masters that we would be no good at and should stay away from, but that's not stopped Torian and others. Am now looking for more examples to dispel the myth.

Additionally, I'm on the hunt for one great case study of an Australian company that has used technology in a genuinely innovative manner that can also demonstrate how that innovation is going to improve their bottom line. It doesn't sound like a big ask, but ...

Simultaneous machine translation steps into Asia

As part of my on-again/off-again commitment (which is no commitment at all, I suppose) to better blogging, I thought it might be worth posting some more general commentary on my general travels. So hopefully you'll be seeing a few more posts about the interesting folk that I get to meet as a course of what I do for a living ...

Anyway, on Thursday last week I caught up with Bob Hayward, director of IT advisory risk services at KPMG in Sydney. I first met Bob more than a decade ago when he was the Asia Pacific vice president for Gartner. Bob's role at KPMG sees him advising local CIOs on green tech strategies, but it's his other life that is the most intriguing.

Bob is also one of a team of four behind the resurrection of Asia Online, a company that has already had several lives through the dotcom boom and bust. Now the company has new life as a provider of statistical machine translation services that are bringing hundreds of thousands of pages of internet content in local Asian languages. Statistical machine translation works by comparing pages of pre-translated written content mathematically to form a model that can then be used on any new page of material. The workings of the process are complex, but the outcome is a better level of accuracy in translation than has ever been achieved before (by a machine at least). And thanks to the availability of cheap high-speed processing power, translation can now happen in near to real time.

The potential is now there to take millions of internet pages that are in English (or other languages) and translate them into the languages of Asia. While the internet may be ubiquitous, English-centric sites have restricted its reach. It will be interesting to see what Asia Online can do to redress the imbalance.

Swapping the HotHouse for the country house

I caught up with HotHouse Interactive founder Simon Van Wyk today. HotHouse is one of Australia's oldest and most respected web development agencies, having weathered the storm of the dotcom era and established itself as an award-winning web development agency. After 13 years at the helm Simon's has taken what he describes as a sabbatical from HotHouse to work on a new business, OurPatch, which is bringing localised search services to regional Australia. Simon's a great guy to catch up with because he brings a level-headed pragmatism to much of what is happening in the online space, having resisted the urge to grow HotHouse rapidly - a path which has undone many of its competitors. It will be interesting to see now whether this new venture has the same longevity.