T3G
Telecom’s new 3G service is very fast. I had a play on an EVDO Pocket PC today and was impressed. Pulling down web pages (on landscape) with images was impressive.
Noticed the TV4 comedy Peep Show when I was in the UK. Brought the Series 1 DVD when flying out.
Recommended if you like English Humour. Review from Amazon:
Welcome to the private world of Jeremy and Mark – two very ordinary weirdos. Peep Show is the innovative comedy series from Channel 4 seen through the eyes of the core characters. In an inventive twist, their inner thoughts and feelings can be heard – whether they be dark, stupid or embarrassingly over-blown. Wannabe popstar Jeremy (Robert Webb) is a lazy man with big ideas, mostly about himself. He has been thrown out by his ex ‘Big Suze’ and has ended up living with Mark (David Mitchell), his old friend, who has a completely different no-pain-no-gain view of the world. Socially dysfunctional in their different ways, Mark and Jeremy have an unhealthy reliance on one another – a dependence that can turn to frustration. And to further complicate their existence, Mark – in his cack-handed way – is in pursuit of the love of his life, co-worker Sophie (Olivia Colman), while Jeremy lives in awe of his idiotic and manipulative mate Super Hans and their beautiful but brittle neighbour Toni.
… is a word I remember as being one of the longest words in the dictionary when I was 10.
I remember it as being the theory that the church should remain seperate from the state. Never did I think I would use Antidisestablishmentarianism in a sentence.
Until last Friday when an Irish guy was talking about how in Ireland they had a referendum on whether divorce should be legal or not.
Seizing my opportunity I replied, “How can the state decide a religious issue, that’s Antidisestablishmentarianism“
A small goal accomplished.
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Sony and Nike have just announced an EyeToy Earlier EyeToy |
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TelstraClear purchase of Sytec first but not last.
… the rumour mill is adamant that TelstraClear will buy a big company before Christmas. Three names are widely touted: Unisys New Zealand, Datacraft and Datacom. There are as many reasons given for each one being bought as there are against.
Would you see 3 new Rollers parked in the same street. They’re
growing on me. Very Thunderbirds.
Not a bad article in the InfoTech yesterday. Always risky with phone interviews.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3095826a28,00.html
Wellington software firm AfterMail was named “emerging company of the year” at the Hi-Tech awards in recognition of its e-mail archiving and retrieval solution. Since the collapse of US energy giant Enron, regulators in many countries have begun requiring companies to archive e-mail correspondence. This has spurred huge growth in the money spent on archiving e-mail, with some estimates suggesting this is growing 90 per cent a year.
“E-mail has moved from an informal person-to-person communication to a matter of corporate record,” says AfterMail chief executive Rod Drury. “I think that’s what’s enabled us to get so much traction so quickly.”
AfterMail’s software archives and sorts e-mails, then lets companies efficiently search through them. “We provide essentially a full data record for all your e-mail, but also unlock the value of the e-mail for the company. It allows a company to access company information.” For example, if a member of a sales team left a company, their replacement could pull up all the e-mails relating to a customer without sifting through an entire inbox. “It’s also helpful legally if you ever need to prove your innocence. It’s hard to prove you haven’t seen something. Martha Stewart would love to show that she didn’t get that stock tip,” says Mr Drury.
The software is designed to appeal to more than just industrial and financial companies. Mr Drury lists Te Papa and the Environment Ministry as customers. “Everybody uses e-mail. It’s the most horizontal application in the world,” he says.
“Software’s a great opportunity to create real value and bring it back into the country.”
AfterMail was founded in October 2003 and Mr Drury says the company managed to break even in its first year. It has ruled out listing in the near future. The company has 10 employees in Wellington and 25 sales reps around the world. It intends to open an office in Britain soon.
Heading back to London for a couple of weeks tonight. 4th time since May. Upgrades came through (phew - it’s a long way when you’re at the back of the bus).
Priceline for hotels wasn’t so good this time. $US120. I’ve had $US90, but still well under the best web rate at the hotel.
Travelling when you have a family is definately not as cool as pre-family days. I know the little fella is going to start cruising over the next week and I’ll miss that.
I love doing business in the UK. I find the people we’re working with are very sharp and professional. There’s more people doing it so I usually meet new people with similar technology backgrounds. Having dinner in a London club is always a buzz as is doing presentations to some of the largest companies in the world.
You’ve got to be there to be in the race.
The AfterMail team is thrilled to win the Wespac HiTech Emerging Company of the Year Award.
Good to see the hard work of PayGlobal rewarded as the overall winner. Also interesting to see how hot the electronics space is.
We certainly have some goals for next year.
The first Wellington meeting of the New Zealand Software Association was held in Wellington tonight. Dom from NZTE has been driving it (thanks Dom).
Paul Weatherly from Software of Excellence did a great presentation on their going global experiences which was really insiteful.
Plan is that we’ll have regular Wellington NZSA meetings the 2nd Wednesday of each month. Come along if your interested in meeting other peolple wanting to get software moving offshore.
update: here is a pdf of Pauls earlier Morgo deck.
Both Amazon and Google are moving clearly into the development/ecommerce space with a very different model from Microsoft.
The Amazon Simple Queue Service offers state management for distributed applications. There are some smart people reading the tea leaves and have worked out they have the right to play in this new distributed world.
What will Microsoft’s response be. A free service from MSDN?
What’s an example of where this would be useful? Well that’s the million dollar question.
What the service provides is a central point of control for decoupled applications, so any sort of peer to peer asynchronous communications service.
News.com has some good build shots of the upcoming Incredibles.
Repost from the Scobleizer a very cool video of moving a bridge in downtown Bellevue.
Microsoft wins £500m
NHS contract
Thinking on from this post on Googles Company Mission with examples like ..
I’m always frustrated by the need to fill in my medical health history every time I go to a new doctor/dentist/optician. Wouldn’t it be great if Google would allow me to fill in a medical history form that they store in their network, together with security settings that allow me to control who gets access to the information? In addition, they would provide a web services API that allowed vendors with security permission to access the information…
The revenue to Google would be in the billions, according to my rough calculations.
Google is therefore assuming the ‘run the business’ value potential that drove the dotcom/eCommerce frenzy.
The fact that people are already trusting Google to store their mail (Gmail) means that their brand is already evolving to earn the public trust for this undertaking.
As Google is ‘newish’ (i.e. hasn’t pissed lots of people of yet) and plays at a defined layer they have the advantage over Microsoft who now run the risk of being relegated to tools and platform and miss the opportunity to clip the ticket as normal business moves online.
Updated article on MSDN with all the new language features in VB 2005.
Introduction
My
XML Comments
Generics
Using Statement
Continue Statement
Global Keyword
IsNot Operator
TryCast Statement
Operator Overloading and Conversion Operators
Property Accessor Accessibility
Custom Event Accessors
Partial Types
Application Level Events
Unsigned Types
Default Instances
Compiler Warnings
Explicit Array Bounds
Conclusion
blog