Reboot number 3.

Look I am back again with another post. However this time some things have changed, like I no longer work for the man. I now own half a software development business that makes software for managing Childcare Centres in Australia.

I am giving Information Security the big flick. I did it for 7 to 8 years and over that time the attitude amongst the general community has not changed a great deal. The most significant change I can say is that people are a lot more aware in regards that bad things can happen. However, they wont happen to me still seems to prevail.

Or the cost to implement security seems a little to high today, we’ll get it next time. Information Security is a risk management strategy and unless the organisation you are dealing with even understands risk, your fighting a loosing battle. Even when the customer has had a compelling event, they still will skimp on the security requirements.

So after eight years in the Information Security field I have come to the one conclusion, its not going to improve until governments make it law. Meaning that if you have a security breach due to the fact you haven’t taken the appropriate precautions to prevent the breach, then the owners or directors of the company will face a large fine or jail term. Sounds drastic doesn’t it, well when your personal information is leaked out of a company or they loose your identity and someone steals your house from under your feet, maybe you’ll see its not that drastic a measure at all.

Now I am back to my roots, software development, which I have kept my hand in over the time, especially from an application security aspect.

The company I now own half of as I said writes Childcare Management software. Which in Australia is a fairly competitive field. In that there are about 24 software vendors that write application software for the childcare industry. That software enables the operators of childcare centres to report the appropriate information about the parents and their children that attend their centre to the Government so they can then pay the Childcare Rebate that many Australians are entitled too.

Why would I get into such a competitive business. Well the opportunity to shake things up and take what appears to me to be a stagnant part of the childcare industry and modernise the business practices and software solutions was to great to pass up. Plus our solution really makes us a Software as a Service provider. With a lot of the key pieces of infrastructure, people, practices and processes in place for a SaaS provider, it will not be hard to branch out and provide SaaS services to other industry verticals.

One thing a couple of my close friends will be aware of is that I am always looking for opportunities to start my own business and be the master of my own destiny. That opportunity presented itself last year and within a 24 hour window I decided I would be happy to leave Cisco and start working for myself. Which surprised a few people, as I had said a number of times that Cisco was the company I would retire from.

I left Cisco on the 31-October-2010 and now at the end of January 2011 I have to say it was the best move I have made. I have been buried deep in code, managing and completely changing how we provide our service and starting vendor negotiations for services like payment gateway facilities. We have a third party payment gateway provider that we use and man have they been living it up on easy street. I wont go into to it in this post, however I will be writing a detailed post on the pitfalls that many small business will be falling into when it comes to wanting to process payments from their customers. Let just say it is one aspect of e-commerce that needs demystifying and having the spotlight on it so it can be fair and equalible for all. Currently the pendulum has swung to far in the wrong direction.

There you have it, it’s now time for me to put my money where my mouth is and see that the last 15 years of experience in the IT industry has given me the skills to craft something special.

Broadcasting to your Social Graph

I was listening to an interesting discussion on the Gilmore Gang the other day were two points of view where raised in regards to the use of Twitter. One point of view was that the people that follow you on Twitter are valuable and therefore the content you put into your Twitter stream should be focused around the conversations you want to have. The other point of view was focused on using Twitter as a broadcasting tool for marketing of what ever you want to promote, either that being yourself, your business or anything else you see fit to promote.

The discussion arose from the recent events centred around Twitter were Ashton Kutcher and CNN where competing against each other to see who could reach the million follower mark first. Supposedly Ashton used some methods that seemed a little low on the morale totem pole to some people in that he offered to donate 20 thousand mosquito nets to Africa if people followed him and helped him win the race.

The point was that using the service in this fashion left a bad taste in some peoples mouths and that it could be considered objectionable that he did this. The other side of the coin and the side that I fall on is that if you didn’t like his approach of leveraging who he is for his own gains, then you can always un-follow and not talk about the incident so as to not give it any air and therefore not help it grow.

The advent of these technologies and the integration of them into how we communicate and the reach they provide, ensures that mediocrity will be exposed and not tolerated at a much faster pace than has ever been seen in our history before. So with greater power comes greater responsibility or does it just expose us sooner?

This got me to thinking about my use of Twitter and my view of its value. When I first heard of Twitter I thought it was brilliant, I thought I got it and immediately signed up. However once I signed up I hit a wall, what the hell do I want to say? So as you can see from my Tweets on the right hand side of the page in the side bar, not a lot by the looks of it. I started to think that as an instant messenger replacement, Twitter certainly isn’t, even though millions of people use it in such a fashion.

To me the value proposition was in the ability to use it as a broadcasting tool. A way of reaching those that have similar interests and are happy to listen to you broadcast your message, whatever it may be. I mean if they don’t like it then they can un-follow you right? Also using it as a broadcasting tool does not equal spamming products and services you want to sell. Doing so will mean you will soon have no one to broadcast too.

Therefore using Twitter to broadcast to your disciples means you need to be judicious in what you put into your Twitter stream. Balancing information of value and blatant advertising will be a skill acquired over time. Also I believe this will force those that are doing the advertising to evolve how they get their message out and ensure it is far more targeted to the audience than we have ever seen. The meta data that we leek and the ability for communities to swarm around things of interest will help shape the way advertising is crafted and delivered in the future. The face of advertising will change.

I myself am thinking about these issues as I have integrated Twitter into a new business I have started. In my previous post I talk about how the ability to gather, correlate and deliver timely valuable information will be a business vertical of the future. As part of that business I have three Twitter accounts so far, that I broadcast information of value into. It is focused information of interest that a segment of the community enjoys. I do blast blatant advertising into those streams in a limited fashion. The advertising is focused and less intrusive because its context aware and relevant to the audience.

Part of the business model is to put together a service of value that helps define the audience, this as I believe and I will be able to speak with more authority about as time goes on, allows me to advertise in a limited yet highly targeted fashion without turning the audience away. The challenge is to ensure the advertising is not SPAM and does not out weigh the value proposition the service provides. As the business model becomes evident and more successful, the tolerance for advertising may diminish as the choices of service providers increases. The winner will have the balance of advertising to content just right.

When that tipping point arrives, the other aspects of the service will need to be highly tuned so they are compelling enough to stop your audience from leaving. This means the value proposition will need to be loud, clear and obvious if the service is to survive. The closer you are to the top, the more accurate that last statement will be.

Is anyone listening, if not, now would be a good time.

For the last couple of months I have been working on a new project in my spare time that is hot. It’s a 21st century business that combines some of the many innovations that have gone before us and extends the wisdom to exploit the paradigm shifts in our digital lives and how we want information formatted for us.

In the Information Age, access to information, fast and context aware will be one of the essential tools for staying ahead of the curve. Having reliable, accurate and up to date information gathered together in a central place, accessible via any method conceivable and in a format designed for the time starved person of the 21st century and beyond is a business vertical waiting to be born.

I believe that as we plug more into the grid and broadcast our lives in real time we are going to want access to information, quickly and easily. The value proposition will be the speed, accuracy, consistency and reliability in which you deliver such a service. This will also be the yardstick to measure your success by.

To transform to such a society a number of events will need to occur on the way, such as:
1. Digitally Connected Society – We are well on the way in this regard.
2. Digitally Savvy Society – My kids will be more digitally savvy than any generation before them.
3. A desire to improve ones ability to make decisions by having access to such information services. Globalisation and the shrinking world we live in, is driving this event at a rapid rate of knots.

These events are occurring as I write this post and every day they accelerate.
Having that vision in mind I am going to share how I intend to create such a vertical. So sit down, buckle up and hang on, this is going to be one awesome ride.

First post for 2009

Wow, it been nearly a year since I updated this blog, so time for some more ramblings about nothing

Work has been extremely busy and IronPort has further integrated into Cisco. This for me personally is a good thing as the career opportunities within Cisco are limitless if you are willing to put your nose to the grind stone. Also Cisco are one of the IT pillars that will be around for a very long time in one fashion or another.

A career highlight for me last year was doing a presentation at Cisco Networkers, which went exceptionally well and I scored one of the highest scores for a none keynote presentation. This is the premier Cisco event in Australia for Cisco and therefore they are extremely keen to ensure an excellent show is put on for all. To the point that all new speakers do a two day public speaking course. Anyone that knows me knows I am not shy about speaking :-)) and therefore public speaking is not an issue for me. The course was excellent and some very valid tips were taken on board to polish my presentation skills.

I keep hearing the economy is slowing down and therefore things are going to get tight. Well so far I have found that if you want the work and are prepared to get off your arse and look for it, then things are just as busy as they were a year ago. However if you need an excuse to sit back and take it easy, then the economy as an excuse will have you covered. Personally I find this situation great, because it removes some of the noise from the market while those willing to work are the only ones left standing. So when people tell me its a shame how the economy is slowing, I nod my head, smile and keep on working flat out.

So that to me looks like an update, I have some things in the pipeline that I would like to talk about, however at this moment I can’t, so hopefully my next post wont be another 10 months in the making

A post about nothing.

Hmm how bazaar I’m writing another post in the same week and one of more than two in the same month. Work has been crazy in that I have spent a lot of time at customer sites doing installations or training resellers how to better gather the customers requirements and tailor the evaluation process to meet those requirements. We also had our Telepresence setup completed this week, however it is already booked out for weeks. Also we only got a TP1000, however we are supposedly upgrading it in the near future to a TP3000. On the subject of Cisco I heard and read some interesting things we have in the pipeline.

A lot of speculation has been in the IT industry for years about how Microsoft Office is dead or dying and that the Windows era of desktop dominance has an expiry date. This is due to the network being the platform and the desktop OS does not need to provide anywhere near the resources and features we use now due to it being able to be virtualised at an application layer and delivered on demand. Well as you know I work at Cisco and Cisco is certainly not renowned for writing desktop operating systems or desktop environments, but I would watch this space. If you look at some of their acquisitions and look who would benefit the most if the network was the platform then it wouldn’t take to much of a leap to see where Cisco might be going to play one day.

Anyway all this work has slowed down my world domination plans through building an iPhone application development shop.

While I’m talking about the iPhone let me bring you up to date on all the rumors I have heard of late in regards to the famous device:

1. Apple will announce the 3G version at the Apple Developer Conference in June.
2. Telstra wont allow the iPhone on their network and that Optus is already in talks with Apple.
3. Apple are going to release the iPhone in Australia in the last week of June and its not going to be bound to a carrier.

As you can see speculation is rife, I personally like number 3, however don’t see this being true.

On the home front my nearly 2 year old son still isn’t walking on his own. My wife is not happy about it and wishes he would hurry up. I never walked until 2 years and 3 months, so hes got until August to walk and beat me. Personally I think hes smart as people carry him and he has all his life to walk, so whats the rush?

Well thats enough rambling from me, I might go and stir a good friend of mine who works for Microsoft about that crappy WinMobile OS he suggested should be on the iPhone.