General

It’s still startup frenzy on the web (2.0) these days. If you haven’t read this before — here are the 15 startup commandments — a good read for those doing startup web companies. The author is Mark Fletcher (www.startupping.com), founder of Bloglines.com. The commandments 1. Your idea isn’t new. Pick an idea — at least […]

According to AppleInsider, Microsoft is doing an about face on support of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in its Mac:Office product. On the one hand this is a great step forward (or should that be backward) for Microsoft in that its user community, especially those in the corporate world, was most upset by the omission […]

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which allows Internet users to make phone calls to each other at no cost, is finally taking off among South African businesses, four years after it became legal to use it outside company networks. This is the key finding of the VoIP in South Africa 2008 study, released today by […]

Sydney is a city of immigrants. In that respect, it reminds me of London, but with better weather and more attractive scenery. Sometimes I wonder where all the Australians are, at least the ones actually born here. The bus from the airport is driven by a Turk with a huge boep and a less than […]

A big chunk of the Internet is free. A very big chunk. But what if it wasn’t? What if you had to pay for the services you consume (over and above what you pay for bandwidth)? Let’s ignore, for now, the slightly obtrusive fact that the Internet wouldn’t be nearly as big or influential as […]

Identity management (IdM) has become a buzz phrase in the industry surrounded by more confusion than facts and experience. So what exactly is an identity and why do we need to manage it? An identity consists of attributes describing a person — typically name, surname, ID number, email address, etc. IdM concerns itself with the […]

I’m fascinated and challenged by Grand Theft Auto (GTA) IV, the new, extremely violent, extremely popular video game. I need to tell you why in two parts. The first part describes the exciting potential of digital games for learning, listing a number of effective teaching qualities embedded in good games. Part two considers these qualities […]

I’ve been Twittering for a week now. You know. The micro–blogging site where you can follow (or listen to) friends and complete strangers, and they can follow (or listen to) you in return. Where you can snoop around to check out whether Matthew Buckland is more popular than Vincent Maher, or if Mike Stopforth has […]

Like the quest for ultimate self–enlightenment, the search for the perfect hosting company seems neverending. No matter how happy you are at the beginning, inevitably something crops up along the way that causes you to revisit your original decision. What was it that made you whip out your credit card? Why did you trust them? […]

I’ve been covering IT, and its newer acronym, ICT, for nearly ten years. In that time I’ve had the joy of watching the trends go around, and around. I’ve watched hype become reality, usually in a far longer time period than the vendors would like, and I’ve watched marketing fizz become dot–com failure, or Y2K […]

A few events have got me thinking about the direction of the Web over the next twenty years or so. The first was a conversation I had with Matthew Buckland about whether Facebook, or something like it, would become a type of operating system in the future, and the second was Google’s announcement of OpenSocial […]