Society and business in the 21st Century
I went along to the Sydney launch for Global Entrepreneurship Week tonight.
What an absolutely interesting evening! There really are a lot of great ideas out there and plenty of talented people making them a reality (many of them 20 years younger than me).
More on this when I’ve had some sleep (in three days times).
I also learned about the Kauffman Foundation. More on that later too.
I’ve long recommended AVG for home users. But since the release of version 7.5 there’s been a slow decline in the quality of both the support and the product itself.
Flagging a critical Windows dll file as a virus is a real worry. If that had happened to me, my first thought would have been that I’d stupidly infected myself with something.
The lesson when a result like this comes from the blue is to treat it with suspicion. If one virus checker flags a problem like this, hit it with a couple of others to confirm the problem.
I think I’ll have to change the free anti virus recommendation on the PC Rescue and IT Queries websites. It looks like Avast! is the best choice and I’ll keep AVG and Anti Vir as the alternatives.
The BBC reports the results of a US study on the profitability of spam networks. Seven researchers set up a fake pharmacutecal website and used the Storm network to drive traffic to it through spam messages.
Out of nearly 350 million messages sent 28 people attempted to buy something which the researchers estimate would have returned about $US 100 a day.
Not bad money, but hardly worth the effort of setting up a fake site, arranging the merchant facilities and getting on to the Storm botnet.
The return also assumes all the potential purchases were genuine. There’s a good chance many of them would have been fraudulent which would have further eroded the returns.
If those returns are typical, then we’re probably seeing the end of the mass spam, although I’m worried that a new breed of 419 type scammers might take advantage of people in financial straits as the economy worsens.
The full study is available at the UCSD website.
Federal Finance minister Lindsay Tanner’s now repeated claim the “worst is over” will either make him a prophet or a fool. Either way, he’s pretty brave to make that statement.
What makes his courage even more impressive is his belief is based on IMF, Treasury and Reserve Bank advice.
These three groups, along with almost the entire economic world, failed to see this crisis coming and have consistently understated the effects since it arrived.
For Australian business owners, more worrying should be policy responses of our politicians.
While China’s stimulus package includes funding for building railways, roads and hospitals, Canberra’s response is to repeat the mistakes of the previous government by ramping the property market.
To compound the problem, the Federal government seems obsessed with keeping Australia in the 1950s. While the Chinese government is encouraging investment in the IT industries, we’re pouring our resources into propping up a vehicle manufacturing industry.
Even worse is the NSW Government’s blind faith in the ratings agencies. It’s a shame Nathan Rees won’t show Lindsay Tanner’s courage in telling these corrupt and incompent fools where to stick their phoney triple A ratings.
Instead he chooses to further reduce our investments on infrastructure and the state’s future.
The lesson to business owners is clear; you’re on your own and you cannot expect any help from the state or Federal governments.
I’ve been wondering why the PC Rescue listings in Google Local were performing so badly. Tonight I discovered that sometime in the past I’ve screwed up the keywords.
This would explain why the site fell off the first page on a number of useful searches.
Bugger.
It was a funny week last week. It seems everybody wants to announce Software as a Service websites.
The first SaaS experience I had was over a cup of coffee with Mark from MyWorkSpace on Tuesday. I like to hear what smaller, Australian operations have to offer and this one seems quite good application.
On the Wednesday I went to the Telstra-Microsoft Joint Venture announcement. This was a strange beast as the current T-Suite services are simply managed Exchange and Sharepoint and in that don’t seem to be anything new over what Telstra was reselling from WebCentral until recently.
The main thrust of the press conference was that you’d be able to do this on a mobile phone.
Unfortunately none of the mobile phone manufacturers has had an opportunity to put Telstra’s new application on their Windows Mobile smartphones, which meant we only saw demonstrations and had no opportunity to try it ourselves.
From a distance it appears the mobile service is just the same synchronisation tool you get with a Windows Mobile device setup to use the Telstra servers.
On a positive side, both the MyWorkSpace and the T-Suite applications are reasonably priced and a good deal for smaller businesses, particularly those start ups wanting to save cash.
In my Smart Company column tomorrow l’m explaining what SaaS, cloud computing and Web 2.0 mean.
The funny thing with all of this is everything is new again. We’re going back to the 1970s way of running computers.
Further to Saturday’s post, I’m researching my story on wireless Broadband for tomorrow’s Smart Company column and I find Telstra are still offering the $0 laptop.
I thought it had been dropped. It’s amazing this offer gets no mention at all.
Gee it’s hard to make sense of Telstra’s website.