All Australians will be well aware of the Rudd governments new Fuel Watch initiative. The tender to build the web site was released (AusTender: Current ATM View - RFT2008-03) in late May 2008, the summary is:-

When is Fuel-Watch Coming?

Another interesting point is the urgency of this tender. Generally government IT request for tenders give a few months to prepare proposals with project completion time frames generally over a few years. However, Fuel-Watch is highly political and obviously has the pedal to the metal.

The closing date for proposals is 26 Jun, giving interested parties about 4 weeks to prepare proposals. Fuel Watch is expected to be operational by 15 Dec 2008.

Assuming the government takes about a month to decide (July-ish) then the winner bidder will have about 4 months (Aug-Nov) to develop the web site.

Is it just me or this a very ambitious timeframe!

And One Other Thing - Is This Just Political Mass Media Buzz?

As an aside note to this post, government's all over the world often pick goods linked to their local culture identity and debate them in the local media generally for political purposes. Examples of this are:-

• Fortune magazine has run articles on the rising price of pasta in Italy and how it is a political issue. Australia's drought was even mentioned as a contributing cause to the increased pasta prices.
• France's media often focuses on the rising cost of bread.  

In all cases the issue is discussed in the media in the same way. People are interviewed on the street complaining and politicians then release new initiatives to generally monitor prices. Could you imagine the cost of pasta being discussed/debated in Australian media? Sounds absurd, well then, run the same ruler over the petrol debate.

I have recently pursued a path along a number of resources orientated towards design and visualisation, that has brought me to an interesting new resource which is the work of the artist Joseph Kosuth in the mid 1960's.

I started with Mark Miller's podcast with the DNR team on the "Science of Good UI". This then lead onto Edward Tufte's video review on the iphone UI. I then moved onto the Turner To Monet exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA). After the exhibition I was then draw to the text, "The Illustrated History of Art" and within this discovered Kosuth's work.

Within Kosuth's work is his well know "Chair I and III" (see picture below). Within the "The Illustrated History of Art" there is a quote related to Kosuth's work that states, "...only art can investigate the state of things beyond physics".          

I think Kosuth's work is valid in the context of modern day UI design as he explored the combination of both verbal and visual representations of objects and concepts. His Chair I and III is an example of this in which a picture of a chair is shown alongside an actual chair, along with the dictionary definition of a chair.

I also believe Kosuth's work (circa 1960's) explores concepts associated with modern day software design in which designers attempt to combine requirements that are generally written, into a useful visual object that a user can then interact with. That is, the UI design. 

This post is an attempt to capture a train of thought that I hope might be useful for others interested in creating new design resources. I was especially motivated by the quote ".. only art can investigate the state of things beyond physics", which I think is a compelling thought for engineers (like myself) to open their thinking processes to influences from the art world. When a student leaves their current problem domain and looks for influences from other domains then rich opportunities for innovation are created. 

We recently spent a fantastic week on the island of Saint Martin in the Caribbean. We were attracted to Saint Martin for the fact that it is half French and half Dutch, therefore in theory combining two international trips into one, European and Caribbean. Throw in all the Americans there and you have a real cultural cocktail, which is great for visiting Australians.

Saint Martin is certainly not an island visited by a lot of Australians and therefore we were commonly greeted with "...wow, you've come a long way", which would then follow with "...how long did it take you to get here?".

Getting there did take a long time and it is certainly not a path well travelled by other Australians, hence I hope that this post is perhaps helpful for others who would like to visit Saint Martin departing from Australia.

Forget the Travel Agents Original Quotes

As the trip from Sydney to Saint Martin is not a popular route, you will find travel agents giving you quotes for fights and hotel stays of up to $10,000 per person! And worse still the flights will be on routes with up to 44 hours travel time! Most agents have flights departing Sydney to LA, and then LA to Miami, Miami to some other island.  

After some investigation, we found the best path was to fly Sydney direct to New York (there is a quick LA stop to clear customs), spend some time in New York and then from JFK airport you can connect direct to Saint Martin (SXM) daily with AA. There are about 7 flights a day from JFK to SXM yet there is only 1 direct flight in the morning which takes about 4.5 hours. The other flights have various stop overs with the worst getting up to 12 hours travel time. Likewise flying back from SXM to JFK there is only 1 daily direct flight. Staying in New York also means you are on the same time zone as Saint Martin which means you only have one time zone to adjust to during your trip. Qantas has a daily direct flight to New York from Sydney. The daily AA flights between JFK and SXM however cannot be booked over the Internet by Australians. I don't know why this is the case, but the AA web site wont allow it. However if you have the flight number and details you can take these into a travel agent and they can book them for you. By travelling this path of Sydney-New York-Saint Martin, you will get a shorter travel time with time for a stop over in New York. Flying back to JFK from SXM you will need a one-night stop over before connecting to the Qantas flight back to Sydney. The good news is JFK has heaps of motels near the airport that are great for this.                

Saint Martin is a beautiful Caribbean island paradise, and now that you have arrived you want to enjoy yourself right. 

Saint Martin's Not So Obvious Travel Tips

1. Fly into New York and connect to Saint Martin.

2. Do arrive 3 hours before boarding at the Juliana airport (SXM).

3. Ask the local taxi drivers the price before getting in the car. All taxis trips are fixed price with no meters, so you need to ask up front or risk tourist tax at the other end. 

4. Beware the mosquitoes in the evening. They are certainly not like the mosquitoes here in Australia. They are smaller and quieter, yet manage to pack more of a bite! You wont know that you are being bitten until the next day when you are covered in welts.   

5. Buy crates of bottled water for your hotel room. The island's water is supplied by a desalination plant, which tastes nothing like Evian. 

6. The Caribbean lonely planet guide is somewhat out of date and seemed to have numerous errors. It is still a helpful guide. 

7. Get plenty of US$1 dollar bills from Australia for tipping. You will find in the US and Saint Martin tipping is expected and if you have nothing but 10 and 20 dollar bills when you need to tip people small amounts ($2-$3 dollars) at places like bars, then your stuck.

8. Do take a taxi tour of the island. It is only about US$30 an hour and well worth it.

9. Do visit the Sunset Beach Bar during the day to see the planes land and then stay still the sun sets.

10. Do eat at the LoLo's at Grand Case. Fantastic huge lobsters on an open BBQ with rich garlic butter. Yum!

11. A lot of people on the French side will take US dollars as a 1:1 swap for Euro, when paying for food and drink.

12. Do eat at the French restaurants along Orient beach.

13. Avoid peak seasons and cyclone season. See Lonely planet guide.

14. Do use trip advisor for getting a hotel in NY. I was really amazed by how good the trip advisor site was. 

15. Don't buy any duty free alcohol before you fly to Saint martin. Saint Martin is tax free. 

16. Take cash with you when you visit the french side, as there is a real shortage of ATM's.

Many people here in Australia and I imagine elsewhere in the world are currently watching in horror as companies collapse or go very close to collapse, initiated by the global credit squeeze combined with heavy gearing.

I was motivated to write this blog post after recently watching a report on the Sunday Business Show about an Australian ASX listed company called MFS.

The MFS stock price went from ~AU$6 to ~AU$1 in the space of 4 weeks!  

An initial response is to blame the founders who were also large shareholders, bad management, greed, asleep at the wheel, etc. However, this response I believe only seems valid in hind sight and I am inclined to believe that the founders were indeed competent at their jobs, both before this disaster and now after it, and perhaps even better off for it.    

If you were the founder of very successful IPO company, with a large paper wealth as a result of your stock holdings, wouldn't you like to turn some of that stock holding into cash by borrowing against it? I think most people would certainly answer yes.

I tried to capture a cause and effect analysis of the situation that occurred to MFS, shown in the diagram below. From this analysis you can quickly see how the control of their company 'got away' from the founders. Some of the visible dynamics are:-

• One cause/effect feed into another, creating a snowball effect.
• The end result cannot be reversed. The echo of this short 4 weeks could persist within the company for many years to come.
• The complicated interactions between founders, lifestyle, shareholders, banks and lawyers.
• Even relatively small debts can have huge impacts on cash flow. 
• A directors sometimes conflicting obligations to shareholders and ASX listing regulations. Information and it's suitability for inclusion in a public announcement can be regarded differently by retail investors compared to large share holders. While both being shareholders of the company, the impact on their respective investments can be effected in opposite ways as a result of the announcement.

Therefore how does a successful founder avoid the above? The answer to this question, which is a common answer to questions about a very complicated issue is, "....well, it depends". I will attempt to discuss an answer in an upcoming post. :)   

Resources:

1. MFS stock price chart
2. Cause and effect diagram

This blog post captures a link to an Australian company called Cleardocs that provides online Australian company secretary documents at a very competitive price.

Of note is the company registration process that they offer for only AU$537.50 (as of 14 Feb 2008). This is only AU$137.50 above the ASIC registration fee of AU$400.

A bit of background on creating an ACN with ASIC

• Typically start up businesses ask their accountant to create the new company for them.
• Costs for this type of service typically ranged between AU$1,200-AU$2000.
  • This price was constructed from AU$800 ASIC fee and then the accountants margin on top.
• In the May 2007 Australian Commonwealth Budget the ASIC fee was reduced to AU$400.

This type of service may be useful if you are creating new company entities for:-

• Holding Intellectual Property as part of a protection or licensing strategy.
• To facilitate joint ventures.
• Re-branding a businesses.
• Starting a new business and looking to reduce up front costs.
• Positioning large contracts and or projects. (In a similar manner to a joint venture).
• Separating large funds for fund management activities. Often linked to this is the use of a unit trust with the new company acting as the trustee of the unit trust.

During late 2007 I read the novel "Lord of the Flies" by William Golding. William Golding was honoured with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.

The characters and plot are covered on the wikipedia site so I will not discuss them here and will instead focus on a few points that I found very interesting.

• I found the novel a little slow to get going, however the novel quickly gained pace and the last 1/3 was very exciting and a pleasure to read.
• The final scene is almost identical to Mel Gibson's recent Apocalypto movie.
• The theme of the children fighting against each other was also very similar to the Japanese movie Battle Royal.
• A subtle theme of "now vs the future" is expressed through the rivalry of the two groups.
• Hunting vs shelter vs playing
• If they don't have smoke they could stay on the island forever.    
• Why they kill a sow with piglets rather than catch and farm the pigs.
• When they burn the island and Ralph thinks of the fruit trees and what will they will eat tomorrow?
• As an analogy with business, the importance of demographics when considering marketing is explored. Evidenced by the savages growing in stages by different people and/or groups and each for different reasons:-
• First choir boys.
• Then a hunting group is formed due to combined hunger for meat.
• Group grows in number to offer protection from the beast.
• The group then becomes large enough that group dynamics take over and members stay within the savages group out of fear, fear that if they question the leader they will be picked out and mistreated.

Some of the passages that I enjoyed and my comments:-

“A little boy wore the remains of an extraordinary black cap on his red hair and who carried the remains of a pair of spectacles at his waist, started forward, then changed his mind and stood still”

• Why did Jack not step forward? I think because his un-civilised behaviour (savage) suddenly seemed ridiculous in front of civilisation (the soldier).

“Fun and games” said the officer to the children

• Spoken because they were children, the assumption is that children would not kill each other or act like savages and if they had been adults this would not have been the opening statement by the solider to the island inhabitants.

Chapter 5 - Beast From Water

“Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.”  The beast within us.

Chapter 8 - Gift for the darkness

The lord of the flies is the pigs head sitting on a stake covered in a blob of flies.

Chapter 9 - A view to a death

“Power lay in the brown swell of his forearms; authority sat on his shoulder and chattered in his ear like an ape”. Describing Jack as the new leader, the chattered in his ear like an ape is brilliant. 

“Somewhere over the darkened curve of the world the sun and moon were pulling; and the film of water on the earth planet was held, bulging slightly on one side while the solid core turned. The great wave of the tide moved further along the island and the water lifted. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon’s body moved out towards the open sea”. A very elegant passage that combines the tides and the stars with the disposing of the body. All the bodies in the novel disappear, this creates freedom for the characters to kill again.

In conclusion I truly enjoyed the novel Lord of the Flies and would certainly recommend it to others, especially those who enjoy reading classics.

This post is a quick grab of a few interesting details from a short television report on Australian mums starting up successful online Internet businesses. The report was aired on A Current Affair on Channel 9 here in Sydney, Australia in December 2007.

Online Businesses List

EnviroTrend

• Eco-friendly designer supermarket shopping bags. (The type that replace the plastic bags) 
• AU$4-6 each
• Selling 3000 per week at A$4 each.
  • This sounds very high, assuming most customers buy 6 at one time this equates to 500 new customers per week.

Find a Baby Sitter

• Directory for people finding baby sitters.
  • A kind of market (buyers and sellers) driven portal based around a specific service, babysitting in this case.
  • Customisation is in the area of data modelling the service, the enquire and the rating of service, etc.
• A$500,000 was mentioned in the report and implied that it was the revenue.

HuggALugs

• Arm and leg warmers for toddlers.
• Price point: A$17 each.
• Making A$250,000 per year.
• Selling in 47 countries around the world

Fertile Mind

• Belly Belt product. (Elastic strip that connects the top of the fly on women's pants). 
• Started in 1997
• Multi-million dollar company
• Advice from founders: To think long term. 
• The fertile mind web site is visually very neat looking, relaxing to the eye and certainly aimed at a female audience.

Tips From The Founders

1. Do what you love (Laugh each day)
2. Invest in the right technology
3. Partner up (Business advisor)
4. Plan around your kids

Common Themes

• Founders where after a businesses they could balance with their lifestyle (families).
• All selling product online that can be:-
  • Posted easily. (Weight and volume low, therefore postage is low price)
  • Does not require any government classification in any country.
  • Price point is approximately AU$30 and under. (Buying decision is not too hard)
  • Could use both Australian and overseas manufacturing sources. (Therefore provides scaling from small quantity to larger quantity).
• All largely focused on export / overseas markets.
• Those selling body apparel are not constrained by any sizing complexities.
• All have good looking web sites, therefore excellent first impression.

Congratulations to all the founders on their success so far and I wish them lots more in the future. :)

I recently (Tuesday 11th of December 2007) had the pleasure of attending a breakfast seminar conducted by the Innovation Bay team with Ben Keighran as the guest speaker. Ben is the founder of an exciting new startup company called Bluepulse which has recently expanded into the USA after securing US$6M in seed stage venture funding. Ben shared with the audience a number of insights into both the mobile and social networking space. From meeting Ben he is certainly very accomplished and will be a future innovator to watch.

I have gathered in this blog post a collection of take away points from the seminar that I thought worthy of note. The points are collected from both Ben's talk, questions from the audience, general discussion and some of my own thoughts and thinking on the area.

Technical Notes on Bluepulse Mobile Platform Development

• In the early days, it was discovered that by trying out a few AT commands into the mobile phone, the menu items where returned.
• Ben connected a mobile phone to a PC (I assume by Bluetooth) which then allowed the mobile phone to control the music playing on the PC.
  • I assume this consisted of client side software on the PC that sat between the Bluetooth API and the music player software API and then a small client (assume java based) on the mobile phone to pass commands to the PC client.
• Early days java and C++ as client on mobile. The mobile phone client detected handset and then controlled itself accordingly. Had over 2000 mobile phone configurations.
  • The new back end detects the mobile phone handset and sets pages orientation accordingly.

Barriers to PC based Social Networking Platforms Getting Onto the Mobile Platform 

The obvious PC based social networking platforms are in this case MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc. These social networks already have very large user bases. Many people therefore believe they will leap from the PC to the mobile with ease. However others in the industry believe they wont for the following reasons:-

• The platform leap is too significant. Examples giving was the huge efforts CNN had to go through to bring their content from TV to Internet.
• The change in platform is too significant of a paradigm change for the company staff.   
• Current PC based social networking platforms are more focused on past connections. The term "social mapping" (which I assume has the same meaning as social network) was used to describe this phenomenon. Social network in this case refers to people being friends while in high school, playing in the same sporting team during 2005, etc.
  • However social networking on the mobile phone is regarded as significantly different as it is behaviour orientated.
  • Users share their actions, movements etc with their social network through descriptions of where they are going or where will they be at a certain time. It is therefore much more focused on the now rather than the past.
• PC ownership declining, generally only 1-3 PCs per house. Alternatively mobile phone ownership is rising with each user having their own, which is generally turned on 24/7 and always with them.
  • The advertising proposition on the mobile phone is potentially more valuable as it is a very directed media.

Bluepulse Company History and Future

• Funded by family and friends. Bluepulse PTY LTD registered with ASIC on Sept 2002, Bluepulse Holdings PTY LTD registered Mar 2007 (I assume as a result of the VC deal). Therefore approximately 5 years of development.
• Seed stage venture funding of US$6M.
• Bluepulse is described as being a new messaging format for the mobile. Previously there was talk and sms, now Bluepulse is a third type of messaging format.
• Target group is university students.
• In future 80% of mobile phones will be Internet connected.
• Bluepulse feel that expertise in the US will help their move to using a much larger back end that scales well.
• A figure of 1 million unique visitors per month was used. I don't know if this is a current or projected figure.
  • From US discussions 1 unique visitor = $1 in value. I assume value attributed is the price you can sell it for to advertisers.

My thoughts and comments

I can see more value to the end user when viewing the Bluepulse network as a new messaging format rather than social networking for the mobile phone. The blending of SMS, email, instant messaging, contact management and location with GPS in the mobile phone in a more user friendly manner is obviously a huge value proposition.

• Current use of mobile phone communications are all point to point based, one user talking or SMS'ing another. Now with web on the phone the Bluepulse network offers point to point between the user and a back end server which then re-broadcasts the message to many.
• New communication methods using web on the mobile phone are relatively new not because of new technological developments but due to mobile phone carriers opening the Internet access available from the mobile phone to the wider web after first offering customers only walled gardens.

Therefore I think Bluepulse is a great new idea. I imagine the company future could be a lot like hotmail in which registered users are the score card and once a significant registered user head count is reached acquisition becomes a real possibility.   

Bluepulse is described on its web site as a "privately held mobile social media company based in San Mateo, California that is busy building one of the world’s largest communities on mobile".

Innovation Bay is described on their web site as "a not-for-profit group of entrepreneurs and business leaders who come together to discuss issues and share experiences within a casual, open and informal environment".

I had the opportunity on Thursday 22 Nov 2007 to attend an informal breakfast seminar conducted in Sydney Australia by the Innovation bay team. The guest speaker was Alison Deans from Netus. Alison was very well spoken and is certainly regarded as a subject matter expect on the topic of online businesses. Alison's talk was very entertaining, informative and a real pleasure to attend.

I have captured below some points of interest that I took away from the seminar. The points below are a mixture of grabs from Alison's talk, questions from the audience and discussions with other people attending the seminar.

• Online advertisers love tight verticals
  • Vertical in this case meaning the vertical columns of text on a web page.
  • Examples of the use of tight verticals that were giving was the collection of blog sites controlled by the Allure Media company of which Netus has invested into.
  • Picking the Lifehacker blog which is one of the 4 blogs maintained by Allure, as an example. The text is left aligned on the page and all contained in a tight vertical. Well orientated advertising is then placed both on the left side and then also in the middle of the vertical text. The placement of such advertising is common place and is perhaps regarded therefore as the best solution for grabbing a viewers attention.      
• Social Networking = unknown content = brand risk to advertisers
  • Social networking sites are very popular and are therefore generating a lot of traffic. However advertisers are largely uncertain about buying ad space and therefore risking the reputation of their brand by having it placed beside potentially illegal, rude, or even raciest content. 
  • A point to this issue is that the content on the Allure blog sites is described as "... localises licensed content from the world leading blog networks". Therefore I imagine that the content comes with some type of guarantee, specification, or service level agreement or similar so as to comfort advertisers.
    
    • Lifehacker has a comment review process that is conducted before a comment it is published. The review process is described on their web site as "...looking for comments that are interesting, substantial and/or highly amusing. ....Your comment will only appear if it is approved". Again protecting the content that will sit beside advertisers brands.       
• Social Networking akin to Bar mentality
  • Bar in this context means drinking bar, pub, nightclub etc.
  • As humans we generally like to gather in groups. Examples of such are new bars, which when they first open a crowd will gather, investigate and have a drink. As there is a crowd more people will come and the crowd will get larger for no other reason than there was a crowd to start with. I think the important observation here is it is not the bar itself that has drawn the crowd but the newness of the bar.  
• Online retailing Australia's next Internet wave
  • After hearing this comment I then become aware of television advertisements for Deals Direct and bus advertising for Lasoo, both of which are new Australian based online retailing business.  
• User experience in relation to advertising budget
  • If your advertising budget is low, you must focus more on the quality of the user experience.
  • In the early days Ebay Australia, started with an advertising budget much lower than their competitors. Therefore the user experience became very important as the catalyst for customers talking to other customers and therefore generating more leads.  
• Buyer and seller dynamics that lead to impenetrable market position
  • Ebay attracts buyers because there are sellers and sellers are attracted because there are buyers. The buyers and sellers form a market. The rate of attraction of buyers and sellers grows at an increasing rate. The growing size of the market therefore makes the market as a whole more protected everyday from other businesses attempting to setup up their own markets.  
  • This type of protection does not require lawyers or large adverting budgets. 
• Preferred Founders are Subject Matter Experts (SME)

Netus are a technology investment company, with an aim as stated on their web site of "...bringing...proven business models, based locally or overseas, to the Australian market".

Innovation Bay is described on their web site as "a not-for-profit group of entrepreneurs and business leaders who come together to discuss issues and share experiences within a casual, open and informal environment".