With the cost of acquiring the services of thousands of drones ever decreasing, it’s getting cheaper to disrupt your competitors during key times such as new product launches. For example, it wouldn’t be unfeasible to ‘organise’ a distributed denial of service attack that takes out your competitors website and mail servers for several days. Coupled with a new product version release of your own could constitute a severe blow to your competitors bottom line and credibility.

I’m not suggesting we all run from our desks, arms flailing, pulling at our hair, screaming “The russians are coming” (which coincidentally would make for a kick ass Youtube channel). I’m hoping I suppose, that you do your due diligence when considering to move key business processes into ‘the cloud’. Do some research on how you can make your systems redundant, backup, backup and backup some more, just because your systems are in the cloud doesn’t mean that your provider should be responsible for your data.

Take a minute today to contemplate where your business would be if your online email provider such as GMail, Office 365 or even Hotmail vaporised (or more realistically, decided to revoke your account for some uncontrollable breach of their terms of service). No, seriously, consider it just for the lulz.. Imagine that as of 2pm today, your whole email history just vaporised. Scary thought eh?

Now imagine if your shiny new online accounting system happened to vaporise at the same time.. You’d always have your cloud computing laptop left I suppose, and seeing as that doesn’t save any data locally it’d be a whole lot lighter to carry to your next job interview.

Tick, tick, tick….

Out of the corner of my eye I catch these two gems.

One bribing his kids with cookies and ice cream if they’ll just flush the toilet (we’ve all been there right)?

The other… Stamping out polio..

The incredible randomness of twitter makes for great Sunday afternoon reading, the Sunday afternoons you wish the mushrooms you had as garnish on your bacon, eggs and sausages were a little more ‘special’ than the plain button variety.

^^^^ Click and sing.. I’ve even provided the lyric below ^^^^

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she’s ten feet tall

And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you’re going to fall
Tell ‘em a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call
Recall Alice
When she was just small

When men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she’ll know

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s “off with her head!”
Remember what the dormouse said:
“FEED YOUR HEAD”

That’s it for me, i’m off to smoke hooker’s with a caterpillar..

Feed your head people…

Microsoft missed search

Google missed social

Facebook missed…. ?

As I began to recuperate and regain strength, I thought a pushbike would help to build some muscle mass back into my legs. Having spent most of my youth on pushies, the decision was a simple one: I’d get a mountain bike for starters and potter around town rebuilding my broken body.

It took all of three months before a phone call would change things dramatically… “Wanna come and ride nasho”? The invitation to ride the National Park was met with some initial trepidation. Would I be strong enough to keep up? Would I be a burden on the group? Would my legs blow up in the middle of the National Park and result in my mates having to carry me out? I pondered these questions as I drove to the National Park, laden with my mountain bike on the back of the car (of course I would never consider not going).

That first ride back was one of the most painful experiences of my life. In one day I transitioned from “I’m walking okay… Kinda” to “You’re joking… we have to climb up that mountain carrying our mountain bikes?” (I kick myself for ignoring basic physics: what goes down must go back up.) The pain I experienced during the next three days was my body’s way of telling me it wasn’t impressed at my new-found mountain biking aspirations.

I rode my bike at any opportunity. We’d visit friends and family; my wife and kids would drive – I’d ride. My body was getting stronger. I began to lose the weight that I’d gained during the 10 years where my body rewarded healthy living with pain. (A healthy immune system would attack the myelin sheaths surrounding my nerves more proficiently, bringing with it exhaustion and pain. So I levied an unhealthy lifestyle to minimise the pain.)

I started participating in charity events – Sydney to the Gong, The Hills Classic and The Sydney Cycle Classic – each time enjoying the fundraising as much as the riding. The first Sydney to the Gong was held just three months after I started riding again. That year was a tough ride; dragging my frame over the lumpy National Park was painful and slow. I finished that year in a time of 4:15 – over four hours of pain. I’d raised a mere $500 for MS. My second Sydney to the Gong was to be an entirely different story. I’d trained hard and finished in 3:05, knocking not only an hour off my finishing time but raising over $3,000 in the process.

This all brings us to this year’s effort. I will be riding from Randwick Children’s Hospital to Brisbane Children’s Hospital in 5 days. Yes, that’s 1200 kilometres of pain, along the east coast of Australia. My initial training for this ride was based on adding mass to my thighs; the course we were taking was going to be relatively flat so my logic was that large thighs could pedal big gears all day. A few weeks ago we received the news that the authorities would no longer let us ride along the planned route due to roadworks, and we would need to reroute inland. The inland route includes some of the nastiest hills you’d want to ride with a bike. My whole training strategy would need to be revised. First item on the agenda would be to lose weight – dragging a large frame over long, sharp hills would be difficult.

With less than a month left I definitely have my work cut out for me. My training regime is to ride two hours per day during the week, with a day off on Friday to ride my mountain bike around the city with my friends, add two long rides (averaging four hours per day) on the weekends – and with this my week promises to be full of cycling goodness.

So check back here as I update the blog on my progress leading up to the ride, including the fun day we have organised on the 24th September in Martin Place (Sydney) and Queen Street Mall (Bris Vegas).

Anthropological Studies have shown that it’s difficult to maintain stable social relationships with groups larger than 150 people. That limit being a direct function of neocortex size, apparently, our brains can’t conceptualise stable inter-personal relationships with large groups of people.

Are we so narcissistic as a society that we strive to value ourselves by the numbers of ‘virtual’ friends we have? The whole time ignoring privacy and security.. Recent events notwithstanding, do you honestly believe that within the ‘virtual social circle’ you have painstakingly built that all your ‘friends’ have your best intentions at heart? What about so called ‘friends’ of your friends, the third party freaks that given default Facebook options can see your personal details.

Sure, Facebook has sufficient options that allow a savvy user to filter out freaks, no argument there, however, how many people on your friend’s list do you honestly believe are capable of understanding the ramifications of Facebook’s complex privacy settings. Add to that Facebook’s regular changes to their privacy settings and the average user has no hope of maintaining stealth from the freaks.

Think about the personal information you are currently divulging on your Facebook profile page, chances are you’re divulging your date of birth, mobile number, place of work, interest, etc. Certainly enough information for a freak to build a detailed profile which can be used for nefarious means or worse, as was the case recently.

Should you delete your Facebook account?

Recently, several groups have pushed for a large scale deletion of Facebook pages, there’s even entire websites dedicated to it, with countdown timers ticking down to ‘D’ day. Given Facebook’s continued lack of respect for your privacy, one has to argue they have it coming to them..

“Facebook has 500 million users, so what if a couple thousand paranoid hermits delete their accounts, Facebook won’t miss them.” I hear you say, I tend to agree with you in the short term, however, I feel that in several year’s time when Facebook has become the new MySpace we’ll look back to this time and realise that it was the beginning of the end for Zuck’s megalomaniacal visions.

No matter where you stand on the argument that Facebook is becoming the new MySpace, I urge you at the very least to delete your personal information from your Facebook profile page. Let’s face it, your ‘real’ friends already have those details.

Here’s a link to the presentation.

Powerpoint presentation on computer security

Here’s a link to the presentation.

Powerpoint presentation on productivity

Productivity tool Links:
www.rememberthemilk.com

www.evernote.com

www.livescribe.com

connect.microsoft.com/site94

www.dimdim.com

www.rescuetime.com

www.lifehacker.com

www.gtdagenda.com

In order to protect the innocent, I can’t name my unsuspecting client, nor will I name the marketing company who duped them into spending a large sum of money on an ineffective marketing campaign.

Here’s how the story played out…
My client approached several marketing companies to craft a campaign for a new product launch.
The marketing company that eventually won the job provided a mail campaign to 10,000 leads which were sourced from a rented list.
The marketing company GUARANTEED 25% conversion rate back to the website. (Bells start ringing at this point for me)

So off they went, arm in arm, skipping down the yellow brick road, singing songs about a wizard, life was grande, sales were going to skyrocket…

Over the course of the next week, the client in fact measured in excess of 3000 clicks back to the website.. An astounding 30% conversion rate from a DL card.
They made 2 sales..

Upon querying the marketing company they were met with all sorts of excuses…
“Obviously, there’s something wrong with the website”
“The colours you used on the landing page were not conducive to selling”
“Copy is bad”
Blah, blah, blah…

Enter Max..
We took a look at the web server logs and noticed some very interesting anomalies, in excess of 95% of the clicks originated from IP Addresses outside of Australia. Surely the marketing company couldn’t have been that stupid, i mean heck.. I can buy clicks which emanate from within Australia, why would these morons buy clicks from Baltic states?
Summary:
Client blew $20K on a marketing campaign that was ill conceived, ill managed, poorly executed and included metrics that were questionable at best.

My advice to anyone who’s thinking of engaging a marketing company that guarantees any sort of conversion rates back to your website is to do your due diligence, speak with clients of the company and see what sort of hard conversion rates they got. Were the clicks legitimate clicks or were they purchased from one of the many suppliers who offer that ‘service’..

As pretty as that looks it’s probably only going to be plausible for feature articles, production costs would prohibit content providers from delivering such slick content on a regular basis. Future digital publications will contain static and dynamic content, the dynamic content being reserved for feature articles and closed sections and static text to fill the remainder.

We’re definitely at the precipice of interactive publications, whether this will benefit humanity and save the content providers from the brink of disaster remains to be seen. I’m certain that like me, you’re waiting for your interactive, scratch and sniff version of the sports illustrated swimsuit calendar.

In a year that will be defined by tablet PC releases i’m going to fight my urges to splurge on the iPad and hold out for HP’s Slate.

My logic for the decision is based on HP’s open standards as opposed to Apple’s walled garden. The video above emphasizes Adobe’s Flash and Air support on the HP Slate, which will be sorely missed on the iPad. Coupled with the fact that HP will be running a derivative of Windows 7 means I can load basic business intelligence applications I already have.

Anybody who owns an iPhone will attest to how annoying the lack of Flash support is. Granted it’s no showstopper, I can surf the web notwithstanding Steve’s decision to forgo Flash for support of the App Store. Games are the highest grossing items in the App Store and casual gaming is one of Flash’s strengths. Will we see Flash support in future iPad / iPhone updates? I think the market will determine that. There’s a horde of new Tablet PC’s about to be released, you can bet all of them will support Flash and Air in some incarnation.

Microsoft Courier may set the cat amongst the pigeons once it’s formally announced, the courier is a dual screen tablet aimed squarely at the journaling set.. In a perfect world, I would have a HP Slate as my sitting on the lounge surfing / reading device and the Courier would replace my diary and notebooks in my laptop bag.