Melbourne Herald Sun, 21 August 2010
How a simple processed meat became a major marketing phenomenon - and everybody's favourite hate - would make a great comedy script, if it wasn't already a comedy script.
In 1970 the Monty Python team screened a sketch that reached new standards of stupidity. Two customers sit in a café where every possible dish contains Spam, the American processed ham. It so happens that sitting next to them, of course, is a crew of cow-helmeted vikings who start to sing "Spam spam spam spam lovely spam" ad nauseam.
This was recalled a decade later, newly-fledged internet email services were being bombarded by floods of unwanted advertising. The geeks of the day christened this "spam" and so it has remained ever since.
Just today, 90 billion spams have flooded the world's computers. And depending on the effectiveness of your spam filter, it probably feels like half of them have hit you.
Over the past 40 years the computing world has fought a continuing war against these ether-borne locusts. Today 96 per cent of all business email is spam.
In front-line defence is a spam and virus hunter called Mailguard. This is an Australian company, headquartered in South Melbourne, that protects companies in 18 countries. Managing Director Craig McDonald does not see the problem going away any time soon. "Some of our clients get - literally - thousands of spam emails per employee per day."
His company protects corporations, government departments and retail chains, including Acer, Baker's Delight, the AFL, the Australasian College of Surgeons.
In the darker recesses of the web you'll find 'botnets' - computers captured by a virus that turns them into groups of slaves, up to two million strong, pumping out email. Such a new spam site has just a few hours to operate before it is spotted and blacklisted by the anti-spam services of the world. But this is long enough to send out billions of letters.
If that's not sci-fi enough for you, they have 'spambots' that crawl the net seeking out computers that are not locked down and secured, and convert them into 'bots' to send out email.
Have I made your hair stand on end yet? Surely with so much effort, they must get some result to make it all worth while? Well a research project secretly measured the activities of a botnet for a month. Their conversion rate was well under 0.00001 per cent. From which they would have made about $3000. However there were other sites in the network, bringing the total up to about $3.5 million a year - not bad in a developing country.
Just what is it that they sell? Like the detective searching the suspect's rubbish bin for evidence, I lowered myself into my own garbage skip - the spam file on my computer. This is where all the rejected mail is sent by my Symantec anti-spam program. Before I empty the folder I always take a quick look, in case some legitimate mail was swept up by mistake.
Out of today's trawl - almost a hundred emails - about 90 per cent were pharmaceutical. This is common with a lot of people I talk to, and reassures me that I have not been specifically targeted for sexual enhancement.
However, I have been selected to receive many millions of dollars which will be passed to me as soon as I give Mr McWealth my bank details. And if that's not enough, Mr Frank Walter has offered me $10 million at three percent interest.
More worrying, I can quickly become a qualified radiologist able to carry out x-rays, diagnosis and treatment with radioactive compounds. I'll bear that in mind before my next medical check-up.
I can easily get an accounting degree - which might explain some of the funny-money stories that appear in this section of the paper. And I've just won half a million dollars in the Nokia competition.
All together now: "Spam spam spam spam, wonderful spam!"
21 August, 2010
15 August, 2010
The Broadband Shock
Melbourne Herald Sun, 14 August 2010
It was a shock, two years ago, when the national broadband network was launched. $43 billion - so much money! $2000 a head! But after some agonised questioning, I concluded we didn't have any choice. It was either fork out, or go sit on the dock to watch the world boat depart without us.
Well now I've been shocked all over again. This time by the threat to discontinue the project two years down the track. We'd be left sitting on that dock, appropriately surrounded by stacks of bananas.
This news came through as I was working on a piece about convergence. This is where the media, tools and mechanics of industry are all coming together - at a spectacular speed.
Internet marketing and on-line shopping are already old hat. Even grandma is ordering her knitting patterns on the net. There's been a spectacular growth in remote working - even very large companies have their virtual offices, with employees working from home or their cars much of the time.
The amount of data passing within and between businesses has grown exponentially. Really, think about the way that you do business now. If you compared it to ten years ago - you'd probably wonder how anything ever got anything done back then.
The media growth is incredible. Pay TV threw down the gauntlet fifteen years ago, now offering over 100 channels of entertainment and news. After a very long pause, conventional broadcasters finally responded and formed the Free TV group. Government released more licences and suddenly we have the growth of free networks - ABC 2,3 and News, 7Two, SBS Two, Go!, One, and others.
Fast coming up is Internet TV. Channels like Boxee.TV (is it a channel? We need a new name.) give you access to thousands of TV programs instantly. Already debate has started - is ITV going to take up too much Internet space? How big will our internet pipeline have to get?
Certainly, in year or two, 100Mb speeds will be the norm around the world for commerce and communications. Which draws the question again, where would we be if we were still stuck in the copper age?
As regulations loosen up we see even further convergence. Telcos around the world are offering internet TV with their broadband packages. Cable TV providers are offering phone accounts and interactive services.
In the US they are already calling this new era TV2. Listen to Allen Weiner, of research firm Gartner Inc: "New stakeholders, such as telco providers, web search engines and portals, and new media titans, such as Apple and Microsoft, make for a crazy quilt of businesses and competitors looking for a significant stake in the future of TV." And they'll all be jostling for a piece of that data pipeline.
But never mind entertainment, what about your business? Most companies need to be connected into huge national data bases for stocks and supplies.
Just-in-time inventory management is no longer the preserve of car companies and big corporations. Now every business has a degree of JIT working, warehousing managed centrally, minimum stock investment on the floor.
All of us in business know the inadequacy of the communications network we have now. So hands up anyone who thinks that present problems, and future requirements, can be satisfied by a bit of tinkering and improvement to our copper network?
Regardless of the weather, I don't think you'll find a single raised hand in Collins Street or Pitt Street.
We now have the last week of an election that makes a Shakespeare play look like soap opera - just count the bodies littering the Forum. But let's keep focussed on what matters. Not next week but for the next ten years. So let me urge the political parties to put away the game plans and take a long cool look at where this country is going and what it will need to get there.
It's not the politics that matters, it's the hard reality of this country's future.
It was a shock, two years ago, when the national broadband network was launched. $43 billion - so much money! $2000 a head! But after some agonised questioning, I concluded we didn't have any choice. It was either fork out, or go sit on the dock to watch the world boat depart without us.
Well now I've been shocked all over again. This time by the threat to discontinue the project two years down the track. We'd be left sitting on that dock, appropriately surrounded by stacks of bananas.
This news came through as I was working on a piece about convergence. This is where the media, tools and mechanics of industry are all coming together - at a spectacular speed.
Internet marketing and on-line shopping are already old hat. Even grandma is ordering her knitting patterns on the net. There's been a spectacular growth in remote working - even very large companies have their virtual offices, with employees working from home or their cars much of the time.
The amount of data passing within and between businesses has grown exponentially. Really, think about the way that you do business now. If you compared it to ten years ago - you'd probably wonder how anything ever got anything done back then.
The media growth is incredible. Pay TV threw down the gauntlet fifteen years ago, now offering over 100 channels of entertainment and news. After a very long pause, conventional broadcasters finally responded and formed the Free TV group. Government released more licences and suddenly we have the growth of free networks - ABC 2,3 and News, 7Two, SBS Two, Go!, One, and others.
Fast coming up is Internet TV. Channels like Boxee.TV (is it a channel? We need a new name.) give you access to thousands of TV programs instantly. Already debate has started - is ITV going to take up too much Internet space? How big will our internet pipeline have to get?
Certainly, in year or two, 100Mb speeds will be the norm around the world for commerce and communications. Which draws the question again, where would we be if we were still stuck in the copper age?
As regulations loosen up we see even further convergence. Telcos around the world are offering internet TV with their broadband packages. Cable TV providers are offering phone accounts and interactive services.
In the US they are already calling this new era TV2. Listen to Allen Weiner, of research firm Gartner Inc: "New stakeholders, such as telco providers, web search engines and portals, and new media titans, such as Apple and Microsoft, make for a crazy quilt of businesses and competitors looking for a significant stake in the future of TV." And they'll all be jostling for a piece of that data pipeline.
But never mind entertainment, what about your business? Most companies need to be connected into huge national data bases for stocks and supplies.
Just-in-time inventory management is no longer the preserve of car companies and big corporations. Now every business has a degree of JIT working, warehousing managed centrally, minimum stock investment on the floor.
All of us in business know the inadequacy of the communications network we have now. So hands up anyone who thinks that present problems, and future requirements, can be satisfied by a bit of tinkering and improvement to our copper network?
Regardless of the weather, I don't think you'll find a single raised hand in Collins Street or Pitt Street.
We now have the last week of an election that makes a Shakespeare play look like soap opera - just count the bodies littering the Forum. But let's keep focussed on what matters. Not next week but for the next ten years. So let me urge the political parties to put away the game plans and take a long cool look at where this country is going and what it will need to get there.
It's not the politics that matters, it's the hard reality of this country's future.
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