Australia Post have every reason to be pleased with their role in the online shopping revolution. They are central to the process by providing a means of converting the virtual into the real, by delivering…
- Director of UWA Centre for Software Practice, The University of Western Australia
The University of Western Australia will offer three free online courses early next year, including one on Australian studies, as it joins the MOOCs movement taking hold around the world. The university…
Since the launch of the massive open online courseware (MOOC) phenomenon, universities not involved in one of the three main platforms have been trying to decide how they should respond. The concept of…
The ACCC’s focus on Facebook comment moderation is part of a broader but potentially futile campaign to protect consumers using social media, experts say. Yesterday the Australian Competition and Consumer…
Imagine a world in which advertising companies were held directly accountable for the vision of the world their ads portrayed. Accountability could range from simple things like why deodorants don’t immediately…
How much do you rely on instant messaging services like Google Talk? One way to find out is for the service to go down around the world as it has done today. Quickly trending on Twitter, the impact seemed…
The sacking of the University of Viginia’s president Teresa Sullivan is a story that can be (and has been) told in a number of different ways. In one version, it is a story of American university governance…
In the same way that free open online courseware is threatening to disrupt traditional universities, open textbook initiatives such as OpenStax College from Rice University threaten to do the same to the…
In 2004, Wired Editor Chris Anderson wrote an article and later a book about how online businesses were taking advantage of the economic principles of something called the long tail. A long tail distribution…
I have just enrolled in a university course called Introduction to Sociology taught out of Princeton University. It is the same course that is given to the students at Princeton except that for myself…
I was invited to participate in a Q and A session called “Profs and Pints” organised by Scitech in WA on the subject of how kids were now finding out about sex. With the pervasiveness of pornography on…
In 2011, nearly 8 trillion SMS messages were sent by about 3.7 billion users. These numbers are staggering for a technology that is limited to being able to send 160 characters from one mobile phone to…
IBM has just released a commissioned report “A Snapshot of Australia’s Digital Future to 2050”. The premise of the report is that high-speed broadband will be ubiquitous and will enable the so-called “Infotronics…
The Apple faithful, or maybe just the jet lagged, have been lining up all night outside the Moscone West conference centre in San Francisco to hear Apple CEO Tim Cook announce Apple’s latest changes to…
Iran it seems has been the target of another novel form of malware christened “Flame”. Much has been made of this new threat because of novel characteristics that set it apart from traditional malware…
I was interviewed about Facebook today on RN Drive by Waleed Aly (you can listen to it here). When the producer asked if I would do the interview, I suggested that a business expert may be more appropriate…
I am watching the ABC logo on iView spin around, not going anywhere, stuck at 68%. The problem is not with my broadband connection. I am on cable broadband and according to Speedtest I can download at…
They are everywhere: people in cafés or supermarket queues, staring at their smartphones with determined concentration, occasionally shuffling yellow tiles of letters to use all of them in a killer move…
BlackBerry manufacturer RIM announced their fourth quarter earnings today. Revenue was down 19% from the third quarter to $4.2 billion and they reported a loss of $125 million. Total BlackBerry shipments…
The Federal Government is considering allowing the US to base military surveillance drones on the Cocos Islands – an Australian territory located in the Indian Ocean between Australia and Sri Lanka. The…
Apple has told a court that it will offer refunds for anyone who was misled by advertising for the new iPad. Apple will also publish a clarification that the device is not able to connect to Telstra’s…
The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) is going to court in Melbourne on Wednesday alleging that Apple misled the Australian public with its launch of the iPad 3 by claiming that it…
There have been enough social media disasters of late to make one thing clear: manipulating sentiment through social networks is next to impossible. The McDonald’s #McDStories campaign in January was supposed…
Whenever the press covers a story about hackers, a great deal of the discussion concerns the nature of online identity, the cohesiveness of hacking groups, and the individuals that identify with these…
Ever since the death of Steve Jobs, interested onlookers have been watching for the first missteps in Apple’s seemingly faultless journey to becoming the world’s most valued and valuable company. Because…
