Mobile Devices Have Become ‘Prosthetic Brains,’ Web Guru Says

BI: You wrote: “Mobile devices aren’t consumption devices, they’re prosthetic brains.” The Common thought is that they are consumption devices, so, what do you mean by that?

Alistair Croll: If you need to check your phone to find out about a meeting, you’ve failed. If your phone understands that you need to know about a meeting, and tells you about it, then you’ve won. In the former case, the burden was on you (to check) and the phone was simply a reference.

I think they’re both.

The Next Big Thing: Big Missing Pieces

How can this change and, as a result, unlock one or two Big Things? To retread a famous two-part Buddhist joke, change is a mysterious thing. Telling people what they ought to do doesn’t always work. Still, two thoughts come to mind.

First, the tablet. We, Tech People have always known the tablet was the right thing to do, and we tried for thirty years without much success. Three years ago, Chef Jobs grabbed the ingredients that had been available to all and, this time, the tablet genre “took.”  Now, perhaps, the tablet will take its place as an ingredient in a yet grander scheme.

Second, go to an aquarium and watch a school of fish. They move in concert and suddenly turn for no apparent reason. Somewhere inside the school there must have been a “lead fish” that caused the change of direction. Perhaps the fish didn’t even realize he was The One destined to trigger the turn.

Who’s going to be our industry’s fish, big or small, that precipitates a cultural change unlocking the potential of existing technologies and gives rise to the next $100B opportunity?

We of course don’t know, but we do know that if the conditions are widely available enough, the chances of a fish being in a position to turn the school, are higher.

Why are men so foolish?

However, it doesn???t take much to get women to compete more. In a recent study, the classic Niederle experiment was replicated with MBA students. The only change in the protocol was that right before doing the experiment, the MBAs were given one of two short surveys. One survey asked about their gender and family, and how many kids they had. The other survey quizzed them about their professional plans ??? what was their expected salary after graduation, et cetera. Women MBAs who took the family survey were reluctant to compete. Women MBAs who took the professional survey had no such reluctance. Even more of them wanted to compete than male MBAs.

To get women to compete, they need to be in a social context where competing is relevant to their success. When they choose to be overtly competitive, women, it seems, are more attuned to the context than men are.

“Just as you???d expect, girls who won the lottery and attended their first-choice charter school increased their odds of going to a four-year college. But boys who lost the lottery (and didn???t go to the charter school of their dreams) had better odds of attending a four-year college than boys who won the lottery.”

Interesting.

DTSanz.com

DTS started as an ISP operating in Wellington in 2001, then grew to service other major NZ cities, then spread coverage nationwide???.then grew into Sydney, then throughout Australia. Throughout our history, we have always worked as one company, all employees on both sides of the Tasman have worked together for the one brand, but we have always been geographically segmented by differences in websites, email addresses, Twitter accounts, etc.

In the last few months, we have set about changing that. We have moved to a single website for both countries that gives detailed information on product differences in each region but represents a unified single entity that operates across borders. We believe this is important because as far as we are aware, we are the only such ISP operating as a single provider on both sides.

Congratulations

Campbell Live beats TV One – first time ever

Campbell Live last night beat the TV One 7pm show Seven Sharp overall audience for the first time since Campbell Live began in 2005.

It is also the first time TV3 has ever beaten TV One in the 7pm weekday slot since TV3 began in November 1989.

Seven Sharp took another hit in the ratings on Tuesday night after a short recovery in Monday’s show, according to overnight ratings from Nielsen TAM.

But will they come back? Ask MySpace.

Reading :: Net-Works

Net-Works: Workplace Change in the Global Economy: A Critical and Practical GuideBy Marvin S. Finkelstein

I ran across this book at UT’s library while looking up a book on a related topic. It’s written to introduce undergraduates and other nonspecialists to a sociological take on the global economy???chapters are named with declarative sentences such as “The Workplace is Socially Constructed” and “Teamwork Trumps Individualism at Work”???but I thought it might offer some concepts that weren’t familiar to me.

Did it? Sort of. But it raised more questions than it answered.

Routing | Deploy360 Programme

Though Internet routing has worked well over the years, there have been instances of errors that caused routing stability issues. There is also opportunity for malicious activities that could damage the routing infrastructure in the future. To prevent future errors and malicious activity, it is important to increase the resiliency and security of the Internet???s routing infrastructure through the adoption of best current operational practices for routing resiliency and the deployment of secure routing protocols.

As noted in our blog post announcing this new topic area, when we speak of ???resiliency??? we mean:

the ability of the network to provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of various faults and challenges to normal operation.

In the months ahead we will be engaging with network operators around the world to help understand how we can best help them and the larger operator community make the Internet more secure and resilient.