san francisco – Page 4

15 May 201113 June 2011

Weekly Wrap 49

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This week was all about San Francisco — but I arrived back in Sydney this morning and now I’m on the Gold Coast for the AusCERT Conference on information security.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 87, “P2P production transforming business”, an interview with Belgian theorist Michael Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation.
The 9pm Edict episode 13, which is something some people seem to glad to see again. Well there you go. I’ll see what I can do about making it a bit more frequent.

Articles

IT: ritual shenanigans, but hey, this is government, for Crikey, all about the federal budget. Kind of.
NetSuite big fish push to cut mid-sized Oz? for ZDNet Australia. NetSuite has announced that’ll be gunning for serious enterprise customers, so could that risk their established relationship with their existing mid-sized customers?

Media Appearances

I was interviewed by enterprise software commentator Dennis Howlett on video, and it’s at NetSuite in Australia – the @stilgherrian view. He also does the Irregular Enterprise blog over at ZDNet.

Corporate Largesse

I was a guest of NetSuite for their SuiteWorld event in San Francisco. Their largesse included a return flight to San Francisco; a limousine to and from San Francisco airport; four nights of accommodation at the Marriott Marquis; a cocktail party one night, dinner at Larry Ellison’s house the next catered by celebrity chef and top US restaurateur for 2011 Michael Mina, and then the gala dinner at City View at the Metreon followed by more cocktails at the Marriott; breakfast and lunch each day; a Flip Video camera 4GB, which I’m giving to a friend; the books Engage! by Brian Solis and CRM at the Speed of Light by Paul Greenberg; NOD32 Antivirus 4 software from ESET; chocolates by Romanicos Chocolate and TCHO; $40 of Starbucks vouchers; energy drink mixes from EnergyFirst; a beverage shaker container thing; mints and a notepad by Ecoswag; a 40%-off discount voucher for Mountain Khakis; and a t-shirt. Some of these items were probably provided by NetSuite’s customers. This amount of stuff is fairly typical for events like this.
While as a journalist I have free entry to the AusCERT Conference and will doubtless be fed and watered most adequately, my air fares and accommodation are being covered by CBS Interactive, ZDNet Australiaâ€™s parent company.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: The view from Larry Ellison’s house in San Francisco overlooking what I think is the Presidio district and out across the bay to Alcatraz. Ellison founded Oracle, and he’s now the fifth richest person in the world,with a personal wealth of $39.5 billion.]

09 May 2011

The travels begin

Just a quick reminder that in a few hours I’ll be winging my way to San Francisco for NetSuite’s SuiteWorld event. If you’ll be there, do get in touch. If there’s something you reckon I should cover, do let me know.

22 March 2011

Visiting San Francisco for SuiteWorld

In May I’ll be visiting San Francisco for the third time in six months. This time it’s to attend NetSuite’s SuiteWorld conference, on their tab.

Curiously enough, NetSuite’s CEO Zach Nelson has been warning against the false cloud.

It’s pretty clear that everything is going to the cloud. I think the real issue is that there are real clouds and fake clouds. The fake clouds are people who are taking existing technology and saying, ‘We can host it for you and that’s the cloud’.

That is not the cloud. If the application is not web-native it’s not going to give you any of the benefits of the cloud. You’re not going to get any of this cost reduction, customisation migration or anytime, anywhere access because you are still using this funky intermediary technology to access that hosted application.

Microsoft is famous for saying ‘all our applications are in the cloud’. No they’re not. They’re their existing applications hosted someplace. That failed back in 1999 — how’s it going to succeed in 2010?

That’s interesting because Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff was also telling us to “beware of the false cloud” at their Dreamforce conference, which I attended in December. You can here him say exactly that on the Patch Monday podcast.

And that’s interesting because Nelson and Benioff used to be colleagues at Oracle. Funny old world.

Anyway, I’ll tell your more about this particular trip as it aproaches.

20 February 201113 June 2011

Weekly Wrap 37

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This time I’m making up for the recent slow weeks with a whole bunch of material from the RSA Conference on information security.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 76, “The end of the open internet?” “I think the age of the deeply competitive internet is over,” says author and telecommunications lawyer, Tim Wu. “The next five years is going to be a story of the big four or big five.” This podcast contains the complete interview with the author of The Master Switch: The rise and fall of information empires, sections of which were quoted in the stories below.
The next episode of Patch Monday is all about the RSA Conference, cyberwar, and Microsoft’s call for what referring to as “collective defence”. I’ve already completed that episode, and you’ll be able to grab it late Monday morning Sydney time over at the Patch Monday podcast stream.

Articles

NBN is ‘visionary’, congratulations: Wu, for ZDNet Australia. Tim Wu reckons the National Broadband Network will be a Good Thing, if it works out as intended.
Egypt and the NBN: the internet, it’s made of people, for Crikey.
Oz kicks US’s butt on net security: Gartner, for ZDNet Australia. Security analyst John Pescatore reckons Australia and New Zealand are ahead of the US when it comes to certain key internet security initiatives.
Digital apocalypse: the road to destruction, for ZDNet Australia. One of the big themes at the RSA Conference was cyberwar.
WikiLeaks isn’t cyber war, but maybe it’s piracy, for Crikey. Infosec specialist Bruce Schneier had an interesting view of WikiLeaks.

Corporate Largesse

My trip to San Francisco for the RSA Conference was paid for by Microsoft.

Elsewhere

[Photo: Cincinnati nerdcore act Dual Core performing at the Electronic Frontiers Foundationâ€™s 21st birthday party in San Francisco on 16 February 2011.]

14 February 2011

Leaving for San Francisco

A reminder: This afternoon I’m heading to San Francisco for the RSA Conference on information security, all on Microsoft’s tab. I’ve also discovered that it’s the Electronic Frontiers Foundation’s 21st birthday party this Wednesday night, and San Francisco Beer Week. What could possibly go wrong?

01 February 2011

Accommodation: Blue Mountains then San Francisco

My accommodation for the next couple of weeks at least is sorted. Finally. The Blue Mountains then San Francisco. However a temporary home for Apollo (pictured) has yet to be finalised.

The plan I outlined a week ago seems to be coming together even better than expected.

I bump out of the house in Enmore, Sydney, on Thursday 3 February 2011. I’ll then spend a couple of days in a hotel so I can tidy up loose ends in Sydney before spending a week at Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains — because it turns out that an industry colleague and his wife bought the Bunjaree Cottages there and need someone to do a spot of caretaking and webby work.

And after that I’m off to San Francisco for the RSA Conference.

I don’t know exactly what I’m doing after that, but at least I’ll have time to think about it.

Apollo, meanwhile, needs to be stashed somewhere. I’ve got a couple of local options already, but if you feel the urge to have an attention-demanding cat for a few weeks do let me know.

[Photo: Apollo, photographed in 2004.]