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 Australia’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.]