Ambition Technology Blog

Whilst double dips and roller-coaster balance sheets belie their funfair parlour, Australia’s Technology Industry at least, appears ready to hop back on the merry-go-round of a candidate skill short market. We’ll explore whether this is myth or reality, and what we should be doing in either scenario.

In this edition of the Ambition Technology Market Trends report:

As usual we are always keen to hear from you, please leave your comments, questions or suggestions in the comment section below.

Or view the embedded version after the jump. Read more…

In a recent article featured in the MIS Financial Review magazine, Brian Corrigan addresses Succession Planning and whether businesses are doing enough to bring in the next generation.

Brian spoke to leading IT profiles to understand their experiences, the challenges involved and the recommendations to fill the void.

The article also features Ambition Technology Director, Andy Cross, who commented “It’s all about looking at your skills and where the gaps are below you… You need that plan in every team and every division. It was a lot more in vogue a decade ago though has been given more lip service than real support in more recent times.”

The article presents key points to achieving an active approach to succession planning:

• Mentor potential candidates so they are aware of what they have to do to succeed.
• Give them the opportunity to act in the role when you are absent or undertaking higher duties.
• Formally assess their performance at the completion of their acting CIO or other relevant assignment.

Visit www.misaustralia.com to view the full story.

Whenever a heavily marketed and exciting new technology is released there is usually a massive initial uptake, often well before the technology is fully tried and tested. Just because something can be achieved does not necessarily mean it is required, especially before the infrastructure exists to make it commercially useful. Recent history is littered with examples of untimely failures; take for example the dot com bubble burst of the early 1990’s which today is but a bad memory in a world dominated by successful e-commerce ventures. I for one remain skeptical of over-hyped technology products or services until the average members of the public have had their say.

A bit of news that slipped under the radar last week was the announcement of final compensation being paid out to certain members of the public who purchased CD’s distributed by Sony back in 2005. Anybody remember why? Digital Rights Management (DRM). I remember the first time I used an iPod and thought ‘what a fantastic little device’, I remember the first time I bought songs from iTunes and thought ‘what a wonderfully easy experience’, and then I remember innocently trying to load the tracks on to my Nokia phone and being very confused as to why I was unable to achieve this. DRM is a term used to describe restrictions of use added to devices and digital content by their manufactures. Originally pushed as an anti piracy measure, it has also been used by manufactures and publishers to limit what we can do with our purchased digital content. For example Apple and Sony only allowed songs purchased from their music stores to be played only on their specific devices. Upon further research I discovered there is code in each downloaded track stopping me from playing my purchased songs on any other device apart from Apple products, code that only allows me to copy the track to CD a maximum of 5 times. Originally Sony even added DRM code in to the CD’s they sold in retail outlets so that when played on a PC it installed DRM software, without notifying the user, which then in turn created a severe security vulnerability on the PC in question, hence the compensation mentioned above. Read more…

There’s no such thing as a free lunch so the saying goes, but more and more recently we are seeing a number of job seekers prepared to work for free.

Whether they are experienced in a particular field and looking to switch careers or newly qualified job seekers looking for the first rung on the corporate ladder, the offer is the same: we will work for free in exchange for a chance to learn new skills. Now the cynics  will call this out saying, ‘well it’s not quite free because they are going to take up our time and resources without giving anything back’ but the reality is that in a labour tight market how big is the exposure upon your resources really? Many an inexperienced employee given the chance will repay your commitment tenfold and who’s to say they aren’t your next rising star?

Others may suggest this is a revival of the school time principal of ‘work experience’ but it’s a little more than that because of the level of skills which these individuals are offering. In today’s society when everyone wants ‘it’ now there’s something refreshing about people being prepared to put something in without the promise of anything in return.

We currently have access to a number of individuals who meet this description so if anyone is interested in finding out more, please contact Ambition Technology.

The topic of a mandatory ISP level internet filter, which forms part of Labor’s policies, has been hotly contested over the past few months and in the last few days the Green Party have come out to side with the Coalition and state that a PC-based approach would be more effective. Labor devised such a plan to target refused classification material that shouldn’t be available online such as child sexual abuse imagery, bestiality, sexual violence, detailed instruction in crime, violence or drug use and/or material that advocates the doing of a terrorist act. This material is currently not available on Australian hosted websites however it can still be accessed on international websites and Labor plan to block these with an ISP web filter.

My question in this blog is this: Should we be against this? Is this being done purely for the safety of our homes and our children, or is this just censorship and a way to control what we see, think and do?

I personally believe that the aforementioned refused classification material should not be available on the internet. I would not want children or adults to view or be at all exposed to this,  however, I do feel that an ISP filter isn’t the best option to combat this, particularly with simple ways around a filter, such as adding a question mark to the end of the web address thereby changing the address enough to make it different, as recently documented by Gizmodo, and the sheer volume of websites out there meaning that a filter could never block them all. In my opinion, I think that both the Greens and the Coalition are right in suggesting PC-based filtering which can offer a much broader filter and can be personalized depending upon the household. Read more…

With Apple Inc. recently becoming the second largest company on the S&P 500 in terms of market capitalisation, it’s no surprise to hear that Apple is opening another company –owned store in Sydney this week. Apple has announced they will be opening their fourth shop this Thursday which will be located in the Castle Towers Shopping Centre in Caste Hill.

So, what is Apple doing so right? Is it their products, service, tech savvy people, the fashionable statement or the whole kit and caboodle?

Recently visiting an Apply store, I can understand what all the hype is about. Apple people are passionate and alive with enthusiasm. You become part of the ‘apple’ community the second you step through their door which drives a sense of loyalty towards Apple products. You become hooked!

A recent blog called ‘Secrets of the biggest selling launch ever’ by Seth Godin, spills the beans on Apple’s success, highlighting the key tactics used. I quite like the following;

1. Don’t try to please everyone. There are countless people who don’t want one, haven’t heard of one or actively hate it. So what? (Please don’t gloss over this one just because it’s short. In fact, it’s the biggest challenge on this list).

2.Make a product worth talking about. Sounds obvious. If it’s so obvious, then why don’t the other big companies ship stuff like this? Most of them are paralyzed going to meetings where they sand off the rough edges.

3. Build a platform for others to play in. Not just your users, but for people who want to reach your users. Read more…

Whilst we all probably agree that including a picture of yourself from your most recent vacation is not the best addition to a professional resume, what should you include and where?

Resume writing is a personal expression of your skills and your experiences but there are some tips to improve your chances of having it read and it standing out from the crowd.

1. Objective or Goal – what job are you looking for and why? Imagine this as your guiding light if you will and it should quickly and easily guide the reader to your desired role and the skills you are going to bring to their business.

2. Skill Sets – identify the skills and attributes that you possess and which go to underscore your objective/goal. List them in bullet points to stand out or block them in to a list format. They need to jump out and be clear to the reader. Consider grouping them into categories relevant to the job Industry e.g. Technology might use Infrastructure, Applications, Business Intelligence, Methodologies.

3. Professional experience – list the most recent and relevant job titles and companies you have worked for showing evidence of what you achieved and how. You should be thinking about answering a few simple questions for the reader; “Can you demonstrate ability to hit the ground running and contribute to the roles success?”

4. Education and Professional development – the easiest section to write, simply identify the qualification you gained, the year and the Institution you received it from. Read more…

If you’ve been keeping up to date with the circus that’s been the 2010 election campaign thus far, you would’ve witnessed Mark Latham’s recent ambush of the PM, Julia Gillard becoming the new editor or Women’s Day and Tony Abbott’s gloating of a “united political party”.

You may have even heard one or two action plans and policies being flung about the place, from Abbott’s proposed lower income tax, overhaul of welfare payments as well as his bid to “stop the boats” to Julia Gillard’s cash rewards for high performing schools and likely focus on jobs.

But how much have we heard from either of them regarding the future of Australian IT? Not too much. Well actually, we’ve heard a little from the PM, but it sounds more like a step backwards for the technology industry rather than “moving forward” as Ms. Gillard has been known to say once or twice before. Read more…

I remember watching Back to the Future II as a kid, amazed by how ultramodern and awesome the world looked as Marty and Doc hopped into their DeLorean and traveled to the future. I couldn’t even fathom just how far the world had advanced technologically and how they’d conjured up such cool gadgets.

From the hovercraft, the self drying clothes, the airborne flying cars and the food hydrator (which transformed a tiny, uncooked pizza to a full sized piping hot pepperoni pizza in seconds!), I was taken aback by just how far technology had moved forward in 2015.

Whilst I doubt the real 2015 will bear any resemblance to the movie’s adaptation (seeing it’s less than five years away), it got me thinking about what the technology world might potentially look like in the next 10 years.

Most technology enthusiasts believe that in 2020, the PC as we know it today will effectively be gone, largely replaced by hosted services that supply cloud-based information and processing, via wireless capabilities.

And yes, skeptics still abound, I believe cloud services will have an increasingly dominant presence in the delivery of software applications because developers will be given more freedom to utilise tools and languages of their own preference, driven by problem domain and skill sets, rather than the constraints of client hardware and operating systems. Read more…

GPUs or Graphics Processing Units were designed as “graphics accelerators”. They were a microprocessor, attached to a graphics card, for offloading floating point calculations. It allowed early 2D graphics to run much faster than by using the host CPU directly. The 1990s saw an explosion into 3D graphics with PlayStation and Nintendo 64 as early examples. GPUs were initially used to accelerate the memory intensive work of texture mapping. Later units were added to accelerate geometric calculations such as the rotation and translation of vertices.

In 2002 GPUs added programmable shading – where each pixel could be processed by a short program that included additional image textures as inputs, before it was projected onto the screen. Parallel GPUs had become as flexible as the CPU while they offered several orders of magnitude higher performance than a conventional CPU. This was particularly true in applications requiring massive vector operations.

It was a fact that did not go unnoticed for long. A new stream of development, the GPGPU or General Purpose GPU, has seen the GPU move out of the purely gaming graphics world and into fields such as scientific calculations and image processing, 3D reconstruction and Stock Option pricing determination.

To really go mainstream the programming for GPU’s needs to get easier. The July 22 2010 launch of Nvidia’s CUDA 3.1 Software Development Kit and the Parallel Nsight plug-in for Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE could be just the ticket…