LagrangePoint - Brad Howarth

New project and blog - A Faster Future - now online at www.afasterfuture.com

For a few months now I’ve been working on a significant new venture with my fiancé Janelle Ledwidge. Now we can finally unveil that the new project is a book – A Faster Future. This new book, curently being written, investigates the future applications and services that will be enabled by high-speed broadband, and the impact these will have on businesses, markets and the economy in general.

With the National Broadband Network gaining momentum, we believe the time is now to start turning attention to how high-speed broadband (both fixed and wireless) can improve existing online services and applications, and lead to the creation of entirely new ones.

We’ve created a new blog site www.afasterfuture.com to help explain a little more behind the idea, as well as to provide regular updates and links to ideas and stories related to high-speed broadband services.

The book will be released later this year, but you can check the A Faster Future blog for updates, and you can follow on Twitter at @afasterfuture. We are also keen to hear your ideas for what you think the future of online services hold.

I'll also continue to post my regular content to this blog as well.

Coming soon - a mobile phone with your choice of operating systems

A little while back I wrote about VMware's plans to make the mobile phone the new battleground for virtualisation (you can see that story here), by creating software that would enable any smartphone to run the operating system of any supplier.

Now it seems that Australian company Open Kernel Labs is bringing that vision one step closer. In conjunction with another virtualisation technology company, Citrix, it has announced a reference architecture for what it calls the 'Nirvana phone', allowing users to access their corporate desktop and applications from a single device in any location.

You can read more of the story in this article at ZDNet.

Spreets - tell your friends and bag yourself a bargain

I've been watching the progress of Dean McEvoy and his company Booking Angel for a few years now (such as in this story for The Age). Dean has put in the hard yards as an entrepreneur, and been relentless in driving the growth of BookingAngel in Australia and elsewhere.

Now the company has launched a new service, spreets, which creates bargain deals for Sydney residents  than sends out an email alert to members. The deal only happens however if enough people opt for it. The idea is that people who are interested use Facebook, Twitter or other means to alert their friends to create a critical mass to secure the deal. Deal makers get new customers without the trouble of reaching out to them directly.

Spreets is a great example of a company using its existing technology base to launch a secondary service to attract customers and generate revenue. Many entrepreneurs get fixated with one idea - often because they don't have time to focus on others - but this can leave them locked in unprofitable businesses, and prevent them from exploring new avenues of innovation. While there is a lot to be said for staying focused, any punter will tell you the benefits of spreading your bets.

XMediaLab adds Masterclass series to Media 2010

XMediaLab has announced the creation of a series of Masterclasses preceding the Media 2010 event being held in Sydney on February 19. The two classes are News and the Spectrum of User Experience, presented by Oliver Reichenstein, the CEO at information Architects (Tokyo), and How to Create an Award Winning Digital Advertising Campaign from Start to Finish, presented by the Emmy Award winning CEO/CTO of The1stMovement (Los Angeles), Ming Chan.

I'll be live-blogging Media 2010 and recording a few web video interviews, so if you are interested and can't make it along to the sessions, remember to check back here on the day.

Hulu exec added to Media 2010 line-up, while Viocorp wants to tell you about the Future of Television

Am looking forward to the Media 2010 event happening in Sydney on February 19 - even more so that Simon Gallagher, the director of international business development for the US online video serivce Hulu, has been added to the line-up. Hulu has been creating waves in the US by demonstrating the capabilities of the internet as a distribution platform for long-form video content, much as BBC's iPlayer has done in the UK, or the ABC's iView has done here.

Meanwhile at lunchtime today (Friday Jan 29) local web video specialists Viocorp are hosting an online seminar title the Future of Television, with presenters including ABC managing director Mark Scott and Beyond CEO Mikael Borglund. More details here, or you can go ahead and register here.

AIMIA Awards tickets on sale now

If you've been to the AIMIA Awards before, you'll know it's a great night out. If not - then here is your chance to attend your first! Especially if you live in Melbourne - on Friday March 5 the Amys are making their way to the town of my birth for the first time in who knows how long. 122 entries will be battling it out across 25 categories (trust me, the after-party is worth the wait ...), including new ones such as Best Online Video and Best Sports. There's also a People's Choice Award for AIMIA members to vote on. You can check out the full list of finalists by clicking here or purchase tickets here.

Registration for AIMIA TradeStart mission to the Hong Kong International ICT Expo closing soon

For most of this decade AIMIA TradeStart and Austrade have run trade missions to the International ICT Expo in Hong Kong. I've been able to tag along to the last five, and everything I've seen has told me it's a great way for technology and digital media companies to get an introduction to the markets of Hong Kong and greater China. The next event runs from April 13 to 16, but the application deadline is February 13. Click here for more info.

Audinate gets another $4 million

Significant venture capital raisings have been pretty thin on the ground here in Australia in the past year, so its great to see digital audio networking company Audinate raise an additional $4 million from its backers Starfish Ventures and Innovation Capital. I've written a few stories about Audinate - originally a spin-out from NICTA - including this blog entry for ZDNet Australia, and in this feature for CIO Australia. Let's hope it's the first of many such announcements this year ...

Congrats to Solar Gem, winner of the Australian Innovation Shoot-out in US

Congratulations to the team at Solar Gem for winning this year's Australian Innovation Shoot-out at Microsoft's Silicon Valley Campus this week. Solar Gem makes low-cost solar energy generation systems for use in isolated (off-grid) locations. The company has already been receiving strong interest from around the world, including an installation at a hospital int he Democratic Republic of Congo. ComputerWorld has covered the story here.

SMH.com.au - Out with the GUI, in with the NUI

One of the highlights of last year's XMediaLab event in Sydney was the presentation from August de los Reyes, the principal designer of user experience in Surface Computing at Microsoft. August took us on a journey through the possibilities of computer interfaces once you get rid of the usual interfaces of screen, keyboard and mouse. The possibilities are intriguing.

One of the steps along the way is Surface technology - a table-top interface that uses movement across its surface as the principal means of interaction. There are a number of developers creating Surface technologies, but at the moment it looks like Microsoft may have the lead when it comes to bringing this technology to market.

Surface is just one stage of the journey towards what might be called Natural User Interfaces - an evolution of the current Graphical User Interface that promises a far more natural interaction - as the name suggests. You can read some of August's thoughts on the topic in this story for SMH.com.au by clicking here.