A great report from the BBC with stunning visualisation of air traffic over Britain.
Brilliant!
Some truly great stop motion animation from Tom Jenkins.
Click the ‘play’ symbol and witness flu related searches by location and offset from average.
This data and much more like it can be found at the Google Public Data pages. Check it out for yourself here.
Some very cheeky creative by Samsung having a light-hearted dig at Apple ‘Fan-boys’.
Myki, “your key”. Now do you want your money back?
The Myki ticketing system has cost the average Victorian taxpayer almost $250. The system has cost in-excess of AUD$1.35 Billion since the project was implemented in 2005 and will continue to run up a $50 million bill every year of operation. But you knew this already, and you’re over it.
So, what don’t you know? Well, here’s the kicker…
Before we had Myki, we had Metcard. The Metcard was a fairly useless systems, so the Victorian Government decided to upgrade. Now, if I were a decision maker I’d be looking for WBP and trying to purchase an exiting and proven system. Nope, not after recent - and very public - budgeting debacles such as Federation Square. The Government wanted to own the intellectual property of the system, so decided to develop the state owned Myki employing the US owned company Keane Inc. Not only were the Victorian people treated as ‘cash-cows’ but the alternative is infuriating!
Words Best Practice, which should have been adopted in Melbourne, was undoubtably the system implemented under British rule before 1997 in Hong Kong. Before the turnover, the Brits spent just about every cent on public infrastructure for the Hong Kong people. This meant a new touch-less card run my the MTR called “Octopus”.
We should have implemented this system in Melbourne.
The company employed to develop the highly successful Octopus card, which is now used in Hong Kong, San Francisco, Stockholm and Singapore and many more major cities, is an Australian company, Vix Technologies, with headquarters in - wait for it - Melbourne.
Google Music launched today rivalling Apple with iTunes Match.
Get on board and Don’t Let Will Die!
View the Kickstarter project page here.
I bet you’re thinking “not much!”. Well, hopefully you’ll be surprised.
Way back in the 1960’s the world witnessed some gigantic strides in technology due, in no small part, to the space race race era. One of the most influential and lasting legacies of that time was the science of project management, particularly resource management.
It was viewed by key decision makers that should the Apollo misisons succeed in landing men on the moon there was a huge priority on returning these national heros safely. I’m sure you can see the logic. Imagine the result had Neil and Buzz died on the return trip.
The result of this realisation was a significant focus and scaling of resources toward the public relations critical requirement, moon to earth. This scaling was significant.
So, what does this have to do with iTunes?
In 2001 iTunes was released months before the iPod. Originally both were only compatible with OS 9. iTunes was first developed in 1999 but it wasn’t called iTunes, it was called “SoundJam MP”. (I know, why did they change the name!) SoundJam MP was purchased by Apple in 2000 and was developed internally from then on.
Apple was struggling in 2001 and there weren’t many Mac users around. In a make-or-break decision the iPod and iTunes were to be made Windows compatible.
The genius behind the scenes was the resource management of the iTunes project. In 2001 there was a massive shift in resources to develop the iTunes software for Windows. The idea being, ‘the most robust and beautiful software on a PC should be made by Apple.’
It worked. Millions purchased the iPod and downloaded the iTunes software.
Had Apple not invested in developing such robust software for the Windows market the iPod project could well have failed and it’s possible the company could have gone bankrupt. Instead Apple is now the #1 seller of digital music players, the #1 digital music retailer and has the largest market cap of any company in the world at over US$330 Billion.
