Australian’s now prefer to communicate using the Internet rather than a mobile/cellphone. In the 2008 edition of Nielsen’s Australian Internet and Technology Report, 33% of Australian’s preferred to communicate using the Internet and 38% preferred to use a mobile phone. In 2009, the balance had swung to 44% and 31% respectively.

Smartphones are commonplace

The widespread adoption of smartphones is driving enabled mobility. Mobile service usage has increased dramatically with 43% of phones capable of accessing the Internet – with search, news, email and maps amongst the most widely used services.

Business models are being redefined

There has been a huge amount of discussion in recent media over charging for content online. A lot of the coverage has had Rupert Murdoch at the centre. This is a huge shift for the world of online news and services, which have typically been free of charge. However, more subtly, Steve Jobs has also been grooming the world for this change. His iTunes platform has made people very comfortable with handing over 99 cents for a song and the recent iPad launch and early newspaper app sales figures will surely see this flourish.

Consumers are engaged

It has long been the norm for people to review a product online, but recent Nielsen statistics show that 86% of people read reviews or discussions about products or services they intend to pay for and that 63% watched a video online of a product before handing over their hard earned.

For the products with strong customer sentiment, it strengthens their position – for those with bad sentiment, they don’t stand a chance. Consumers can now share their enthusiasm or fight back after a poor experience.

Consumers that aren’t treated fairly have the means and ability to reach massive audiences through flawless distribution like YouTube and Facebook. Be careful about your brands online perception and especially careful about what your own staff could saying about your brand.

Bullish trends for social currency

When you consider the plethora of social websites – how many can you think of that don’t have a competitive angle to them? 4square has their points and mayorships, YouTube has their views, Twitter has their followers, TripIt has their days from home, LinkedIn has their connections and it’s expected that Facebook’s newest currency could potentially become one of the largest global economies.

Social currencies are gaining weight, reputation is now worth more to some folks than money in the bank.

Barriers to social networks are reducing

Amid recent concerns over Facebook’s latest privacy changes, privacy controls amongst the major networks are becoming more sophisticated. An increased ability to filter what is displayed to my friends, family, neighbour or a complete stranger aids in growing a user’s trust in a site, allowing them to flourish from the embryo to the social butterfly.

Nick believes that all sites will soon consider social tools a must have rather than a nice to have and that the term social media as a term.

The social web is all about you: it’s not enough to know that the user likes sport, we need to know that you like Tennis on Wednesday nights and Rugby on the weekends.

The web is improving behavioural understanding – it is moving from observations about similar events to a knowledge of what you need or like and when. We are moving away from the collective intelligence approach that Amazon used to bring us the customers who bought this also bought to this deeper individual understanding.

That said – I think that some of the collective intelligence techniques are very relevant and under utilised to make intelligent suggestions about what the user is trying to achieve.

Websites are constantly using the social currency of reputation to encourage users to participate with their site – increasing engagement and length of site visit. Great for the popularity of their site and the advertising spend. Some great examples of common social functionality we see on the web are:

• tell others what you’re doing
• see the latest activities of people you know
• connect your identities – the activity from sites like Linked In, Twitter, Facebook is intermingled across the web
• build collections of things
• find others like you

The web is moving towards a deeper behavioural understanding from the current models that are used

To view the current process list:

SELECT * FROM V$PROCESS;

For more information on what processes are currently doing, I found this post pretty useful.

I recently had to increase the number of allowed connections to a database, which meant a restart. I did this using:

# sqlplus /nolog
CONNECT / AS sysdba;
SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE;
STARTUP;


These are pretty basic operations but thought they may be of use to someone out there!

Drucker discusses what he perceives to be the definition of an executive and the role that they play within an organisation. Druckers key take-away points are that:

• Effectiveness must be learned
• Record and analyse where your time goes
• Focus your vision on contribution
• Make the strengths of yourself and others productive
• Items with the most impact should be undertaken first