Time: 5.30 pm – 7.30 pm

Venue: CBS Interactive Sydney

This is being run as part of the RSPCA Cupcake Day fundraiser – if you are a cupcake maker you can go to the RSPCA site & sign up to receive a cupcake kit.

Register (opens a Google Docs form)

Sponsors Needed
If you’d like to help out as a sponsor please

let the unorganisers know.

They need some prizes for the fabulous cupcakes & their bakers, & a food or drink sponsor would be nice too.

What is a CupcakeCamp?
CupcakeCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and eat cupcakes in an open environment.

It is based on similar principles as other unconferences such as BarCamps and you can find some more information here.

In this instance the plan is also to raise some funds to help out the RSPCA as well as enjoy each other’s company and a cupcake or several.

Check out the website at www.amplify.amp.com.au for the ‘full monty’ on what it is, why they do it, who’s coming and what’s going on.

She’s got a few External Festival Passes available at a cost of $3,000 for unlimited participation, including all workshops (with 19 well known speakers from around the globe).  Registration info is here & program info is here.

A slightly lower cost option is the Technology on Tap night at 5.30 pm, Tuesday 23 June at The Paragon Hotel, Circular Quay- price $10 at the door.

I’m told that Technology on Tap is “a unique opportunity to experience a TED-like event right here in Sydney, without the cost and time investment of international travel”.

Note: @MaverickWoman advises that “AMP makes no profit from these events & the external Festival Pass fees assist in defraying the cost of bringing top international speakers to Sydney”.

At the launch there will be a talk by IT entrepreneur, Bob Hayward, who was recently appointed Chief Technology & Innovation Officer APJ at CSC, on the current state of the IT sector and opportunities for growth.

Since this is the first meeting for this new regional group, prospective members will have the opportunity to network and to explore the benefits of participating in the Cluster.

Might be worth it for ICT businesses, business users of IT, university researchers and people interested in starting an ICT or ICT-related business in the Illawarra to head along for this session.

More info & to RSVP for the launch: http://www.icti.org.au/events

One of the social events that are part of the Connecting Up 09 conference is a Women in IT Brunch at which Jody Mahoney (Vice President, Business Development, at the Anita Borg Foundation) is the guest speaker.

For the uninitiated, the Anita Borg Institute was founded in 1997 by renowned computer scientist Anita Borg, Ph.D. (1949-2003). The Anita Borg Institute seeks to:

• increase the impact of women on all aspects of technology, and
• increase the positive impact of technology on the world’s women.

Cost for the brunch is $65 and it is at 10.30 am on Sunday 10th May 2009 at Brighton Le Sands – registration form is here (opens pdf). Any queries call : +61 2 9280 3677

It’s going to be interesting to see how this idea turns out. In any case there are some interesting answers to the question:

Apart from Telstra, what do you see as the top one or two challenges currently holding back the growth of the digital media industry in Australia?

Answering this question for Digital Bullets #1 are: John Butterworth, Dominic Carosa, Martin Dalgleish, Adam Dunne, Tony Faure, Steve Fanale, Paul Fisher, Guy Gadney, Lee Stephens, Hannah Schwartz, Liam Walsh, Jennifer Wilson and Jenny Williams.

Dear Stranger,

Thank you (I hope) for deciding to follow me on Twitter.

My mamma raised me right and, if she knew what Twitter was, she would have brought me up to at least consider whether I should follow you back. (Mamma might even have thought it would be polite to follow back everyone who chooses to follow me, but mamma liked to drink.)

Stranger, I use Tweetlater to review new followers. Have you tried it? It gives me a snapshot of you. Not the kind you gave to your boyfriend that one time at band camp: a data snapshot. I get to see your description of yourself, your most recent tweet, and your stats (how many people you follow, how many are following you, how many updates you’ve posted and when you joined).

Mamma always said “more haste less speed” but mamma didn’t have the internet. When it comes to Twitter, I’m giving myself five seconds to make my decision about you.

With Tweetlater I can choose to “accept” you. Accepting in this case means I follow you back, not that you’ve finally found someone who understand why you wear women’s clothing, sir. I can also ignore you (you follow me, I don’t follow you), or block you (it just wasn’t meant to be).

Mamma would at least want me to tell you what’s going to make my mind up so here it is.

1. Your description of yourself: Can I see from that why you might be following me? You’re in Australia, you’re interested in social media, you have a sense of humour. Or are you peddling something — God, SEO, weight loss, sex. It’s not necessarily fatal if you are selling something but it has to be something I might want to buy.
2. You have followers. It’s social proof (as the PUAs say), if you’ve got a healthy number of followers. And that number needs to be in proportion to the number of people you’re following. If you’re following 10,000 people and only 20 are following you, Stranger, you’re Norman No Mates and no friend of mine.
3. You’re following a believable number of people. If you joined Twitter a week ago and you’re already following 1,000+ people, you’re obviously undiscerning and haven’t chosen to follow me because you think we might have mutually interesting things to share (I know one of us is interesting of course, so I’ll probably still let you follow me).
4. Your most recent tweet is interesting. This is the least important. You might have heard of the woeful @Scobleizer. I know he’d to think you have. He thinks every tweet should be about business but I respect a work/life balance. Your last tweet knocks you out only if it confirms a doubt arising from the other information. I might forgive you putting your religion up front in your profile (unlikely) but you’re out if your most recent tweet is about letting Jesus into your life. I’m sorry but we’re just not going to get on.

That’s it, Stranger, simple as that. I hope this isn’t goodbye.

Jack
p.s. If I do follow you and you auto-DM me, we’re through.

No news is good news?

I seldom take a train but what I read in the papers supports my little experience: you don’t get much for your tax dollars with Sydney’s trains.

If I ran Sydney’s lamentable railway service I would be falling over myself to help commuters. I might hand out plastic seat covers so they could sit with confidence that their trousers weren’t soaking up last night’s vomit; or I might give them free newspapers so they had something to read other than the smutty  graffiti encouraged by discounted student travel.

What I would not be doing is paying lawyers to menace iPhone app developers who are doing nothing more sinsister than offering rail timetables in a contemporary form. I wouldn’t be doing it for at least three reasons:

Firstly, I’d probably be very, very busy trying to clean up the trains and get them to be punctual. I wouldn’t have time to be threatening commuters and developers with legal action.

Secondly, I’d probably be too embarrassed to spend even more taxpayer money than I already do, especially on lawyers threatening some of the few supporters I do have.

Thirdly, I’d think to myself: hang on, this will save me a dollar or two on developing my own application (see above point about frittering away taxpayers’ money).

“RailCorp‘s primary concern is that our customers receive accurate, up-to-date timetable information,” a spokeswoman said in a statement.

“This includes details of service interruptions, special event services, trackwork and other changes. Third-party RailCorp timetable applications may contain inaccuracies and have the potential to mislead our customers.” via SMH

This is certainly a sensible argument with which one can’t find fault. After all, on the few occasions I have taken the train I have seen RailCorp staff running around with red pens offering to update commuters’ hard copies and printouts of timetables with details of “service interruptions, special events services, trackwork and other changes.” In fact, RailCorp has disabled the “print version” feature of its online timetable so you can never have anything but an up-to-the-minute electronic version. Hang on, no they haven’t, my mistake. But this is all very sensible nonetheless. Really. Why on earth should the public be able to take public information from a public service and make it available to the public? Christ almighty, next step End Times.

Contrast Railcorp’s thick-headed approach to this issue with the Bureau of Meterology‘s enlighted embrace of Graham Dawson’s OzWeather iPhone app. As Graham told our packed-like-a-5.17-commuter-service seminar Entering the Mobile Ecosystem, BOM simply forks over its data to him, no charge, no drama, no issues.

It’s almost as if BOM thinks to itself, “We’re paid for by the public, maybe the information we generate by spending that money should, you know, belong to the public.” Communists.

Maybe, and here’s some real craziness, RailCorp should be spending its time and money making the trains run on time, not worrying the public might be “misled” if iPhone app developers give them access to the published timetable. Or, and now my brain is really starting to hurt, they help these guys to incorporate up-to-the-minute information into the app because it is, you know, web-enabled so that would be an — argh! the pain, the pain! — a win-win.