I read the other day that Best Western hotels have announced the loss of 8 millions personal records from their database. Records included customer names, private addresses, credit card details and more. Apparently an Indian hacker gained access to the Best Western systems and sold the information to the Russian mob.
Which nicely dovetails with something I was going to write about the awesome new start-up Airbed@Breakfast, a service that was set up to;
enable people to earn money by renting out extra space, and offer travellers a viable alternative to hotels.
I love the concept of AB&B, it’s simple and relies on good old fashioned traits of honesty, hospitality and friendship. AB&B explain how their service works by saying;
It’s simple. Nice folks, folks like you, list their guest rooms, futons, and even couches on the site and set a price per night. Adventurous travellers looking for a place to stay can search the listings for an accommodation that’s just right. When they find a match, guests can book your room via credit card. You receive a notification to check out their profile, and decide if the guest is appropriate for your pad. When you accept a guest, contact information is exchanged, itineraries emailed, and the transaction is completed confirming the reservation.
I love it - and best of all you don’t need to worry about dodgy hackers getting your personal information!
Good to see TC CEO Allan Freeth out and tearing at the dogma that comes from the broadband ideologues - his point seems to be forget fibre to the home (FTTH) concentrate on Fibre to the node or Fibre to the business.
I gotta say I agree - I’ve had so many people preach at me about instant 10% productivity gains with widespread fibre rollouts that it makes me shake to hear - where’s the empirical evidence I say?
No - the real issue to me is that my buddy - who runs three or four good sized SMEs, can’t get DSL at his house on 30 minutes from Christchurch - let’s forget pipe dreams about Fibre to the home and concentrate on a dual strategy of allover coverage of reasonable DSL and targeted fibre to particular areas that justify it.
And for those that want fibre and aren’t in a targeted area, the Canadians (did I mention my soft spot for Canadians - have a solution - a great partnership between homeowners and the telcos - nice)
I can’t help but comment on the hugely underwhelming version 2 of the digital strategy. As reported in the dominion post, the minster believes we are at no risk of having “inspiration fatigue”. I’d tend to agree….
* 80 percent of households will have 20 megabit per second broadband connections.
* “Open access” fibre networks will be operating in at least 15 cities.
* Fewer than 5 percent of household computers should be infected with computer viruses or malware.
* Three-quarters of advertised ICT job vacancies should be filled, up from just over half last year.
* Teleworking will cut the number of commutes to work by car by 5 percent
Just how this is going to benefit us economically is left out. Cunliffe does think that the massive investments going into making fast broadband available will be used though.
“Just ask any young New Zealander if they are fatigued by the digital world and they will say, ‘Can I get another 20 megabits of bandwidth, Dad, and get out of my way because I want to talk to my friends on Facebook’.”
Coincidently Alan Freeth came out today with a much more pragmatic view of what all this fast internet will be used for….
the main result of faster broadband links to the home may be more downloads of pornography and movies rather than improvements to productivity
Until we build support multinational digital businesses i’d have to agree. This to me is the bit lacking in the digital strategy, where is the money going to come from
The biggest benefit of SaaS, as I see it, isn’t the fact that it’s available online and anywhere. Rather it’s the added value that connectivity brings.
A great example of what this can mean in practice comes from the Xero update which came out today. Xero now allows a couple of interesting features;
Click to (Skype) call
Unified Communications (UC) is the way of the future. Imagine being able to click to call, to SMS or to Skype from within your application. Xero has gone half way there with the roll out of click to Skype functionality. Of course it only works when the receiving party has Skype - and it’s be nice to see some functionality for IM or traditional calling - but it’s a step very much in the right direction.
Contact Links
Xero also added the ability to build own custom links to a CRM system directly from within the app. Users can set up Contact Links under their Organisation settings. Xero has also created a link builder that reportedly makes it easy to match contact fields inside Xero to other systems.
It’s good to see some of the network, and networked effects coming through from Xero - still a long way to go but they’re getting there
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