By Andrew Milroy

In the past year or so, it has been amazing to witness organisations finding ways of using social media to engender innovation and creativity.  By offering employees full access to these tools, innovative use of applications like Twitter and Facebook can come from all parts of the organisation.  Restricting access to social media risks placing an organisation at a competitive disadvantage.

These tools can be used in an enormous variety of ways.  They can support and enable common business processes such as sales, marketing, customer services and recruitment.  In addition, they can even support industry specialists that seek to improve the ways in which they do things.  Specialists in industries from aeronautical engineering to zoology are finding ways of using social media to support, enhance and transform their business activities.

I recently met up with an ex-colleague who now works for Carnival Australia, a cruise company.  To most people, it is not obvious how Carnival might use social media for business purposes.  But, some creative and innovative individuals within the company have found ways of using Facebook to enhance customer service and improve customer experience.  In addition to setting up pages that are used broadly for marketing purposes, Carnival also sets up Facebook pages for each cruise.  Customers of the cruise are then invited to ‘like’ the group for their cruise.  On the page, they can share information with other customers and with Carnival employees.  Discussions commence in which customers can gain information relating to their cruise, from peers in addition to corporate information from Carnival.  So far, Carnival has found that this feature is popular with their customers and the company believes that it improves customer experience significantly.

Given that there is clear evidence of social media tools, including Facebook, being used for innovation and to increase productivity, why do some companies continue to use web filtering tools to restrict employee access to social media?  The short and polite answer is that the people who make these decisions often have very little understanding of the relationship between business and technology.  In the 1980s, when spreadsheets were first widely used, some myopic employers were concerned that their employees would spend too much time using spreadsheets for personal use such as creating shopping lists.  A similar argument was used if we go further back to the widespread introduction of the telephone in the work place.

Telstra’s response to the Bill wasn’t a big surprise to Ovum. Telstra has been engaged in behind-closed-doors discussions with the Government on the future of the industry and the NBN. The objective of these talks is a “win-win” outcome for the Government and Telstra. This is where the issues will really be addressed, not in the to-and-fro of the public debate.

Cisco is offering approximately $3 billion for Tandberg stock, an 11% premium on the latest trading price and a three times multiple of revenues. If the deal is completed, Tandberg’s current CEO will head up the group’s worldwide telepresence business – he will be responsible for two-thirds of the telepresence estate in enterprise global services.

The Government’s strategy on separation is to make Telstra an offer it cannot refuse. Separate yourself, or have separation done for you.

The dilemma facing both fixed and mobile next generation network builders is the current and foreseeable gap between network costs and the revenues that can be captured by the network business. Even in the absence of regulation, the shift to IP based networks has seen an increasing commoditisation of network services. New services are being enabled, but the benefits are largely being captured either by end customers or the retail service providers.

Mobile broadband is now driving almost all the growth in the mobile industry in Australia. With incredible connection growth of 120% year-on-year there were 2.2million ‘big-screen’ mobile broadband connections in June-2009. This means on average 1 in 10 Australia’s has a mobile broadband connection.

Several news outlets have reported multiple undersea cable breaks around Southeast Asia occurring on 12 August 2009. Due to the depths of the water and the fact that – according to various reports and quoted cable operators - multiple cables have been affected, the most likely cause is undersea seismic activity (i.e. earthquakes).