Murray Woodman

Australians are being pressured financially as resources (water, oil) become more scarce and expensive. There is a confusingly wide range of options available to households and consumers to help them become more green. more…

TV sets are now so massive that they dominate a room completely. A significant proportion of a room is devoted to them. We need to make more of this space. more…

I heard a story on 2BL which was about North Shore (conservative area of Sydney) parents being concerned for their public liability when their children hosted underage parties. They were worried that some children would engage in illegal activities such as underage drinking and drug consumption. They were also very concerned about gate crashers. Apparently some of them were making parents, and possibly minors, sign contracts before being allowed entry to the party. I generalised this and wondered why there weren’t easily maintainable “contract” web sites which could do this kind of stuff. more…

Content Management Systems (CMS) now proliferate. It is now common for content providers to have software that manages and categorises their content assets. Metadata standards now exist (RDF, XTM, RSS). Influential thinkers, such as Tim Berners Lee, have popularised the concept of the semantic web. Standards Organisations (ISO, W3C) have put effort into defining exchange syntax. The groundswell is rising slowly. How do we take advantage of this? more…

There are a few major expenses in a person’s life. We all know of the house and the car but then what? An engagement ring would be pretty high on most people’s list. An average ring can cost around $10000. This kind of outlay makes future husbands a little nervous. They don’t want to make a mistake. A diamond is, after all, for ever. more…

Dot Com boom. Everyone making money for silly things. Growth of the services sector: a virtuous circle. Bankers, accountants, lawyers, consultants, developers all outsourcing and using each other’s services. Big bonuses. Keep staff happy and motivated. Realise that the web can be used as a front end for anything and that if it could organise the previously disjointed then money could be made. For example, uncopyrighted printed directories and inventories had been transformed into online databases which were proving to be very useful. Can we organise masseurs in an online world? more…