I attended the end of year AIIA briefing last week. While I don't normally attend such a ICT industry business gathering, I couldn't resist this time, as the speaker lineup was just too good to miss:

  • Roger Allen, Executive Director, Allen & Buckeridge
  • Pippa Leary, Product and Marketing Director, Fairfax Digital
  • Ted Pretty, Senior Consultant, Macquarie Bank
  • Alex Zelinsky, Director, CSIRO ICT Centre

The event totally lived up to my high expectation, and I walked away with some wonderful wisdom/experience/industry insights from the 4 speakers, and I'm going to record some of my notes/quotes from the event so that I can come back at the end of 2007 and see how many of these observations/predictions still is/came true:

  • Web 2.0 is not about providing content, it's about providing 'context' for others to provide content/have enabled interactions; user participation is the killer app of Web2.0; also key are personalisation, semantic clustering, mashups; but to do all these effectively, the hard core backend content management system and architecture needs to be in place to support all of this and enable the management of a variety of digital formats
  • expect the following from the near future - pervasive wireless connectivity, storage becoming ubiquitous and personalised, leading to mobile workforce, network becomes the platform, information overload will be coming to an end, 'things' will get smarter...
  • Power of the internet is not just for social interaction, but as tool for political change, used to mobilise mass's opinion
  • future investment areas include bioscience, digital media, security/identity management, mobility, smart home

There were also some interesting guidances for those running an enterprise: 

  • go to a consumer electronic show for a change, that's where the action is
  • watch how your teenager works and plays
  • cater for your new workforce as they become more and more mobile
  • enterprise cannot stay closed shop to blogs, web services architecture is opening things up, you need to be at least aware
  • corporate and governments are lagging by a lot even compared to our 'home', need to get clued up about Web 2.0 as that's how you need to communicate with your employees and customers