Make 2016 the year The Cloud works for you

We've heard so much about Cloud Computing over the last 4 years that this weird term has quickly become a part of our vernacular. Everything digital is increasingly "in the cloud".  How can we make it work for us?

Your photos are likely on Apple's photo storage site, your address book is up there too, via your phone. Gee even your relationships and private opinions are most likely archived in FaceBook's cloud for you.

If you think about it all of this has kind of happened without us making much of a decision about it.

Perhaps it's now time to do a little thinking about "The Cloud" and what you want in it, what you don't want in it and how it could work for you.

The most obvious advantages of the cloud are the ability to access your work from anywhere with an internet connection. The other being your ability to be able to share your work with others.
Both these features of cloud computing open up a world of flexibility in how a business works.

You can easily have people work from home or outsource a task to someone by giving them access to your cloud systems for the period of their engagement. This alone can vastly reduce costs.

Cloud systems are however very reliant on reliable broadband connections that are fast and inexpensive. While this is available to many people, it is still an issue for many locations. Fortunately most cloud systems now have phone apps that allow you to do your business on your phone.

One of the most robust and useful of cloud systems is now called Google Apps for Work - This is very similar to Google's free versions delivered through gmail. The difference is you can operate all through your own domain name instead of Google's. You also get a higher storage capacity for documents in this paid version.

The pricing is reasonable at between $10-15 per month per email account. Which is very similar to Microsoft's own cloud app offering.

Who’s to blame when artificial intelligence systems go wrong?

Republished via:

1. by Gary Lea
   Visiting Researcher in Artificial Intelligence Regulation at Australian National University
2. There has been much discussion of late of the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), especially regarding robot weapons development and a related but more general discussion about AI as an existential threat to humanity.

   If Skynet of the Terminator movies is going to exterminate us, then it seems pretty tame – if not pointless – to start discussing regulation and liability. But, as legal philosopher John Donaher has pointed out, if these areas are promptly and thoughtfully addressed, that could help to reduce existential risk over the longer term.

   In relation to AI, regulation and liability are two sides of the same safety/public welfare coin. Regulation is about ensuring that AI systems are as safe as possible; liability is about establishing who we can blame – or, more accurately, get legal redress from – when something goes wrong.

   The finger of blame

   Taking liability first, let’s consider tort (civil wrong) liability. Imagine the following near-future scenario. A driverless tractor is instructed to drill seed in Farmer A’s field but actually does so in Farmer B’s field.

   Let’s assume that Farmer A gave proper instructions. Let’s also assume that there was nothing extra that Farmer A should have done, such as placing radio beacons at field boundaries. Now suppose Farmer B wants to sue for negligence (for ease and speed, we’ll ignore nuisance and trespass).

   Is Farmer A liable? Probably not. Is the tractor manufacturer liable? Possibly, but there would be complex arguments around duty and standard of care, such as what are the relevant industry standards, and are the manufacturer’s specifications appropriate in light of those standards? There would also be issues over whether the unwanted planting represented damage to property or pure economic loss.

   So far, we have implicitly assumed the tractor manufacturer developed the system software. But what if a third party developed the AI system? What if there was code from more than one developer?

   Over time, the further that AI systems move away from classical algorithms and coding, the more they will display behaviours that were not just unforeseen by their creators but were wholly unforeseeable. This is significant because foreseeability is a key ingredient for liability in negligence.

   To understand the foreseeability issue better, let’s take a scenario where, perhaps only a decade or two after the planting incident above, an advanced, fully autonomous AI-driven robot accidentally injures or kills a human and there have been no substantial changes to the law. In this scenario, the lack of foreseeability could result in nobody at all being liable in negligence.

   Blame the AI robot

   Why not deem the robot itself liable? After all, there has already been some discussion about AI personhood and possible criminal liability of AI systems.

   But would that approach actually make a difference here? As an old friend said to me recently:

   Will AI systems really be like Isaac Asimov’s Bicentennial Man – obedient to the law, with a moral conscience and a hefty bank balance?

   Leaving aside whether AI systems can be sued, AI manufacturers and developers will probably have to be put back into the frame. This might involve replacing negligence with strict liability – liability applied without any need to prove fault or negligence.

   Strict liability already exists for defective product claims in many places. Alternatively there could be a no fault liability scheme with a claims pool contributed to by the AI industry.

   Rules and regulations

   On the regulatory side, development of rigorous safety standards and establishing safety certification processes will be absolutely essential. But designing and operating a suitable framework of institutions and processes will be tricky.

   AI expert input will be needed in establishing any framework because of the complexity of the area and the general lack of understanding outside the AI R&D community. This also means that advisory committees to legislatures and governments should be established as soon as possible.

   Acknowledging that there are potentially massive benefits to AI, there will be an ongoing balancing act to create, update and enforce standards and processes that maximise public welfare and safety without stifling innovation or creating unnecessary compliance burdens.

   Any framework developed will also have to be flexible enough to take account of both local considerations (the extent of own production versus import of AI technology in each country) and global considerations (possible mutual recognition of safety standards and certification between countries, the need to comply with any future international treaties or conventions etc).

   So as we travel down the AI R&D path, we really need to start shaping the rules surrounding AI, perhaps before it’s too late.

   We’ve already started discussions around driverless cars – see here and here – but there’s so much more to deal with when it comes to AI.

   What do we do next? Over to you.
3. 
   
4.  Republished under Creative Commons — Attribution/No derivatives licence.

Elephants and strippers love bitcoin

The internet has always been an elephant in most board rooms. It's big, popular, sometimes ugly and very energetic. The internet elephant uses more bandwidth than all the financial sector put together. Grows faster than a gold mine and adopts radically new business forms every few years. Though one nut the internet has found hard to crack is a simple universal micro payment method. Until now. The digital economy may just about to become turbo-charged.


A relatively new way we can feed jumbo is with a virtual currency and early indications show it's working a treat.

As is so often the case online, look to the online sex industry for an answer to a challenge.
Interestingly the digital porn industry has been suffering from it's own popularity. There are more terabytes dedicated to erotica that anything else. More importantly once a photo or film is taken it's replicated easily by hundreds of others who increasingly dilute the market and drive down the value of a "popular body of work". So much so that most 'bodies of work' are now free. The only commodity left is 'live' shows. These are strip shows where the viewers can login after paying, then 'chat' with the performer, who can choose to interact or ignore the heated banter. How though does the performer get paid?

Enter the challenge of quick, fast and relatively anonymous online micro payments.
Bitcoin and it's sister virtual currencies have recently gained a foothold, fast becoming seriously popular and useful. In the case of live shows it makes good sense to quickly transfer an entry fee to the performer and watch for a fixed time. This is happening too in the live online gaming space with platforms like Twitch.TV broadcasting live games to interested viewers around the world.

It's relatively easy to set up a Bitcoin wallet, there are several providers out there - once you've set that up you have a unique address to send payments to and of course ways to send requests to a bitcoin currency exchange to cash them out in 'real money'.

With the US reserve accepting that Bitcoin is now a semi-legitimate currency isn't time to feed the elephant with virtual 'nuts'. Weird, perhaps but it's happening and growing in popularity.

The author makes no apologises for using such huge, nutty metaphors about elephants. Instead he strongly suggests a small online payment to:

SavetheElephants.org 

Images are used under a Creative Commons licence via WikiCommons.org from their respective owners. Click on images to view sources.

Lorde: A Weather Vane for Social Media Culture

A 16 year old New Zealander, Lorde has shot to unprecedented popularity in the global music race recently, topping the US & UK charts. She's a phenomenon that may be a much broader weather vane, signalling a wind of change in the online world. Challenging one of the founding tenements of the current pack of social media platforms; love of self. If so, teenagers like Lorde will again lead change as in the 50s & 60s.

There is evidence in Lorde's poetic song texts that indeed she may be heralding a major shift in our explosive interest in self focussed social media. If the popularity of of her online downloads and messaging is anything to go by this young woman may have pointed out one of those great shifts in online behaviour. One towards a desire for a more constructive, collaborative online reality.

Lorde. A weather vane? Pic by Thatboyrion

Lorde, AKA Ella Yelich-O'Connor is a particularly astute representative of her generation, in her own words she's no white teeth teen. A lover of poetry thanks to her mother and of music thanks to her father seems to have provided the ideal environment for a positive artistic questioning of the popular paradigm.

Her first & incredibly popular album named the double entendre 'Pure Heroine' is laced with strong subtexts that the(her) digitally native generation is tiring of looking at glam bang social media posts & ads.
Forbes magazine journalist Liv Buli (@lbuli), a specialist in online data analysis of the music industry published a revealing insight into Lorde's popularity last month in @Forbes. In it she cites an explosive weekly download from Sound Cloud of 825,000 for one song on the album Royals. A song with a strong generational critique of contemporary glamour culture with words like ".. That love just ain't for us, we crave a different kind of buzz" and "My friends and I have cracked the code". There seems to be an emerging commitment to working together for something more real, more satisfying in her texts.

Maybe her prophetic words "We're on each other's team" is a deeper cry for people to work together collaboratively rather than endlessly shout and brag to each other through contemporary social media sites.

Whether her honest observational song lines are game changing influences like Bill Haley's '54 recording of Rock Around the Clock is a matter for the future, Lorde's early popularity suggests she may very well be. It is possible that in being supercharged by today's internet world, her change could be more influential and spread more quickly than in the 50s & 60s.

The internet with it's ability to connect people together certainly can spread cultural change quicker than at other times in history. The internet constantly seems to surprise us. Who would have imagined a FaceBook or a YouTube being a billion people strong in such a short time. Or that Social Media would be a part of national revolutions. Though pretending that the online world will always look the way it does at the moment is foolhardy at best.
Lorde's "I'm kinda over being told to throw my hands up in the air" and "all my fake friends and all of their noise" or "Maybe the internet raised us" taps into a feeling for change in the way teenagers perceive things. Perhaps in much the way teenagers of the 60s used the music of their age to change the prevailing culture.

If the seeds of change are germinating online we should not expect to predict it with specifics. Instead we should be ready for the change by reading the shifting winds, expecting to find the signs in unusual places. Perhaps in the musical poetry from teenagers is a place to keep an eye on.

I'm not sure of the exactness of the sort of changes that will happen, yet there's a sense of a new examination of reality and how the internet can help better reflect that. It's early days, though research & development that OI's been conducting point to a desire emerging of a more collaborative context. A context that creates a more satisfying online reality. Granted a new reality may seem impossibly small as I write. The all consuming strength of FaceBook, YouTube & Twitter are pervasive.

To paraphrase Lorde's song Still Sane "I maybe little but I'm coming for the crowd". That crowd may very well be turning toward a renewed online reality as her songs suggest. If that is the case we've all got a lot to look forward to from her generation and the online tools that they will use.

In the mean time download and/or listen to Pure Heroine

Dave Abrahams
@digitdave - @OrganiseInt

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Search Gravity rules revealed

Search Gravity™

When Isaac Newton founded his ideas about gravity under the apple tree little did he know that in the new cyber world the same rules would apply.

While 'gravity' may seem a strange way of approaching the impact of your online assets. It's one of those concepts that makes more sense the more you work with it.

OI Organise Internet's successful search methodology is focussed around the realities and rules of online gravity. "We've been developing this methodology for 10 years now and it works. The methodology helps us keep ahead in the often shady world of SEO" Says Dave Abrahams, Principal Consultant of OI Organise Internet an specialist Australian search innovation firm.
Clearly the firm isn't going to reveal it's latest innovations it is keen to spread the word about their  research & development.

The first rule of Search Gravity™ is about QUALITY. 

We make clear to all our clients that when they are building assets in cyber space they need to be quality assets, everything from websites, Social media, videos, blogs needs to be good quality. Using dodgy tricks to attract hits, likes etc simply ruins your online reputation and effectively acts like anti-matter. Likewise poor marketing efforts degrade your organisation, poor grammar and oversized images have negative effects too. Quality is the magic formula of the building gravity in cyber space. Quality differentiates you from the space junk and white noise out there online.

The second rule of Search Gravity™ is about creating MASS.

To use an obvious pun "It's not rocket science" to create online or cyber mass. It is however difficult to achieve in any organisation. Competing agendas and diverse responsibility chains make the task a challenge. You really need to establish common links and reference rules .This will sew together an organisation's assets and not tear them apart. For example when the Marketing department launch a new Social Media campaign they may be inadvertently diluting your online mass by creating parallel offerings. "We see this a lot in our business" says Abrahams "Many campaigns have different names and syntax to the original product or service. The names may seem cool but they play into the hands of competitors who can take over a top search ranking".

Rule three of Search Gravity™ is about Attraction & Acquisition

Just like any aspiring planet you need to attract mass to get bigger. In the cyber world this can be facilitated by partnering with organisations that not only link to your offerings; blogs, product specials or campaigns but also apply the quality and mass rules that you've created previously.
"We often negotiate on behalf of clients with third parties for positive cyber partnerships. Naturally it's up to the clients to sign off on the partnerships but more often than not this works out to be mutually beneficial" says Dave "In some cases we've even started partnerships that lead to mergers or buy outs"

These are OI's three rules of creating Search Gravity™. Sure they are not the sort of thing that NASA will be adopting anytime soon but gee they are an easy way to conceptualise, organise and report to clients. We're developing new tools and techniques all the time that use these metrics and methodologies. Feel free to talk to us about advanced ideas or campaigns.

Is your CMS a hand brake?

Using a content management system of CMS to manage you organisation's web information is a no brainer, yet are yesterday's CMS really keeping up with your demands?
Content management is such an amorphous term these days, as is the case with so many tech terms CMS has become an anagram with it's own life. The CMS has joined such capitalised giants like OS , SMS, FTP & PC. The CMS used to do what it stood for, 'managing content', simple, easy to understand and a great step forward from direct coding of html. The CMS used to be a small miracle too, in that it opened up the editing of online content to an army of new players to use and publish. Content expanded massively as a result, as witnessed by blogs and wikis. Content production exploded! Indeed it could be argued that today's social media systems are simply great big CMS with some pepper and spice thrown in. Revealing the publisher's long held secret that people love news and  people love an audience, even if it's their own 'virtual' audience.
These days you can sign up and grab a free CMS from a myriad of open source or commercial sources. Weird and wonderful names such as Drupal, Joomla, DotNetNuke, Liferay and Moodle have established footholds in their geography of the internet. WikiPedia, itself a BIG CMS lists dozens of CMSs. WordPress indeed has become de rigour on the web as a open source industry in it's own right. With the ever promising 'template' producers selling a million look and feels (strangely never quiet what we're looking for).

Though as we've discovered over the years a CMS is only a starting point to an online strategy it's not an end point!

From humble CMS to Super CMS

A CMS can be also be a full business process re-engineering tool. It can be the basis for everything from customer feedback and reporting to an intranet style form replacement for tablet of mobile computing. More advanced functions that allow complex data flow or financial calculations can harness the use of cloud computing. Then a CMS can be used to closely integrate with your existing internal or external data systems.

Fast, Flexible Alternative to off the shelf

OI has been researching and developing it's CMS Syntara for 6 years as a alternative to off the shelf CMS packages. It's been built for extreme flexibility of use, enabling it to effectively become an innovation platform without the full expense of a pure coded application.


A team of developers and business analysts are constantly improving and developing Syntara through the latest technology research and feedback from the pool of trusted clients. What other system is improved on a weekly basis with upgrades and updates happening automatically? Features of Syntara include:
• control: full add/ edit/ view/ delete control over all data records
• usability: search, quick-find, backup and restore
• integration: full import/ export capabilities, links into your existing website, can integrate into your current PC-based systems
• website: full WYSIWYG editors, email, website and performance statistics, file upload and an image library
• communications: integral email and SMS communications, post, scheduled communications, and complete transaction logs
• administrative: reporting, concurrent users, multiple user permissions levels
• calendar: with weekly and month activity views, transaction and activity logs, task and project scheduling
• secure: firewall and IP restrictions, user passwords and definable access levels
• invoicing: sending via email or post, scheduled and automated invoicing and payment reminders, recurring billing, and MYOB / Xero integration
• Streaming video or video on demand integration
• Full cross device interoperability - tablet, phone of specialist device.
• Plus more… with much more to come.

If your CMS is not keeping up with your demands, it may be worth considering a transition to a secure, fast and flexible system such as Syntara.