by cameron | Dec 14, 2006 | Melbourne, Melbourne's Leaders, Podcast
This is the second show in my series of interviews with Melbourne’s top business and government leaders that I’m calling “Melbourne’s Top Dogs“. On this show, I’m very fortunate to interview Simon McKeon, Executive Chairman of the Melbourne office of Macquarie Bank, aka “The Millionaire Factory”, Australia’s premier investment bank.
Simon is an inspiring bloke. Not only has he risen from humble beginnings at Dandenong East Primary School through to the top of Australia’s corporate ranks, he’s also a genuine social activist. Five years ago, at the age of 45, Simon went part-time at Macquarie Bank to focus more of his energy on other pursuits – such as his role as a Director of World Vision, Chairman of corporate social responsibility organisation Melbourne Cares, chairing the Australian Federal Government’s takeover panel and volunteering as a counselor to heroin addicts at a St Kilda clinic. Oh and he is also a world champion speed sailor.
During the interview we talked about his background, his motivations, how he handles criticism, and how important empathy is in his dealings with people.
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The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me†by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.
by cameron | Dec 11, 2006 | Podcast, science, Uncategorized
I’m listening to the New Scientist Magazine’s podcast interview with Richard Dawkins. It’s really interesting stuff and it looks like a bunch of secular scientists from around the world are getting ready for the latest round in the Great War between Science and Religion for the minds of the human race. I’m personally one who agrees with Dawkins that the battle needs ramping up.
Speaking of religion… Father Bob Maguire wants me to help him set up a webcam in his church to record his Christmas Eve sermon. He’s the one priest I don’t mind helping out. Does anyone have any recommendations for a good webcam which could capture a high-res image inside a church? We need to somehow set up a simple capture system that Bob’s people can operate. They will need to be able to focus, capture, save the file, and then I’ll help them figure out how to upload it to our servers.
by cameron | Dec 6, 2006 | Uncategorized
I’ve uploaded a copy of the presentation I’m delivering this afternoon at Digital Media 2.0. You can check it out here. Not sure it’ll make much sense without my witty comments that go along with it though.
by cameron | Dec 6, 2006 | Melbourne, Uncategorized
Roo have been around 4 years. Have penetrated most of major video publishers around the world. In Australia, they work with News, Sensis and SBS very closely. Their profile in the US is much higher than it is in Australia. Locally they white box their services to other publishers. They enable activation, marketing and distribution of digital media video over multiple platforms. Started in Caulfield in Melbourne 4 years ago with three people. Publicly listed in 2003 on NASDAQ. The core of the vision has always been that the internet is becoming a media distribution platform that needs to be paid for by advertising. Now have a customer base of 100+ Fortune companies. Currently serving 60M+ streams per month. According to comScore Sept stats, ROO ranks as #8 video streaming service by volume in the world. YouTube throw $5 – 6 million a week at bandwidth costs. (Cam’s note: That’s…. $20 – 24M a month! $250M+ a year! Holy cow.)
by cameron | Dec 6, 2006 | Uncategorized
Sigrid Kirk, Group Publisher, and Tom Quinn, CTO, from News.com.au are the second session here this morning. It’s more of a moderated discussion with Bill Dawes as moderator.
They started by saying that while News has been at the digital game as long as their competitors, they haven’t really “attacked” it as hard as they could have. That, however, is changing fast.
News Lab is a new site they have where they are experimenting with new services they are trialling. They are prepared to experiment and see what works. They have been very pleased with the success of their blogs.
Their biggest challenge is to take their 3000 hard-bitten old world journalists and move them into the new world but they have been surprised at how keen to get involved in the new space many of their people have been. The challenge then is to skill those people up.
Focusing very much of RSS for the future. Starting to experiment more with AJAX. They also see video as very important and have been pleased with how their relationship with ROO Networks has delivered content for them. They were able to put their toe in the water with video pretty quickly and get access to lots of content.
Tom talked a bit about their approach to capacity planning. Steve Irwin’s death created so much traffic on News’ sites it was 3x their previous peak. Peter Brock’s death was 2x their previous peak.
Adelaide Now is a new site which is an online version of News’ Adelaide masthead which is a weekly newspaper but is now producing news daily for the site. They also have Perth Now. Local content they see as being very important in the future.
They have a small multimedia team but are planning on ramping it up soon. They will produce their own video content and make them available to the entire News network. They want to produce as much of their own video as possible but it’s very expensive so they plan to source it from a wide variety of sources, including UGC.
Rod Tobin from their multimedia team said they are currently streaming using Windows Media but want to move to Flash. One reason is that people are watching the video from work and employers are taking media players off corporate PCs.
They see UGC as fairly resource intensive as they need to have people on staff monitoring the content for defamation, etc. Here’s something I didn’t know – MySpace have rooms of people in Puerto Rico monitoring everything that goes up onto MySpace. 40,000 videos a day are uploaded and they have to check every one?
Tom confirmed that advertising dollars are moving from print and TV to online and readership of newspapers is declining year on year. And while they advertising rates online are lower than in print, the costs of production and distribution are lower as well.
