Hard News by Russell Brown

I'm part of the Digital Inclusion panel at 4pm on Wednesday which I am looking forward to. Anyone who's attending, do say hi any time during the three days - I look like my Twitter avatar (for now).

I feel I should go to these things to help ny career, but have this massive aversion to standing in a room balancing a sandwich and a glass of wine while chatting to a bunch of (almost entirely) blokes who I don't know.

(I used to go to expos in Europe when I was doing sales support - that was better as we went in a gang and had a booth area to hang out/nest in).

My suggestion for anyone gregarious wanting a start up business is a networking service for the curmudgeonly - you fill a form in with what you want to achieve and who you'd like to meet, and they rep for you and set up some coffee dates, job interviews or whatever.

It's mainly group discussion sessions and presentations rather than schmoozing (couple of specific 'networking' sessions in the programme). Certainly not a trade expo.

Twitter stream may also give some idea of the different people attending.

Certainly not a trade expo.

Anything but.

I'm on the economic opportunities panel on Friday morning, sharing lessons from our fast-growing video games export sector.

However, I'm just as passionate about how we can beef up e-learning, e-health and citizen engagement using games and game techniques. We get a lot of our digital literacy from games and games are the early adopters of many new approaches

For me, NetHui is about connecting with diverse Internet stakeholders and users, not just the 'usual suspects'.

InternetNZ has released twin reports on the economic impact of the internet in New Zealand, from Infometrics and NZIER.

Since you mention the TPPA, there was the ars technica artical the other day on the change in U.S. language around copyright (linking the change to ACTA getting the slapdown in Europe)

article

The sheer virtuosity of modern conference presentations is a thing to behold.

Comic Sans, amirite...

Did you hear about when Dracula got management consultants in? They said he needed to interact more with stakeholders....

Since you mention the TPPA, there was the ars technica artical the other day on the change in U.S. language around copyright (linking the change to ACTA getting the slapdown in Europe)

Meanwhile the Granny is going all, “The TPPA Is Here To Help Deliver You To Greater Prosperity”.

Already, NZ's ICT sector is coming out against it in its present form. If worst comes to worst, I hope they do a Wikipedia-esque Black Out.

Meanwhile the Granny is going all, “The TPPA Is Here To Help Deliver You To Greater Prosperity”.

What a thoroughly mad argument.

No worries, folks! We can just sign the agreement then ignore it! What could go wrong?

Had a skim. They don't mention the impact of the Internet in enabling the fisking of ridiculous concepts like "consumer surplus" (this prices goods and services we have today in terms of what people would have paid for them at a historical point. For instance, one might ascribe a huge value to an airline ticket, on the grounds than someone in 1850 might have given a huge amount to travel to NZ in a day of relative comfort, rather than months on a leaky sailing ship with a 10% mortality rate. Then, you regard that value as actual money, so by being able to fly to the UK without dying of typhus, we have "earnt" many years of wages, subjected of course to inflators, deflators and fudge factors).

Also, if the Internet contributed so much to economic growth, why was growth mostly faster in the decade *before* internet access became widespread? (I use US growth as a proxy - that country probably has the highest level of Internet adoption).

No worries, folks! We can just sign the agreement then ignore it! What could go wrong?

“In doing so, the Washington Post says:

“Mr. Zoellick calculated that flawed trade deals are better than none, so he went ahead with Australia. It is true that Australian tariff cuts will boost U.S. manufactured exports. But the Australian sugar sham sends a signal to protectionists: The Bush administration will cave if you say “boo” to it. After the Central American pact promised the region a tiny crack of access to the U.S. sugar market, the lobby went into high gear to prevent a repeat with Australia. Now the lobby has won. The world’s poor farmers who are waiting for a chance to export their way out of poverty will be the losers, as will shoppers in your local supermarket.”

So America instantly gets 99 percent tariff free access to Australia, and in 2022 we get to sell them some cattle ( I prefer an 18 year old single malt with my steak, not a Scotch with my 18 year old steak), and the farmers of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Florida keep the milk and sugar out of the trade equations. ”

What a thoroughly mad argument

it's our government's one, coincidentally.

(I use US growth as a proxy - that country probably has the highest level of Internet adoption).

It's 27th.