You’d think legal judgments were about making things clearer. However, today the Australian legal system managed to blur and confuse some key areas with potentially serious ramifications for cloud storage providers. The Full Federal Court has acted to overturn an earlier decision in relation to the legality of the Optus TV Now service (a mobile app providing consumer access to sporting events underpinned by a "cloud" service).
Not so long ago, leading-edge tech innovation was the domain of large enterprises, corporations and government departments – companies that could afford the high capital expenditure required with its long-term return and payoff.
Moneyball is a movie about the Oakland Athletics baseball team, who won an astonishing league-best 103 games in 2002 with a payroll of just $40m. That’s the same number of wins as the New York Yankees – a team with triple Oakland’s payroll. The story also has lessons for those of us in business – especially those involved in IT decision making and things like cloud computing.
No man is an island, no business a walled garden. And, increasingly, no piece of technology can stand alone if it wants to be useful in today’s world. Convergence isn’t just a buzzword at IT conferences; it’s been going on for centuries. Whether it is people converging into symbiotic living and working environments (cities) or business models increasingly integrated into communities and with each other (after all, isn’t that what B2B is?) everything seems to evolve closer and closer linkages over time.
Time: the weekend of November 19th and 20th. Place: Melbourne. And so the stage was set for an epic battle: Android vs. iOS. No holds barred, 24 hours to create a functional mobile app from scratch. No networking or business people about, the event was strictly for devs in a competition not for the feint of heart.
