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A Series of Tubes #105: Stilgherrian on the iiTrial, the ANAO NBN report, and South Australia’s electoral law; Engin launches hosted SME VoIPFebruary 5th, 2010AFACT didn’t just lose the “#iiTrial” (to give its Twitter name), or “Village Roadshow Pty Ltd vs. iiNet Limited” (to be more formal): it suffered the loss of its favoured strategy, to make ISPs responsible for infringements by its users. What better topic for this week’s discussion with Stilgherrian? Unless, of course, it’s the Australian National Audit Office report into NBN Mk I, or perhaps the “South Australian Government versus the People” – which also get a look in. A Series of Tubes also speaks to Jack McKeon, head of business sales VoIP industry veteran Engin, which this week launched a nice, simple SME hosted VoIP service: you can start just by signing up and plugging a suitably-configured phone into the LAN. A Series of Tubes #104: Welcome to 2010 with Stilgherrian on China and the iThing, Renee Le May on the Launch of DelimiterFebruary 2nd, 2010Well, A Series of Tubes has taken its long break, and now we’re back for 2010. Renee Le May is a long-time Australian IT journalist whose credits include ZDNet and the Australian Financial Review. Now, he’s striking out on his own with an Australian IT wire service called Delimiter. Tubes talks to Le May about where he sees the gaps in the Australian tech press, and the business model he’s using for the service. And greeting Stilgherrian back for the new year, we talk about the global cyber-war (is there any other kind?), and the launch of Apple’s latest assault on consumer wallets and DRM-free content, the iPad. A Series of Tubes #103: Ending 2009 with Cisco on security, Stil on the NBN and the filterDecember 22nd, 2009And so we approach the end of the year, and what a year it’s been! Tubes welcomes its new sponsor, Virtual Offis, and will get the logo added to the site early in the new year. This week, in its last episode for 2009, A Series of Tubes returns to some of its most common themes of the year: security, the NBN and filtering. Under the security heading, we speak with Glenn Welby, IronPort manager for A/NZ for Cicso, about that vendors 2009 Security Report. In particular, Cisco believes that the rise of social media as a security threat signals that it’s time to pay more attention to the human aspects of security. Or, as Tubes might put it, security is a “PICNIC” – Problem In Chair, Not In Computer. And to end the year, Tubes talks about the NBN with Stilgherrian, while on the perennial subject of filtering, we ask what those who advocate Internet freedoms can do to turn it into a question that “Joe Sixpack” cares about? Smart Call #74 – 2009 in reviewDecember 22nd, 2009In this Smart Call, Dr. Catriona Wallace from callcentres.net helps us to look back at 2009. We look at Senator Steven Fielding and the extended Do Not Call Register proposal. Also on the show:
And while we’re here, all at Smart Call wishes our readers and listeners the very merriest of Christmases, and a fabulous 2010! A Series of Tubes #102: Nextgen’s backhaul win, Gov 2.0 with StilgherrianDecember 11th, 2009Well, the year is drawing to a close, and here’s the second-last A Series of Tubes for the year. This week, we talk to Nextgen Networks’ CEO Phil Sykes about the company’s $250 million project to build (and operate for five years) a regional backhaul network that will deliver more than 6,000 of fibre to places far beyond the sandstone curtain. What will the new network mean for competitive broadband in regional Australia – and for the consumers in those regions. And in our second-last chat with Stilgherrian for 2009, Tubes discusses Government 2.0, emerging security vulnerabilities discussed in Verizon Business’ threat survey, and how not to do political Twittering. A Series of Tubes #101: AARNet turns 20; Stilgherrian eats crow and talks about Mininova, and Twittering the news from CanberraDecember 3rd, 2009With the 20th anniversary of AARNet’s first permanent connection to the Internet last week, Tubes took the opportunity to speak with Chris Hancock, CEO of AARNet about the organisation today and in the future. How might the organisation that has been in the vanguard of the Australian Internet look in the future? Tubes regular Stilgherrian admits an error – no, really! – and we also discuss how the political events early this week broke on Twitter, how Mininova has given up on the file-sharing business in the Netherlands, and why Microsoft is trying advertising campaigns to kill off IE6 once and for all. A Series of Tubes #100 (already!): Ericsson ConsumerLabs founder Henrik Palsson, Stilgherrian on Google and TiVO (and other stuff!)November 27th, 2009Henrik Palsson, the founder of Ericsson’s ConsumerLabs research operation and now specialising in emerging markets, is a true believer in the value of telecommunications. A mobile phone, he told Sydney journalists and analysts last week, has an even bigger impact in remote Africa than it has in Sydney or Tokyo. In this live-recorded discussion, Palsson also discusses control over media files, and Ericsson’s vision of a world in which the Internet connects not just six billion people, but fifty billion devices. Tubes regular Stilgherrian talks again about Google-versus-Murdoch, and about the Google-TiVO tie-up and what it means in terms of controlling the devices we use to access the Internet. Smart Call #72 – Electrifying customer serviceNovember 23rd, 2009Sorry for the corny title for this show, but what else can one call a program in which our two interviewees come from Energex and Energy Australia? From Energex, we have Dayle Grant, the company’s Contact Centre Group Manager. Dayle joins us to explain how the company gets ready for summer, when tropical storms, extreme heat and even wildfires can mean that the company gets 100,000 calls an hour from customers anxious to know if they are safe or (when things really go pear-shaped) when electricity will return. Energex has all sorts of interesting tactics to cope with these surges, including a very interesting use of home-based agents. And stick around to the end of the interview when Dayle explains the ROI from these efforts. Our second feature comes from the Right Now summit, which I attended as a guest of the company in early November. At the summit I had the good fortune to be present for a case study delivered by Samantha Forbes, Quality Assurance & Training Manager, Customer Services at Energy Australia. This is one of the best presentations I have ever heard at a call centre conference and details how the company replaced a real dud of a knowledge base with a shiny new one from Right Now at accrued all sorts of benefits along the way. Training time fell, agents became more engaged and customer satisfaction is heading in the right direction. Samantha offers fabulously detailed insights into the company’s change program in this wonderful presentation. A Series of Tubes #99: Vizioncore on Managing Virtualisation, Stil on Acquisitions, Virgin’s Gold Card Twitter-Storm, Murdoch and GoogleNovember 19th, 2009Virtualisation is the life of the party: you can build big systems, make clouds to cover the whole sky, or just reduce the number of boxes needed in an SME. But what about managing virtualisation? Chris Akerberg, president of Vizioncore, talks to Tubes about his company’s latest ereleases. And in Tubes’ regular chat with regular Stilgherrian, we look at the TPG-Pipe acquisition, how Virgin Mobile’s e-mail became a Twitter-storm of whinging, hyping Twitter in Iran, and the looming and growing stoush between Google and Rupert Murdoch. There have, by the way, been some hosting issues at A Series of Tubes, and Episode 98 seems to be off the radar. You can, however, still hear it here. Smart Call # 70 – Travel and analytics advance agentsNovember 14th, 2009On this show, we have a look at two unusually advanced ways to improve agent performance. The first comes in our main presentation, which comes from Paul Cahill, General Manager Customer Service at Internet Service Provider iiNet, which operates contact centres in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Paul explains how iiNet works to build a consistent culture across these three nations. One tactic: sending staff abroad so they can experience its centres in other nations, share experiences and make sure everyone delivers consistently. Our second feature is a sponsor interview with Fergal Murphy, IBM Global Business Services’ Senior Managing Consultant for Business Analytics & Optimisation. Fergal joins us to explain Analytics Optimised Routing (AOR), a new technology from IBM that applies analytics to the task of routing. The idea behind AOR is that skills-based routing is great, but if you can route to an agent whose personality and lifestyle matches the caller’s, they’ll be more empathetic and you’ll get better results. Fergal explains the genesis of AOR and offers a case study to explain its benefits. |
