Intellectual Property

Raising Capital For New Business

Posted by on March 13, 2013 at 10:51 pm

Almost every time I meet someone with a great idea they are so focused on the problems associated with the idea that they lose touch entirely with the fact that the solution comes from raising capital.   If the vision is strong enough there is invariably an infinite amount of capital available to help realize […]

The Shift To E-Publishing

Posted by on March 3, 2013 at 7:53 am

I met with a student last week who is about to join the class that I co-ordinate. I hesitate to use the word teach, because to me the word “teaching” implies that one person tells the other what to do. While I try to impart a huge amount of useful and relevant information to the […]

Innovation: How do you start it? How do you stop it?

Posted by on August 17, 2012 at 7:06 am

Innovation has been a hot topic for quite a while. Recently it seems to have gone mainstream. Companies want to innovate. Universities want to innovate. Governments want to innovate. Why? Because if you are not profitably creating new ways to solve problems, someone else is, another company, another country…. and the ownership of the knowledge […]

X Media Lab And Hyperconnected

Posted by on May 28, 2012 at 5:53 am

In the next month in Sydney there will be a lot of attention on connectivity. First there is the XMediaLab conference and the accompanying workshops to be held at the Sydney Opera House. Then there is a much smaller event to be held at the Sydney Business School – Hyperconnected. Both of them are working […]

Networks, Change and Managable Risk…

Posted by on September 12, 2011 at 6:06 am

A study was recently completed by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute into the smallest number of people that through exerting influence in a network, can bring about change.  Apparently the number is slightly less than 10% – provided that the core base is highly committed and not prepared to change themselves. This has quite significant implications […]

Getting To A Price

Posted by on April 14, 2011 at 10:39 am

So someone calls you up and says that they want to buy your company. You take a deep breath and then say, let’s talk… There are a lot of wrinkles in selling your business. The main one is that most people are so unused to the concept that they stumble at the first fence…. Imagine […]

Allan Caswell and On The Inside

Posted by on May 7, 2010 at 1:50 am

You are an aspiring songwriter, and you get a shot at writing the theme song for a new TV series. It might be successful. It might not. You don’t know, but you do know that the guy who came up with the idea had one of the longest running series in the history of British […]

Beatles Tube

Posted by on April 12, 2010 at 1:06 am

Amazing isn't it…? There are only two major recording artists that are not legally available as digital downloads – one is AC/DC and the other is The Beatles. But someone has now put together all of the Beatles songs and videos into a “YouTube” styled interface so that you can access them all in one […]

The Doppelganger Meme and Copyright

Posted by on February 7, 2010 at 11:14 pm

If you use Facebook you would know that there is a meme that is traveling around it to swap your photo for a photo of a “doppelganger” – someone famous that you look like. It's pretty cool. Suddenly you see pictures of movie stars next to your friend's name and you realize how much they […]

Some Thoughts About The "Downunder" and "Kookaburra" case

Posted by on February 6, 2010 at 10:50 pm

I have been amazed at the outpouring of emotion about the decision by the court last week in favour of Larrikin Music in its plagiarism suit against EMI Music. This is in relation to whether “Downunder”, the iconic Aussie song from Men At Work, infringed “Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree“, the iconic song […]