Daily load of crap Awards
Well today is a red letter day in the Australian IT industry with two loads of crap coming at me (and you if you live in Australia).

Load of Crap # 1 - Lack of Talent2

The first is a brief mention in The Age about a report/survey done by (yet another) recruitment firm called Talent2 which takes the Ben Hosken 2003 award for the biggest load of bollocks.....The survey found that employees are "wasting" up to 10 mins a day leaving the office to get take away coffees.....extrapolating that they estimate that $1.84 billion (Australian pesos that is....which by the way will soon pass the American WBack).

WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP!!!!!
1. What idiot at I have a Lack of Talent 2 decided this was worth doing??
2. Have they never taken some paper and got a coffee to think through things in a different environment?

Maybe they have a side company called ChainEm2TheDesk2 selling tools to keep those pesky employees at their desks from 6am until 6pm.

As an aside, what does it take to be a recruitment company these days....a PHP, MySQL web site with a nice bit of I'm hip to the plan type graphics talking about blah blah and a mobile phone to handle those pesky contractors looking for jobs and daring to bother you in the middle of your South Yarra coffee of St Kilda chardy???

Load of Crap # 2 - The Destra Music Service

Its getting close to the end of the year, so it must be time for ehYou, I mean Destra, to launch some new crap service.

As a piece of history, Destra was formally known as ehYou and was one of the early dotCom companies in Australia....basically they were a hosting service until some bright spark saw the success of MP3.Com (now there's another dud) and decided that their share price could jump if they got MP3.com.AU.

They then launched a crappy DRM'd music service which had less than 100 albums (maybe it was even less than 10) each of which cost more than the CD in the store (including the cost of the tram ticket to get to the store)!!!! For the launch of the service they spent their investors hard earned cash to pay for the flights, accom, hookers and coke for I-Cube to appear for their launch. Needless to say, their music system had maybe 100 downloads and really went nowhere Fast.

With the launch of iTunes, Roxio Napster, etc. etc. this year, Destra's strategic thinkers obviously decided it was time to relaunch their music service, this time they have more tracks but still crap drm and only on M$ machines. A great little bunch of band wagon jumpers if I ever saw one! So I played with the service last night (as best I could on my iBook) and have the following thoughts.

THE BAR HAS BEEN RAISED!!!!

Look at iTunes and new Napster....the UI is great, the feature set is great (missing a few things but still great) and what do they give us THIS CRAP. A frame based shit site with crappy navigation and zero value add.

So they digitised 100,000 songs and wacked em in a database and obviously got the Destra coffee boy to build em one of them new fangled web site things.

In the sneaky Destra department, they are still celebrating their little PR exercise a month ago where they got a prominent Melbourne finance reporter to write a nice article about them and their music service in other to shunt their share price north...which it did from 1c to 6c at which point they immediately raised a little more cash to cover the rumored $400,000 left in the bank.

NEXT!!!!

Its been quiet here
Last week I was off to the US for business and while I was based in San Francisco, I travelled to Vancouver and San Diego within the 4 full days along with long long meetings.

Unfortunately (and surprisingly) I was much wired than I am at home. No wi-fi everywhere etc.. so I've been very quiet with my postings for the last 2 weeks.

Today is Oskar's 3rd birthday!! Happy Birthday son....you are a marvel!!

The high light for him so far has been having the thunderbirds come and visit :-)