Mobile gaming enterprise

Greetings from the CeBit Sydney Enterprise conference, where I was part of a session of four diverse speakers this afternoon. Stephen Beachman from DB Schenker first talked about the uses for wireless technology for tracking and managing goods distribution. One example he gave was using GPS tracking and temperature sensors on sensitive loads of resin used for building parts for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft in Australia. If the resin is not kept at the correct temperature in transit, it will not have the needed strength to hold the aircraft together.

Then I talked about mobile web optimisation.

Tom Crago from game developer Tantalus Media talked about the game development industry in Australia and the effect of the global financial crisis. He then discussed the difficulties of adapting to direct online sales of low coast games, as popularised by the Apple iPhone store. He is on the Department of Industry's IT Innovation body. It occurred to me that educational software was a potential area for growth. Education is a major export industry for Australian but the design of educational software is in its infancy. As online a software based education increases most of the Australian education export industry will be lost. But there is the opportunity for development of some of the software and content in Australia which will be replacing the current face-to-face manual education.

Last was Judith Lammers, from BITKOM lawyers, talking about the copyright laws around the world and various schemes for collecting copyright levies. The laws and processes vary from country to country. One interesting point was that collecting societies were considering levying "The Cloud". The reasoning behind this is that in many countries there is a levy on blank removable media, such as write-able CD-ROMs. As this storage is replaced with online storage the agencies would like to levy the online storage. A question I wanted to ask Judith about use of the Creative Commons licence, to avoid difficulties with copyright in the material. Interestingly, CeBit encouraged speakers at the conference to use CC and there was a CC logo on the bottom of each of her slides: is this something which lawyers and courts are comfortable with?