Australia needs to join the high speed broadband revolution

As usual, the current Australian government has done a poor job at explaining the benefits of one of their major initiatives and as a consequence it is being largely ignored and risks being totally abandoned if they lose power. I’m talking about the National Broadband Network.

Unfortunately, the cost of the Australian government’s planned $43 billion National Broadband Network has become the issue rather than the benefits of high speed broadband for the country. The Opposition has focused on the cost, perhaps with good reason, and claim that the project is a White Elephant, yet they haven’t offered any viable alternatives.

Meanwhile the Government has failed to sell the real benefits of the NBN to the public and potentially negate the argument against.

I’m no infrastructure expert and I don’t pretend to know the best way to deliver high speed broadband to the nation but I do believe we as a country must have a high speed broadband network as soon as possible.

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Get noticed in the web industry

I just came across a great piece in Smashing Magazine by Christian Heilman titled Making your mark on the web is easier than you think. There is some excellent advice in here for people looking to get noticed, make a start in the industry or win a job. In fact it has some parallels with my thoughts on getting a job in the media and marketing industry.

Here are the main points, but please check out the full article for more details.

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Start me up

I have become increasingly fascinated by technology start-ups and the business of launching an online business. With this post I am looking to start an occasional dialogue on the trials and tribulations of starting a new business in the digital economy. We’ll see how it evolves.

In early April 2009, five Australian guys met in a funky bar in San Francisco to compare notes on their respective business ideas. There were three different technology start-ups involved in the conversation, all excellent ideas with bucket-loads of potential, and all three have taken very different paths to realization.

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NLYZR website analysis tool

I’m very proud to announce that the latest, fully-automated version of our NLYZR website analysis tool is now live.

The team at Sticky launched the original NLYZR 12 months ago and in the ensuing year we tested and reported on over 3000 websites from around the world. Using that experience, we have been able to fine tune and improve our NLYZR reporting to the stage that the Free Web NLYZR is now a fully-fledged web application.

Free Web NLYZR provides a detailed report in around 30 seconds. The report is more SEO focussed than the previous version, covering your site’s on and off site optimisation plus factoring in your results for a nominated keyword search. Basically it tells you how well optimised your website is.

The Free Web NLYZR is just one part of our overall NLYZR Suite. Clients use the full range of tools to receive detailed website reporting and advice such as:

• Keyword selection and ratings

• On-site analysis and recommendations

• Off-site analysis and recommendations

• Rank reporting

• Competitor analysis

We use these tools to assist clients to significantly improve their search rankings, build website traffic and convert traffic into sales, leads and inquiries.

Please feel free to use NLYZR to test your site any time and if you have any questions or feedback we’d love to hear it. The more sites we test, the more feedback we gain, the better the system becomes.

How does your website look on an iPad?

Here’s a little test to do when considering an agency for your digital marketing.

Grab an iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone and enter the agency’s URL in the browser. If the agency understands web marketing then their website will display seamlessly.

Unfortunately many agency websites will not display seamlessly, in fact they may not display at all. That’s because they have built their websites in Flash and Apple products are not Flash enabled.

We tested a bunch of agency sites on our new iPad yesterday and the results were alarming. Here in Newcastle 4 of the leading agency websites couldn’t be viewed at all while another 2 had serious formatting issues.

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Marketers must start thinking about apps

The mobile phone apps market is booming and is expected to go into overdrive when Apple’s new iPad device launches next month. For most corporate marketers apps are probably nothing more than a curiosity or a convenience if they have app-friendly devices.

But maybe businesses should start thinking about apps a little more strategically as part of their internet marketing strategy.

Research firm Gartner expects that cellphones will be the most common device used for browsing the web by 2013. They predict the number of browser-equipped phones to exceed 1.83 billion, compared to 1.78 billion old fashioned computers in use within 3 years.

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Apps are another important media touch-point

We recently announced (rather excitedly) that our Inbound Marketing site GetSticky was now available as an iPhone app. A week later I was happy to inform you that MediaHunter had also become available through the iTunes Store as an app.

So what you ask? Good question.

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The Get Sticky iPhone app

Here’s a fun little project we’ve been doing at Sticky. We’ve just launched the Get Sticky iPhone app with a little help from the guys at MotherApp.

Its basically the Get Sticky blogsite for your iPhone. Nothing life-changing but we’re proud of it all the same. It allows you to stay up to date with all the latest Inbound Marketing news and tips plus our weekly industry website ratings…all from your iPhone.

You can download it here for FREE.

Like I said, its probably not going to change your life, but we’d really appreciate your support to help our little app get some traction in the crowded apps marketplace. Please download it to your phone (or computer thru iTunes) and give us a nice review, then tell your friends.

Thanks in advance for your support.

We have the technology

Welcome to the future.

Its 2010, a time oft referred to in sci-fi movies and old TV shows as “The Future”. Sure, we haven’t got hover cars yet, but technology and media is now well and truly exceeding expectations. It wasn’t long ago that we were marveling at the push and touch technology in the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report, now becoming a reality on smart phones and the forthcoming iTablets.

In fact, technology and media are evolving so rapidly that its hard to keep up with what will be the break-out hit of the year and what marketers should be focussing on. Here are just some of the prognostications from those in the know:

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from IT News

Senator Stephen Conroy is fast becoming an international name – with the world’s technology and political community astounded as much by his plans for an internet filter as the build of the $43 billion national broadband network.

London’s Telegraph led with the headline “Australia plans Chinese-style internet filtering“, reminding its UK readers that the leaked ACMA blacklist had included the “innocent websites of a dentist’s practice in Queensland, a tuck-shop consultant and a kennel operator.”

In the United States, Fox News ran with the headline: “Joining China and Iran, Australia to filter internet.”

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