As a kid it was bug-catchers, Mechanno, and as I got older the 200-in-1 electronic kits from Tandy, and Dick Smith that helped me understand how things worked. Dad tended to draw the line at power tools (though shotguns and rifles were fine?!).  Our television was the oldest in the neighbourhood and servicing it was a regular occurance on weekends before  the serious Saturday and Sunday night movie marathons began. Sometimes he would allow me to change a valve but mostly my sisters and I had to sit back in a wide arc and just be ready to wack him with a piece of wood. Unfortunately that never happened either. Anyway, on top of those things came sport, music, language, and reading. I learned a great deal as a kid through some wonderful experiences but such a busy schedule is pretty standard fare for a kid growing up today, and in most cases we take it all in our stride.

From a childhood learning perspective, yesterday we talked about incorporating open source software development languages into secondary education curriculums. That makes sense because of the proximity to graduation and the "real-world" application that senior students will require as they approach the end of their journey through the system. But what about early childhood learning and discovery? While teaching kids a computer programming language at a very young age may have sounded like a strange thing to do even a generation ago, from a K/P-7 curriculum perspective, it is really no different from the music and language lessons which kids undertake today. Many pre-prep or kinder centres even start children on basic French and Italian before they get to school.

If you have worked in Asia Pacific for long enough you will know that geographic knowledge is surprisingly sparse on the ground once you leave the airspace. It is an airspace in which you can fly from Sydney to Tokyo in the same time you can fly East Cost-West Coast return in the US. Asia Pacific is a big big place.

As an Asia Pacific employee you will also remember the multiple times that you have been sent a web lead by head office for your Austrian counterpart. Or most memorably for me the CEO who believed that Kuala Lumpur was a 3-4 hour drive from Sydney. In fairness it's not all one-way traffic. Many Asia Pacific employees have felt the ire of confusing "the United States" with the four countries that constitute North America. 

While it is no surprise that the global definitions for Asia Pacific ultimately determine the strategies and approach for most multinational companies, it is an ongoing surprise that the region is so expansively bundled when it comes to in-country insights.  End-user organisations all over Australia know about the glass ceiling that exists with international ICT market research companies whose lowest data level is often aggregated to Asia Pacific, yet it is the international vendors who continue to retract funding to meaningless geographic levels when economies change. 

• How should collaboration strategies be different today than 2-years ago? 
• What is officially in and out of the collaboration stack in 2009 and what are the hand-offs to CRM, ERP and other corporate platforms?
• Outside of advertising, where are the examples of monetization, or other value creation measures from collaborative human networks?
• How will IBM address OpenID and other SSO and identity management mechanisms in the collaboration suite/platform
• What are the mobility and SME options for Enterprise and SMEs in Australia and Asia Pacific?
  

These are just some of the questions I’ve set out to answer in Orlando this week at IBMs annual Lotusphere conference. In 2009 it has attracted over 7,000 attendees making it the single largest collaboration conference on the planet. To put that in context that’s about 1,000 more than are expected in Spain this year for the Linux User Group conference. With all the yellow and black swarming around Walt Disney World it is akin to being in the jostle at the turnstiles of a Richmond home game in finals week.

Such is the zealousness of a Lotus and Domino devotee that I’m sure there will be people attending Lotusphere this week that won’t even realise there is a presidential inauguration on Tuesday (Wednesday Australian time). So I might have to watch what I say this week or just remove my picture from the blog until Thursday. I am looking forward to the fervour of a big American conference. They are quite unlike anything we see in Australia. How many Australian ICT events are opened by Dan Ackroyd?

TechnologyOne is a minnow in the world of ERP yet the brisbane-based software company will this year surpass 100million in revenue for the first time.

CEO Adrian DiMarco believes that growth will come in chunks of 20-25% over the next few years. Where will that growth come from? By unlocking the complacency of large enterprise buyers. DiMarco's take is that incumbent suppliers continue to profit from organisations unprepared to change.