CWA New Media: Our Blog

Large numbers can attract the attention.   These figures come from a BBC report, and it advises that this is a 41% growth since last year.    Included in the report was that 117.6 million people accessed the internet using their mobile phones last year, up 133% from 2007.

Students are the main strength of mobile internet users, the study said: 43.5% of them use their mobile phones to read online news, download music, check email and perform a variety of other tasks.

At the end of 2008, the number of net users in China, which has a population of 1.3 billion, was almost the same as the entire population of the United States.

wow!

As usual, this year’s Animfx in Wellington was a fascinating mix of topics and people, reminding us that this city is packed full of creative talent.

Some of the sessions I attended had a big focus on 3D.  For example, guest speakers signalled likely growth in 3D movie releases as production and post-production technologies become more flexible and multiplexes begin to upgrade their projectors.     An intriguing bi-product of the upgrades is that some cinemas overseas are beginning to offer beamed-in, live presentations of 3D-enhanced events  – such as major sporting events and powerhouse opera performances.

So hang onto those 3D glasses!

Software Freedom Day has been and gone and left a wake of open source excitement behind it!

The Unlimited Potential team (with of course help from us, Catalyst and many others) hosted the most excellent Software Freedom Day. There was a pretty amazing turnout, as Brenda’s photos show and I think just about everyone who attended enjoyed the conversations that resulted.

There were many highlights for me  – seeing the OpenSolaris Student Packs , a zsh(1) demo, and an excellent discussion about on NZOSS.  CWA New Media has been connected with the NZOSS for a while.

The Wellington Convention Centre was a pretty great place to host the event and the Havana coffee was wonderful.  The 150+ attendees from all round the country proved that Wellington really is the ICT capital and the fact that many stayed into the night, and kept going over curry afterwards was testament to the connections and collaborations going on all around me.

Thanks to Unlimited Potential, especially Jayne Wallis, and everyone who took part, for putting Open Source on the map and securing this event as an annual extravaganza on the ICT calendar.

CWA New Media is proud to be a key sponsor of New Zealand’s events around Software Freedom Day.  Check out the website for the programme of open source fun and geeky get togethers on September 20th.

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere!

This year we got together with

• Unlimited Potential,
• New Zealand Open Source Society (NZOSS),
• SuperHappyDevHouse,
• WellyLUG,
• Cafenet,
• Catalyst IT
• and Sun Microsystems

to organise a local event to be held at the Wellington Convention Centre – Civic Suites 1 & 2 in Wellington from 12pm – 6pm.

There are two main parts to the schedule- an opensource barcamp and a hackfest.

Register here and come along and celebrate Software Freedom Day by taking part. There will be free wifi, coffee all day at the venue, and pizza and beer as things wrap up at 6pm.

The capital city has been a fantastic place to be recently if you’re in the digital media space.

Over the last few weeks Wellington has hosted the launch of Creative Commons Aotearoa, a series of Digital Content Strategy workshops, and the AnimFxNZ07 symposium.

AnimFxNZ was a great experience, bringing together subject experts and industry representatives from around the world. Featured speakers included Dreamworks Animation Director Tim Johnson, Star Trek Visual FX Supervisor Dan Curry, and Executive Creative Director of BBC Children’s CBeebies Michael Carrington.

Tim Johnson opened the event with an enchanting presentation which made the point that the classic structure of a good story hasnt changed since Aristotle first defined it, while Michael Carrington made the gathering envious with his presentation about the range of work the Childrens’ Department of the BBC is doing in the fields of broadcasting, online and immersive worlds.

KAREN – the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network – has just been introduced to society.

Launched on 31 August, the network joins a fraternity of similar networks in over 40 countries. KAREN provides high speed networking between New Zealand’s science, education and innovation networks, and can carry data at least 10,000 times the speed of an average broadband connection. The site provides backgrounds and examples of its potential.

Source: KAREN