May 2006 Archives

Fun fun fun.

Yesterday Reeltime went out to say they're courting a portal partner.

He [Mr Karantzis, Reeltime CEO] said the unnamed partner had felt "that the amount of web traffic that they get at the moment will help them sell a set-top-box, if (customers) do an initial try-before-you-buy from the web".

...

Yahoo-7, ninemsn, Google, Fairfax Digital, and Australian IT's publisher, News Limited were among the names that Mr Karantzis mentioned as having achieved that popularity.

This list is rather odd. Google isn't interested, and none of the other players have an ISP partnership to make it work. Keep in mind that the Reeltime model is requisite on the partner having a last-mile network capable of pushing the bits needed for its set-top box.

Is someone going to announce an ISP and Reeltime deal simultaneously?

And in an "Australian first" Channel 9 are letting viewers download episodes of McLeod's Daughters. Not sure why anyone would want to download that crap but hey, its the tech/biz that's interesting. :) Seems like they've been shaken into gear by the Yahoo!7 partnership.

I'm hiring a couple of folks for my team:

We work in a FreeBSD, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Apache environment. Clicky the job titles for the full job description, I've only included the sales pitch here. ;)

Service Engineer

The Service Engineer is responsible for maximising service quality through the use of best practices and standard, shared processes. Combined with your strong technical background your keen interest in providing the best possible user experience will have you striving for continual improvements in service availability, code maintainability and process consistency. This role would ideally suit a software developer or systems admin with a strong end-user focus, someone who isn’t happy with “good enough” but also takes into account business realities. Tweaking an application to squeeze an extra 5% performance would excite you just as much as developing a repeatable deployment process that doesn’t drive the rest of the development team crazy. Oh, and did we mention you will be responsible for all of the local Yahoo!7 infrastructure? Well, you might have to share it with operations, but you’re a team player right?

Software Engineer

Your primary goal will be to help develop and deploy the underlying systems that power many of the shared features across the Yahoo!7 properties. With a solid raft of technical skills already under your belt, your outlook should be a question of "how can I best apply my technical kung-fu to help our users and our business?" You will have spent way too much time playing pointless Flash games and browsing the web, and take pleasure in the fact that your mum was wrong - spending all that time mindlessly clicking did land you a job after all. Most importantly you will be a team player in the truest sense - unafraid to seek help when you need it, always available to lend a hand, and when you discover something cool your natural inclination will be to share.

Anyone interested drop me an e-mail.