All posts by silvia

“Venuturous Australia” at Pearcey awards event

Open Source, Stuff, vquence, , , , , ,

Yesterday was a long and fascinating day of discussions about innovation in Australia.

At this year’s Pearcey Medal and NSW Pearcey State Award event, the focus was on the recently released innovation report from Terry Cutler with a focus on the effects on ICT (Information and Communication Technology).

If you only look at the summary report, you will miss the structure of the full report, which is why I have outlined it here:

  • Chapter 1 stalling not sprinting
  • Chapter 2 the national innovation system
  • Chapter 3 innovation in business
  • Chapter 4 the case for a public role in innovation
  • Chapter 5 strengthening people and skills
  • Chapter 6 building excellence in national research
  • Chapter 7 information and market design
  • Chapter 8 tax and innovation
  • Chapter 9 market facing programs
  • Chapter 10 innovation in government
  • Chapter 11 national priorities for innovation
  • Chapter 12 governance of the innovation system

I took home a few very interesting observations from reading the reports and from the discussions at the Pearcey event.

But before I can comment, I have to state which organisations I see as ICT innovators in Australia.

  • The government-funded ones are the Universities, NICTA and CSIRO (CRCs fall in the same general class).
  • The big drivers of transforming new research outcomes into business are start-ups and the SMEs.
  • Further innovation happens in large companies and multi-nationals with a stronger focus on incremental innovation rather than disruptive innovation.
  • In ICT, we need to add another big driver of innovation: open source software. I’ll explain this later in more depth.


The following observations on VenturousAustralia and what I took away from the Pearcey awards are on these topics:

  1. Support of fundamental R&D in ICT
  2. Commercialisation of ICT innovation
  3. Enabling SMEs to succeed
  4. Regard for the contribution of Open Source

TOPIC: ICT and innovation

At the Pearcey awards, we had long discussions about whether ICT was appropriately represented in the report and whether the recommendations are pushing ICT further into a supportive role while missing our opportunities to innovate and lead in core ICT.

It is generally accepted that ICT has a major effect on the productivity increase of almost all Australian industries. DCITA reports show that in service industries, between 35 and 65 per cent of productivity growth is estimated to have been driven by technological factors

Ogg Theora video, Dailymotion and OLPC

Digital Media, Open Source, vquence, ,

Today, three of the worlds that I am really engaged in and that tend to not have much in-common with each other seemed to come to a sudden overlap.

The three worlds I am talking about are:

  • Social video publishing (through my company Vquence)
  • One Laptop Per Child (I am really keen to see more OLPC work in the Pacific)
  • Open media software and technology (through Xiph and Annodex work, as well as FOMS)

I was positively surprised to read in this blog message that Dailymotion and the OLPC foundation have partnered to set up a video publishing channel for videos that can be viewed on the OLPC. The channel is available at olpc.dailymotion.com. You can view it on your computer if you have the appropriate codec libraries for Windows and the Mac installed. Your Linux computer should just support it.

To understand the full impact of this message, you have to understand that the XO (the OLPC laptop) does not support the playback of Flash video by default. OLPC cannot ship the official Adobe Flash plugin on the XOs because it is legally restricted and doesn’t meet the OLPC’s standards for open software. Thus, children that receive an XO are somewhat cut off from social video sites like YouTube, Dailymotion, Blip.tv, MySpace.tv, video.google.com and others, even though there are lots of education-relevant videos published there.

The XO however ships with video technology that IS open: namely the Ogg Theora/Vorbis video codec and software. This is incidentally also the codec that the next version of Firefox will be supporting out of the box without need of installation of a further plugin.

Unfortunately, most video content nowadays available on the Internet is not available in the Ogg Theora/Vorbis format. Therefore, Dailymotion and the OLPC Foundation launching this channel that is automatically republishing all the videos uploaded to the Dailymotion OLPC group is a really big thing: It’s a major social video site republishing video in an open format to enable it to be viewed on open systems.

New Ogg MIME Types ratified

Digital Media, Open Source, ,

The IETF has just ratified RFC 5334 “Ogg Media Types”, which I have co-authored.

The new Ogg MIME types are as follows:

  • audio/ogg for all Ogg files that contain predominantly audio, such as Ogg Vorbis files (.ogg or .oga), Ogg Speex files (.spx) or Ogg FLAC files. The file extension recommended to be used is .oga, but .ogg will continue to be used for Ogg Vorbis I files for backwards compatibility.
  • video/ogg for all Ogg files that contain predominantly video, such as Ogg Theora or Ogg Dirac files. The file extension recommended to be used is .ogv. Please stop using .ogg for Ogg Theora files, since that causes havoc for any application trying to determine which application to use for opening such a file.
  • application/ogg used to be the MIME type recommended for any Ogg encapsulated file. This is obsoleted by the new RFC. Instead, application/ogg is a generic MIME type that can be used for Ogg files containing custom content tracks. This may e.g. be a Ogg file with 5 vorbis, 2 speex, 2 theora, 5 CMML, 2 Kate, and a custom image tracks. Such files have to use the Skeleton extension to Ogg to be able to describe the content of the file. The file extension recommended to be used is .ogx.

The RFC also specifies the possibility of using codec parameters to the MIME types to specify directly within the MIME type what codecs are contained inside the files. This may for example be “video/ogg; codecs=’dirac,speex,CMML'”.

More details on these decisions and on further considered MIME types are in the Xiph wiki.

Disclaimer: I had no influence on the funny number game that happened between the obsoleted rfc3534 and the new rfc5334. 🙂

Happy MIME-typing!!

Resurrecting old Maaate code

analytics, code, Digital Media, Open Source,

Have you ever been haunted by an old open source package that you wrote once, published, and then forgot about?

The BSD community has just reminded me of the MPEG audio analysis toolkit Maaate that I wrote at CSIRO when I first came to Australia and that was then published through the CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences division.

The BSD guys were going to remove it from their repositories, because since I left CSIRO more than 2 years ago, CSIRO has taken down the project pages and the code, so there were no active project pages available any longer. I’m glad they contacted me before they did so.

Since it is an open source project, I have now resurrected the old pages at Sourceforge. They are available from http://maaate.sourceforge.net/. I have re-instated the relevant weg pages and documentation and updated all the links. I discovered that we did some cool things then and that it may indeed be worth preservation for the future. I expect Sourceforge is up to the task.

Thanks very much, BSD community and welcome back, MPEG Maaate!

FOMS submission deadline extended

code, Digital Media, FOMS, LCA, Open Source,

The Foundations of Open Media Software workshop has just extended its deadline for submission of registrations requests with travel sponsorship.

FOMS addresses hot topics – such as the new <video> and <audio> tags in HTML5, the uptake and development of open video codecs like Ogg Theora, BBC’s Dirac and SUN’s OMS codec and their native support in Firefox, open audio & media frameworks and players such as gstreamer, ffmpeg, vlc or xine, or the standardisation of audio APIs across platforms. Further topics are listed in the CFP.

In previous years, FOMS has stimulated heated technical discussions and amazing new developments in open media software, such as the creation of libsydneyaudio, the uptake of liboggplay, the creation of Xiph ROE, or the creation of the new Ogg CELT codec.

Video proceedings of last years’ workshops are here. There are also community goals that were set in 2008 and 2007 and provide ongoing challenges.

You should definitely attend, if you are an open media software hacker. This is a chance to get to know others in the community personally and clear up those long-standing issues that need a face-to-face to get solved. Also, it’s a great social event not to be missed. As a bonus, you can spend the week after FOMS at LCA, the world-famous Australian Linux hackers conference, and deepen your relationships in the community. Come and join in the fun in January 2009, Summer in Hobart, Tasmania.