We’ve got some exciting news to announce today.

Heather Jones, an awesomely talented communications exec who just happens to be my wife, has started her own corporate communications and social investments consultancy – Filtered Communications.

As Media Connect wrote today (subscribers-only, full copy below), the opportunity came about as a result of a redundancy package. It was good timing – this business idea has been in the works for some time.

The big picture story is that we’re setting up an new entity called Filtered Media Group. I remain director of Filtered Media, our digital media services division. Heather is director of Filtered Communications, a practice focused on corporate communications, social investments and corporate social responsibility.

The idea behind this structure is that it will allow us to focus on our different areas of expertise (and different client bases), while taking advantage of complimentary skills.

It’s early days, so I’ll write more about what we are doing soon. But until then, you can email heather [at] filteredmedia.com.au  and read the Media Connect story below (republished with Media Connect’s kind permission):

Jones takes redundancy, launches business

Tiffany Blatchford, IT Journo / Media Connect

Heather Jones, Lenovo’s former communications director for Australia and New Zealand, will launch her own Corporate Communications and Social Investments consultancy practice, Filtered Communications, following her redundancy earlier this month from the PC maker.

Filtered Communications will operate as a division of Filtered Media, a digital media and social networking consultancy, founded in 2007 by Jones’ husband, technology and business journalist, Mark Jones. The new Filtered Communications arm will “focus on corporate communications and values-based leadership coaching, as well as social investments consulting, for medium to large Australian companies and their internal management teams,” Jones said.

Describing her redundancy from Lenovo as being “of mutual advantage to both parties”, Jones explained she had been keen to pursue new opportunities anyway, and was looking forward to seeing if she could make a go of running her own business.

“I’m very excited about the leadership coaching aspect of my new business. I’ll be helping managers and senior executives identify what makes them personally successful in their leadership roles, and what makes the company successful, then marrying the two together,” said Jones.

Jones also expressed a lot of enthusiasm for social investment consulting because this is “a real moment in time”, when companies are becoming more aware of their corporate social responsibilities.

“Companies are beginning to understand that they have a responsibility to society and the environment, without always knowing how to manage that,” said Jones. “Social investment coaching is about helping companies develop successful corporate social responsibility strategies. I believe passionately in the power of strategic CSR to help build a brand, attract new staff, particularly gen Y’s, who are passionate about social justice issues, while importantly, positively impacting the communities and people the brand serves.”

According to Jones, during the course of her 14-year PR career and personal interests, she has developed firm connections to various NGO’s and philanthropic associations, as well as Australian business leaders, and these contacts will allow her to assist companies to develop their corporate brands, and better understand the charity landscape. She will be “industry-agnostic”, believing corporate communications and CSR skills reach across any industry, but acknowledges technology as her homeland.

When asked what she is most looking forward to about embarking on her new business venture, Jones said it would be the flexibility and autonomy, and being able to apply her skills to focus more intentionally on things she’s most passionate about.

Prior to her comms director role with Lenovo, Jones was the Asia Pacific communications manager for IBM’s PC division, and was instrumental in the management of the acquisition locally of the division by Lenovo back in 2005. She is proud of the progress the company has made in establishing its own presence and identity in the Australian and New Zealand market since that time, and her role in that process.

Jones was one of a number of redundancies made by Lenovo earlier this month. While not willing to give specifics regarding the round of redundancies, a Lenovo spokesperson said: “In an intensely competitive market such as this, Lenovo is focused on fine-tuning operational efficiency in order to keep bringing superior value to our customers. As part of a recent set of initiatives to make the organisation more competitive, some roles in the company have, unfortunately, needed to be phased out.”

Jonathan Schwartz: Now, since John Gage first uttered the phrase, Sun has been saying "The Network is the Computer." It’s one of those rare vision statements that only becomes more true over time. And next week, we’re going to prove the point by unveiling the world’s first on demand supercomputer. And by on demand, I mean accessible through your browser, with a credit card.

This grid story has been kicking around for years. What’s interesting about Sun’s move is that it will give savvy IT managers an easy way of testing it out by flexing the corporate AMEX.

Oh, and yes, he’s broken the news on his blog. That says something about the future of corporate communications too.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to run Foxtel? Until recently, the 10 year old Australian cable network hadn’t even turned a profit. It’s competitively hobbled by its joint ownership by Telstra, News Ltd and PBL, and now it’s woken up to the reality of the Internet.

Foxtel chief executive Kim Williams has rolled out this sob story as it becomes apparent that broadband usage has surged past cable TV:

In Australia, the number of subscribers for pay TV grew by 6.3 per cent to 1.69 million last year, while broadband customer numbers surged more than 80 per cent to 1.67 million.

What amuses me is Foxtel’s belief that government regulation of content on the internet – Australian sporting events in particular – will help appease its ills. Then you’ve got this bizzare notion implicit in the story that Foxtel must somehow compete with "broadband," which is clearly not a company or entity one does battle with in the traditional notion of competition. Mr Williams at least has one thing right: Foxtel’s content will continue to struggle (some might say in vein) against content freely distributed over the internet, which by definition will never succumb to regional interests.

I’m up to my eyeballs in content for a special report we’re producing for the Fin on Tuesday (make sure you go buy a copy!).

Anyway, I just came across this article in Red Herring It’s from back in April, but it does a great job of articulating where we are as a country and technology industry in comparison to our friends over the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

Australia’s economy is booming, its IPO market is surging, and there has never been more money available for private equity. Things look good—unless you’re in early-stage IT or biotech.

While the United States is shaking off its post-boom wounds and carefully heading back to early-stage investment, Australia is a case study in caution, clinging to latter-stage investments and corporate buyouts. Yet new Silicon Valley friends may help to convince early-stage investors to enter the market.

The Economist’s latest Technology Quarterly picks up on the Grid Computing meme, and pours cold water on Sun Microsystems in the process.

"Who wants to buy a computon?" (sub req) implies that delivering computing power in a utility-like fashion has merit, but the technology’s evangelists – notably Jonathan Schwartz – are losing people amid all the geek-speak. We’re not hearing the right economic argument.

Since I don’t have an online sub, I’m forced to actually type a few grafs from the magazine to explain:

Offerings such as Sun Grid, while novel, do not solve the ultimate problem: the efficient allocation of networked resources. People do not think of their computing needed in terms of, say 50 processor-hours; instead they have specific tasks of varying importance and urgency, and want to get those tasks done economically, using whatever resources are available.

Since I’ve been following the grid story for years, my first reaction was to dismiss this notion as nonsense. But the story goes on to quote Bernardo Huberman, a researcher from HP whose developed grid software called Tycoon. Tycoon is a "stockmarket or clearing house" for grid computing users. You’ve got an urgent processing job? Then pay more for your computing cycles than the next guy and you can jump straight to the front of the processing queue. It’s the eBay of grids.

It’s an interesting idea. But to me what’s more important is how we understand/sell these ideas to the wider IT community. Huberman proposes calling the unit of value grid customers buy a "computon" (mix of computation and photon). A computon is meant to signify a performance & value benchmark that combines processing cycles, memory, storage, and network bandwidth.

Despite The Economist’s attempt at uncovering a brilliant new insight, it turns out computon is not a new idea (eg, this Grid blog story from 2003). So that then raises the question: why have Sun or HP apparently not marketed the ‘computon’ or an equivalent term.

Sure, Sun’s got it’s $1 per processing hour model. But what if Sun jacks up the price to $1.50? What’s the common benchmark across the industry that gives users a clear sense of comparitive value? As much as I hate jargon, it strikes me that IT professionals need a term like computon & associated standards that finally brings grid computing into the real world of enterprise computing.

So what’s Telstra CIO Jeff Smith’s story? Noticed the story of his resignation in The Australian, while I prefer our coverage in Computerworld as you might expect.. heh.

Was he bored? Worn out? Time for a sea change? The official line from Telstra is that Jeff has completed his assignment. That sounds a bit like a new take on the "leaving to pursue other interests/spend time with family" story.

Another view could be that he’s reached the peak of his Telstra hype curve, looked around from that lofty position and seen the clouds on the horizon. Those clouds of course being the full privatisation of Telstra and life without Ziggy: two big headaches you’ve got to suspect Jeff is looking to live without. And so he hit eject while the resume is still looking good.

That nasty conglomeration of Hollywood media powerbrokers is trying to squash what’s arguably been the most interesting, ground-breaking development in gadgets since the Sony Walkman. Apparently they’re trying to revive the Betamax wars and in doing so take us right back to 1984. It would be funny if it wasn’t so scary.

John Davidson has a piece about it in today’s AFR (behind the firewall here), as does CNet Asia, The Washington Post, and a whole ton of publications via Google News.

And yes, this was a US Tuesday story but yesterday was the Australia Day public holiday, and I’m getting pretty good at ignoring the blogosphere on holidays (gasp! .

At the risk of looking really un-cool, I’ll mention his name and suggest that Nick (over-exposed) Carr is partly responsible for for what Gartner now sees as the "new CIO."

CIO Australia got a regional scoop to interview Gartner analysts about a new book on the subject of the new CIO. My observation is this latest round of CIO naval-gazing (perhaps it should stand for "Chief Introspective Officer"? is affirming one of the role’s central tenents in the wake of the Carr publicity: technology does actually deliver competitive advantage.

The twist is that according to Gartner, senior business executives are now refocusing on IT with that in mind – they don’t have a choice. In that context, the challenge I can see facing CIOs is how well they can blend IT skills with "strategic leadership" in areas like business processes and global business trends, since that’s the buzz that seems to matter in the board room (this week).

Some relevant quotes from the article:

In their new book, The New CIO Leader: Setting the Agenda and Delivering Results, Broadbent and Kitzis, who is group vice president of Gartner’s Executive Programs, argue that CIOs today stand at a crossroads, their role inevitably transforming under both the ubiquitous presence of technology in organizations and the recent technology downturn. CIOs will have to respond or else risk consigning themselves to oblivion. "They can seize the moment to leverage their expertise into a larger and more strategic role than ever before," as the authors put it, "or they can allow themselves to be relegated to the sideline function of ‘chief technology mechanic’."

***

"Standing still is not an option – every CIO will follow one of two paths based on these perspectives," the authors write. "The path influenced by the view that IT is irrelevant to competitive advantage leads to a role that might be called chief technology mechanic, a role ultimately no more prestigious than that of a factory floor manager. The other path, influenced by the view that IT is at the heart of every significant business process and is crucial to innovation and enterprise success, leads to a role we call the new CIO leader."

Ian Penman, the man who retired in 2000 as boss of Compaq South Pacific, has randomly emerged to run Volante. ARN’s got the story, but there’s little there about what Penman was doing in his retirement and why he can’t stay away from IT. Good on him – I think.

You might be aware that Computerworld Australia brought to light a little spat between Sun and HP. Jonathan Schwartz used his blog to argue HP/UX is dead. HP sent Sun a letter asking them to stop making “misstatements of fact.”

Sun’s PR folk were good enough to email us a copy of their very detailed letter to HP (minus the address details) refuting that assertion. (Here’s the word doc for download: Download response_to_hp_letter_fnl.doc)

The letter concludes:

For our statements of fact, Sun has valid, objective and verifiable evidence. Accordingly, and based on the above, Sun affirmatively stands by its claims regarding HP/UX and will not agree to cease making such truthful and/or subjective claims.

Given that Sun has defended itself with a stack of public information, including material from Computerworld US and HP’s own site, you’ve got to wonder why they didn’t do some homework first.

In short, this story highlights the impact of CEO-type blogs and the power of the internet as an easily searchable public record. It’s also a good lesson for those in the PR business.