Stories by: Richard Noone

If luck is the universal currency for a traveller I was beginning to think if I didn’t have bad luck, I’d have no luck at all. A tyre had blown on the Kombi just outside the picturesque town of Bega on NSW’s south coast. Still there are worse places to be broken down in, anywhere in the Northern Territory springs to mind, and besides it gave me a good chance to catch up with former Kombi owner and long time traveller, Alan Morgan.

He might know when you've been naughty or nice but the only thing all good little resellers have been wishing for from Santa this year is a bumper finish to an otherwise stagnant 2002. Richard Noone investigates how digital still cameras could prove a lucrative lining to some pretty thin stockings.

The talk of Intel's Developers Forum being held this week will no doubt revolve around the chipmaker's soon to be released chipset code-named Banias. Although it remains unknown exactly how much the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer intends to reveal about the long-awaited technology, one thing is for certain: it stands to raise some interesting questions about the future of mobile computing.

Gary Jackson is a man on a mission. After taking the reins of EMC's Asia Pacific operations in February he has overhauled the storage vendor's senior management in most countries, streamlined the company's go-to-market strategy, and committed to doubling the revenue contribution the region makes to EMC.

Someone once said that if all the difficulties were known at the outset of a long journey, most of us would never start out at all. The same could be said in many ways of working in the channel.

This year's theme is "effective and efficient interaction". How did you come up with it and how does it reflect what Di Data's doing at a customer level?

Dimension Data has placed its faith in a new branding and go-to-market framework, dubbed Application Networks.

It's rare these days that you can attend a conference or technology showcase and not have vendors thrusting pamphlets in your face on their latest gear.

"I just feel raped." Max Goldsmith, the man who has spent the last 17 years building up a reputable storage business, has reason to be upset. He's just watched in abject horror as Powerlan last week put the shell of his former company XSI into voluntary administration. Although Goldsmith would not be drawn on how much XSI owed creditors, some of whom have become close personal friends, ARN estimates it to be around $600,000.

Dimension Data's 11th annual Forum conference in Coolum, Queensland, opened in typical fanfare last week, only to have a blackout cut short the opening keynote by Cisco Internet evangelist Howard Charney.

With an October deadline for the consolidation of the post-merger HP's distribution line-up looming, Tech Pacific is actively recruiting small HP resellers with a promotion that offers instant credit accounts and voucher rebates.