Stories by: Trevor Clarke

It's not just toned muscles and the boxing Kangaroo spirit rallying our athletes at this year's Beijing Olympics. IT is also giving us an edge in the lead up to the race for gold and helping to make the Australian team feel more at home in China.

IDC research manager IT spending, Jean-Marc Annonier, claims there is a growing focus on services aimed at the mid-market.

Are we at war? Yes, and not just in the miserable and bloody campaigns of Iraq and Afghanistan. Government agencies at all levels - local, state and federal - have been subject to malicious attacks and victims of a flourishing underground criminal industry that some observers say is bigger than the $US321 billion global drug trade.

Running a small business has never been easy; it needs time, emotional, financial and physical commitment that many find overwhelming. The hours are long, the pace of progress is often frustrating and the results can be mixed.

Australian IT industry representatives have applauded the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) plans to introduce its first Energy Star rating for servers by the end of the year.

Swing that notebook around your head by a cable. I dare you. Well, actually, it's more like the vendors are daring you, double daring you, and if you don't they just might do it for you. Or they could throw wine at it, ask a famous rugby player to drop it and stomp on it, go scuba diving with it or just drive the car over it a couple of times. Seem a bit extravagant? Perhaps, but they've done it before and will happily do it again; check their commercials if you don't believe me.

The introduction of carbon reporting obligations under the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting (NGER) Act 2007 from July 1 are expected to have little impact on the broad Australian business community, service providers claim. However, many are reporting a substantial increase of awareness of climate change issues among corporates.

Saying Australians love their sport is more than just a cliche. We all know that whatever the sport - league, union, AFL, football, cricket, netball, surfing - we'll play it or watch it and have done so for generations. And we will continue to do so for many to come; it's built into our genes.

If you're not doing virtualisation you're either thinking about it, planning to do it, piloting it or at least reading about it. If you're not, well you're not really into IT. For the last few years the technology has been searing its way into the minds of decision makers and spreading its virtual tentacles into assorted elements of the IT architecture.

If the Australian economy used to be carried on the sheep's back, it's now sailing a swelling commodities wave. Demand from vastly populous Asian countries like Japan, China and India for the things we grow on our farms, dig up from under the red-brown earth and extract from the depths of the sea has jammed traffic outside national ports as ships queue up to carry our commodities north. Coking coal, iron ore, thermal coal, nickel, copper, uranium, wheat, lead, you name it and we're probably shipping it in large numbers.

Australians have never really been an emotional bunch. But if some of our researchers get their way, we might just be showing our feelings at work with a little help from some innovative IT.