Sitting in the fifth row of the recent Make Poverty History concert in Melbourne, I was amidst a sea of cameras and camera phones clearly capturing video clips and as well as still photos. Some of the results were already up on YouTube the next morning, with more popping up over the next few days including clips from the next day's telecast.

Although this budding Spielberg didn't have great seats, I'm sure the people in front on me had clips to rival what was shown on the television the next day. While these fans might have the hardware to be their own television network, they're soon going to need the lawyers to match because, according to Crickey, what they're doing will be a criminal offence attracting $AU6600 fine under Australia's farcical new copyright laws. If you think this doesn't affect many people, take a look at what happened at a recent U2 concert in Sydney when Bono called on people to pull out their camera phones.

Possessing equipment to copy an unauthorised recording (such as a computer), making a copy of an unauthorised recording (such as to your computer) and playing an unauthorised recording publicly (such as on YouTube?) are also each worth another $AU6600 fine. That's a bloody expensive night out, even considering the exorbitant price of concert tickets these days.

Police will have the power to issue on-the-spot infringement notices incurring $AU1300 fines but have already said the laws are unenforceable, according to the Herald Sun.

Australia's proposed new copyright laws are so laughable they're getting international attention - from MSNBC to the International Herald Tribune and even the New York Law Journal - pointing out the laws could make using iPods and video-sharing sites like YouTube illegal. Once again the Australian government's response to new technology is, rather than attempting to understand it, to come up with ludicrous rules that no-one will follow just so it can say it's doing something and then hope the problem will go away. Insisting people only watch recordings of television shows once and then record over them is another example of the ridiculous approach this government is taking in its new copyright laws.

Perhaps the most hypocritical and insulting aspect of the whole thing is that politicians are perfectly capable of mastering new technologies when it serves their own purposes, such as finding loopholes in the Commonwealth Broadcasting Services Act makes it illegal to broadcast political ads in the hours before an election.

Is anyone is Canberra is listening? Once again the world is screaming from the roof tops that they're making a mistake, but they soldier on regardless. How can politicians expect people to take copyright laws seriously, or any laws for that matter, when they are so obviously written by people out of touch with technology and the real world.

We're getting to that time of year when the blogosphere is starting to turn its eye to the coming new year and trying to guess what's coming up. For those whose business relies on anywhere/anytime access to all the gear they need in the office, it promises to be a bumper year.

While 3G and NextG have been in the news recently, the services haven't yet hit their full stride. Next year, I reckon all the Aussie carriers will have HSDPA services. What this means is that the WiFi hotspot business will see some pressure, through the added competition, leading to better pricing (hooray) and having only a small speed loss when you're not in the office. Personally, having been a 3G user with a service from Three (the Aussie arm of Hutchison) I'm looking forward to the speed bump.

The mobile phone market is likely to get a shot in the arm. It seems that a Taiwanese company has got the deal to make 12 million handsets for Apple. I'm sure that news leak has made the folks in Cupertino grumpy. How they'll sell the so called iPhone and what technology they'll use (GSM, CDMA) is still unknown. Some are postulating that Apple will buy spare capacity from a number of carriers and set up their own carrier business (think iTunes/iPod - own the ecosystem). I doubt that'll be the case but I hope it's a GSM phone so that there's a chance we'll see it downunder.

Will the iPhone come to Australia? Is this what'll look like? So many questions.

Finally, the decision by HTC to start marketing its own phones rather than having mobs like i-mate, O2, Dopod and HP rebadge them opens a new dimension to the smartphone market. As HTC can make and sell its own devices this should, in theory, lead to better pricing for consumers. It also means that those companies will have to look to other manufacturers and designers. That means new ideas and more innovation.

2007 will be a good year for mobile office workers.

This week I'm in Korea, taking a tour of Samsung's home base operations. Yesterday I had an amazing opportunity to sit down with the designers of some stand out products, such as the new R7 television and a mobile handset set for exclusive release in Italy as a Versace branded design.

Through the magic of a translator we discussed Samsung's growing strength as a design-centric corporation. The classic situation of the "design champion" form of design management is alive and well here, with Samsung's Chairman having specified a bold new vision of design and creativity as the heart of the business back in 1996.

The R7 in white-red: what do you think, ladies?

What was interesting is Samsung's three phased approach to becoming a design leader and, as crass as the term is, a "trend setter". To 2005 they have worked on pushing their designs to show a clear Samsung identity, and to the end of this year they have targeted the production of original designs. Next on the agenda, through to 2009, they aim to produce designs that deliver on the idea of "emotional experience".

That last was a bit of a corporate speak moment in an otherwise excellent discussion on design, but the sense of "emotion" they are aiming for is already starting to appear in the design of the R7. Building on the original Samsung design of the R5, a starting point here was to create a television that would appeal to a woman. It's a fair call that most TVs are pretty masculine in style. They're big, bulky, and have certainly joined the car as a blokey status symbol. Commercially, to appeal to a female could be a very lucrative angle here.

The R7 has hidden the speakers, their aim being to take away all distraction and focus the object on the screen. The hero style of white-red also makes the box itself almost disappear. Apparently in testing, though, the black is still preferred. Maybe they were the results of the bloke tests.

Differentiation is difficult in the incredibly competitive TV market. It's good to see a major electronics manufacturer identify and work hard to push their production away from building boxes and toward producing design objects. We all want our homes to look good, and TVs can detract from an effort to design a stylish living room (again, unless you are eager to slap a giant black box on a wall in the name of showing off how big your "screen" is).

Price. Performance. Design. I'm glad that last one is starting to get a bit more play in this game.

I had an interesting conversation with Melissa Clark-Reynolds last week. She's the CEO of PayGlobal, a company that offers integrated human resources and payroll software.

Admittedly, payroll isn't the sexiest part of IT, but it is mission-critical: try not paying your staff one week/fortnight/month, and see how long the business keeps running. And I have a soft spot for the subject, having spent part of my gap year in a payroll department.

Melissa Clark-Reynolds: "most employers don't know what to do" about WorkChoices and payroll/HR administration.

Anyway, our conversation was fairly wide-ranging and I might return to it in a subsequent post, but here's the bit that worried me: Clark-Reynolds claimed that "most employers don't know what to do" about the WorkChoices legislation's effect on the administration of payroll and other aspects of HR.

To some extent it's because WorkChoices is a moving target. A few days earlier, the Federal Government announced proposed amendments to the Workplace Relations legislation, including changes to the requirement to keep records of hours worked. But Clark-Reynolds pointed out that even though the Government had previously changed the enforcement date to give employers more time to comply, there had been "no pull-through from customers" - in other words, they're still not demanding WorkChoices-compliant software from their suppliers.

Do you know what the changes mean for your organisation? Is your existing payroll/HR software (or service provider) already compliant with WorkChoices? If not, what are you going to do about it?

Topfield Australia has finally released a high definition Personal Video Recorder, yesterday announcing the TF7000HDPVRt sporting twin high definition tuners and HDMI output. The 250GB hard drive holds roughly 70 hours of SD or 30 hours of HD recordings.

Topfield's long-awaited high definition TF7000HDPVRt

Topfield make arguably the best PVRs available in Australia, so a HD version has been highly anticipated. The TF7000HDPVRt has been two years in the making and some people were starting to doubt it would ever appear, there were even rumours the unit would be released by another company under another name. Well, it's here now - selling for $AU1299 - and I hope to get my hands on one to review in December.

Glancing at the spec sheet, I have to say I'm disappointed that it doesn't have a wifi link like the TF6000PVRt released earlier this year. Why Topfield can't just put an Ethernet port in there is beyond me, it would make the device much more versatile and allow it to automatically download the IceTV seven day program guide as well as access other internet services.

The frustrating thing about the Topfield PVRs is, even with HD, they're only half of my dream device. What I'm after is dual high definition digital TV tuners for recording two programs at once (tick that box), a hard drive recorder with the ability to pause live TV and watch the beginning of a show whilst still recording the end (tick), a seven day electronic program guide (tick), a DVD player/recorder (no) and the ability to record from external devices (no again, the 70000 doesn't even have the 6000's SCART input, which you can't record from anyway). It would also be useful to be able to play DivX video files, plus have Ethernet and/or wifi for accessing the web and playing files from a network drive. The only way to get all of this in one device is to buy or build a Windows XP Media Centre Edition computer. MCE boxes are versatile but expensive, and I want something more reliable than a PC at the heart of my lounge room.

Zensonic's Z500

Australia's Zensonic (soon to be renamed Ziova) makes the excellent Z500 media player (soon to be renamed the Clearstream CS505) covers all of these missing features except for the ability to record. Zensonic and Topfield seem to be diverging on my dream device from different directions, it will be interesting to see if one of them is prepared to take the plunge and incorporate the features of the other. Crossbreed a Z500 with a TF7000HDPVRt, throw in a DVD or even Blu-ray burner, and you've got yourself the ultimate home entertainment device.