WWWalker Staff

History

Beginnings and Pressures

We formed our own business to capture opportunities in Australia being let go to USA and UK too much! We are an Australian-based, agile, niche, hi-tech, international, competitive microbusiness started in 1997 with a rich diversity of experience to draw on. We are basic contractors on small, specific jobs - no open-ended work. We have tertiary qualifications (BSc, Grad Dip IM-Lib) to draw on.

We are an incorporated service-based company in the knowledge economy. Dwight Walker is our creator, director and manager. We have our own online resources and use the Internet heavily. We travel to other cities outside of where we are based to setup jobs for customers or work onsite.

We started in 1997 because we could see opportunities for working on the Internet and most Australian companies were sitting back waiting for USA to do it first then copy them. In 2010, most other companies have caught up and overtaken us. We decided to get in first and not lose the opportunity. This took risk on our part but we were not willing to see Australia left in the dust yet again but be the leading force in the World Wide Web industry, so we went for it.

We have hit a few disasters in the IT industry. We barely survived the dot com crash in 2001 due to being agile and willing to change and grow with the world economical conditions, going mobile from 2003 after moving to Orange from Sydney which saved on rental and storage costs.

Most of our customers used to contact us via phone, fax or email but now our local presence is more important. Before it was just our internet and mobile phone connectivity.

Most of our early customers were in USA, Canada and UK, not Australia (as usually is the case with our remote country), so we got very good at dealing with remote customers and still have our customers nearby and away from where we are based, using the Internet and onsite as our main vehicles for business.

In November 2006, Orange was not technically savvy so they passed up using wireless internet over dialup. Mobile internet in 2010 in Orange is still a novelty.

From 2000, we moved into open source software such as Linux and away from Microsoft to cut costs and remain competitive - it was a risk but we have built up a niche now which has been steadily overtaken by hundreds of Indian Web developers at a much lower price point than us.

In March 2007, we moved to ADSL2+ broadband in Orange opened doors briefly for remote assistance and better inhouse software development and inhouse private online services. We moved location to Brisbane in January 2008 with the broadband but have not used it as we are on the road most of the time from April 2008.

In October 2007, we had a person try to shut our business down by throwing a rock through our window to scare us off. Thugs are pretty anti geeks in Orange so we put our equipment in storage behind a security gate and deal with customers in and outside Orange. After much pressure on us to leave in November 2007, we decided to compromise and stay on in Orange a little while longer.

In January 2008 we moved briefly to Brisbane a better, more law-abiding but heavily congested city but were not able to survive due to lack of sales and affordable housing. While there we did a short Web project

We were not ready for the change in Brisbane. The rough move was tough and we destroyed our confidence by moving with no way to go back easily to Orange and are now working from Orange to let us recover over the past 2 years and were trekking all around NSW, ACT, Victoria and Queensland to build up our resources till funds ran low in December 2008.

This replenished us a little financially after all the dry years in NSW but left us in the lurch when it came to an abrupt end. We tried to operate independently again via a QLD address but were unable to live there personally due to lack of resources so used Orange as a base to seek work and run our little business remotely back in Brisbane till a better time to relocate.

In February 2009 after coming back from his father's funeral in Brisbane, Dwight's bike was stolen outside St Barnabas 'Cafe Barneys' in McLachlan St, Orange. Despite putting his story in the Central Western Daily on 7/3/09, no-one has owned up or handed it back. Nothing is sacred in Orange, not even a church.

Since January 2009 Dwight has done many odd jobs in Orange NSW such as cleaning, busking and incorporated violin teaching into the business to cut the debt built up in 2008 doing his father's book on Mt Margaret Mission and lack of new customers due to the credit crunch. He has travelled to Canberra to build his business, Sydney for training and Brisbane for new sales via his office in Brisbane.

Philosophy and Direction

We go against the trend and use our information technology and information science to go ACROSS many sectors, instead of going vertical in just one chain of products.

We build the glue that holds many disparate parts together - backend, browser, applications, networks, security. So we don't spread ourselves too thin - we use the diversity of the Internet community to go beyond our comfort zone and try to do things that may seem irrational or difficult but will see the way through - a can-do attitude to life! We have a vision that is years ahead so we always read up and are prepared for the next wave before the big guys get there, since we are librarians and can do research worldwide via the Internet. :)

We don't want to become as bureaucratic as other firms as it would ruin the reason for going independent so we push on with making our business better and not falling into the trap of poor customer service and pathetic quality that other bigger companies follow ad nauseum. This is costly and risky but hopefully is better in the long run. We may need to join the rest of the IT industry to survive.

Rubbing off from Dwight having travelled a large part of his childhood, we easily integrate with other cultures. We are cross-cultural. To survive insular communities, we use the Internet to keep in touch with forward thinking groups.

We explore new technology as it comes along. We started the business so we had a vehicle to use to develop new technology. The business is to support us. We carefully manage job size so it does not overload us. This is the beauty of being the boss: we cannot be sacked by ourselves but we can lose jobs, allocate funds or kill off bad jobs as we see fit and not be locked into useless contracts however it costs much to survive.

Workplace Authority (ex Workchoices) does not affect us as we are boss and worker - a working director - no conflict between the parties - we would like better pay and conditions and and sometimes pay ourselves more as we are able or move to a better location for our sanity so there is less stress on us - a very flexible system for managing funds to better our personal interests and maintain the corporate bottomline like other companies.

Sometimes company interests to drive down costs cost us emotionally due to isolation and no local people of a similar educational standard e.g. Western Sydney, Orange, so we change to better locations from time to time to stay on top mentally.

We bear the burden of any losses for months if we are shafted but do not stay locked into dead-end deals for long. That is the freedom and cost of running our own business and not being employed by someone else's business and is one of the main reasons why we continue to keep going all these years! Nothing else gives us this amount of freedom to explore new ideas and we are assisted by music dollars to keep afloat.

There is a discipline of running a business that stops us being locked into dead-end deals which is very helpful for our personality but can hamper our growth financially. It is like flying a little aeroplane: if it starts to dive, we pull on the rudder to give it lift. Remarkably even in the worst storms we have a very resilient business and we usually bounce back though it can sometimes takes months if we ditch dead-weight and change course for the better of the business.

Sometimes harsh billing decisions have to be made to kick off bad customers who want to milk us for all we are worth so our billing grinds those kinds of jobs to a halt and stops more red ink and debt killing us off. We then have pump in more capital from music to resuscitate our business and give it legs. Music is a great marketing arm.

The reality is there is a huge downturn in the world in April 2009 and our business is on hold so we are doing lots of new sorts of work in this business such as music now to live!

Managing Director

Dwight Walker

Qualifications:

• BSc (computer science), UQ 1987
• Grad Dip Info Management-Librarianship, UNSW, 1991
• Cert IV Small Business Enterprise, TAFE NSW, Baulkham Hills, 1998
• Registered Indexer, Australian and NZ Society of Indexers, 1996
• Basic Methods of Instruction, TAFE NSW, Gymea, 1993

Professional Associations:

• Affiliate of ParraConnect (Parramatta City Council and civicTEC and WSITC) (2010-)
• Affiliate of Western Sydney IT Cluster (WSITC) (2009-) - WSITC Linkedin Group
• Affiliate of IEEE Computer Society (till 2003)
• AALIA (till 2002)

Skills

• Software Engineer/Programmer: C, C++, Pascal, Ada, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, BASIC, SQL database programming
• Technical writer, editor, researcher
• Webmaster, information architect, librarian, information manager
• Network Manager, Sysop: PC and LAN systems support

Interests:

• bush fiddler

Contact details:

• Email: info at wwwalker.com.au
• ICQ chat id: wwwalker, UIN 4631678
• Yahoo! Messenger id: roorythmics - Webcam and USB Phone available
• Windows Live Messenger id: wwwalker - Webcam and USB Phone available
• Skype id: dwightwalker - Webcam and USB Phone available
• Jabber id: dwalker7 at jabber.com
• Twitter id: dwightwalker
• Mobile: +61-(0)412-405727
• postal: PO Box 1476, Orange NSW 2800 Australia

Skills

System	Poweruser	Programmer	Sysop	Web programmer
Debian Sarge, Knoppix, Ubuntu and Xandros Linuxes		1 mth	1 yr	4 yrs
Fedora Core 3 Linux			1 mth	1 mth
Slackware and SuSE Linuxes		2 mths	8 mths	1 yr
CentOS 3.6				1 yr
FreeBSD 6.2			2 yrs
Apple Mac OS X 10.3.9, 10.4	1 mth		1 mth
Apple Darwin				1 mth
Red Hat Linux 5.1, 7.0			2 yrs	3 yrs
SunOS/HPUX UNIX		2 yrs	1 yr
Windows Vista			1 mth
Windows XP Pro	2 yrs		1 yr
Windows 2000	1 mth		1 mth
IBM OS/2 Warp	1 yr		1 yr	1 yr
Windows NT 4.0	4 yrs		1 yr	6 mths
Windows ME	4 yrs		1 yr	1 mth
Windows 95/98	2 yrs		2 yrs
Microsoft, TCP/IP, Novell LANs	10+ yrs	1 mth	10+ yrs	10+ yrs
Intel, AMD and Emerson Network Power (ex Motorola 6800 and 68000), Z80 microprocessors	10+ yrs	4 yrs	8 yrs	10+ yrs
virus scanners and backup/restore	10+ yrs		5 yrs
setup of cable/ADSL modems, wireless broadband and WLANs, routers and firewalls for Telstra Bigpond and Wireless Broadband, Optus, Unwired, AAPT, MySoul, People Telecom, Netspace: D-Link - D-Link Australia Belkin Apple Airport Extreme Maxon MiniMax ASUS Eee PC DrayTek Siemens Speed Stream 4200 Linksys (GPL code) Netcomm Netgear			2 yrs
CDMA/GPRS/WAP mobile Internet				2 years
Skype VoIP				6 mths
Aldi HDTV USB DVB-T receiver	1 mth

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