My company has been working on two world-class underground software packages to complement Globaltech’s range of Pathfinder® underground survey systems:

1. Pathtracker® Pro

Globaltech’s state of the art Pathtracker® Pro software gives you a 3D view of the borehole survey. This benefits geologists by visualising the length, direction and shape of the bore hole.

Features include:

1. Plots graphical representation of the hole-path
2. Generates Plan, Elevation & 3-D Views with tools to turn the hole round
3. Can generate Global Positioning data (GPS) corresponding to each survey taken
4. Generate hole path in Global Earth View
5. Generates PDF report that includes graphical representation and essential data
6. Convert Magnetic Azimuth to Geometric Azimuth
7. Generates Elevation, Easting & Northing
8. Allows data to be sorted in ascending or descending depth
9. Toggles temperature column between deg Centigrade and Fahrenheit
10. Processes survey data to describe the best hole path
11. Generates nominal Magnetic Total and Magnetic Dip
12. Identifies bad shots (caused by magnetic anomaly or movement)
13. Easily de-selects identified bad shots

2. Pathtracker®

Pathtracker is a ‘Survey Data Quality Check’ software. Pathtracker accepts and process survey data captured by the Pathfinder® multi-shot survey probes without any reconfiguration or mapping. Raw survey data captured by Pathfinder can be processed to best describe the hole-path whilst anomalies are identified. There are many tools such as data mapping, anomaly identification, and individual survey shots’ coordinates. Surveys processed by Pathtracker can be loaded into Pathtracker Pro for hole-path graphic display & analyses.

Pathtracker single licence is issued free of charge with every Pathfinder Multi Shot probe. Additional licences can be purchased.

Pathtracker® has essential features and is designed to provide survey data quality checks and enables the operator to map the survey data captured by Pathfinder® multi-shot to be loaded into Pathtracker Pro, 3rd party ‘hole path analyses’ software or simply displayed in a familiar format.

What does it do?

1. Convert Magnetic Azimuth to Geometric Azimuth
2. Generates Elevation, Easting & Northing
3. Allows data to be sorted in ascending or descending depth
4. Allows selecting de-selecting of data Columns
5. Allows re-positioning of data columns
6. Toggles temperature column between deg Centigrade and Fahrenheit
7. Generates nominal Magnetic Total and Magnetic Dip
8. Identifies & highlights bad shots (caused by magnetic anomaly or movement)
9. Easily de-selects identified bad shots
10. Processes survey data to describe the best hole-path (by selecting Smooth Az)
11. Fixes bad shots where applicable & labels them as fixed (by selecting Smooth Az)
12. Generates survey report/file that can be loaded straight into Pathtracker Pro (by checking the Pathtracker Pro Compatible check box) for graphic representation and hole analyses
13. Facility to create template(s) to retain favorite configurations

Thank you to all our developers in getting these products released.

Doesn’t sound much, but ExxonMobil have set a record for undersea drilling:

ExxonMobil has completed the world’s. longest extended-reach well drilled from an existing offshore fixed platform drilling rig, increasing the company’s ability to produce more domestic oil supplies from existing facilities at the Santa Ynez unit, offshore southern California. The well drilled from the Heritage platform using ExxonMobil’s Fast Drill technology extends more than six miles horizontally and more than 7,000 feet below sea level.

Through the use of this extended reach drill technology, the well will be able to produce an additional 5.8 million barrels of oil equivalent, an amount equal to the annual energy consumption of over 144,000 Californians.

I stumbled across an interesting analysis of a new technological process, horizontal drilling and extraction of shale natural gas. Read the whole thing here but here is the key chart comparing horizontal vs vertical wells:

Comparative production from a vertical and horizontal natural gas well (Chris McGill).

Production Volume

One thing that did strike me is that the horizontal peak production is well above the vertical well but has a shorter life span. Horizontal wells do have significant technical challenges (as seen in the article), but perhaps we can analyse the above chart to give us an idea of the benefits of horizontal drilling. Now to do this is a little tricky, as I do not have the original chart. However, using Photoshop, I was able to extract the area of the chart and the scale to get us total volume (note these are approximations only, but it gives us a “back of the envelope” view):

• Vertical Well (Yellow): 3547 MMFC
• Horizontal Well (Orange): 6097 MMFC
• Horizontal to Vertical Well total production gain: +72%

Judging from the chart the horizontal well extracts and extra 72% more oil in 10 months versus 100 months for vertical wells.

Production Value

Now to estimate the total value of the well let’s assume the price of natural gas is stable (at Henry Hub) at $8.00 per MCF:

• Total value of the horizontal well is  6097*1000*$8.00 = $48,776,000
• Total value of the vertical well is 3547*1000*$8.00 = $28,376,000

Time Value of Money

This is where we get to use some basic financial models to determine the value of horizontal wells compared to vertical wells. The time value of money is the value of money figuring in a given amount of interest earned over a given amount of time. As an example, with an interest rate of 5% per annum, 100 dollars received today is equivalent of receiving 105 dollars in a year’s time.

Note that the horizontal well lifetime is 10 months compared to the vertical well lifetime of 100 months. Thus to be fair we need to compare the value of the horizontal well and the vertical well after 100 months. This is where the Time Value of Money comes in. Let’s pretend we bank the $48,776,000 that the horizontal well extracts, thus after 100 months (assuming 5% interest rates):

• Total value of horizontal well at 100 months: $70,913,392
• Total value of vertical well at 100 months: $28,376,000
• Horizontal to Vertical well gain: +150%

Extraction Costs

I do not know, in detail, the relative difference in extraction costs for these two methods. However, we now have the Horizontal to Vertical Well gain to use in our decision making. If the Horizontal to Vertical well cost is less than Horizontal to Vertical Well gain (+150% in our example), then it becomes economical to use the horizontal well method.

UPDATE: here is some commentary from The Oil Drum on this article regarding the discount rates:

With the resultant economic downturn around the world, companies should exploit their under-utilised human capital to prototype new products, services and business processes.Change challenges your company’s business practices, orthodoxies and the status quo. Executives should take a step back and re-assess their strategies and question how their organisation can better serve the market in the most cost effective way. If your company is suffering through a slow period, and have excess capacity, then this is a perfect opportunity to experiment and beta trial new products, services and business methods in your organisation.

Meet with your customers. Discuss their problems. Look for opportunities to remove their pain points. Can you save them time and money? Invite them to work with you on a solution. As an example, we are currently conducting a small scale trial of a prototype pedometer teaching aid at a local primary school that helps educators teach children about the importance of physical activity. This helps teachers who are time-poor to create new and inspirational classroom activities for their students.

Mobilise your team into groups of 3-4 and brainstorm new areas that the business to explore. It is not enough just to have ideas; you need to empower them with resources (ie. money and time) to conduct small scale beta trials. A scenario: your team has an idea for an intranet software package that integrates data from different departments and brings up an information dashboard to allow quick and timely decisions. Connect your engineers, business analysts and relevant stakeholders together to get a quick prototype done, evaluate the results and decide how to proceed. Having the ability to experiment and actually implement prototypes of ideas will give your company the competitive edge when the economy turns around.

Let the ideas flow from the bottom-up. Assuming you have adequate rewards and recognition based on personal and departmental Key Performance Indicators, the ideas and prototypes that flow from your team will have a better chance of success than ones forced down from above. Provide the leadership, parameters and boundaries of the solution and watch the magic happen!

While investing in new products and services may seem risky in the present climate, it is far better to start innovating now and be in a strong position when the economy (eventually) starts growing again.

Giving us more Time. That’s the goal of technology. As CEO’s, we are time poor and are expected to perform miracles across many disciplines, and as such, we look for any tool that helps us save time while continuing to perform at our peak level.Over the years, I have tried and tested many software programs and am ruthless about hitting that “uninstall” button if it doesn’t fit my needs. So I have come up with my Top 10 list of software tools which have stood the test of time on my PC.

1. Microsoft Office (including Outlook)

Part of any IT setup is the ubiquitous Microsoft Office. Due to the shear scale of usage, this is a no brainer. Excel is my favourite for doing financial modelling, simple databases and charts. I use Microsoft Outlook as my personal information manager to organise email from my 11 email accounts, my tasks and calendar. Make sure you archive often to improve Outlook’s performance.

2. Firefox

The fastest growing web browser, Firefox, is easy to use, fairly light and fast. Good security and regular updates. 3^rd party plugins such as FireFTP, Google Toolbar and Roboform (see later) further enhance this product.

3. Roboform

How many passwords do you have to remember? I have nearly 600. Roboform is a program that manages your passwords securely on your computer. One master password gives you access to all of your passwords. Web browser plugins (Roboform Toolbar) allows you to easily fill-out and submit login codes into websites. This has saved me countless hours of frustration. Well worth the investment.

4. Google Desktop

So much time is devoted towards searching for relevant documents and emails. Google has a neat program that indexes your computer and your servers for files, emails, chat logs etc. It has saved me a lot of time searching for those elusive documents and emails. While it does take quite a bit of processing power from your machine, it is well worth it in the end. And it’s free.

5. Maxtor BackUp

When you purchase a Maxtor external hard disk you get a neat backup program. You can schedule an automatic backup of your important folders on your PC. I set mine to run at 3am every day. It also has a “Safety Drill” Copy which takes an entire image of your hard drive. So if your PC hard drive fails you can recover it (including your installed software) on a new hard drive. I run the “SafetyDrill” every week.

6. Evernote

Have you ever been working on a project and wanted one area to collect your notes (handwritten and electronic), emails, websites into one area? I discovered Evernote a couple of months ago and have been a heavy user since. I use it to store my current projects I am working on. It even has rudimentary handwriting detection, which makes searching fairly easy. It also has a feature (which I do not use yet) to synchornise with other computers, servers and your colleagues. Plus it’s free.

7. MYOB

Having a snapshot of your finances at an instant is vitally important for a CEO. For startups, you can’t go past MYOB. It is fairly intuitive to use, although you may need your accountant to run through the basics with you.

8. Avast!

Avast! is an excellent and low-cost virus protection. It automatically downloads and installs updates so you don’t have to worry about checking to see if you have the latest version. Be sure to remove your current virus scanner completely before installing Avast as it will conflict with one another.

9. CCleaner

Over time, your PC will accumulate a lot of information in the system registry and in temporary files. If it fills up too much, it can have a detrimental effect on your PC’s performance and stability. CCleaner is a free software package that runs a diagnostic check over your system and automatically clean up any unnecessary files and settings that you no longer need. I run it every fortnight.

10. SpyBot

With the open nature of the Internet, there comes the threat of spyware, adware and malicious programs can infiltrate your computer via the websites. Note that these may not be picked up by your normal virus scanners, so I recommend that you install this and run it regularly. I run SpyBot automatically every night to keep my PC clean.

So that’s my Top 10 Software Tools on my PC. Stay tuned for next month’s article: Top 10 Online Web 2.0 Services for StartUp CEO’s

The thirst for knowledge, entertainment and communication online continues to. Internet technology has evolved from being primarily a text based medium to a rich multimedia channel for its audience. So why is video growing so rapidly on the web? I believe that online video is replacing TV as the primary form of entertainment. This trend will continue to grow as more content producers use the Internet as a primary means of distribution.

To understand the potential of video I hypothesized that the online media consumption habits would, in the long term, mirror offline media consumption habits. One basic metric to measure consumption habits is to examine at advertising expenditures. According to TNS Market research, year is the US advertising expenditures for all media in 2005 were:

So that we compare apples with apples I have grouped offline media into text (newspapers, magazines), audio (radio) and video (TV) based offline media. Thus we then get the following breakdown:

So if we assume that the online viewing habits will mirror online viewing habits expect to see advertising expenditures to be split is roughly the same way. Total US Internet advertising expenditure for 2008 is projected to be $25.9 Billion and currently online video accounts for a tiny $1.3 Billion (Source:eMarketer). This represents just 5% of the total US Internet advertising. In comparison, offline video accounts for 44% of total offline ad spend. If we extrapolate these findings we see that video has the potential to be worth approximately $11.4 Billion in the US in 2008. In other words, there is over $10 Billion in unrealised potential in online video right this minute.

This is why online video is so hot right now.

Web 2.0 is the current flavour of the month in the online world. Businesses, start-ups and established corporations are embracing this new trend like, well, Web 1.0 circa 1999. What can Web 2.0 offer your business? We will explore three somewhat overlapping aspects of Web 2.0 and discuss its impact on organisations. There are three “spheres” of Web 2.0:

• Technology Architecture;
• Business Models;
• Aesthetics.

What drives the business model for a company to establish a Web 2.0 project? It’s about communication. The simpler the communication method, the greater the capacity to communicate more effectively, which inevitably leads to more people sharing knowledge. We have seen the explosion of user generated content, such as You Tube, MySpace and Flickr. Companies are now moving towards “employee generated” and “customer generated” content. Instead of managers and the executive writing “top-down” directives, we may see the emergence of “bottom-up” policies and ideas emerge and discussed from staff and “lateral” policies introduced from the macro data of customer experiences. Of course, the cultural aspects of the organization needs to support such open discussions and this level of workplace democracy for this to work. This also includes engaging with your customers in an open dialogue and be prepared to hear their opinions: good and bad.

But haven’t we heard this all before? Didn’t IT knowledge platforms of the past from Lotus, Microsoft and the myriad of other software providers going to help knowledge sharing and customer satisfaction? Yes, they did help. But as employees become increasingly comfortable with consumer oriented Web 2.0 websites the more they become familiar with both the culture and technology tools that aid knowledge sharing. Similarly, customers now expect companies to have online forums and blogs and be intimately involved with the brand and product experience- thereby increasing their loyalty.

So what is the software platform that enables Web 2.0? In simple terms, the software architecture of a website consists of a database (where raw data is stored in logical groups, eg. user login details), the code (which communicates with the database and decides what is displayed on a particular page) and the presentation (or the “look and feel” of the website). These are separate modules that communicate with each other. For example, if we change the presentation or “look and feel” of a website we don’t have to worry about changing the structure of the database. This means we can have database designers working on the database structure, the coders working on the programming and the graphic designers working on the presentation of the site. Of course, there will be interface points that need to be managed but by separating these three basic layers allows innovation to prosper in each layer as a specialist can develop solely for a particular layer and not have to worry about the other. For example, it is unlikely that a database programmer will have the artistic flair of a graphic artist designing a website’s “look and feel.”

You have probably noticed that new Web 2.0 websites like, YouTube, Flickr and the myriad of blogs out there, somehow look different. Bolder, cleaner, gradients, bigger text and less cluttered. Screen elements can be resized and buttons fade. The technology fuelling this innovation is AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript). We won’t be going into its details, but the key message is that AJAX is helping improve the look and feel and more importantly the usability of the web. By usability we mean that the web user experience is moving towards what we expect of PC software (eg. Word, Outlook etc.). Think of it as having the best of both worlds – the user experience we expect from PC software coupled with the power of being online via your web browser.

The other important technology, XML (Extensibile Markup Language) is a common language that allows software (be it on the web, PC or mobile) to communicate with each other. So by having that common format, data can be exchanged and presented in unique ways.

So how can Web 2.0 “aesthetics” help corporations? One of the key problems facing executives is the real time reporting of what state their organization is in. Revenue, expenses, customer satisfaction, burning issues, media and PR “buzz.” In most cases, the information is there; in fact one can argue that there may too much information. The trick is to turn information into knowledge (and hopefully knowledge into wisdom!). Web 2.0 technologies can be used to distill information into dashboard objects – charts, dials, bar charts etc. For example, below is a snapshot from Salesforce.com’s analytical dashboard:

Note the wonderful, colourful snapshot of the organization an executive can get and cut through the information “clutter.”

Concluding remarks

As with all new corporate technology, it’s important to have realistic expectations about what it can achieve. If you want a knowledge sharing blog make sure you have a knowledge sharing culture first with your customers. Want a great executive dashboard? Make sure you have a visually creative development team that can transform your old boring spreadsheet data into an imaginative array of dashboard indicators to help you, at a glance, get a hold on how your organisation is performing.