Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Let the algorithm do the investing

    Let the algorithm do the investing

    Investment advisers could be the next occupation to face automation reports Bloomberg Business with the prediction two trillion dollars worth of investment funds could be managed by computers by the end of the decade.

    An important aspect of the change to computerised investment advice is the reduced fees that makes professional knowledge far cheaper and more accessible.

    The downside, as Bloomberg points out, is that there may be fewer investment advisers enjoying corporate hospitality and conventions in future so there may be other industries feeling the job losses too.

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  • The sharing economy’s wobbling wheels

    The sharing economy’s wobbling wheels

    Ride service Uber had a setback last month when the California Labor Commission ordered the company pay one of its drivers, Barbara Ann Berwick, over four thousand dollars for expenses.

    For sharing economy services like Uber this is a problem as their business model depends upon shifting all the costs and as much of the risks as possible onto contractors.

    Should the ruling set a precedent the economics of these services start to look shaky and could even challenge the shifting of risks to users and contractors.

    Take away the new age romanticism spouted by some over services like Uber, Freelancer and 99 Designs and there’s a ruthless business model that minimises costs and risks, that low level of overheads is why these companies have been so successful in attracting investors.

    For the workers, carrying the costs and the risks isn’t such a good deal. “If you work it out,”Barbara Berwick said, “if I didn’t get compensated for expenses, I’d be working for less than minimum wage.”

    While the ruling makes life less precarious for drivers like Berwick, it may curb the enthusiasm of the investor community for the sharing economy.

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  • The pulse that’s barely beating

    The pulse that’s barely beating

    Earlier this week Deloitte Access Economics released Australia’s Digital Pulse, an overview of how the nation is responding to the needs for the IT related jobs required in a changing global economy.

    Deloitte pointed out that most of the Australian economy’s IT jobs aren’t actually in the IT industry with less than half the sector’s employment being with technology companies and the majority of software writers and engineers employed by everything from finance companies to retailers.

    This ties in with results found by recruitment website Indeed.com whose Senior Vice President, Paul D’Arcy, visited Australia last month and pointed out globally three quarters work of software developers work for non-tech organisations an in the US that proportion drops to seven percent.

    As technology becomes more embedded in industries the need for workers who understand the tools becomes critical. This isn’t a new thing as we saw word processing and spreadsheet software enter workplaces twenty years ago which required typists, secretaries and accountants to become far more acquainted with the workings of personal computers than they otherwise would have cared to.

    Intriguingly in Australia during the twenty-five years that computers and the internet have taken over the workplace interest in IT careers and enrolments in computing subjects has risen and fallen.

    Between 2000 and 2008 the number of students doing IT related courses halved as Australian businesses cut back on tech spending, offshored their work and bought in an army of 457 visa workers to replace local workers.

    Coupled with an economy where renovating kitchens or driving mining trucks is better rewarded than most technical jobs, it wasn’t surprising that students chose not to study computer science related subjects. In the last few years undergraduate numbers have started to tick upwards as the resources boom has faded and coding has become cool due the successes of people like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

    Interestingly, despite the dearth of entrants into the sector over the last fifteen years, Deloitte found the overall Australian ICT labour market appears to be adequately supplied at present, however the expected increase in future demand for ICT workers means that skills shortages could constrain future economic activity.

    With many things Australia has been lucky for the last twenty years and our neglect of ICT training has been one of many fields we’ve been able to neglect. As we’re seeing with the internet of things, cloud computing and big data all becoming a common part of business the skills we’re going to need in our workers are going to change.

    The challenge for both companies and our education system is give today’s kids the skills they, and the nation, needs to be globally competitive. We may not stay so lucky over the next two decades.

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  • Social media and the changing media landscape

    Social media and the changing media landscape

    “We seek news on Twitter but bump into it on Facebook” points out the Reuters’ 2015 Digital News Report in its analysis of global media consumption.

    The broad trends from surveying over 20,000 online news consumers in the US, UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Brazil, Japan and Australia are clear – social media is becoming the main way people are finding their news while television is slowly declining.

    Probably most concerning for the television networks how younger viewers have turned away from TV with only a quarter of those aged between 18 and 25 tuning in as opposed to two thirds of those aged over 65.

    Given the aging of television network audiences it’s not surprising that last week Australia’s Network Ten, part owned by Lachlan Murdoch, found a lifeline from the country’s main cable network as the broadcaster is finding revenues declining.

    The question is how long advertisers are going to stick with television as audiences increasingly move online creating a revenue gap estimated by analyst Mary Meeker to be worth around thirty billion dollars a year.

    For the moment, the great hope for the online world is Facebook with Reuters finding the service is dominating users’ time. In that light it’s not surprising the company has such a huge market valuation.

    The competing social media services are still facing challenges, particularly with Twitter showing a far lower level of penetration with the general public, leading Harvard professor Bill George to speculate the company risked becoming the new BlackBerry.

    While the online services struggle for supremacy and television slowly declines, the real pain continues to felt by the newspapers who continue to find their relevance erode and few of their readers prepared to pay for their content.

    The Reuters report confirms the trends we already know while giving insights into the unique peculiarities of each market.

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  • How software defines the Industrial Internet

    How software defines the Industrial Internet

    The Internet of Things is a three legged stool of the consumer, enterprise and industrial applications says Vice President of GE’s software division, Bill Ruh.

    “It’s about connecting machines, connecting people and driving a new kind of experience. For the consumer it’s a social experience, for the enterprise it’s a whole new way of how their IT departments running, in the industrial space it’s a revolution where we get to rethink how we operate.”

    Ruh sees the IoT as being worth over 14 trillion dollars to GE over the next two decades, making it bigger than the other two legs combined.

    Eliminating downtime

    Most of that value comes from three areas; improved resource utilisation, operational optimisation and eliminating unscheduled downtime.

    “The fact is downtime is expensive, for airline 41% of all delays and cancellations are due to mechanical errors. If we get rid of those your life gets better, my life gets better and the airline’s lives get better.”

    “Zero unscheduled downtime doesn’t sound sexy but it’s one of the most profitable and sexiest topics ever.” In this Ruh agrees with Salesforce’s Peter Coffee that eliminating outages is a key part of delighting the modern customer.

    Ruhe sees that the industrial sector hasn’t used IT and the internet well in the past, “RFID was going to change the world and it didn’t, we saw smartgrids were going to be the biggest thing and it didn’t achieve a lot of the hype that people saw.”

    “Now the technology is aligned not just with technology for technology’s sake but to an outcome that leads to growth for an industrial sake.”

    An example of the operational efficiencies that Ruh is particularly proud of is GE’s PowerUp technology that promises to improve the output of wind turbines, “it is a series of technologies used to analyse information about every wind turbine on a farm and to dynamically adjust each and every one to optimise the wind speed.”

    “When you do that we’ve found we can generate up to five percent more electricity per wind farm because of software, which adds twenty-five percent more profitability.”

    “In the next generation of wind turbines all this kind of software is going to be embedded in it from the design phase through to the operational phase,” Ruh says. “It’s going to change how our customers are going to operate wind turbines.”

    Building digital twins

    Another aspect Ruh sees with the changes is how machines and data will work together where equipment or parts are shipped with a ‘digital twin’, a software representation of the device that lets the customer test scenarios on their computers.

    “I can now do ‘what if’ analysis on that machine using its data and that’s going to change how things work. That takes everything from 3D modelling, to manufacturing, to maintenance to operations.”

    Building on domain knowledge

    Ultimately Ruh sees GE’s strength with the Industrial Internet being the company’s domain knowledge, “this world is different and you cannot come from outside and pretend you’re going to learn it as you go.”

    “The way people buy equipment is totally different, we have equipment that’s eighty years old and we still support it. That’s totally different from the software world.”

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