Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Employment’s changing face

Is it management’s and white collar workers’ turn to deal with the change of contracting and business process outsourcing?

Last Thursday recruitment company Talent2 launched its 2013 Market Pulse Survey looking at the employment trends across the Asia Pacific.

According to the survey, things are looking good with 61% of businesses across the Asia Pacific forecasting growth and 45% expecting to hire more staff.

However there’s an interesting underlying theme to the good news, employment is changing in large organisations.

One of the give-aways is the fact that while nearly two-thirds of businesses expect to grow in 2013, less than half intend to increase staff. Businesses are doing more with less.

Part of this is because of increased automation. Despite the headlines, productivity is increasing in workplaces – particularly offices – as technology automates many business functions in fields like logistics and workforce management.

Another aspect driving the lack of employment is outsourcing, Talent2 say the proportion of Australians working as full time employees dipped below 75% in 2012 with a four percentage point drop over the year.

With more businesses contracting work out, one could expect the number of sole proprietors to be increasing. However this seems not to be the case.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the number of sole traders is barely moving – between 2006 and 2011 the number of “non-employing Australian businesses” only increased 5% while the population grew over 8%.

This implies the proportion of contractors in the workforce is actually shrinking.

Much of this is probably due to the work going offshore, particularly to Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs) in countries like the Philippines, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.

Saturday’s Australian Financial Review looked at what the BPOs are doing in the Philippines and they aren’t carrying out the call centre and basic clerical work that’s made up most of the outsourcing over the last twenty years. Now it’s management roles that are going offshore.

The bigger issue confronting Australians, however, is not call centre workers being relocated to the Philippines. It’s low- to mid-level professional jobs, being moved out of companies, accounting firms and law offices.

Legal outsourcing has been growing for a decade as large law firms have moved many of their para-legal and routine tasks offshore to countries where legal graduates are plentiful but work at lower rates than their western colleagues.

An interesting aspect in legal offshoring is that much of the work that was done by young lawyers has now gone to overseas contractors, which probably means there’s going to be a shortage of experienced legal practioners in the medium term. This is going to have profound consequences for law firms and their partners.

It’s also going to mean law and associated degrees are going to be less popular with school leavers as career prospects dwindle.

The biggest impact though is for managers – we’ve grown used to the assumption that management jobs stay at head office while the lower level jobs go to the lowest cost provider.

Now is those lowest cost providers are offering good quality management staff along with support desk and call centre staff.

During the restructurings of the 1980s and 90s, it was blue collar workers who were the most affected by change. Now it’s the turn of the office workers and managers.

It will be interesting to see how many of the people who thought they were secure in their roles deal with the uncertainty they now have. For some it’s going to be a tough decade.

One street, five networks – the madness of rethinking the NBN

One suburban street shows the madness of changing the NBN fibre to the premises policy.

In Technology Spectator today I write about how Australia is risking repeating the mistakes the colonies made with railway gauges on much more grand scale with telecommunications technologies.

With talk of re scoping the National Broadband Network project, despite being four years into a ten year undertaking, it’s important to understand just how foolish this would be an what a mess it will create.

To illustrate this, I’ve gone for a walk along a Sydney street on the Lower North Shore. This suburb is less than 5km from the city’s central business district.

The pillar at the end of the street

At the end of this typical suburban street is a little gray, well guarded but battered pillar. This box is important as it contains the connections to the local telephone network and its replacement will house the distribution equipment for a fibre network regardless of what type is installed.

Interestingly, just the presence of the pillar and the associated manholes nearby indicates there is already fibre in the neighbourhood, one aspect in the NBN debate that’s overlooked is that optical fibre is standard for telco backhaul and distribution networks.

The only reason fibre hasn’t already been rolled out to homes and businesses is the sunk cost of the copper cables. When it’s necessary to replace an entire copper system as in New York after Hurricane Sandy or in South Brisbane after the local phone exchange was sold, then fibre is what telcos will install as its cheaper to maintain.

Plain old telephone lines

Walking down the street we find the first example are those who are going to be stuck with the old copper network under a fibre to the node solution.

What’s notable about that pole is its shocking state – in itself it illustrates just how Australia’s telecommunications networks have been allowed to run down with the underinvestment of the last twenty years.

There’s a very chance the householders connected to those phone lines won’t be able to sustain a reliable ADSL or FTTN connection because of the state of the wires.

Remember, this pole isn’t in some remote part of rural Australia, should you be brave enough to climb it you’d have a wonderful view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, North Sydney and the city. Its state illustrates that underinvestment is just as much a problem in the suburbs as it is in the bush.

Using the Pay-TV network

One the alternatives being touted is using the Pay TV network cables – know as Hybre Fiber Coaxial, or HFC – to carry the broadband signal.

Here’s an example of the Foxtel installations and the poor work quality stands out immediately. The connection on the left is notable for its rain catching properties which doesn’t bode well for what’s happening to the coax cables in the duct lurking beneath the footpath.

As an aside, the sort of poor quality workmanship found in the cable rollout is another risk to the NBN as it appears NBNCo is repeating Foxtel’s mistake of screwing the installation contractors into the ground on their rates. The result is really low quality work which won’t stand the test of time.

Making HFC even less useful is the fact that most Australian properties can’t connect to it.

In one of the best of examples of the drooling incompetence of Australia’s political ‘elite’, the 1990s Keating government managed to engineer a situation where the two cable companies rolled out their networks to the same places – 30% of the country got two networks while the rest received nothing.

The real problem though with the HFC network is that most Australians who can get it haven’t bothered – take up rates in the areas cable is available struggle to hit 50%. So an Abbot government would actually have to pay to connect households to a service they’ve never wanted.

Probably the cruellest part of all with the HFC proposal is the coax network itself is approaching the end of its life and most will be replaced with fibre within a decade. So we’re not saving a cent, just kicking costs down the road.

Apartment living

Even if you lived in that thirty percent of the country that did get pay-TV cable along their street, you were out of luck if you lived in an apartment or townhouse as few strata committees were interested in paying Foxtel install cables and Optus was never interested in MDUs – Multi Dwelling Units in telco-speak.

A little way down the street from the houses photographed above are a group of town houses. Under the current NBN plans, this complex will get fibre. Under the coalition’s it will be stuck with copper.

The worst case scenario is a “fibre to the basement” solution where the fibre is run into the building’s distribution frame and then it’s up to the owners to make the connection using the existing copper phone lines.

In many cases it will never happen as strata managers and committees would keep putting it off, or they’d choose the lowest cost option which would exacerbate the poor work of the overworked NBN contractors.

Tower living

Next door to those townhouses is an eight story apartment block. These people risk being the biggest losers in the new telco environment.

The problem for tower block dwellers is the low quality of the buildings and the lack of space for fibre telco risers. Under the fibre to the premises proposal some of these blocks are going to pose serious challenges to NBNCo.

Should the fibre to the basement proposal go ahead, many of the notoriously penny pinching owners corporations won’t complete the installation.

It’s highly likely that many Australian apartment dwellers are going to find themselves on wireless or LTE (mobile phone) connections for the foreseeable future as both the telco policies and poor building standards are going to deny them access to high speed fibre. This is going to have financial consequences for many landlords.

The risk for businesses

Most Australian businesses which occupy office buildings or industrial estates and they are going to be affected in the same way as apartment dwellers. The solution proposed by the coalition is that they should pay for their own fibre connections. Some will, many won’t and we’ll end up with another set of connections in our commercial districts.

One street, five networks

So just on one suburban street we could have people connecting through the old copper network, the HFC pay TV network, fibre to the basement, wireless and direct fibre for those who can afford it.

This is madness.

What’s even greater madness is that we’re four years into the National Broadband Network project and we’re talking about changing the scope for what’s been billed as one of the biggest infrastructure projects in Australian history.

Praying the luck continues

The Technology Spectator starts off with a comparison to the railway gauge madness of the 1850s. There’s an interesting parallel today.

Two weeks ago, the Australian Financial Review reported that millions had been spent on lawyers and consultant fees on Sydney’s North Western railway yet no work has been done.

On the same day, Business Insider published a story on the extensions to New York’s Long Island Railroad.

Around the world governments from New York to Nairobi are getting on with building infrastructure. In the meantime Australia struggles with building tram lines.

When we do decide to build a major project we get four years into it and decide to change our minds.

The nation dodged a bullet despite having made bad choices with roads and railways in the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries. Australia prospered despite those poor decisions.

If we can’t get telecommunications right then we better hope the luck continues through the 21st Century.

Now may not be a good time to buy Melbourne property

Why do monster skyscrapers mark a looming economic downturn?

There’s plenty of indicators that can be used to predict the health of an economy

While my favourite is the mini-skirt index, the most reliable is when rich folk start building huge skyscrapers.

Whenever developers propose a hundred storey building it marks the top of the property cycle. Should they get to actually build the thing, you can be guaranteed a nasty economic downturn is about to hit.

The Skyscraper Index’s historical record

This track record was set with the very first megatower – the Empire State building was started just before the 1929 stock market crash and completed as the great depression tightened its hold on the United States.

Forty years later New York’s ill-fated World Trade Center opened just in time to welcome the 1973 oil shock and subsequent recession.

A more recent example is Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building which was topped out in time for the city’s property crash and economic rescue by neighbouring Abu Dhabi.

In Australia, the most notable downfall was 1980s entrepreneur Alan Bond who planned to build a 140 storey tower on the World Square site opposite Sydney’s Town Hall.

The site was excavated but Bond went broke before work started and the hole remained for over a decade until a more modest 40 storey tower was built on the site.

Australia 108

So the news that property developers want to build a 108 storey tower on Melbourne’s Southbank should worry the Victorian government and unsettle the state’s property owners.

What’s always notable about these super skyscrapers is the garishness of the project. While Australia 108 won’t match the Burj for sheer Las Vegas gaudiness, it will feature the ‘Star burst’, a star-shaped Sky Lobby and hotel at the top of the tower.

Why the Skyscraper index works

The reason why 100 storey buildings are such a reliable economic indicator is because they illustrate there’s too much dumb money in the economy. It rarely makes sense to build such tall buildings.

Designing and building high rise buildings is complex and expensive – the higher you go, the more construction challenges there are as this Popular Mechanics article describes.

Skyscrapers are subject to the law of diminishing returns as the taller the building is, the more space that’s needed for services like elevators, air conditioning, water supplies and fire protection which reduces the landlord’s rentable floorspace on the lower levels.

When a building reaches a hundred storeys, there’s little space available on the lower floors for paying tenants. So the economics don’t add up.

Builders, property developers and financiers know this so when they start proposing projects that don’t make commercial sense it’s a fair indication the locals are gripped with irrational exuberance and Adam Smith’s invisible hand is going to deliver a short, sharp slap to the back of the economy’s head.

Does it matter to Australia?

And so it is in Melbourne, which is going to be interesting to watch as South East Queensland is the only Australian metropolitan area to suffer a prolonged property downturn in the last twenty years.

Hopefully Melbourne’s woes won’t affect the rest of the Australian economy but given how much the nation has invested in property and the stratospheric debt levels to service that speculation, it may well be that the rest of the country will follow Victoria.

Winning the next election might not be a good thing for Tony Abbot and his followers who genuinely believe a Liberal government will deliver a magic pudding to the home of every dinky-di Working Australian.

Will the top level domain milk cow save Melbourne IT?

The new global top level domains promise to be a rich cash cow, but is it enough to save Melbourne IT?

Beleaguered domain registration company Melbourne IT hopes the new breed of global top level domains will be its salvation after a decade of indifferent returns and a wallowing shareprice.

When the top level domains – known by their geeky acronym of gTLDs – were proposed five years ago they smelled like a revenue grab and so it has turned out.

To date 1930 organisations have applied for one of the top level domains, with a $135,000 evaluation fee that’s a juicy 260 million dollar pot to be shared between ICANN and the various domain registrars. No wonder Melbourne IT’s management is drooling.

One of the assurances of ICANN when the top level domains were announced was that trademark ownership would be part of the expensive evaluation process. That Melbourne IT is now spruiking gTLDs as a defensive intellectual property tactic is a notable backflip from ICANN’s earlier position.

The trading names aspect of the new global TLDs is going to be problematic for the registers and ICANN, a quick look at the applicant list for the new names sees domains like Tennis, Fail and Compare being applied for.

Good luck with defending those names in court – although having a spurious claim on the global use of the word ‘tennis’ will no doubt keep an army of Tennis Australia’s well paid lawyers occupied for years.

Even more delicious is Telstra’s claim to the domain name ‘yellowpages’. Despite being a declining business the Yellow Pages trademark is fiercely defended by various incumbent phone and directory companies around the world so it’s hard to see how that application will get passed without strong objections.

The real tragedy in the Melbourne IT story is how the company has gone nowhere for over decade after being the darling of the stock market when it was floated in 1998.

When Melbourne IT floated, it attracted controversy with it’s shares being priced at 2.20 and opening at $8.80. A stag gain of 300% for the insiders who got shares.

Despite the beliefs of those brainwashed by government privatisation campaigns in the 1990s, a staggering stag (pardon the pun) is money straight of the pocket of the listed company’s existing shareholders – Melbourne University in this case – and is evidence of either gross incompetence or malfeasance by the board and its advisors.

Given the Victorian government’s Auditor-General cleared the Melbourne IT board of any wrongdoing, the only explanation for the company’s botched float is gross incompetence.

The company’s share price since is clear evidence that gross incompetence remains a problem within the organisation’s leadership.

Whether the strong demand for global Top Level Domains can drag Melbourne IT out of it’s long term mediocrity remains to be seen but with the management’s track record it’s difficult to be optimistic.

Disclaimer: I was a director of a company that was a Melbourne IT reseller. There’s a long blog post in the poor, 1995 IT systems used by MelbourneIT and those might be related to the company’s poor performance over the last decade.

Would you know if you’ve been hacked?

With 200,000 new malware threats each day, keeping ahead of the online bad guys is impossible. We need to be smarter.

“I report to head office in Moscow” is a line which either means you’re in a James Bond movie or at a lunch briefing with the Russian security company Kaspersky.

While the James Bond movie would be fun, the Kaspersky lunch was an interesting briefing on their new security product.

A notable aspect of the discussion was the explosion in malware – there are over a hundred million malicious programs circulating on the internet with over 200,000 new threats every day.

“We struggle to keep up,” says Kaspersky Lab ANZ Managing Director, Andrew Mamonitis.

That a security company with 2,700 specialists struggles to keep up with the evolving threats emphasises the scale of the task facing a network administrators and IT managers.

It’s a task beyond all but the biggest companies.

Sometime ago I suggested every computer user should assume their computers are compromised and managers should work work on limiting what intruders can do to system.

With staff bringing their own devices to work, those risks are multiplied as some devices will almost certainly be infected with malware.

There are some basic things that computer users should do to make their systems harder to break however it’s almost impossible to protect against a zero-day exploit or the efforts of a sophisticated and determined hacker.

With our homes and motor cars, we realise it’s almost impossible to keep determined thieves out, so we take precautions like alarms, immobilisers and basic security such as keeping valuables out of plain view.

That attitude is what we now need with our computer technology, any hope of keeping your office server impregnable from outside attack is long gone.

Was telecommuting another broken technology promise?

Is telecommuting another broken technology promise?

Telecommuting promised, or still promises, to free caged office workers from their cubicles, relieve the sardine-tin conditions on our peak hour trains and reduce traffic congestion on clogged roads. But has that promise been lost like so many other predictions of the technology age?

Banning remote workers is the latest edict from Marissa Meyer as she continues her daunting task of turning around Yahoo!.

Meyer’s move follows Google’s Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette claiming telecommuting is counterproductive and discouraged at his company.

One of the great promises of the computer age – almost up there with the paperless office – is the ability to work from home as if you were sitting in an office.

So promising is telecommuting it’s one of the main selling points for Australia’s National Broadband Network.

Having two of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies come out against remote working, particularly Google with its reputation for innovation and creativity, seems to damn the practice.

This isn’t helped by Australia’s nanny state deciding that companies are liable for remote workers who manage to fall over in their own home – twice.

Risk is the real barrier to adopting telecommuting, the risk of a compensation claim for a remote working employee falling over while rummaging in their kitchen fridge is one aspect but a more a bigger risk in the mind of a bureaucrat is that a subordinate is not under their control.

Control is almost certainly what focuses Pichette’s mind. While Google is portrayed as a company full of original thinking, non-conformist geeks in reality only half the staff, at best, fit the stereotype while the rest are the same corporate bureaucrats you’ll find at an insurance company or a quantity surveyor’s office.

In the case of Yahoo! a decade of mismanagement has left the company unsure of who exactly works for them, Meyer’s solution is to order everyone into the office so she can count heads.

The fact that some Yahoo! staff will quit, others won’t be able to get to an office and some will turn out to have been long dead (with relatives gleefully cashing Yahoo!’s cheques) is a bonus for Meyer as she looks at reducing staff costs.

In reality remote working is growing, partly because so much of the white collar workforce has been contracted out and few freelancers are interested in hanging around clients’ offices if they can avoid it.

A bigger factor is that workplaces themselves are changing as fewer organisations need to have huge office blocks. While the cubicles themselves might not go away, they are going to be clustered where the customers and workforces are rather than locked away in modern ivory towers.

That has some major consequences for our workforces and cities which the bureaucrats – both in the private and public sectors – have barely started to get their heads around.

Photo of commuters at Liverpool Street Station courtesy of Genkaku aka James Farmer through SXC.hu

Graphs, damn lies and the middle class

Graphs can give us a misleading picture of our society, particularly when we’re looking at the middle classes

Graphs are great for illustrating a story, and also excellent at misleading people.

A good example of where a graph can give an incorrect impression is the Sydney Morning Herald’s story Whatever Happened to the Middle Class.

The story is a very good explanation of the predicament Australia’s political classes have put themselves into – exacerbated by their 1950s view of dividing the workforce into poorly paid ‘blue collar’ workers and affluent ‘white collar’ office staff – but it suffers from the selective use of headline graphs.

Viewing the big picture

The first graph shows how Australians are identifying themselves as middle class and the trend looks staggering,

Now if we add those who identify themselves as working class, the picture looks even more dramatic with some pretty volatile swings,

However if we now add in those who identify themselves as rich, or upper class, we get a better perspective as the entire range is now shown,

Selective choosing the Y, or vertical, axis will always give an exaggerated view of a trend or proportion. Once we take the full range in we see the real extent of things. It also has the benefit of showing the trends aren’t as volatile as first appear.

Middle class perceptions

When we look at the graph showing the full picture there’s a number of interesting trends and characteristics about Australian society that come out of it which are worthy of some future blog posts.

Most notably is the identification of Australians being middle class as their property values increased.

On this point, it’s worthwhile contrasting the Australian experience with the US, here’s a Gallup poll from last year on how Americans see themselves,

While the definitions are different – that Americans differentiate ‘working class’ and ‘lower class’ is interesting in itself – it’s clear that the same trend happened in the US with more people identifying themselves as being members of middle class when their property values were increasing.

In 2008 and 9 there’s suddenly a sharp increase in Americans identifying themselves as working class as the property downturn bites. The steady increase in those claiming to be ‘lower class’ from 2006 onwards is worth closer examination.

What this means for Australia

The implications of the US trends is that any Australian politician intending to dismantle John Howard’s middle class welfare state will have to wait until the property market falls before trying to win any popular support.

For this year’s Australian election though, what’s clear is that any attempt to stoke the fires of class warfare is going to fail dismally in the outer suburban marginal seats so coveted by both parties.

We’re going to see a lot more selective graphs during the course of this year, it’s worthwhile taking time to look at them closely. The stories may be different, and a lot more nuanced, than the headlines tell us.

People like us – could poor hiring practices bring down Silicon Valley?

Are poor hiring practices putting Silicon Valley at risk?

A strange little story appeared in Business Insider a few weeks back, 9 Things Your Resume Needs if you want to be Hired by Apple or Google is a curious view into the mindset of Silicon Valley.

Purporting to be an extract from a book written by a former recruiter who claims to have worked for Apple, Google and Microsoft, the story exposes a weakness in Silicon Valley and the technological elite which may cause the very disruptions they have unleashed to work against them.

The nine items are fascinating for the elitist, US-centric view of the world they portray and each is worth investigating on their own.

If you graduated from an elite college, your chances of getting an interview vastly improve

Yes, where you went to school does matter to the tech giants. Of course there are exceptions, but McDowell says an Ivy League or other top university will get you noticed.

There’s not much more to add to this, except to note that the vast majority of students whose families can afford such an education are from the upper middle class.

The Googles and Apples like to see relevant internship experience.

If you waited tables when you were 19, that isn’t attractive.

If you are lucky enough to get into a an Ivy League school on a scholarship or manage to scrape together the money you may still not make the cut.

To the author, only those with sufficient wealth to participate in unpaid internships are going to get jobs at the top Silicon Valley companies.

Your major matters

Sorry liberal arts people or chemical engineers, you’ll need another way in to Google or Apple.

This is an interesting one, Silicon Valley boosters often talk about the creative process and how coders are artists however according to the recruiter that’s just lip service.

She encourages students to pick majors that are directly relevant to Google or Apple. Finance, accounting, marketing or computer science majors have the best shot of being noticed by a tech recruiter. At the very least, minor in one of those fields.

A focus on finance, accounting and marketing is the same as any old corporation – you could be going for a job with AT&T, Goldman Sachs or the government with qualifications like that. So much for unique.

Dissing chemical engineering is particularly interesting as Chem Eng graduates have passed one of the toughest university degrees. Whats more, the demands of mobile computing devices means battery technology is one of the most pressing issues facing Silicon Valley at the moment. Chemical Engineers are the folk who will solve this problem.

Big tech companies like to see people giving back to their communities.

Volunteering can be a great way to buff up your resume. That said, McDowell warns: “don’t serve soup in a soup kitchen.”

Instead she suggests hunting for a sales or marketing position, or offering to help a charity with its website and design.

This is a really obnoxious statement – basically saying we want to you volunteer, but we don’t want you to help people.

Just how many sales and marketing people are needed by soup kitchens, volunteer fire brigades or community pantries is open to debate.

A bigger issue with this mentality is that it favours bureaucrats and paper shufflers rather than doers. Which again is something anathema to the public statements of Silicon Valley’s leaders.

They also like good spellers and speakers.

Writing and communications skills aren’t just necessary for media jobs. They’re important in any career you’ll have.

Well, duh.

If you are buddies with college professors, that’s a plus.

Professors aren’t just impressed by how you do in their classes. McDowell suggests helping them with research projects, asking for help and attending office hours, or becoming a teaching assistant.

That doesn’t hurt, but it’s pretty basic vanilla advice and again it’s tough luck if you have to do a shift at the local fast food restaurant so you can feed yourself.

Show you understand multiple positions at Google or Apple

If you want to work at one of the top tech companies, it helps to have at least a basic understanding of multiple positions in the organization. McDowell calls this being a Generalist.

On one hand this advice makes sense but on another many technical roles are not generalist positions.

Generally having a knowledge of the company’s structure and roles is going to look good to any interviewer, assuming you can get past the gatekeeper at the recruitment company.

Entrepreneurs have a better shot of being hired.

This is a funny one, if you’re a real entrepreneur then the thought of working in cubicle at Apple or Microsoft while answering to a middle manager straight out of a Dilbert cartoon ranks with getting hot pine needles thrust under your toenails.

One of the conceits of modern corporate life is that they value entrepreneurs and the free-wheeling spirits – the truth is they don’t and the first true hint of entrepreneurialism among the ranks will be smothered quickly with a deluge of paperwork.

Funnily enough, being a successful tech entrepreneur is a path to getting a good job at a tech company although it’s more likely to happen as an acqui-hire than through a recruiter.

Good news: Your GPA doesn’t matter very much

Most people think tech companies, Google in particular, harp over candidates’ GPAs. McDowell says there is little truth to that rumor.

This is only good news if you’ve ticked most of the other boxes, which means you’ll be considered if you’re middling graduate from Stanford or Harvard but forget it if you went elsewhere, regardless of how good your marks are.

The danger of recruiters

What the Business Insider story really illustrates are the risks of relying on third party recruiters as gatekeepers to filter out new employees.

Regardless of how good the recruitment consultant is they are going to apply their own cultural filters and biases onto the selection process and as a result knock out most good candidates.

More importantly, a company risks developing a monoculture if the recruitment process is too effective at filtering out people who don’t fit a narrow stereotype.

A new breed of officemen?

Reading the Business Insider story leaves one with the feeling that many of these companies are beginning to look like IBM in the 1960s – monocultures more concerned about the colour of an employee’s tie and choice of shirts rather than the talents they bring to the organisation or the value they can add to customers.

This is probably the greatest risk of all to the tech industry, that they end up with an insular group of people with fixed mindsets.

Should that happen, then the wave of disruption Silicon Valley has unleashed on the world will end up being the industry’s undoing as smart kids working out of garages in Michigan or slums in Delhi will out innovate the staid, comfortable incumbents.

It’s also interesting to consider how many other industries are now suffering after several decades of similar recruiting practices where leading businesses are now dominated by insular, unworldly monocultures.

Image courtesy of Alexfurr on SXC.HU

It’s too late, baby – when digital reality bites

Sensis decide to move on from a print based model to digital advertising – a decade too late.

Yesterday Sensis announced it would restructure for digital growth by sacking staff, offshoring and “accelerate its transition to a digital media business”.

The directory division of Telstra has been in decline for years, a process that wasn’t helped by then CEO Sol Trujillo embarking on his expensive “Google Schmoogle” diversion.

A decade later, Managing Director John Allen has announced another 650 jobs to go from the remaining 3,500 workforce.

John’s comments are worth noting.

Until now we have been operating with an outdated print-based model – this is no longer sustainable for us. As we have made clear in the past, we will continue to produce Yellow and White Pages books to meet the needs of customers and advertisers who rely on the printed directories, but our future is online and mobile where the vast majority of search and directory business takes place.

Carol King put it best – it’s too late, Baby. These are words that should have been said a decade ago.

New York celebrates its entrepreneurs with Made in NY

New York City shows how cities and nations have to promote their economic strengths

Part of a thriving industrial hub is having the business and skills that support the sector. If you’ve got them, you need to tell the world you’re open for business.

Somebody who is doing this well is New York City’s Office of Media and Entertainment which runs the Made In NY program.

While much of the focus of the program is on attracting film production, Made in NY recently branched out into promoting the city’s tech community boasting successful businesses like video sharing site Vimeo, tutor matching service Tutorspree and stock photography supplier Shutterstock.

Towards the end of the Shutterstock clip one of the staff mentions ‘drop bears’ – a little bit of Sydney argot creeps into the story.

It’s the Sydney connection that makes the Made In NY campaign so bittersweet, I was involved in setting up the Digital Sydney project for the New South Wales government.

While Sydney doesn’t have the size of New York’s or London’s tech industries it does share the advantage of being one of the most diverse cities in the world. The work of organisations like ICE in Parramatta is important in realising some of that potential.

That potential is huge – having sizeable communities of East and South Asian language speakers gives Sydney a real opportunity in the Asian Century.

Unfortunately most of those communities live in Sydney’s West and while lip service is given to the needs of that region most economic development work focuses on corporate welfare for established interests and supporting inner city stuff that white folks like.

When I started at what was then the Department of State and Regional Development in 2009 I was told that many in the agency believed NSW stood for “North Sydney to Wooloomoolloo”, something that largely turned out to be true. The west of Sydney, like most of the state, took second place behind the wants of big business.

This is what’s encouraging about the Made In New York campaign, it promotes smaller business – although they all seem based in lower Manhattan staffed largely by a middle class monoculture, which seems to be a problem when you buy into hipster chic.

Hipster chic is one of New York’s strengths and that’s what every city and country needs to be doing in a global connected economy.

If you can’t define and articulate what it is you add to the economy, then you’re locked into the low value, small margin commodity end of the marketplace and that is a tough place to be.

The question for all of us, on a personal and a national basis, is do we want to be price taking commodity producers or do we want to develop the high value, growth business of the 21st Century.

New York City has made its choice, we have to make ours.

ABC Nightlife February 2013

For February’s ABC Nightlife segment Tony Delroy and I are looking at software prices, the new breed of smartphones for seniors and the future of the telco industry

Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy on ABC Nightife across Australia to discuss how technology affects your business and life. For February 2013 we’ll be looking at the software rip-off, smartphones for seniors and Telstra’s roadmap for the mobile economy.

The show will be available on all ABC Local stations and streamed online through the Nightlife website.

Some of the topics we’ll discuss include the following;

Why are Australians paying so much for software
Is is just software that we’re paying too much for
How is the internet changing markets
What are the downsides with buying products over the net
How smartphones can be made for special uses
Telstra’s roadmap for the future of Australia’s mobile industry
How do Telstra’s plans affect the NBN and the other telcos

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

Seniors and smartphones

A phone for seniors shows how the smartphone market is evolving to meet people’s needs.

One of the opportunities with Android based smartphones is the ability for companies to offer modified phones aimed at certain industries and markets.

Ahead of next week’s Mobile World Congress, Fujitsu has announced a phone designed for seniors with larger icons and a less sensitive touchscreen.

The senior market is one that’s been ripe for savvy manufacturers as older people move onto smartphones and demand devices that meet their needs.

Over the years there had been attempts at mobile phones designed for seniors but most of them had been pretty lame and none had sold well.

The difference with smartphones is that most of the design changes are involved in the software and with open source platforms like Android and Ubuntu it makes it easier for companies to build easy to use devices.

Now it’s fairly easy to make these devices, we can expect to see more of them and as smartphones are becoming cheaper – a quick look at the Alibaba website shows wholesale prices for Android based phones as low as $10 (although you have to buy a container load of the things.)

There’s some opportunities for some smart entrepreneurs with these devices and we’ll see some interesting smartphones aimed at certain groups.