Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

The Lives they Loved – Another future for journalism?

The New York Times asked readers to send in memories of loved ones who had passed away in 2012 – is The Lives They Loved one of the futures of journalism?

The New York Times’ wrap up of the year’s obituaries may give us an idea of one of the many futures for journalism.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that obituaries are just dry recantations of the lives of dead white men and they often are – particularly when about celebrities or undistinguished politicians and businessmen.

Good obituaries though are masterpieces and those of society’s genuine unsung heroes are moving and educational. A well written obit of an obscure but deserving person is usually a rewarding read.

As part of the their summation of 2012, The New York Times has taken their obituaries one step further by asking readers to submit photos and stories of their loved ones who’ve passed away during the year.

The Lives They Loved is the result, a wonderful collection of touching photographs and stories of parents, partners, children and friends who have passed away in the last year.

User Generated Content – UGC – is one of the foundation stones of new media. The idea is the audience themselves provide the content which frees services like Facebook, YouTube or I Can Haz Cheeseburger from the costs and irritations of actually creating things that people are interested in.

The New York Times project may well show that traditional news channels with their dedicated audiences and relevance to communities may do UGC as well as any hot new Silicon Valley startup.

While User Generated Content isn’t the future of journalism, it almost certainly will be one of the them. Whether it turns out that old media use it better than the newer upstarts remains to be seen.

Uber’s New Year’s test

New Years Eve 2012 is going to be a tough test for the Uber hire car booking service as prices surge.

Update: It appears Uber passed the New Year’s Eve test without problems. There were almost no complaints at all.

New Years Eve 2011 was a tough night for customers of the Uber hire car booking service in New York City when fares surged as partygoers headed home.

This year, Uber hopes to overcome problems by making sure customers are aware with big warnings of prices and even a sobriety test so users can confirm they know what they are doing when they agree to catch a cab.

Uber’s dynamic pricing matches supply with demand, which means a more reliable service but also opens the company to allegations of price gouging during busy periods.

Those allegations are exactly what happened in New York last year and in 2012 Uber’s risks of bad publicity are far higher as the service is now international with operations in cities like London, Paris and Sydney.

Sydney will be the first city to encounter the effects of surge pricing and big risks lie in the Harbour City as Sydneysiders are used to fixed cab fares and enjoy a good whinge when things don’t work in their favour.

Over a million people are expected on the shores of Sydney Harbour to watch the New Year’s Eve fireworks which means cabs and hire cars are at a premium.

If Sydney has the triple fares expected in New York then Uber’s fare from Circular Quay to Bondi Beach will be around $150. This compares to the standard cab fare of around $30.

Those markups will be exploited by the incumbent taxi companies and booking networks. We can expect a wave of stories over the next few days from tame journalists regurgitating the incumbents’ media releases.

How Uber’s Australian management deals with this will be worth watching. One hopes they are prepared a tough week and don’t enjoy the festivities too far past midnight.

Another problem for Uber is going to be Sydney’s mobile data networks which are horribly unreliable during peak periods. It may well be that Uber’s customers and drivers never get a fare anyway.

Last year I was near the Habour Bridge and didn’t have a Vodafone signal from 8pm onwards. I’ll be comparing the performance of all three Aussie networks from the same place tonight.

NFC and the car key revolution

Near Field Communications (NFC) systems are more than just ways to pay bills with your smartphone, they promise to upset many industries.

Many businesses have made easy money by ‘clipping the ticket’ of the customer, new technologies like Near Field Communications and cloud computing threaten the easy profits of many organisations.

During yesterday’s 2UE Tech Talk Radio spot where Seamus Byrne and I stood in for Trevor Long, host John Cadogan raised the prospect of replacing car keys and even dashboards with smartphones equipped with Near Field Communications (NFC) systems.

Since NFC technologies appeared we’ve concentrated on the banking and payments aspects of these features but there’s far more to this technology than just smartphones replacing credit cards.

With the right software an NFC equipped smartphone, tablet computer, or even a wristwatch could replace any electronic controller – this is already happening with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth enabled home sound systems, TV remote controllers and games consoles.

An important effect of this is that it cuts out expensive custom replacements like bespoke control units or electronic car keys.

Car keys are a good example of how what was previously a high cost profitable item becomes commodified and those business that had a nice revenue stream find new technology cuts them out.

As keys become replaced with NFC enabled devices then then the scam of with new sets of keys costing up to a thousand dollars with fat profits for everybody involved becomes redundant.

This is something we’re seeing across industries as incumbent businesses find their profitable activities disrupted by smart players using new technology.

Just as manufacturing and publishing have been dealing with these disruptions for the past two decades, it’s coming to all industries and it’s going to take smart operators to deal with the changes.

Is Facebook the new Microsoft?

Are the internet giants – Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon following the same path as Microsoft did in the 1990s?

One of the problems with dominating your field is that to find new growth opportunities involves becoming distracted with your core business and damaging your reputation. This is what hurt Microsoft over the last decade and now threatens the internet’s big four.

App.net CEO Dalton Caldwell wrote an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg describing how the social media giant is trying to wipe out competitors through bullying them into being acquired.

If a business doesn’t succumb to Facebook’s seduction, then they risk being wiped out by the social media giant setting up their own version of the product which they can push out to a billion subscribers.

Jason Calacanis explores this strategy with Facebook’s launch of Poke, designed to compete with the instant messaging service Snapchat.

In many ways this is the same model that Microsoft employed in the 1990s as it worked towards dominating the desktop computer market – bully innovators into selling to them and, if that fails, copy the product and crush the opposition.

It worked for Microsoft because they controlled the distribution channels through their tight relationships with computer manufacturers.

Microsoft created their own applications, or features in their products, which would be bundled onto Dell, Gateway or Compaq computers. Once users had functionality built into Windows or Microsoft Office then they didn’t have to buy a third party app.

Bundling network protocols destroyed the business models of LANtastic and Novell, in the browser wars Microsoft killed Netscape by putting Internet Explorer on the desktop and in the office suite predatory pricing killed WordPerfect and Lotus while resulting in acquisitions of companies like Visio.

This way of business cemented Microsoft’s domination of their desktop, office productivity and server markets at the turn of the century. It was a true river of gold that continues to flow today.

Unlike the personal computer software markets, bullying or buying your way into market dominance doesn’t work online as the barriers to entry that protected Microsoft from competitors are nonexistent on the web.

Both AOL and Yahoo! learned this the hard way as their acquisition sprees through the dot com boom didn’t prevent them from sliding into irrelevance.

A good example of how hard it is for the Internet giants to execute a plan for world domination is the rise and fall of Google’s Knol as described by Seth Godin, who thought his own Squidoo startup would be crushed by the Internet giant. It turned out not to be so.

For the web incumbents the fundamental problem are, as Jason says, that they are not focusing on their core businesses and they have plenty of Plan Bs as Seth Godin described.

The manager who fails with Knol or Poke moves onto another division with a pat on the back and a safe claim on their bonus. The startup founders on the other hand are fighting for survival.

All four of the Internet’s giants have similarities to Microsoft in the 1990s as every single one dominates its niche and wonders how to expand outside their core business – for Google, and possibly the other three, there’s the added problem of managerialism as a large cadre of managers worries more about maintaining privileges over competing in the marketplace.

Managerialism ended up crippling Microsoft and continues to do so today, whether Facebook and Google can avoid that fate remains to be seen.

A bigger problem for Facebook is losing trust – Microsoft’s conduct, particularly with WordPerfect and Netscape in the late 1990s made a generation of developers and entrepreneurs cautious about dealing with the company.

For many that suspicion remains and is one of the barriers the company now has to overcome in the smartphone and cloud computing markets where it is one of the crowd of scrappy challengers.

In the social and online worlds, collaboration is one of the keys to success. If Facebook, or any of the others, lose the trust of the community then they’ll become irrelevant a lot faster than WordPerfect or LANtastic did.

Becoming irrelevant is the real worry for Facebook’s tenured managers and their investors.

2UE Weekend Computers, 29 December 2012

Paul Wallbank and Seamus Byrne stand in for Trevor Long to talk technology, computers and the internet on Radio 2UE Weekends.

This Saturday from 3.10 pm Seamus Byrne and myself will be standing in for regular guest Trevor Long to discuss tech with John Cadogan on Radio 2UE.

We’ll be taking calls on the Open Line, 13 13 32 or tweet to @paulwallbank while we’re on air.

Some of the things we’ll be covering include the following.

What type of smart phone?

We have the iPhone, Android and Windows phones. Which ones are better?

The iPhone’s been dominating for the last few years, but now Android is overtaking it. Why’s that?
Microsoft are pretty late with a mobile phone, can they catch up?
What’s happened to the other makes like Nokia, Blackberry and Motorola?
So what if you don’t want a smartphone, what if you just want something to make phone calls?

Checking your phone and Internet plans

There’s was story this week about how people are spending too much on their mobile phone and Internet plans. What should people be looking at and how often should they check their plans?

Paying for stuff with your mobile

You can use your phone as a boarding pass on some airlines, now Telstra and Vodafone are looking at ways to use your mobile to pay for groceries with your mobile phone.

How does the system work?
Who takes the money?
Is this safe?
How far is this away?

Your views, comments or questions are welcome so don’t be shy about calling in.

Has Yahoo got its mojo back?

Yahoo’s offer of three months free access to their Flickr Pro photo sharing service could be the start of CEO Marissa Mayer’s plan for the company’s recovery.

One of the disappointments with Yahoo in recent years has been management’s inablity to effectively use the impressive portfolio of online assets that they’ve built up over the last 15 years. Could this be about to change as Marissa Mayer finds her feet as CEO at Yahoo?

A first step may be Yahoo’s free offer of Pro accounts on their Flickr photo sharing service which is coupled with a new iPhone app and a marketing drive.

Their timing is exquisite as Instagram, the file sharing service of the moment, struggles with privacy concerns. Flickr offers far better control over photographers’ rights than Instagram or most other social media services.

While the Flikr offer won’t reverse Yahoo’s long term decline on itself, it could be the start on a long journey of re-establishing the company’s credibility as one of the leading web companies.

2013 promises to be a turbulent year for the big four online empires as Apple adapts to life without Steve Jobs, Amazon fights on a number of fronts, Facebook tries to justify its massive market valuation and Google digests Motorola while dealing with declining internet advertising rates.

If Mayer and her management team can get a coherent strategy that realises the strengths of Yahoo’s product portfolio, then the company might be in a position to challenge the Internet’s big four.

Yelp’s problem with activists

Yelp and other online review sites have a problem when the Internet mob gets stirred up.

It’s been a bad couple of years for James Knight, a dentist in Fort Dodge, Iowa.

First his wife found some text messages he’d exchanged with Melissa, his attractive assistant who’d been with his practice for ten years.

Then James’ spouse demands Melissa is fired.

James then has what was no doubt a difficult conversation with Melissa’s husband explaining why she’s been sacked.

Then Melissa sues him for discrimination. He wins the case.

Melissa appeals to the state’s Supreme Court and loses there as well however the case now has national attention.

This attracts the ire of the Internet mob, who start posting bad reviews about James on Yelp despite most of them not even living in Fort Dodge, let alone using his service.

For Yelp, the rabble descending on James Knight’s review page is as much their problem as it is his.

Yelp is one of the leading customer review sites which are changing the way small business operates and getting “smashed on Yelp” isn’t good for one’s reputation.

Recently a builder also attracted the ire of the online lynch mob when he threatened to sue a customer over a poor Yelp review.

As consequence, his Yelp page was overwhelmed with negative reviews by people who’d never used his business. The service had to delete 65 of those reviews which clearly had nothing to do with the quality of service the builder provided.

The problem for Yelp, an other online review sites like Tripadvisor, is that for their sites to be trusted the reviews have to be reasonably accurate – self righteous internet mob skewing results is going to damage the service’s credibility as much as the targeted businesses.

What this means for Yelp is that the low cost online business model doesn’t work, for the site to be relevant and credible there has to be administrators checking reviews and dealing with these situations.

There’s also a lesson for all of us using the web – mindlessly joining online lynch mobs creates more damage than it fixes.

Picking on a mid-Western dentist because he appears to be a pussy whipped jerk isn’t really solving humanity’s problems – we can all find causes that are a better use of our time.

Reskilling the workforce

The 1980s management aim of reducing training costs is now affecting business, the next generation of leaders will be finding opportunities in today’s skills shortages.

One of the core objectives 1980s management philosophy is to shift costs and risks onto others. Staff training is one area that caught the brunt of the drive to slash expenses for short term gain, as a consequence we have a skills crisis with offers opportunities for savvy entrerpreneurs.

In Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: Chasing After the ‘Purple Squirrel Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli discusses his recent book that looks at this problem.

Cappelli’s argument is that companies aren’t offering enough for the skills they desire, they often ask too much of candidates and they won’t train staff.

In Cappelli’s book, he claims that staff training has plummeted;

One of your chapters in the book is called “A Training Gap, Not a Skills Gap.” You have some figures showing that in 1979, young workers received an average of two and a half weeks of training per year. By 1991, only 17% of young employees reported getting any training during the previous year, and by last year, only 21% said they received training during the previous five years.

The predictable consequence of neglecting training for the last thirty years is we now face skills shortages and those responsible – the managers and business owners who refuse to train workers – are now demanding governments do something about it.

In many ways today’s skills shortages epitomise the short termism of 1980s thinking and how we now find society, and business, is struggling with the long term effects and costs.

Wherever there’s a problem there is opportunity and there’s a breed of businesses, training companies and workers who will be taking advantage of the failures of the previous generation of managers.

For those stuck in the 1980s mindset that training, like most staff expenses, is a cost and not an investment they are going to struggle in a world where adding value is more profitable than being the lowest cost provider.

The photo THE BEAD MAKER — Apprentice Watches the Master — A Rosary Shop in Old Meiji-Era Japan was posted to Flickr by Okinawa Soba.

An infinite number of blogging monkeys

Are writers standing out from the noise of the web?

With the recent kerfuffle over writing for free, I thought I’d spend Christmas Day re-reading Chris Anderson’s Free.

Deep in the book there’s the pertinent quote;

Abundant information wants to be free. Scarce information wants to be expensive

This is key question all writers, and anyone else in the creative industries need to ask, are we just adding to the tsunami of abundant information or are we adding something insightful and unique that has scarcity value?

On the web there’s a unlimited number of monkeys writing rubbish, even if we’re the one that’s managed to bash out Hamlet nobody is paying much attention.

We need to be better than the noise, and the sites we give our work to – whether we get paid or not – need to be a step above those churning out rubbish.

Santa says buy more stuff

The Age of Consumerism has its biggest annual celebration at Christmas, but will it remain relevant for future generations?

Around the world, today marks the annual peak of consumerism. It’s interesting how one of the most important dates in the Christian calendar has been adopted by commercial interests.

In non-Christian countries, particularly in East Asia, the lack of a religious tradition shows the modern ritual for what it is – an orgy of consumerism driven by a century of advertising and opportunistic businesspeople.

For the western cultures, the biggest symbol of the occasion is Santa Clause, a figure largely invented by the Coca-Cola Corporation.

It’s often said that successful religions co-opt the festivals and practices of earlier beliefs, many European Christian celebrations are said to be modern interpretations of older rites which marked key harvest and calendar dates.

Today the religion of consumerism has co-opted the older Christian festivals which makes Christmas the grand celebration of consumption that it is.

Religions though are a product of their times, the successful ones adapt to change and thrive for centuries while many wither away as their relevance to society and the economy fades.

The Western religion of consumerism is at one of these points now after a century of unchecked growth.

Will Consumerism continue to thrive as living standards rise in Asia and Africa or will it fade as overfed Americans and Europeans wear out their credit cards and look to defining themselves by something more than the expensive toys they can buy?

Should Consumerism fade, will it be replaced with older traditions or will something else rise to meet the needs of 21st Century society?

Is hard not to hope for the consumerist orgy that is the modern Christmas celebration to fade, if not for our communities then at least for our waistlines and bank balances.

Fiddling the prices

Has the Internet’s promise of transparency failed as online retailers vary prices.

Discriminatory pricing is nothing new, a good salesperson or market stallholder can quickly sum up a punter’s ability or willingness to pay and offer the price which will get a sale.

Anybody who’s travelled in countries like Thailand or China is used to Gwailos and Farang prices being substantially higher even for official charges like entrance fees to national parks and museums.

The Internet takes the opportunity for discriminatory pricing even further arming online stores armed with a huge amount of customer information which allows them to set prices according to what the algorithm thinks will be the best deal for the seller.

Recently researchers found that the Orbitz website would offer cheaper deals for people searching for fares on mobile phones and prices would vary depending of which brand of smartphone people would use.

Writers for the Wall Street Journal did an experiment with buying staplers and found the same thing.

Interestingly, one of the factors Staples’ seems to take into account is the distance customers live from a competitors’s store – the closer you live to the competition, the lower the price offered.

There’s also other factors at play; sometimes you don’t want a customer, or you don’t want to sell a particular product and it’s easy to guess the formulas used by Staples and other big retailers do the same thing.

One of the great promises of the internet was that customers’ access to information would usher in a new era of transparency. In this case it seems the opposite is happening.

Australia’s high cost quandary

Is property the answer to keeping Australia’s high cost economy afloat?

“Around the world our towncars are usually 30% more expensive than taxis, in Sydney it’s 20% as the cabs are pretty expensive,” said Travis Kalanick on launching the Sydney version of Uber’s hire care booking service.

It’s not just hire cars which are expensive in Sydney – the soaring cost of living in Australia is bourne out by Expatistan, a web site that crowdsources the cost of living in various cities.

Expatisan’s comparisons find Sydney up with Tokyo and London as the most expensive towns on earth.

That conclusion means Australian businesses, governments and policy makers have some important decisions ahead of them.

Cholesterol in the veins

High property prices have been the norm for two decades in Australia, the middle class welfare state that both political parties support gives tax and social security concessions to property owners while the banking system requires most business lending to be secured by property.

As a consequence, generations of Australians see property as the only path to financial success. If Bill Gates, or any of today’s entrepreneurial wizz-kids, had been born in Australia, they’d be encouraged to get a safe job and buy property than to take the risk of starting a new business.

The property obsession has another perverse effect in that it creates a short term outlook for Aussie business owners who have to consider getting, and paying off, a mortgage quickly to secure their financial foundations.

A few weeks ago a business owner was profiled in the Sydney Morning Herald, which some call the Sydney Morning Property Spruiker, who paid 1.1 million Aussie dollars (a million US) for a property in Redfern – which is Sydney’s Bronx.

That poor guy not only has a fat mortgage to pay off, but he has to pass those costs onto his customers. Just to pay the bank is a fat chunk out of his business before he pays his staff, landlord and the various other expenses before he can take his profits.

Having to pay the bank for living costs is the main reason why Aussie businesses don’t invest in capital equipment, which in turn makes them less competitive than overseas competitors.

One of the myths in Australian business is that competitiveness is solely due to labor costs, what the ideologues preaching this miss is that even if Aussie workers were paid a bowl of rice a day, Chinese and Mexican factories would still be more productive due to the investment in modern equipment.

For the sake the argument, we won’t even discuss German, Japanese or Swiss manufacturers who are still competitive despite Australian level cost structures.

This last point is what’s missed in much of the discussion about Australia’s economic future – apologists for Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens and the self congratulatory Canberra monoculture say that the high Aussie dollar is here to stay and mining will be driving the economy.

Should the mining sector stall, which currently seems to be the case, then housing development will pick up the slack according to the policy-makers’ groupthink.

That housing development is going to come at a high price, with Australian land and homes already among the world’s highest. Given Australia’s private sector debt is among the highest in the world already, it’s hard to see where the money will come from to fuel further property speculation.

Right now Australia has a serious problem in determining what the future will be for the country.

If the future is a high cost economy underpinned by massive property property prices, then the future has to lie in high value added sectors.

The question is ‘what sectors’? Australian business, governments and society in general seem to think that property speculation is the future.

Property speculation turned out not to be the future for Spain and it looks like China’s speculative boom is meeting its obvious end.

Australians are going to have to hope that it really is different down under and that young people and immigrants are prepared to spend huge amounts of money to keep the economy afloat.

If the policy makers are wrong, then the worry is that there is no Plan B.