Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Building the closed internet

    Building the closed internet

    One of the great strengths of the social and cloud business model was the idea of the open API, recent moves by Twitter and LinkedIn show that era might be coming to an end.

    This week Nick Halstead, the founder and CEO of business intelligence service Datasift, bemoaned his company’s failure to negotiate an API access agreement with Twitter that restricts their ability to deliver insights to customers.

    Earlier this year LinkedIn announced they would be restricting API access to all but “partnership integrations that we believe provide the most value to our members, developers and business.”

    Monetizing APIs

    Increasingly social media and web services companies are seeing access to APIs as being a revenue opportunity – something many of them are struggling to find – or as a way of building ‘strategic partnerships’ that will create their own walled gardens on the internet.

    For developers this is irritating and for users it restricts the services and applications available but it may turn out to backfire on companies like LinkedIn and Twitter as closing down APIs opens opportunities for new platforms.

    A few years ago industry pundits, like this blog, proclaimed open APIs will be a competitive advantage for online services. Now we’re about to find out how true that is.

    One thing is for sure; many of the companies proclaiming their support for the ‘open internet’ are less free when it comes to allowing access to their own data.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • Dropbox and Microsoft’s alliance of convenience

    Dropbox and Microsoft’s alliance of convenience

    Today’s announcement that Dropbox and Microsoft have deepened their alliance throws a further challenge out to Google’s ambitions to take a slice of the office productivity market while further reducing profits for the once dominant software giant.

    Dropbox’s new deal with Microsoft give of users the ability to edit Office documents natively in their browser. It’s an advanced version of the feature that Google have offered with their Docs service for some years.

    A notable aspect of this deal is how Dropbox have been prepared to partner with Microsoft – a decade ago smaller and relatively new companies were suspicious of working with Microsoft given the giant’s well deserved reputation for ruthless behaviour.

    Equally Microsoft teaming with more agile newcomers rather than trying to bully them out of business is a distinct change from the company’s peak days under Bill Gates.

    The real target of the alliance though is Google and the Dropbox-Microsoft deal makes Office 365 a far more formidable offering as a cloud service.

    For Google the deal means they have to add more features to their Docs service to counter a more competitive Microsoft offering. It also shows the marketplace is shifting as alliances of convenience are forming.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • Dashing to the shops with the internet of things

    Dashing to the shops with the internet of things

    Amazon this week showed off their Dash Button, a device that lets brands set up a one press ordering system for customers.

    The idea is that a brand, say a laundry detergent, gives out buttons that when pressed will automatically deliver washing powder or whatever product is preprogrammed into the device.

    While its safe to say Amazon’s Dash button is a gimmick, it’s not hard to see washing machines, coffee makers or industrial equipment that comes preprogrammed to automatically order supplies when it detects reserves are running low.

    So the Dash Button could be showing us how the Internet of Things will help us shop with smart devices automatically organising deliveries for us.

    On it’s own the Amazon Dash Button won’t be changing the way we shop but the future of retail is going to be very different as the IoT rolls out.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • Is the tech startup sector a boys’ club?

    Is the tech startup sector a boys’ club?

    I’m putting together a story on what the Australian tech community can learn from the Ellen Pao story where an upcoming female associate at iconic Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers sued the firm for sexual discrimination.

    Although Pao lost the case it rightly caused much debate within the US tech community about the lack of gender diversity, particularly given the number of women in the American venture capital industry has collapsed from 10% in 1999 to 6% in 2014

    The reason for this seems to be simple, as Lauren Helper pointed out in the Silicon Valley Business Journal back in 2013 the industry is intensely tribal quoting one industry participant, Mark Taguchi, ‘“people operate in tribes,” he said. “They have groups of people that they learn to trust, that they work with, that they like.”’

    In some respects this is a strength for the Silicon Valley industry as it means new entrants have to be vouched for by trusted figures but it also risks the sector being insular and dominated by narrow groups based on background, ethnicity or gender.

    Once an industry defines its leaders and innovators by their friendships, schools or workplaces it risks becoming irrelevant to the outside world and it’s inevitable an inward focus will blind the group to new trends and developing technologies.

    The warning from Pao’s case is Silicon Valley may be becoming too insular, it’s a handy wakeup to remind participants there is a big, diverse world outside the Bay Area.

    However the US tech sector might survive without diversifying given its size and access to capital. Forother countries’ developing industries – like Australia’s – it’s a hindering factor few can afford.

    In most ecosystems diversity is strength, it’s hard to see how that’s any different for the tech sector. Boys Clubs are relic of last century and have little place in this one; for regions looking at copying Silicon Valley, this is one trait not to pick up.

    Similar posts:

  • Microsoft’s server clock counts down

    Microsoft’s server clock counts down

    One of the challenges facing Microsoft are the millions of users quite happily using the company’s older products.

    While Windows XP is by far the biggest problem – only last year the number of systems running the fourteen year old operating system still outnumbered those running the latest version – Microsoft faces similar issues with its server 2003.

    This week Microsoft warned support for Windows Server 2003 has entered its last one hundred days and urged customers to look at shifting onto new systems.

    Interestingly most of the case studies they cite involve customers moving from on premise servers onto cloud services.

    While that’s very good advice as most customers, particularly small businesses, don’t have the capabilities it shows how the industry has shifted in the last twelve years.

    For most of those companies a decade ago cloud service, or Software as a Service (SaaS) as it was known then, weren’t available for most business functions. Today they are the norm and usually the best option for smaller operations.

    That shift to the cloud has meant an entire industry now faces extinction as the army of suburban IT service companies that once maintained those servers are now largely redundant.

    As the clock ticks down on Windows 2003 server so too does it for all the businesses that once depended upon the PC industry.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts