Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Travel review: Hilton South Wharf Melbourne

Melbourne’s Southbank Hilton is a nice choice if you’re attending a conference. Don’t go for the views though.

The Melbourn Hilton South Wharf is a good location for conference attendees, but for others it might be a little out of the way.

Melbourne boasts two Hilton hotels – the Park Hilton in Jolimont just to the East of the city and near the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground and the newer South Wharf Hilton on the Yarra River across from the refurbished Docklands precinct.

For those attending events at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, the South Wharf Hilton is an unbeatable location as you’re right next door to the venue. For most of the rest of Melbourne, the South Wharf Hilton’s a little bit out of the way.

If you’re using public transport, the closest services are Southern Cross Railway station and the tram stops on Flinders Street, both are a reasonable walk and getting to the train station takes you through some depressing and pedestrian unfriendly architecture.

On foot, it can be a slog from the city centre or Crown Casino through the convention centre, ladies with high heels should consider packing a pair of flats or be prepared to hail a cab.

By car and cab, it’s a circuitous route from the city centre, although if you’re coming in from the airport or the highway from the North or West of Melbourne, the hotel’s easy to get to off the freeway.

One of the interesting cultural aspects to Melbourne are the locals’ obsession with views – this probably comes from an inferiority complex over not having a nice harbour like Sydney’s. This means tourist and accommodation marketing often gushes about the views from the windows.

For all of Melbourne’s attractions, views are not the city’s greatest asset and most of Melbourne looks like Minneapolis or any other Twentieth Century high rise city from anything above the third floor.

In the case of my room, the view was of a freeway approach and a massive discount retail outlet complex, in the distance lay the docks and the West Gate Bridge – another manifestation of Melbourne’s civic desire to outdo Sydney in areas the city can’t compete.

Drawing the curtains on this less than inspiring vista was harder than expected and it took a bit of hunting to find the controls for the electronically operated blinds.

The hotel itself is a nice property and the rooms are lovely with comfortable beds. Unfortunately I was too busy with the conference to check out other facilities like the gym.

At both check in and departure the staff were extremely efficient, pleasant and polite.

If you’re attending a conference at the MCEC this is a good hotel to stay at and I’d recommend it, the main drawback is it’s a little out of the way if you’re wanting to explore Melbourne.

Paul travelled to Melbourne courtesy of Xero.

Leaping seconds, new millennia

The leap second brings back memories of the Y2K frenzy

Along with a storm disrupting cloud computing services, last weekend also saw computer networks being disrupted by the leap second.

Servers needed to rebooted, websites froze and – as usual whenever there’s a technical glitch – airline check in systems fell over causing chaos for thousands for travellers.

It’s all very reminiscent of what we thought would happen with the Y2K bug. While sensible people didn’t think planes would fall from the sky, dams collapse and the world financial system grind to a halt (we had to wait another eight years for that), we did think there would be a lot of dumb little things to irritate us over the first few days of the year 2000.

That no real disruption happened, not even the airlines check in systems failed or tried to check in people for 1901, was credit to the entire IT industry. It a shame that the success in dealing with the complex unknowns of what was called the Y2K “bug” – which wasn’t really a bug but a feature – ended up being portrayed a scam by the entire IT sector.

A couple of years ago I was talking to a finance guy who claimed “the whole global financial crisis was a scam, just like Y2K.”

That view overlooks how the IT industry knew it had a problem and dealt with it, as opposed to the banksters and their friends in government who denied there was a problem right up to the moment it happened.

Of course it’s easy to ignore your business or industry has a problem if you know your friends in government will make sure your bonuses, holiday homes and private school fees will be guaranteed by the taxpayer, the taxpayers’ children and the taxpayers’ grandchildren.

Last weekend’s leap second and the cloud computing outage teach us that technology isn’t infallible and that things do go wrong.

For most of us when they do go wrong, we won’t have the government to bail us out.

This isn’t anything new. In any complex society, the unexpected can disrupt our comfortable way of living in ways we don’t expect. It’s something all of us should occasionally think about.

Is the Virginia storm outage bad news for cloud computing?

A disaster or an opportunity for the cloud computing industry?

On the eve of the US Independence Day holiday weekend, the last thing you need is a storm taking out your services. Unfortunately a storm across Virginia did exactly that to one of Amazon’s key data centres, taking with it popular social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest along with the Netflix movie service.

Having a key data centre going down and knocking out the services that rely on it surely exposes one of cloud computing’s greatest weakness – or does it?

Last week I spoke to Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security for Google Apps, who made the point “not all cloud providers are created equal”. The Virginia outage illustrates this.

Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram all made choices to solely rely on one data centre for key parts of their services leaving them exposed should a storm, earthquake or tsunami affect that location.

Eran introduced me to a term I hadn’t heard before – “shared fate zones” – a good example of which would be putting all your servers in Virginia where they can be knocked out by a storm, in California or Japan where an earthquake can disable them or solely around the Indian Ocean where a tsunami like that of 2004 could know them all out.

All the major cloud providers have the facility to spread loads across the globe for exactly this situation. The services affected by the Virginia storm chose not to do this and they eventually were caught out.

Events like this aren’t just an issue with cloud computing, or even technology in general. Storms, earthquakes, fires and many other natural or man made disasters are a fact of life which can disrupt business. If an earthquake hits your town, the question is how quickly can your business and customers get back to normal.

Distributing services is actually the cloud’s strength, it means we’re not tied to one office or location so we can get back to normal a lot quicker than those who have lost everything.

Computer networks being knocked out is nothing new, we’ve seen this plenty of times over the last fifty years as squirrels have chewed cables, technicians have pressed the wrong button or natural disasters have disabled data centres. By spreading the load, cloud computing services should make networks less prone to problems.

A lot of people will say in the next few days that Amazon’s outage illustrates the unreliability of cloud computing, it’s actually the opposite.

Deep mining business data

Big data means big opportunities for businesses prepared to look at what their customers are doing

This post originally appeared as Mining Business Data: Get ready to drill and excavate, the June 28, 2012 post on Smartcompany.

The IT industry loves buzzwords and the phrase coming into fashion is “big data”. Forget “social media” or “cloud computing”, much of what you’ll be reading about in columns like this over the next few years will be about mining the information piling into our businesses.

Big data’s power is illustrated in yesterday’s report that Mac users will pay more for hotels than those on Windows systems. So travel site Orbitz now plans to headline more expensive options to visitors using Apple computers.

While social media and cloud computing are falling out of favour, we shouldn’t discount those old-fashioned terms as they are two of the main drivers of big data. Cloud computing makes it possible to crunch data cheaply, while social media is generating even more data for people to play with.

Sydney business Roamz is a good illustration of how social media, cloud computing and big data come together. Born out of founder Jonathan Barouch’s desire to find local activities for his young child, Roamz pulls together data from Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare to build a picture of what’s interesting in your neighbourhood.

It’s no coincidence direct marketing giant Salmat has invested in Roamz, as the data being gathered allows companies to paint a comprehensive picture of what their customers like.

Another business making sense of big data is Kaggle, set up by former Reserve Bank economist Anthony Goldbloom. Kaggle is a crowdsourcing service which runs data analysis competitions on business problems through to things like HIV research, chess ratings and dark matter exploration.

Like most things in the computing industry, these services were only available to those who could afford supercomputers a few years ago, today they’re available to anyone with a credit card and internet connection.

The era of big data might help us overcome Pareto’s Principle – otherwise known as the 80/20 rule – that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers. We can also be sure that 80% of our problems come from a different 20% of clients.

Having the ability to crunch numbers quickly means we can identify the good payers and problem customers before we do work for them. It might also mean we beat another business truism by finally being able to identify the 50% of our advertising budget that is being wasted.

Even if you don’t think your business is ready to dive into the world of big data, it’s worthwhile at least having a look at your website analytics to see what your customers are looking at.

Who knows? Like Orbitz, you might identify those cashed up Mac users who love spending money.

Darling Harbour and the peak of consumerism

Sydney’s old docks reflect the changing economy

Sydney’s Darling Harbour was one the centre of the nation’s mercantile economy, from across the country millions of tons of grain, wheat, sugar and other commodities were loaded onto ships and exported to the empire.

Eventually Darling Harbour fell into disuse, the docks became containerised, bulk goods moved to specifically designed loaders and the new breed of cargo ships were often too big to fit under the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

What really sealed Darling Harbour’s fate was Australia moved from being a largely export based agricultural export economy to a service based consumerist economy.

Today Darling Harbour illustrates that change, the docks have become expensive restaurants, hotels and shopping centres. The notorious “hungry mile” of docks is being converted into “Barangaroo” complex of office blocks, apartments and possibly even a casino for “high roller” Chinese gamblers.

Even the cruise liners are going. The 1980s vision of Darling Harbour as a temple to consumerism and property speculation is complete. In this way, Darling Harbour has become a picture of the Australian economy.

Just as Australia’s mercantile era peaked just before The Great Depression of the 1930s – the depression of the 1890s was actually far harder on Australia, particularly Melbourne and Victoria – the consumerist era finished with the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

It will be interesting to see how Darling Harbour evolves over the next hundred years.

For a glimpse of the final days of the old Darling Harbour, Island Shunters an ABC documentary from 1977 showed the working lives of railway workers in the goods yards on the Western side of the docks. Today those railyards are the Australian office of Google and Fairfax’s headquarters.

Refocusing on Asia

Australian business are looking again at Asian markets.

One of the interesting things about Australian society and business in the last twenty years is how the nation seems to have turned away from Asia.

In the 1980s and early 90s, the country was focused on exporting services and building long term relationships in sectors ranging from Malaysian construction, Thai diary farming and legal services in China.

Twenty years later, Australian businesses and government seem to have given up with the consensus among industry and political leaders now being that all the nation can export is raw minerals, bulk agricultural goods with a sprinkling of third rate educational services.

Globally focused Australian businesses – particularly those in the startup sector – look to Silicon Valley for funding, inspiration and markets. Only a minority are looking North to Asia rather than across the Pacific.

ViDM – Ventures in Digital Media – is one of those businesses and CEO Willie Pang of the Sydney based advertising technology startup believes the time is to seize opportunities in growing Asian markets rather than concentrating on Silicon Valley financing and exits.

“Focus on building a great business. If you have a great business someone will buy you,” says Willie.

The opportunity ViDM sees is in advertising trading platforms bringing together publishers and advertisers across the digital, print and broadcasting channels. Willie expects this market to be worth eight billion dollars across Asia within five years.

Many of those opportunities in the Asian market are in business-to-business markets such as advertising platforms which is another difference to the largely consumer focused Silicon Valley model.

For Australian business, Willie doesn’t see funding as being an issue with money being available for smaller startups and mature companies.

Like in Silicon Valley the real problem lies for business in the middle stages of their development where they are too big for angels and smaller funds but not interesting for the bigger investors. That grey zone lies between two and ten million dollars.

For the companies that do raise the funds and go hunting in Asian markets, the rewards can be great. Not only do this economies have great growth rates, the diversities of Asian countries mean there are different opportunities lying in each nation or even provinces.

Right now, US businesses are focussed domestically or just on a narrow range of opportunities catering to affluent Chinese consumers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

Willie sees that as another opportunity, while US and European companies are distracted it’s a good time to be entering the Asian markets. But that window of opportunity won’t last forever.

“We’ll either play in that space or the Americans will do it” says Willie.

The opportunity is open to us. Will we grab it?

Breaking the media camel’s back

Will News Corporation’s split be the end of print media?

Speculation that News Corporation is going to split into two could be the straw that breaks the back of the media industry.

News gathering has always been subsided by other revenues, mainly advertising in newspapers and commercial broadcasting.

Since the rise of the internet, most of that advertising has followed the audience elsewhere and newspapers have only held on because some advertisers are slow to break the business habits of the last 150 years.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation took that subsidisation to another level, with profitable pay TV and movie divisions also subsidising the print operations that allowed Murdoch to reach his position of power.

Should News now split those profitable operations away from the declining print divisions, those in the news media are going to find themselves in an even bigger world of pain as their revenue declines become even more apparent.

We could be seeing the end game for print in News Corporation’s move. The challenge for all of us now is to figure out the journalism model that works in an era where information is a commodity and there’s no guarantees of easy advertising revenue.

Connecting the data dots

The age of big data means big opportunities

One of the connected world’s weaknesses is its fragmented as various silos of data appear in the different social and cloud services.

Bringing those sources together in a way that’s useful and relevant is one big opportunity for entrepreneurs.

Sydney company Roamz is one of the businesses looking at this opportunity by bringing together a user’s Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare feeds to figure what interesting stuff is happening locally.

Roamz’s CEO and founder Jonathan Barouch has a vision to “cut out the noise” from social media services by “curating and cleaning the data”.

The idea of curation isn’t new in the online world, this is probably one of the biggest challenges for everyone on the web as we find ourselves swamped with data. To date, much of the idea of ‘curation’ has been around news sources where services like Google News try to deliver relevant current affairs to the user’s desktop.

Social media sites are particularly in need of curation, particularly given your friends in Nevada are much help when you’re looking for a good coffee shop in Melbourne.

This is the problem Roamz seeks to solve and we’re seeing this with various other services, not least the social media platforms themselves as Facebook tries to extend its reach and Google attempts to integrate their local services with the Zagat restaurant review system and Google+.

Some would dismiss these services as “first world problems”, after all who cares about twittering hipsters trying to find a single origin, fair trade soy latte in Broadmeadows?

There’s a point in that view, although there is a much bigger problem for businesses in this fragmented data world in harnessing and validating various sources of market intelligence.

For businesses that get this right, they’ll be able to target advertising and marketing much more effectively while being able being able to tap into what their customers think and want.

It’s no accident therefore that one of Roamz’s major investors is consumer communications giant Salmat, who can deliver great value to their corporate customers through supplying this data and market intelligence.

The next IT buzzphrase is “Big Data” where businesses deal with this flood of information that is swamping all of us, by being able to understand customers and their behaviour things become far more efficient and cost effective.

Bringing data together and making sense of the results is the big challenge of our times, those who can solve the problem will be among the next generation of business leaders.

Mapping new industries

Can Google Maps Coordinate change the business world?

As smartphones become ubuiquitious in business, more applications are appearing that take advantage of the devices’ inbuilt features like GPS and cameras.

To date, many of these have services have been in consumer based, social media style applications but as the market matures, more business orientated services are appearing.

Google Maps Coordinate, the latest service from the search engine giant, uses a smartphone’s built in location services to track field staff and allocate jobs through an Android smartphone app.

On top of that, Google have added a Maps-style interface for businesses to schedule appointments and for staff to accept assignments.

It’s a nice but basic product that doesn’t really address any gaps in the marketplace with job scheduling technology being available for over a decade in the logistics and field service industries.

Connect2Field’s chief executive Steve Orenstein compared Google Maps Coordinate to his own product and while Steve is talking up his own company, the comparison does show this is a market that’s well catered for.

Given the market already has plenty of participants, it would make sense for Google to make the API available to existing players and profit from the rich data they can provide, that move might even give the edge to Android devices in an enterprise market that will become a two horse race if Microsoft fail to execute on Windows 8 and their tablet devices.

Unfortunately Google has chosen not to include these services into their enterprise API packages, leaving them competing against existing players rather than working with them.

At the moment Google Maps isn’t on a roll, having dropped their developer rates by 88% to deal with threat from Apple’s new mapping service.

Probably the biggest drawback to Google Maps Coordinate is its lack of integration with Google Docs, the increased siloing of Google’s operations makes the company start to resemble Microsoft and this is an issue Sergei Brin and Larry Page are going to have address lest the company find itself locked into the same inward looking stagnation.

While its difficult to see Google Maps Coordinate surviving in its current form given the nature of the marketplace, the trend in business orientated geolocation services is changing how companies work.

As smartphones take over the market and location based services become accepted, we’ll see more tools taking advantage of the business opportunities. For Google, this sector has huge potential and it will be interesting to see how they succeed in capitalising on their market dominance.

Is Microsoft’s Surface Tablet Vaporware?

Will we see the Microsoft Surface released this year?

In the early 1990s the term “vapourware” appeared, it was born out of big software vendors announcing mythical products with a whole new bunch of features which the opposition already had.

Usually that next great product never appeared; it was just a ploy to stop customers defecting to the competition’s superior product.

There were a number of ways to spot vapourware – the lack of a working prototype, vague release dates and no firm pricing being just three.

Earlier this week, Microsoft brought tears to the eyes of grizzled IT industry veterans who missed the days of regular vapourware announcements with the “launch” of their Surface tablet computer.

After springing the event at short notice on the tech media, forcing the poor petals to travel to Los Angeles rather than their usual haunts of Silicon Valley, Manhattan or Texas and then starting the event late, Microsoft added insult to injury by not even letting the journalists play with a working version of the Surface, let alone take one home to play with.

One of the impressive things about vapourware are the specifications and this is true with the Microsoft Surface. The specifications of the base model Windows RT are about the same as the base model iPad with the added benefit of a keyboard, USB and Micro SD ports.

Looking past the hype, it’s clear Microsoft are having trouble with their strategy of a unified operating system across smartphones, tablets and traditional PCs, which has forced them to announce two different versions of the Surface, running different operating systems on different chipsets.

Having potentially incompatible products makes it even more important for tech journos and early adopters to play with the new devices to see how well they work – that version one of any new product doesn’t work well is another lesson from the 1990s IT industry.

In the spirit of vapourware, Microsoft hasn’t mentioned what either version of the Surface will cost, which probably indicates they don’t know what the final sticker price will be either.

Despite being funny, there was a serious side to vapourware – in the 1990s businesses often held off purchasing decisions or upgrades as they waited for promised products or features to arrive.

While eager customers waited for products that never arrived, their productivity slipped and technologies that should have been adopted earlier ended up coming late to the office desktop.

For Microsoft investors, the nature of the Surface announcement should be disturbing as the vapourware business tactic only works for incumbents in a strong market position and the software giant is anything but strong in the tablet computer market.

While it would be good to see a credible competitor to the iPad, it’s going to be difficult to take Microsoft seriously until we see some working versions that we can play with.

The lessons from the 1990s computer industry are clear – don’t fall for vapourware and buy what works for your business today.

Can Singapore become a global VC centre?

Singapore’s SingTel has an interesting way of dealing with competitive threats in a new market.

While Silicon Valley grabs most of the headlines about cool new businesses Singapore has been quietly building its own position in the global venture capital industry.

SingTel, the city state’s main telco operator, setup their own venture capital fund in 2010 with Singtel Innovate investing between S$100,000 and thirty million in various ventures.

The strategy from SingTel, which is closely aligned with Singapore’s government, is a very canny one – it allows the telco to move beyond being a “dumb pipe” just providing the phone network and fits into the nation state’s aim to be one of the centres in an increasingly Asian centred global finance system.

Yesterday SingTel launched a new Australian startup venture, the Optus Innov8 Seed fund which offers investments of up to A$250,000 in new start up businesses in return for equity or other stakes.

To identify the right investments SingTel are partnering with various start up groups and incubators in Sydney and Melbourne which is an interesting way to filter out unsuitable businesses.

Being funded by a telco, the Optus Innov8 program is naturally focused on the technologies that are going to help their business in an evolving market, the areas they are currently looking at are mobility solutions and digital convergence.

For Singtel and Optus this is a long term investment as equity stakes in new technologies will position the business well as their industry evolves and margins come under pressure in their core telco market.

To businesses looking for investments, the Innov8 program is a welcome addition to the funding landscape but Singtel also offer access to Asian markets with operations in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Edgar Hardless, the CEO of SingTel Innov8 says “if you’re looking at going into the Indian market, we can help with introductions. Same with any of our other markets”.

Those introductions are useful but probably more important is the market intelligence that a partner like SingTel can bring on board. Understanding foreign business conditions is a great advantage for a foreign venture.

Asian markets can be tough, particularly for Australians who have been bought up with a US centric view of the world, but there are plenty of success stories. There is a successful group of entrepreneurs catering to the massive Indonesian market while companies like Dealize have moved their head office to Hong Kong.

Dealize was part of the Pollenizer incubator which is one of Innov8’s partners. At the launch, Phil Morle of Pollenizer pointed out that his business has set up a Singapore office to take advantage of the favorable investment conditions there.

While Innov8’s program is relatively small, it’s a much needed addition to Australia’s start up and venture capital scene and will help some new businesses in the app and mobile space.

Hopefully a few other corporations are looking at SingTel’s lead and thinking how they can tap into these new industries that may disrupt their own.

For Singapore, the city state has always had a number of advantages for the finance industry. By expending into new financing new sectors they are securing their own future in the 21st Century.