Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Crowdfunding as product testing

    Crowdfunding as product testing

    A story from the Wall Street Journal describes how Sony have crowfunded their FES watch project, a smartwatch with an electronic paper wrist strap.

    Sony’s decision to crowdfund new projects is fascinating, not least because it gives researchers and entreprenuerial employees the opportunity to commercialise projects at little cost or risk to the company but also as a powerful way to judge the market demand for an idea.

    The FES watch campaign is good example how companies, big and small, can use crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. As we see more creative applications of the two concepts we may well see some radically new management methods and business models arise.

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  • Where will the digital leaders come from?

    Where will the digital leaders come from?

    Last Thursday in Sydney a group of industry groups, telcos and local councils launched their 2030 Communications Visions initiative; a project “to shape a digital vision and set of goals for Australia to achieve global digital age leadership”.

    The project is a worthy one, particularly given the failure of Australia’s National Broadband Network, which I’m writing about early next week in Technology Spectator however one thing that bugs me is what exactly is ‘digital age leadership’.

    If we look at the rollout of technologies like the motor car, electricity or telephone through the Twentieth Century it was a mix of private companies, community groups and governments that championed the development of roads, mains power and phone systems. People either demanded their towns became connected or raised the capital to do it themselves.

    So on one level, the champions need to be us. We have to lead our communities and industries by using the technologies and showing what can be done, that also makes our businesses more likely to succeed in the future.

    On another level, we need to consider the genuine leaders of the ‘electrical age’ or ‘motor car age’; people like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford built businesses that led the world and still exist today.

    For countries, it’s no coincidence that the United States is the richest nation on the planet after having most of the leading business in their industries over the last hundred years.

    That latter point is really what the Digital Visions project is about; do Australians want to remain a wealthy nation in the Twenty First Century?

    Governments have a role in this, as the UK is showing, and political leaders need to be encouraged to take the digital economy however governments can only do so much and successes like Silicon Valley are more a fortunate by product of spending rather than the consequence of strategic policy.

    Ultimately, leadership starts with us — we can’t afford to wait for governments, big business or someone else to take the reigns.

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  • The Economist’s World in 2015

    The Economist’s World in 2015

    One of the annual features in The Economist is it’s World In… edition where the magazine makes predictions on the year ahead.

    For 2015 the magazine has its usual wide range predictions; some safe, some risky and some out of left field, like Papua New Guinea topping the world growth lists for next year on the back on a new LNG plant comping online.

    Economy: The fastest-growing economy in the world in 2015 will be Papua New Guinea, where GDP will expand by nearly 15%. China will drop its growth target to 7% (from 7.5%). Overall, global growth will be higher in 2015 (3.8%) than in 2014 (3.2%).

    Business: Singapore tops the Economist Intelligence Unit’s global business environment rankings for 2015. Watch out for Xiaomi, a Chinese mobile-phone maker, as it continues its meteoric rise and goes global. And expect a welcome return, at least in some places, to the nine-to-five culture in the

    Interest rates: In the United States and Britain, where growth is relatively robust and unemployment is coming down, interests rates will start to rise in 2015, ending a long period of ultra-low rates. In the euro zone and Japan, by contrast, central banks will continue to ease monetary policy, to battle against deflation. The diverging paths of the main central banks will lead to more volatility in equity,

    Statistical landmarks: It will be a year of striking “crossovers”, as America overtakes Saudi Arabia to become the world’s biggest oil producer, China overtakes America to become the world’s biggest economy (measured at purchasing-power parity) and Facebook overtakes China in terms of its

    Elections: Britain will have another hung parliament after its general election in May, with David
    Cameron probably remaining prime minister. But Canada’s leadership is likely to change hands in an October election, with the Liberals’ Justin Trudeau taking the helm.

    The environment: A deal of sorts will emerge from the Paris summit in December 2015. Hydrogen- powered cars will hit the road, as Toyota and Honda launch the first mass-market fuel-cell models. And Australia will be in the global spotlight as the UN decides whether the Great Barrier Reef should be put on the endangered list.

    Technology: “Wearable” technology will be all the rage, thanks to the launch of the Apple Watch and other devices. Virtual-reality firms will overcome the cost and technology problems that have prevented their products from becoming mass-market hits. And mobile phones will become mind-readers, thanks to “anticipatory computing”, which enables them to trawl their users’ data to predict events

    Sport: Australia will win the cricket World Cup, New Zealand will win the rugby World Cup and the United States will win the women’s football World Cup.

    Space: America’s New Horizons spacecraft will fly by Pluto, after a journey of nearly nine years – maybe igniting a campaign to reinstate Pluto as a fully-fledged planet from its current “dwarf” status.

    Some of the predictions are obvious while others may be a bit longer term than 2015. Overall it’s an interesting range of predictions and in the next few days I’ll post an interview with two of The Economist’s editors, Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran and Daniel Franklin, justifying their forecasts for the year ahead.

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  • Where will the jobs come from? ABC Nightlife radio

    Where will the jobs come from? ABC Nightlife radio

    If you missed the program it’s available from the Soundcloud site.

    Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy on ABC Nightlife across Australia from 10pm Australian Eastern time on Thursday, November 27 to discuss how technology affects your business and life.

    Last week a US company showed off its robotic security guard, with the boast it costs less than half the wages of a human officer. It isn’t just security guards, baristas or taxi drivers, many knowledge based jobs — from call centre workers to lawyers — can be done by computer programs, or algorithms.

    Even the building industry isn’t immune from the robots as 3D printing moves into making houses by squeezing concrete out of computer controlled nozzles.

    In almost every occupation technology is changing the way we work and reducing the number of workers needed to do a job. So where next for employment in the Twenty-first Century?

    Meet the K-5 robot security guard

    For this month’s Nightlife we’ll be discussing how the robots and algorithms are taking over the workplace and what this means for our communities and businesses.

    Join us

    Tune in on your local ABC radio station from 10pm Australian Eastern Summer time or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

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

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

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  • A non toxic form of midlife crisis — Audible CEO and founder Don Katz

    A non toxic form of midlife crisis — Audible CEO and founder Don Katz

    “I had what my wife describes as non toxic form of midlife crisis,” says Don Katz of Audible, the company he founded in 1994 and remains CEO of today. In an interview with Decoding The New Economy, Katz describes a startup journey that covers all the bases.

    As Rolling Stone’s European correspondent Katz was engaged to write a book in the early 1990s about how digital technologies were changing music and what he realised was the industry was about to go through a fundamental change.

    “I had a wonderful career as a writer, I was a long form magazine writer in the glory days of ten thousand word articles,” Katz says of his life in journalism. A book commission lead him to research the future of digital distribution of written works.

    Survival in the digital economy

    One of the driving ideas was how creators can sustain themselves in the digital economy, “my content was already being ripped off on the Unix internet and I thought ‘how will the profession creative class sustain themselves if there’s no ability to control the distribution?’”

    Having founded Audible in 1995 at a time when few people were downloading or even using the net, Katz was in the box seat of the first tech boom and subsequent tech wreck in 2001.

    At the peak of the dot com boom  Audible was floated on the NASDAQ stock market, “In 1999 good companies that were leading categories went public and got massive amounts of free capital.” Katz recalls, “It was one of those weird moments, there were 1500 publicly listed internet companies at the beginning of 2000 and there were 140 by 2003.”

    Surviving the dot com bust

    Katz puts the company’s survival during that period to a conservative attitude towards capital and the alliances he had created with the industry’s major players — at one stage Microsoft held a 37% share in the company and Katz was one of Steve Jobs’ confidants during the early development of the iPod.

    Eventually one of those alliances became critical when Katz became bored with running a listed company, “it was an amazing adventure being a public company CEO for nine and a half years. It was very exciting and an honour to serve shareholders.”

    Katz’s patience ran out with being a public company CEO when automated trading came to dominate the daily operations of management, “suddenly you had this metaphysical sense of ‘who are you working for if someone wants volatility?’ That suddenly got old.”

    Audible already had a relationship with Amazon who had taken five percent of the business in 2000  in return for bundling audio book links on the ecommerce giant’s book pages. Katz also found Amazon founder Jeff Bezo’s long term view towards investment and returns a much more satisfying business model than the day to day grind of meeting short term shareholder demands.

    In early 2008 Amazon bought Audible for $300 million and retained Katz as the company’s CEO.

    Building new startups

    For new startups, Katz advises “make an absolutely fearless inventory of what you know is true about this idea and what you’re good at and what you’re not good at.”

    “You need to have people you can trust and believe in. Beyond that, be very sober about business models that are sustainable. There’s a lot mistakes that people make where you’re solving a problem in a piece of a value chain that isn’t sustainable. It’s easy to get confused about who the customer is.”

    “Figure out who the real customer is. Sometime people overplay the fact that the customer is the capital, the capital will come if people have the innovation and the passion.”

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