Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Happy birthday, iPad

Last week’s anniversary of the iPad has some useful lessons all disruptive businesses

Last week the iPad’s first birthday quietly passed, lost among the hoopla of the release of the tablet computing leader’s second version. It’s a difficult to think of another product that’s changed an industry so radically and so quickly.

All of Apple’s successes in the last decade have been in areas with many already established players; the iMac entered a crowded PC market, the iPod was just another MP3 player and the iPhone plunged into a sector sated with hundreds of mobile devices.

With each product Apple redefined their segment of the market place and established a secure, and profitable, niche.

The iPad was somewhat different to the other products; with it Apple redefined the entire market and now leads the tablet computing sector. Yesterday industry analysts Gartner put out figures claiming Apple has over two-thirds of today’s market and will still hold half in 2015 despite the rise of the cheaper Google Android devices.

Notable in Gartner’s predictions is the absence of Microsoft Windows based systems and that’s the clue for the iPad’s success as industries like healthcare, retail and logistics had been begging for affordable and usable tablet computers for a decade which the clunky Windows based systems had consistently failed to deliver.

Another factor in Apple’s favour has been the rise of cloud computing, which has freed devices from relying on heavy and power hungry internal hard drives and made them more flexible. One of the most popular business iPad applications has been Evernote, a note taking program which has proved indispensable for business executives.

Most of those executives work for corporations where the IT departments had blocked the introduction of cloud services and Apple products on compatibility and security grounds.

Senior management’s adoption of Apple products and cloud services has broken down that enterprise barrier, which is one of the reasons why competing companies that made their fortunes selling desktop and server products are now desperately trying to find other selling points.

In many ways, the adoption of Apple and the cloud is similar to how personal computers entered business. In the 1980’s computing departments resisted the introduction of PCs for almost the same reasons as IT managers today object to social media, cloud computing and Mac desktops in the office.

The difference is the PC revolution was initially driven by the office accountants, sales teams and secretaries who found desktop applications like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect made their jobs more effective. This time, being different, it’s their managers driving the change.

For smaller businesses and entrepreneurs Apple’s successes open a whole range of opportunities in the applications and services markets to support these devices.

Those applications also help upstarts disrupt existing industries; the lower cost of entry is reducing barriers and speeding up lead times making slower incumbents more vulnerable to change.

Disruption is probably the greatest lesson that Apple and Steve Jobs have taught us with the iPad, you can enter an already crowded market with a product different from the existing players and own a substantial part of it.

All businesses, regardless of the sectors we work in, can learn from the iPad whether it’s how we can use tablets and the cloud in our operations or how we can apply Apple’s disruptive business model to secure a profitable industry niche. It’s a good time to be being open to new ideas.

Email turmoil

What the Epsilon email breach means to you.

The massive email breach at Epsilon, the World’s biggest email marketing services company, has rightly caused headlines as it appears customer addresses from many of the world’s largest brands has been leaked to spammers and crooks.

Epsilon looks after the email services of major brands, including Tivo, Marks & Spencer, McKinsey and Dell Australia so the breach has exposed many people’s email addresses.

What does this mean?

The breach has not exposed passwords or credit card details, so there’s no direct threat from the breach.

However, having your name, email address and a company you’ve dealt with means a phishing attack, where a crook poses as a business you’ve dealt with and tries to get your passwords, will be more effective.

Normally these messages are a give away as they aren’t addressed personally to you and are often from organisations, usually foreign banks, you’ve never dealt with.

However a scammer who knows the organisation along with your name and email address can now launch a pretty convincing fake email campaign directing you to a site pretending to be say a competition or a security warning that asks you for your password.

Given many people use the same passwords for all the secure sites they visit, there’s a reasonable chance the bad guys will get a large number of live accounts and be able to access victims’ bank accounts, email services and social media sites.

What should you do?

The first thing is to be careful, don’t respond to any suspicious emails and if you are uncertain call the organisation’s support line from a number although do not use any numbers or other contact details shown on the suspicious email.

If you are concerned you have fallen for a trick, then change all your passwords immediately, we’d also suggest following the instructions on the IT Queries website and having a layered approach to security where sites which don’t matter have simple passwords.

We can also expect a wave of fake email and social media messages as peoples’ personal pages and accounts are hijacked and the scammers try posing as other people.

The Networked Business

The first of the City Of Sydney’s Let’s Talk Business looked at how business can use the cloud

The first of the City Of Sydney’s Let’s Talk Business workshops looked at how business can use cloud computing services to help improve the marketing, operations and profitability.

My presentation, Business In The Cloud covered the definition of cloud computing, the benefits for business, the risks and the case for getting on the cloud.

The text of the presentation, shown here has been broken into four segments each addressing the individual points.

What is the cloud?

The opening section looked at what cloud computing is, the underlying definitions and how it works. We discussed how the underlying concepts of cloud computing are nothing new and how the concepts of shared resources across a reliable and robust network are part of the very reason for the Internet itself.

The benefits of cloud computing

Having defined cloud computing we look at the benefits of these services, focusing on the flexibility online software delivers and how businesses can use these tools to quickly seize opportunities in our fast changing society.

Risky business

Every new technology has its risks and cloud computing is no different. In our third presentation we look at some of the online traps and how to manage them.

The business case for cloud computing

Concluding the presentation is a summary of the business case, balancing the benefits and the risks and concluding with how businesses might use cloud services.

Further information

Illustrating how businesses can use online tools, we have a list of some of popular business cloud services that can help your organisation use the web to be more flexible and innovative.

The presentation was part of the Let’s Talk Business series of workshops run by the City of Sydney and held at the Customs House. There’s three more events in the 2011 series covering the new consumer, mobile internet and business leadership.

If you’ve been along to the Lets Talk Business events, or have some ideas on how business can use cloud services, we’d love to hear your comments.

The networked business Part 4: The business case for cloud computing

Part 4 of the Let’s Talk Business Cloud Presentation

This is the fourth and final part of the presentation given as part of the City of Sydney’s Let’s Talk Business series of events on new business technologies.

The case for business cloud computing

Cloud computing is part of the future of of business. Increasingly it’s going to become of fundamental part of our society as we become more connected.

Business is open 24 hours. Even if your office or staff aren’t working at 4am on a Sunday, customers are checking your website to look at your products. If you are selling online, everything has to be running.

The cloud is not a tool for every business. For some, the risks or limitations mean they are better served running application or storing data on their own computer.

For most businesses though the cloud changes the game, it makes them more flexible and productive.

In an era where we’re seeing massive change in our economy and society, it’s the business who can respond quickly to the new normal who will survive and prosper.

Cloud computing helps businesses adapt and are part of the key to running a successful enterprise in the 21st Century.

This is the third of a series of four posts taken from The Networked Business presentation. Parts One, Two and Three are also online. A list of the useful business cloud computing tools to accompany this article.

The networked business Part 3: Managing risk in the cloud

Part 3 of the Let’s Talk Business Cloud Presentation

This is the third part of the presentation given as part of the City of Sydney’s Let’s Talk Business series of workshops on new business technologies.

Not always free

There are some misconceptions about cloud services though.

Just last year, the Australian Financial Review ran a front page article headlined “massive savings to be made in the cloud” stating that cloud services can save a business up to 80% on its IT spend.

Many industries have made the mistake of relying on cheap prices to get customers through the door. Think of Myer’s problems with their perpetual sales, a mistake being repeated today by dozens of smaller businesses offering 80% off meals or haircuts through the group buying services.

In the Internet based industries we’ve made the mistake of training our customers to believe we can do everything online for free.

Free is an illusion, there is almost always a cost and on the net you’ll either pay by spending time or giving away your own, or your clients’, privacy.

The better services cost. The most successful cloud service, Salesforce.com, is quite expensive although still substantially cheaper than the server based alternatives.

Many services though are based on the freemium model, when you need additional features or grow beyond a certain size charges kick in or increase with your needs.

Mail Chimp, an online email management system is an example. Late last year I resurrected a mailing list which hadn’t been used for 18 months. I chose to pay the fee for MailChimp as their management service would deal with the hundreds of invalid addresses and unsubscribes a neglected mailing list always attracts when you restart it.

Not only did MailChimp deal adequately with these problems but it also took the size of the mailing list below the 2,000 name threash hold for their free service. So spending a bit of money actually saved a lot more money and a massive amount of time. It also illustrated the flexibility of cloud systems and their pricing models.

The risks

Nothing though is risk free. Any technological change comes with risks; electricity changed humanity but thousand of people die every year from misusing it. We can say the same for the motor car, steam engines and penicillian.

For all the benefits of Internet technologies they too have their own risks. In cloud computing we can divide them into three major groups; Reliability, Terms of service and Security.

Security

Probably the most misunderstood, and so riskiest, aspect of IT is security. Most business people over estimate the security of their own systems and are shocked when their data is compromised by viruses, hackers or, most commonly, their own staff walking out the door with vital information.

Cloud services generally have better security than most business networks as they have the resources to deal with the massive task of keeping computing systems secure, but there are still risks in using online providers.

Strong passwords begin to matter and guarding them is important as well.

Granular access, not giving everyone access to everything also becomes very important. This is also a common problem on small business networks.

Accessing cloud services from shared computers or through unsecured wireless networks is probably the biggest danger, particularly with mobile workers. It’s important any provider you use offers encrypted services, which you can tell from the login page showing https:// at the beginning, and making sure you log off when you finish using computers in Internet cafes or in other people’s offices.

Terms of service

When using cloud services you have to understand these are someone else’s computers you are occupying so you have to play by their rules regardless how arbitrary they seem.

Wikileaks is a good example of how large cloud and Internet providers use ToS to shut down customers they don’t like.

You don’t have to upset the CIA or Julia Gillard to get into trouble. Victoria Buckley Jewellers in Sydney’s Strand Arcade uses beautiful porcelain dolls to model their products. One of the female dolls has nipples and Facebook shut down Victoria’s account after a series of photos showed the doll topless, nudity being a breach of Facebook’s conditions.

A more common problem is eBay shutting down traders’ accounts on spurious piracy claims. This is very common and genuine risk to anyone running an online store relying on PayPal or eBay.

Probably the best example of silly piracy claims is when the University of Florida hit the Flickr photo sharing service with claims that every photo with a description containing the words “Florida” and “football” was a breach of their college grid iron team’s copyright.

The howls of outrage from angry Flickr users when their pictures of kids playing football while on holiday in Florida or local team photos were taken down soon convinced both organisations that their actions were hasty and ill-advised.

The problem remains though that online services are still too quick to shut down other people’s services so you need to plan for these type of disruptions.

Reliability

Tied closely into the terms of service is reliability.

Reliability is at the heart of all technologies. If something breaks down most of the time you use it, then it’s of little use to your business.

If you are using a cloud service you need to have both reliable internet connections and a provider you can trust. This is why free services often don’t cut it for business use.

One aspect cloud services and technology companies often sell is the Service Level Agreement or SLA, these offer a refund if the service doesn’t perform to set standards. While SLAs are useful, they don’t make up for the disruption a service interruption causes your business. As Virgin Blue found during their service problems late last year.

As we’ve seen with the recent natural disasters in Japan, New Zealand and Queensland, the Internet routes itself around problems. So if you are in a problem area the challenges of keeping your business operating may be increased while communications are still being repaired

Redundancy is the key, just as the Internet and cloud computers have redundant features, so too should your systems. You have to choose providers that let you easily download usuable data from their services in case you find yourself offline or unhappy with their product.

This is the third of a series of four posts taken from The Networked Business presentation. Parts One, Two and Four are also online

The networked business Part 2: The benefits of cloud computing

Part 2 of the Let’s Talk Business Cloud Presentation

This is the second part of the presentation given as part of the City of Sydney’s Let’s Talk Business series of presentations on new business technologies.

Scalability

This scalability, or flexibility, of cloud computing changes the way we buy and use technology. No longer are we locked into major technology investments as leasing services off larger companies means we don’t have the capital costs of investing in computers, servers and all the associated software purchases and support charges.

An architect or designer a few years ago might spend $10,000 per employee every three years kitting them out with the latest workstation capable of running AutoCAD or another high end design program.

While some businesses still need that sort of investment, most can now get away with just a computer running a web browser and the boss can pay the monthly bills on her credit card rather than having to take out a loan against the family home.

The 19th Century Prussian general, Helmuth von Moltke said “no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy” and similarly no business plan survives its first contact with the marketplace. The flexibility of cloud computing means we aren’t locked into expensive technology choices as our business evolves to meet the changing demands of our customers and industries.

Teamwork

Collaboration is another of the big buzz words of today’s economy. The truth is all successful businesses are a collaborative effort and have been since the days of cavemen hunting mammoths.

One of the biggest irritants with PC based systems is how they are designed for one user at a time and how many force you to pay for an unreliable multi user versions.

Think about Microsoft Word, if you’re accessing it on the network you’ll find only one user at a time can read or edit it. This was true of the older desktop accounting packages.

The older, desktop based accounting packages only allow one user. Their multiple user, network packages are expensive and clunky. The cloud based systems like Xero or Saasu, an online service based out of Elizabeth Street here in Sydney come with the teamwork functions built in.

Recently at a workshop in Melbourne, a director of a large services company told me how his board of directors are using Google Docs to work together on agendas and committee documents. Using cloud services are saving him and his colleagues many hours of work and avoiding having big piles of documents dumped on them the weekend before their board meetings.

The team aren’t just your employees, it can also be your customers, suppliers and other business partners. Cloud services allow you to share selected information without compromising your own systems.

Mobile working

By definition your customers and suppliers aren’t in your office. Increasingly your staff and even the boss aren’t there either.

Working on the move has been one of the great weakness of both PC computing and the mainframe era. Cloud computing, made possible by accessible and affordable Internet, means we can now easily access data and applications while we’re on the road.

Remote working has been possible in the past, but it was awkward and difficult. To set up secure connections usually involved setting up a complex and flaky Virtual Private Network that tended to choke at the times you needed it.

In my own IT support business we saw this a number of times where we struggled to set up reliable remote networking connections. For instance the owner of a business in Pyrmont decided to move his home to Orange and telecommute into the office. At the same time his assistant had a baby and wanted to work from home.

The juggling of hardware and server requirements so the client had a secure and reliable service was difficult and expensive. Today the use of online accounting and office packages along with cloud based document sharing services like Dropbox, that business could be paying $100 a month without any upfront capital costs.

Dismantling edifices

Those capital costs are real, a five person Sydney law firm I know ended up spending thirty thousand dollars when their software provider told them they had to upgrade their systems.

Much of a big or small businesses IT budget goes into building impressive technological edifices that add little to the profitability of the business.

Worse, IT is a time consuming beast – in a big business hundreds of people are employed to keep their computers running. In a small business, the proprietor or manager spends a disproportionate amount of time messing with technology.

Cloud services take a lot of that load off businesses.

We should keep in mind though that this is as big a benefit for big businesses as well as small. Last year the Commonwealth Bank of Australia announced they were moving services to the cloud.

The big end of town has woken up to the benefits of cloud computing, while they have a problem in dismantling their massive structures once they do they will be stronger more nimbler competitors as their cloud platforms make it easier for them to respond to market changes.

Barriers are falling

As large businesses are learning, removing big capital costs reduces barriers to testing new ideas. It means getting a new business up and running is cheaper and quicker than ever before.

On the back of Sydney Buses at the moment you’ll see ads for Freelancer.com, stating you can get an iPhone app or website developed from $30. While the reality is you’ll pay quite a bit more than that, the point is well made – with a web browser and a credit card you can outsource large parts of your business.

Most of these outsourcing businesses are run on cloud services. Many of the social media successes like Facebook and Twitter grew by hiring space off cloud computing services such as Amazon.

For established businesses, the cloud is changing the very fundamentals of their operations. One of the biggest growing areas in the outsourcing industry is the legal profession where law firms are giving lower level work to companies in India that can carry out the tasks of junior lawyers or paralegals. The cloud technologies these services use allow the law firms to supervise and bill for the workers as if they were in the same building.

Because you can be up and running in minutes using cloud computing services without the need of installing software on your computer, let alone the time involved in managing and downloading updates, it’s a quick and effective way to grow your business.

This is the second of a series of four posts taken from The Networked Business presentation. Parts One, Three and Four are also online.

The networked business Part 1: What is cloud computing?

Part 1 of the Let’s Talk Business Cloud Presentation

This is the first part of the presentation given as part of the City of Sydney’s Let’s Talk Business series of events on new business technologies.

The IT industry loves buzzwords and one of the biggest buzzwords at the moment is Cloud Computing.

Another thing the IT industry loves is overselling concepts, think of Y2K or the Dot Com Boom, so in this presentation we’ll look at what cloud computing is, whether it’s being overhyped and what it can realistically do for today’s businesses.

In 2003 Nicholas Carr wrote in the Harvard Business Review that Information Technology no longer matters. In Nick’s view, computers, the Internet and IT are all becoming a utility and we’ll take computers and the Internet for granted just as we in the Western world consider clean running water and electricity today.

That point of view is probably true and the always on nature of the Internet and cloud computing is bringing us closer to the day we’ll assume IT is always there.

In the always on, always connected society each of the nodes we see on this screen could be a customer, a supplier, an employee or even the tax man and this changes the way we do business.

But every innovation has its risks and every revolution its victims. So we’ll look at the risks as well as the opportunities in an economy where cloud computing is changing the fundamentals of our businesses.

What is the cloud?

Before we go on, let’s explain what the cloud is. The analogy of a cloud is quite appropriate, just as a rain cloud is made up of many individual water particles, the Internet is made up of millions of computers talking to each other.

In fact there are so many computers on the Internet that the Internet Protocol version 4 developed in 1980 allowed around 4 billion address and we’ve just run out of those.

The Internet Protocol 6 now being introduced allows 34 undecillion addresses. An undecillion is a trillion, trillion, trillion so 34 undecillion addresses is a big number, although in 1980 4 billion seemed to be a lot and it was unthinkable we’d use them all up in 30 years.

The Internet though was designed to survive the unthinkable. Surviving a nuclear war was the reason for the Internet’s design. The fundamental idea behind the net is redundancy, should one group of computers fail the network adapts and sends the information around the damaged area.

The same principle applies to cloud computing, the tens of thousands of computers in each data centre – the buildings that house the cloud computing companies – are duplicated many times so if one or a hundred fail then others will pick up the work and the person using the service should never notice there has been a problem.

Naturally the data centres themselves are duplicated so the failure of one centre won’t interrupt the service. When you open a document in Google Docs, the data and the program are being run on computers in Oregon, Belgium possibly even here in Sydney.

Interestingly, the computers in these data centres are cheap and basic with most of them having less power than our home or office desktop computers.

The real power lies in combining the capabilities of these modest systems, as a group they are far more powerful than most supercomputers.

For our purposes we can define cloud computing as using someone else’s computers to do the work rather than our own systems.

Cloud computing is nothing new

The idea of cloud computing isn’t new, it goes back to the earliest days of computers.

Until the arrival of the personal computer, academics and businesses had to use mainframe computers where time was allocated to them by the computing department. These were only really feasible for well resourced organisations.

The Personal computer took the data off the servers and onto the desktop. It’s notable that IT departments back then resisted introducing personal computers for almost identical reasons that they are resisting cloud and web based services along with social media tools today.

PCs and later laptops and smartphones had advantages that the old mainframes could never offer and while the old ways of centralised computing didn’t go away, most people and businesses preferred the advantages of the smaller, more flexibile systems.

With the arrival of the Internet, it was possible to link computers in the same way again and take advantage of the economies of scale of what we call client-server systems while retaining the benefits of personal and mobile computing.

This is the first of a series of four posts taken from The Networked Business presentation. Parts two, three and four are also online.

Ten business uses of cloud computing services

Some online services to help your organisation

As part of the City of Sydney Let’s Talk Business program, we’ve put together a list of some of the more popular uses of cloud computing for the small business.

Cloud services offer a lot to all business, particularly small and start up enterprises that need to move fast and are often cash strapped.

There’s a massive range of services available on the cloud and here are a few that are worth exploring to help your business.

email

Electronic mail is the cornerstone of every business, in the past it’s been a nuisance sharing the email account or keeping track of users and passwords. Today most cloud email services are free and offer as much, if not more than the computer based alternatives.

Google’s Gmail
Windows Live Hotmail
MailChimp (for newsletters)

Accounting services

One of the greatest challenges for small business is doing their books and accounting software is a must have for every commercial operation. Online services reduce costs and increase flexibility for businesses of all sizes.

Saasu
Xero
MYOB Your Business Cloud

Customer Relationship Management

CRM software helps you monitor and understand who your customers are and what you’re doing for them.

Salesforce
Sugar CRM

Backups

Backing up is critical for your business. Having an online automated backup helps you ensure essential data is safe.

Carbonite

Shared storage

Sharing files with others helps your business be more efficient as teams can get work done without using the same computer.

Dropbox
Box.net

Communications

Voice over IP, or VoIP, is a massive cost saver and most of them are cloud services.

Skype
MyNetFone

Office applications

One of the biggest costs for business is the software for writing letters and working on spreadsheet. There’s free and paid for services that you can use on the cloud that cut your costs and increase your office productivity.

Evernote
Google Docs
Zoho Docs

Project management

Running and managing projects is a complex task made much easier with a good project management program to keep track of tasks and time.

Basecamp
Zoho Projects

Blogging platforms

Web Logs, or blogs, are becoming the platform of choice for getting small business websites up and running due to their flexibility and ease of use.

WordPress
Hotmail

Outsourcing

Cloud computing and online services are making outsourcing possible for small businesses. With a browser and a credit card, you too can be in the outsourcing business.

O-Desk
Freelancer

These are just a small range of outsourcing services available for small business, we’d love to hear your experiences and suggestions for other online products.

Planning for today

Business aren’t recognising the connected future has arrived. It’s not too late to recognise this

Last week the Communications Day Summit was told of the bizarre situation where owners corporations and building managers were actively preventing their properties from being connected to high speed Internet.

This short sightedness shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who’s had to argue with architects about allowing sufficient data raisers in commercial buildings or has despaired at stingy developers condemning their projects’ future occupants to years of living in powerboard infested firetraps by only installing one or two power outlets per room – something that’s common in even high priced complexes.

As well as being firetraps, these properties are limiting their potential future value as owners and tenants find it hard to connect the devices most businesses and family find are essential to modern living. This situation is going to get worse as we start to rely even more on the web and we find we our incomes and livelihoods are tied to the reliability and speed of our connections.

This failure to plan for the connected economy by Australian businesses is a familiar story, last year one of the state governments asked the tech industry what they were planning around the high speed Internet access the National Broadband Network planned to deliver. The overwhelming response was “dunno, I guess we’ll wait and see.”

Last week Geof Heydon of telecommunications company Alcatel Lucent told an almost identical story of cluelessness where one of the big four banks asked its suppliers how the NBN would affect the provision of their products.

The frightening thing is the availability of reliable and fast Internet is already here for most of the population and yet the majority of the business community, not just the retailer sector, seems to be ignoring these fundamental changes to our marketplaces.

Even if you don’t like the NBN, or last week’s news of cancelled tenders only confirms suspicions Canberra has their sums on the project hopelessly wrong, cancelling it is going to strand large chunks of regional and outer suburban Australia without access to the newer services.

We all have to ensure our business plans have provision for the changes that are happening as our customers, staff and suppliers adopt high speed and mobile Internet. Failing to do so is going to leave your business or investment stranded, just a community without roads or high speed broadband would be.

Why manners matter online

Good manners go a long way on the Internet

Yahoo!7’s attempt to reduce bullying and offensive behaviour in their forums and comments illustrates a problem we have in the online community — that many people forget their manners when they connect to the Internet.

Manners matter online because there is no divide between your behaviour on the Internet and in the physical world. What you say and do online can affect your personal and professional life.

In previous posts I’ve looked at how this affects business people and politicians, but poor online behaviour such as bullying, offensive language and just downright poor manners can affect all members of the community, even if you aren’t online yourself.

Much of the problem lies in that people forget the Internet is a global medium, what you post from a computer in Parramatta can be seen by someone in Paris. Many also think they are anonymous online when it’s actually difficult to cover your tracks.

So here’s a few ideas on how to be a good cybercitizen;

You are what you tweet

Keep in mind everything you do online can affect your job, your family and your personal assets. All the rules and laws of the physical world apply online as well.

If you wouldn’t do or say something on the street, then you probably shouldn’t do it online either.

You are not anonymous

Okay, you signed up to a forum with a false name and setup a dummy hotmail or gmail account to confirm your identity. You are still not anonymous.

Upset enough people or seriously break the law and you will be found. Being truly anonymous on the net actually takes a lot of effort .

Show respect

We all have ideas and opinions which the Internet is a great medium for spreading, be it using social media tools life Facebook and Twitter or in forums and comments sections on websites.

Regardless of how good your idea is or how passionate and well founded your opinion is, there will be those who choose to disagree with you. Respect those views and don’t get offended when dissenters, however shallow or ill-informed appear.

Be helpful

If someone is asking a silly question or is clearly new to an online forum, be polite. Don’t put them down or call them names, just help them or direct them to where they can get assistance.

Take a deep breath

If someone has got under your skin and you’ve written a savage reply, think before pressing the “submit” button. Often, that witty riposte doesn’t look so clever when you’ve calmed down or looked at it in the cold light of morning.

Avoid foul language

Swearing online makes you look low rent, just as it does in the real world. Save the invective for when you’re with your mates in a private forum. The Internet is generally not a private forum.

Walk away

Sadly the Internet attracts trolls who enjoy upsetting people and provoking strong reactions. Don’t join them.

If you find someone is upsetting you or sucking you into a vortex of pointless arguments, just walk away from the discussion. Block them, unfollow them, defriend them.

In the worst case, if you’re finding one online venue such as a web forum or social media site attracts people who upset you, stop using it. Your life is too short to be sucked into negative, carping discussions with people who thrive on criticism of other’s hard work and ideas.

The Internet is becoming the repository for our culture while our society has a lot of negativity we’ve also done great things. So rather than be part of the negative aspect, be part of the solution — be bright, welcoming and honest but most of all show respect to your fellow online citizens.

A strong and vibrant society is built on respect and manners so let’s make our online communities how we’d like the world around us to be.

Should you upgrade to Internet Explorer 9

Every big software update has its traps

Big fat computer updates always worry IT people as the changes can break important business software and leave a lot of irritated staff complaining they can’t do their job because “the computers won’t work.”

Microsoft’s latest version of Internet Explorer – released two weeks ago – has to be treated with a bit of care as IE is a fundamental part of Windows, something which made the spyware outbreaks last decade so problematic, so any change to the inbuilt web browser can ripple through your entire office network.

Internet Explorer 9 itself is a decent improvement over earlier versions with improved loading speeds, a download manager and integrated search, all features which had been lacking against the competing Firefox and Chrome browsers.

Most importantly, IE 9 has a range of security features that makes it a lot safer to use than previous versions. However those safety features are where the problems can lie as legitimate programs may be blocked along with the bad guys.

The immediate problem with IE9 is that many organizations that are still in the dark ages of Internet Explorer 6, having locked themselves into bad technological choices at the beginning of the millennium, and so will struggle with the new versions. If you deal with the websites of these organisations, who are often government departments and financial companies, then you can expect some hiccups in their online communications.

Inside your office, you may find some of your older software doesn’t play nicely with IE9, this is probably the major reason why many businesses have hung back from updating to Windows 7 from Window XP. If you are still using XP then Internet Explorer 9 won’t be an issue for you as it only runs on Windows 7 or Vista.

Microsoft’s not making IE 9 available for Windows XP is probably the strongest sign yet that the software giant is going to make a concerted effort to move users off what is now a decade old operating system.

For businesses, if your systems support it then IE 9 is a good and important update, however it’s best to use an alternative like Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari for day to day browsing and reserve the Microsoft tools for the sites that insist upon it.

As with all major upgrades you have to test your systems before rolling out the new program across your network. Install the revised software on one or two key staff members’ computers and get them to test the new programs in a working environment to check that key operations aren’t affected or, if they are, how you can fix or work around them.

Overall, Internet Explorer 9 is a worthwhile update and an important part of Microsoft’s trying to stay relevant in a world where computing revolves around the Internet rather than the desktop.

Whether Microsoft can manage to stay relevant is a topic for another day, but at least IE9 keeps them in the game.

Magazines 2020

Content Providers, curators or experience makers?

As hundreds queued around the world for the latest Apple iPad an Australian media tycoon told a business breakfast that newspapers were a sunset industry. Where does this leave magazines and other print media?

The last decade for magazines has been tough, as readers drifted to largely free websites with the advertisers following. The challenge for publishers is how do they follow their markets onto the web while still making money.

Magazines aren’t unique in this challenge – the media industries, like many others, have been affected by the rise of the web. Magazines themselves sit somewhere between the recording and newspaper industries with news stand sales and subscriptions being a bigger proportion of incom while not having the same newspaper classified income which has collapsed so dramatically in recent years.

The Shift Online

We’ve seen a massive shift to the web over the last decade and that movement is only accelerating as advertisers start to follow consumers and the public embraces social media and online gaming.

PriceWaterhouseCooper’s Entertainment and Media Outlook forecasts the magazine industry to lose 1% of advertising market share – from 5 to 4% of the overall spend – over the 2010 to 14 period with all the losses going online.

While the magazine industry looks at losing 20% of its advertising revenue to the Internet, figures are similar for newspapers, radio and free to air television with online advertising moving from 18% to 26% of the market. The advertisers are, quite rightly, following the customers.

Following readers online is the great challenge for the magazine industry, the question is how do they do it and continue to be profitable.

The Internet Challenge

The greatest problem on the Internet is making money, businesses have trained web surfers to expect online products – particularly news and entertainment – for free. Even physical goods have become increasingly commoditised as deal of the day and group buying sites have used “cheap” as the main hook for buyers.

Today’s reader and consumer expects goods they find online to be cheap and any content they discover to be free.

That isn’t fatal for a business as the broadcast television industry has shown us you can provide free content paid for by advertisers and make a good living while there’s no shortage of merchants who’ve built empires on the fast moving consumer good model of “stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap”.

Part of the online magazine industry’s response to the challenge of adapting to these models has been to use free labour. The rise of the Digital Sharecroppers, where writers provide content for free, has been the result.

People have been prepared to provide content for free for all manner of reasons. The problem for publishers, and readers, is quality writing is not sustainable under this model and we’re beginning to see the end result where writers are forced to drive buses and the free content is being increasingly sourced from PR agencies, their tame blogger bunny friends or from content farms more concerned about gaming Google through SEO keywords.

Free content also reduces the barriers to entry, which are already extremely low in online given a geek with a WordPress site or YouTube account can have a site up and running in a couple of hours for less than a hundred dollars. If content is low quality, there’s little reason for readers to have any loyalty or to stick to any one site.

There is the other type of free content though, User Generated Content (UCG) consisting of the comments, forum posts and free articles submitted by readers. Many of these followers are fans and this is perhaps where salvation for the magazine industry lies.

What formats can we expect

The old magazine format isn’t going to go away, it’s just going to decline as part of the overall distribution. We’re going to see more short and long format online content complimenting the magazines along with a lot of user content in the comments and forums sections.

We’ll also see more cross platform selling like we currently see with magazines like Better Homes and Gardens though with a much bigger online and interactive component than the present TV-magazine tie ups.

Content though will be more important than format. The SEO driven plays and content farms are a transition effect and as both search engines and readers become more savvy, the influence of sites like eHow and The Huffington Post drop away.

Probably the biggest sleeper though are the electronic readers such as the iPad and Kindle, it is just possible these devices might resurrect the fortunes of the publishing industry in a similar way to the Compact Disk did for the music industry in the 1990s. Certainly Rupert Murdoch is hoping this.

How will magazines engage with consumers in 2020?

Successful magazines are going to find the niches where readers and advertisers will pay to be engaged and identified with key groups, demographics and markets. Adding value to readers is going to be the key to revenue on an Internet that is full of noise of movement but with increasingly fewer nuggets of wisdom.

It’s those nuggets of wisdom, useful analysis and unique worthy content that will be what time poor and somewhat information addled consumers are going to be looking for.

They are also going to be looking for a platform to get their views heard. So it’s going to be critical that magazines make that platform available through comments, forums, reader blogs and giving loyal and knowledgeable readers the opportunity to write for the publication.

Engagement is going to mean allowing site visitors some ownership of the content. The more you can build conversations and contributions around content, the more likely it is that readers will come back and the more likely they are to pay for add ons and read advertisements.

Where will the revenue come from?

The great challenge in the Internet era is making money online. We’ve trained the market to expect news and information to be free and that genie is now out of the bottle, and despite the paywalls we try to put up, we’re going to struggle to convince readers of our value.

As writers, journalists, editors and publishers, we’re going to have to demonstrate our worth to the people who are prepared to pay for content. Right now there aren’t many of who will pay for relevance and quality, but things may be changing as readers realise much of what they currently find on content farms is unsatisfactory.

Subscriptions and advertising are still going to be critical while events, merchandise and other revenue streams are going to be useful revenue centres but it’s hard to see how they will contribute to the bottom line any more than they currently do. It’s also important to remember that successful staging events is an expensive task involving skills many publishers simply don’t have.

Hyperlocal is a fascinating area for magazines. While much of the focus has been on adopting local search to the newspaper industry it could be that specialist magazines can deliver effective localised products through directories and mobile phone applications.

For instance let’s say we have an offal magazine for those who like to offal. A Brisbane businessman visiting Adelaide feels like a plate devilled kidneys for dinner. It could be that Offal Eaters Monthly magazine has a paid app or a subscriber site that allows him to find what he wants in a strange city.

What is the role of the publisher/editor?

More than ever the publisher and editor are going to have to know their market intimately. At a time when audiences are going to be widely fragmented it’s going to be essential to understand what the readers want.

User generated content provides an opportunity for publishers and their editors to understand the market and monitoring what is being said by the target audience is going to be a key role of the modern editor.

Moderating and controlling what’s being said on the platform will also be a key role for an editor. We all know the Internet is God’s gift to opinionated idiots and the risks of defamation, piracy and other brand damaging activity on websites are very real. The editor’s job will increasingly be to filter out the lunatics while encouraging interesting discussion.

Most people though don’t want to create content, beyond having a quick comment on a post or sometimes joining a discussion. Another important role of the editor is to balance the higher quality, paid content with user generated material to ensure the publication’s site doesn’t dissolve into just another web forum.

Publishers too are going to be challenged by this and their task is to find the deep niches where these models can succeed then convince advertisers and subscribers that their sites are worth signing up to.

Given the ease of launching new sites, the key to success is being the trusted leader in your segment. If your content can be easily replicated or bought from another source then the survival odds are firmly against you.

The next nine years

We should also keep in mind change isn’t new, broadcast television gave a death sentence to news magazines like Life or the Bulletin a generation ago, and these publications only survived because of indulgent owners. The magazine industry met those challenges, evolved and survived albeit with great change and a few casualties.

The same is happening now, the industry is evolving and adapting to the new mediums and the changed behaviour of advertisers and readers. It’s not pretty or easy but the rewards are going to be there for those who figure it out.

Had we been around when Gutenberg invented the printing press we would have wondered what will happen to all the monks who up until then had spent their lives manually copying religious texts and important documents. Change came to the monks, but not in the ways they expected.

The web only recently turned 20 and in 2020 it will still be less than thirty years since its invention. All of us will still be learning, making mistakes and discovering where the opportunities are.

It’s a time of challenge and the rewards for those who get it right are great. The key for magazines, like all of us, lies in understanding our markets and audiences.