Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Living in a changing world

    Living in a changing world

    “We’re looking at a future where every aspect of our lives could be utterly different to how it is now,” declared ABC Radio host Linda Mottram in our semi-regular technology spot on Monday.

    Linda’s concern was based around our talk on 4D printing and the future of design and she’s absolutely right – life is going to be totally different by the end of this century.

    We won’t be the first generation to experience such massive change to society and the economy, our great grandparents at the beginning of the Twentieth were born into a world without electricity, the motor car or antibiotics.

    Those who survived the two world wars and lived to a ripe old age in the 1970s saw life expectancy soar, childhood mortality rates collapse and the western economies shift from being predominately agricultural to mainly industrial and service based.

    From our position, it’s difficult to comprehend just how radically life changed in western countries during the Twentieth Century.

    When we wonder where the jobs of the 21st Century will come from, it’s worth reflecting that many careers we take for granted today didn’t exist a hundred years ago and the same will be true in a hundred years time.

    The technology we’re using may be new, but adapting to massive change isn’t.

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  • A bot named Willy and the risk of trusting data

    A bot named Willy and the risk of trusting data

    For two years we were captivated by spectacular rise of the Bitcoin virtual currency. Allegations those gains were a result of market fixing raise important questions about the integrity of our data networks.

    The Coin Desk website discusses how the Mt Gox Bitcoin exchange was being ramped by computer bot network nicknamed Willy.

    Rampant market ramping – where stock prices are pushed up to attract suckers before those in know sell at a profit – has a proud financial market history; during the 1920s US stock boom, fortunes were made by inside players before the crash and its subsequent banning in 1934.

    So it wouldn’t be a surprise that some smart players would try to ramp the Bitcoin market to make a buck and using a botnet – a network of infected computers – to run the trades is a good technological twist.

    Blindly trusting data

    The Willy botnet though is a worry for those of us watching the connected economy as it shows a number of weaknesses in a world where data is blindly trusted.

    As Quinn Norton writes on Medium, everything in the software industry is broken and blindly trusting the data pouring into servers could be a risky move.

    The internet of things is based upon the idea of sensors gathering data for smart services to make decisions – one of those decisions is buying and selling securities.

    Feeding false information

    It’s not too hard to see a scenario where a compromised service feeds false data such as steel shipments, pork belly consumption or energy usage to manipulate market prices or to damage a competitor’s business.

    Real world ramifications of bad data could see not only honest investors out of pocket but also steel workers out work, abattoirs sitting on onsold stocks of pig carcasses or blackouts as energy companies miscalculate demand.

    The latter has happened before, with Enron manipulating the Californian electricity market in the late 1990s.

    When your supply chain depends upon connected devices reporting accurate information then the integrity of data becomes critical.

    Like much in the computer world, the world of big data and the internet of things is based up trust, the Mt Gox Bitcoin manipulation reminds us that we can’t always trust the data we receive.

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  • 4D printing and the next generation of design – ABC Sydney

    4D printing and the next generation of design – ABC Sydney

    I’ll be on ABC Sydney this morning discussing 4D printing and the future of design as the Sydney Vivid Festival swings into gear.

    Some of the areas we’ll be looking at in the spot that should start around 10.20am is what exactly is 4D printing, how can materials build themselves and how designers are creating more sustainable devices like Google’s Project Ara.

    One particularly interesting Vivid session is the Electric Dreams to Reality session that will feature local entrepreneurs and makers explaining how they are using the internet of things and new design.

    We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on 1300 222 702 or post a question on ABC702 Sydney’s Facebook page.

    If you’re a social media users, you can also follow the show through twitter to @paulwallbank and @702Sydney.

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  • The race to build smartcities

    The race to build smartcities

    For the last decade city administrations have been jostling for the title of being a ‘smartcity’ – a metropolis that brings together technology, creativity and business to grow their local economy. Now the competition is getting fierce.

    While the concept has been around since British Prime Minister Harold Wilson coined the phrase the Great White Heat of Technology fifty years ago, the arrival of the Internet of Things, cheap sensors and accessible wireless broadband have made wiring up a city far more easier than a decade ago.

    So now we’re seeing a race to set up smartcities with just the last week seeing Kansas City join the Cisco Connected Communities program, a consortium of  UK technology groups announced Milton Keynes will be wired up and French machine to machine (M2M) network provider Sigfox launched its plan to add San Francisco to the cities it’s covering.

    Kansas City is a particularly interesting location being the first town to recieve Google Fiber and  its designated Innovation Precinct along the new street car route the city is building. The Connected Cities scheme will cover that corridor.

    Kansas City’s Innovation Corridor isn’t a new idea, it’s not dissimilar to the Digital Sydney project I put together a few years ago. The difference is it has both government commitment to it and a business community energised around the possiblities. Whether that’s enough to make it a success remains to be seen.

    What is clear though is that today’s technologies are changing cities, just as roads and electricity did in the Twentieth Century and steam traction, railways and town water did in the Nineteenth.

    That’s why the race to build smart cities is so important for communities that care about where they want to be in the 21st Century economy.

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  • Limits of the black box business

    Limits of the black box business

    One of the paradoxes of the modern tech industry is that while its leaders preach openness and collaboration, their own businesses are mysterious unaccountable black boxes.

    This website has often looked at how the Silicon Valley business model leaves users and partners exposed to arbitrary enforcement of vague policies and indifferent customer service.

    A good example of the black box business model is eBay’s major security breach where it appears millions of users have had their personal and banking details compromised. Instead of informing customers immediately, the company’s management hid the problem and hoped stonewalling inquiries would make the problem go away.

    Lacking accountability

    In the black box business model, not being accountable is the key – we see it with Amazon’s bullying of book publishers, Google’s high handed identity policies and Facebook’s puritan censorship.

    Those high handed attitudes to customers’ and users’ rights is born out of arrogance; all of these company’s managements, and the corporate bureaucrats who enforce the policies, believe their hundred billion dollar businesses are untouchable.

    Such arrogance might though be ill-founded as each of these businesses is less than twenty years old and, while they themselves have deeply disrupted existing industry models, there is no reason why their own market dominance and huge cash flows can’t be usurped by new technologies or challengers.

    In age where trust is the greatest currency, hiding beyond a block box of algorithms and impassive customer support may not turn out to be a successful management strategy.

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