Paul Wallbank – Communications Professional
Comms, journalism and writing
Dropbox’s warning about staff benefits is an indication of tougher times in the Bay Area
Despite having spent a hundred thousand dollars on a chrome panda for their office lobby, Dropbox are warning staff that benefits are about to tighten, Business Insider reports.
The warnings from Dropbox’s management are a clear indication that tougher times are approaching for tech companies. For those wanting to imitate the Silicon Valley greater fool model or get a slice of it, that opportunity may have passed.
As the western world’s workforce ages, we will have to rethink politics and economics
There’s one common piece of advice entrepreneurs have for others.
I’ve spent much of today, interviewing Australian tech company founders on why they moved to San Francisco for a project I’m doing.
One question I’m asking is what advice they would give others planning a similar move.
Every response so far has been, “do it now. Don’t wait.”
So what are you waiting to do?
Despite the benefits, there’s a number of risks of having your data or applications hosted on cloud services.
Despite the benefits, there’s a number of risks of having your data or applications hosted on cloud services. The three most important are costs, availability and portability.
Having spent the last three days at EMC World in Las Vegas, the cost factor in public cloud services is clear for larger enterprises and many companies – including the soon to be merged EMC and Dell – are basing their business plans on corporations and government agencies bringing at least some of their IT function back in-house.
Smaller companies too are at risk from high costs as a myriad of cloud services can quickly become a big drain on a small business’ finances.
Availability has long been a problem with cloud services as they are at the mercy of internet access and, more importantly, subject to the whims of companies’ policies. Two good examples being Amazon’s arbitrary deleting of users’ kindle licenses and Google’s Real Names debacle.
In the last two days another version of this has arisen where a musician found Apple Music had deleted his collections, while there are claims this ‘bug’ this may be due to clumsy user interfaces it shows the risks in entrusting key data to the cloud.
Which leads us to the most critical point with cloud services – portability. Many online businesses are working on the basis of locking customers into their services.
Most founders asset they want to lock customers in by offering the best services but it’s not hard to see as these companies grow, the urge to use proprietary formats or convoluted exporting tools to keep clients on the platform becomes stronger.
Cloud services aren’t going away but all of us are going to have to take precautions and understand the risk. And backup locally as often as possible.
Augmented reality products are about to become common as the Skulley motorcycle helmet shows.
As video technology accelerates, the push for augmented and virtual reality applications accelerates. Of the two different technologies, it looks like augmented reality is beginning to get traction in the marketplace.
One example of an augmented reality application is Skulley Systems, a motorbike helmet with a head up display similar to those in fighter jets.
The idea was the result of the company’s founder having a motorbike accident in Barcelona as he was reading a street sign. Dr Marcus Weller wanted to buy a bike helmet that displayed driving information and found there was nothing on the market.
Dr Weller is not alone in his idea of augmented reality devices, Sony have reportedly patented a contact lens that will record the details of your life and play it back to you. It’s just one of many different augmented reality ideas that inventors are proposing although Sony’s appears to be more of defensive patent ploy rather than a real product.
Skulley though doesn’t have the smart motorbike market to itself, last year Intel demonstrated their own motor bike helmet that integrates with the bike’s internal management systems.
The main difference between Sony’s patent and Skulley Systems is the motorcycle helmet is close to reality having been through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, then seed and venture capital investment.
What Skulley are showing is the augmented reality applications are close to fruition, partly because ideas like visor displays are clear solutions for today’s problems. We are though only at the beginning of the roll out of both artificial and virtual reality technologies.
Open communications is essential in a time of change, tech giant EMC finds
One of the big technology industry stories currently is the merger of Dell and data storage giant EMC, which at seventy billion dollars will be the biggest merger in the tech industry’s history.
With fifty thousand employees managing such a change presents a challenge for EMC’s managers and something noticeable attending the company’s EMC World conference in Las Vegas this week is how upbeat almost all the staffers about the impending merger.
In an interview with David Goulden, the CEO of EMC’s Infrastructure division, which is the company’s core business, I asked him how they were keeping staff morale up in the face of changes that will almost certainly cost jobs.
“Change creates uncertainty,” says Goulden. “One thing I’ve learned from this is you cannot over-communicate and that’s true internally and it’s true with our customers. We’ve put an incredible amount of effort in communications so our teams are engaged to go and speak to their customers.”
As change is now a constant in all industries Goulden’s lesson should be noted by all managers and business leaders – clear, honest and open communications with employees and customers is essential in keeping the trust of the markets and workforce.
The old model of restricting information and hoping no-one finds out is increasingly harder to sustain and from a business point of view unprofitable in the medium term as well.
Paul travelled to Las Vegas as a guest of EMC and Netsuite.
In the last fifteen years of blogging I’ve rarely missed a day and in over last five years I haven’t missed one regardless of whether it has been on a friend’s couch, in an airport lounge or on a train.
Tonight, in Las Vegas, it’s been tough as I’ve been slammed with many ideas and tips that have made it had to get a sensible blog post together.
Roll on Friday.
Startups may look sexy, but working for them is hard and stessful
Anna Weiner writes a great piece on the brutal realities of working for tech startups. The food might be good but they are an anxious and stressful place to work. This story is worth a read for anyone considering working for one.
Google bets on artificial intelligence and machine learning as the company deals with the shift to mobile
Breaking with the company’s tradition of the Sergi, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai writes this year’s founders letter laying out how the search engine giant is focusing of artificial intelligence and the machine learning.
Pichai’s view of the world seems to tie in very closely with founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin with him laying out a vision of making the internet and computers accessible to all.
The challenge for Google is the shift away from personal computers, something that the company is struggling with and a factor that Pichai acknowledges.
Today’s proliferation of “screens” goes well beyond phones, desktops, and tablets. Already, there are exciting developments as screens extend to your car, like Android Auto, or your wrist, like Android Wear. Virtual reality is also showing incredible promise—Google Cardboard has introduced more than 5 million people to the incredible, immersive and educational possibilities of VR.
Whether Google can execute on that vision and manages to diversify its revenues away from depending almost exclusively upon web advertising will be what defines Pichai’s time as the company’s CEO. He has a challenging task ahead.
Modern politics is being disrupted by change as greatly as any business
One of the key features of modern western nations is how stable politics is with very few major parties being less than fifty years old and many boasting a history lasting back a century or more.
Now in the US and Australia we’re seeing the slow motion implosion of the established parties of the reactionary side of politics – it would be misleading to describe the schoolboy ideologies of most American Republicans or Australian Liberals as being ‘right wing’.
Tony Wright in the London School of Economics blog asks What Comes After the Political Party?
Wright’s view is political parties are doomed to extinction as their memberships dwindle and this is an opinion shared by many watching the declining participation in formal politics over the last fifty years.
One result of that declining participation has been the steady increase in power of the machine apparatchiks who’ve increasingly replaced boots on the ground with corporate funding.
The consequence of that increase in power has been a steady disconnect between the concerns of the electorate and the priorities of the party leadership.
In the US that disconnect resulted in the Republicans blindsided by the rise of Donald Trump and the Australian Liberal Prime Minister increasingly looking like Grandpa Simpson as his party shuffles towards what increasingly looks to be a ballot box disaster.
Both parties are likely to rip themselves apart as the contradictions of the modern reactionary movement – dismantling public services while increasing government powers – come home to roost with the ideologues and pragmatists within the organisation fighting bitterly.
The truth is political parties are no more permanent than businesses, or indeed nations, and in a time of economic change it isn’t surprising old parties die and new ones are formed.
While political parties won’t cease to exist, the new political parties that will rise from the wreckage of today’s will be different in both their philosophies, organisation and membership.
Parties that were formed in the horse and carriage days or the early era of newspapers and radios are always going to find the internet era to be a challenge, that they are being run by men whose political theories haven’t moved for fifty years only guarantees their demise.
In many ways, what’s changing politics is exactly what’s changing business. However the politicians and their supporter seems far more oblivious to change than their commercial counterparts.
The rise and fall of Tivo is a good example of the transition effect during technological change
A good example of the technology transition effect is the Personal Video Recorder (PVR) where a decade ago relatively cheap hard disk drives started to displace videotape, CD and DVD players.
During that period Tivo was the giant of the PVR industry but it wasn’t to last as the plummeting price of hardware made the devices a commodity while the rise of streaming media changes the industry’s dynamics.
Now Tivo is no more as it is bought out by entertainment company Rovi, a victim of the transition effect.
Facebook’s revenues show how the service is leading the way in making money from the mobile internet.
It seems Facebook has found its river of gold with the company’s quarterly stock market statement reporting a 57% increase in revenues and a stunning 195% in net profits.
Particularly impressive was mobile sales made over 8o% of the company’s advertising revenue, up from just short of three quarters in the previous years.
For other online services, particularly Google, Facebook’s success on mobile must be galling as they struggle with the shift to smartphones.
How long that growth can continue remains to be seen. For the moment though, Facebook is showing how to make money on the mobile web.
