Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Trade offs in the smart city

Smart cities are a trade off between privacy and utility, what is the balance residents are prepared to accept?

What are the trade offs in the connected city? Last week we had an opportunity to talk with Esmeralda Swartz, Ericsson’s Vice President of Marketing Enterprise and Cloud last week about what policy makers and citizens need to consider.

One of the important issues is security in both the data being collected, “what are the benefits and what is not acceptable?” Esmeralda asks.

In all the conversations this site has had with smart city advocates the topic of open data has been essential, but this raises the issue of security. Something lacking in the Internet of Things.

“Security has to be built into every level,” says Esmeralda who flags that the IoT adds a whole range of new risks.

Along with security, a critical part of a successful connected city is having open data, Esmeralda believes.

“if you start looking at the all the layers that need to be connected then they have to be open,” she says.

Open data is a critical point for smart cities and connected communities, if information isn’t open then it’s hard for an ecosystem to develop or for residents to have confidence their data is being used for their benefit.

For companies like Ericsson, who are trying to establish themselves outside of the traditional telco model, gaining the confidence of communities and their leaders is essential to their smart city strategies.

Much of the smart city movement is based upon solutions looking for problems – a common trait of the IT industry – for vendors like Ericsson to succeed in selling their products it’s essential to prove value to their customers and gain the confidence of communities as they trade off utility for privacy.

Guessing ethnic affinity

Big data can create big risks, particularly when a service like Facebook starts racially profiling

What’s your ethnic affinity? Apparently Facebook thinks its algorithm can guess your race based upon the nature of your posts.

This application is an interesting, and dangerous, development although it shouldn’t be expected that it’s any more accurate than the plethora of ‘guess your age/nationality/star sign’ sites that trawl through Facebook pages.

Guessing your race is something clumsy and obvious but its clear that services like Google, LinkedIn and Facebook have a mass of data on each of their millions of users that enables them to crunch some big numbers and come up with all manner of conclusions.

Some of these will be useful to governments, marketers and businesses and in some cases it may lead to unforeseen consequences.

The truth may lie in the data but if we don’t understand the questions we’re asking, we risk creating a whole new range of problems.

What happens when machines start to learn

Deep reinforcement learning promises to change the way robots are taught to do tasks

Computer programming is one of the jobs of the future. Right?

Maybe not, as Japanese industrial robot maker Fanuc demonstrates with their latest robot that learns on the job.

The MIT Technology Review describes how the robot analyses a task and fine tunes its own operations to do the task properly.

Fanuc’s robot uses a technique known as deep reinforcement learning to train itself, over time, how to learn a new task. It tries picking up objects while capturing video footage of the process. Each time it succeeds or fails, it remembers how the object looked, knowledge that is used to refine a deep learning model, or a large neural network, that controls its action.

While machines running on deep reinforcement learning won’t completely make programmers totally redundant, it shows basic operations even in those fields are going to be increasingly automated. Just knowing a programming language is not necessarily a passport to future prosperity.

Another aspect flagged in the MIT article is how robots can learn in parallel, so groups can work together to understand and optimise tasks.

While Fanuc and the MIT article are discussing small groups of similar computers working together it’s not hard to see this working on a global scale. What happens when your home vacuum cleaner starts talking to a US Air Force autonomous drone remains to be seen.

Warning against the connected car

The FBI and US Department of Transport warn of risks in the connected car.

A year after hackers demonstrated the risks of connected cars, the FBI and the US Department of Transportation have warned consumers of the risks in internet connected vehicles.

This warning comes as automobile manufacturers are pushing their new breed of motor cars as being software platforms rather than vehicles and calls into question how well security and safety are being designed into their products.

One of the recurrent features of these sort of warnings is how regulators, manufacturers and software designers try to push the risks back onto consumers rather than the companies designing these systems.

Officials said that while not all car hacking incidents result in safety risks, consumers should take the appropriate steps to minimize their own risks.

It’s hard to see what consumers can really do, as most of these systems are ‘black boxes’ protected by strict terms preventing users from seeing, let alone understanding, the software running the vehicles. Customers have to trust the manufacturers to do the right thing.

For the Internet of Things, and connected cars, to be successful they have to deliver value to consumers and have the confidence of the market. Right now many of these features seem to do neither.

Google focuses on the short term

Google’s reported divestment of Boston Robotics could mark a fundamental change in the business’ culture.

Just over two years ago Google acquired high profile robot developer Boston Robotics, at the time it appeared a major step both the search engine giant and the industry.

Today, Bloomberg reports Google are looking at divesting Boston Robotics as the company is not proving to be fit into the company’s other divisions while management sees better revenue prospects in other ventures.

If the latter is true then the sale marks a shift in Google’s attitude towards long term investments. That may mark a turning point in the company’s development.

Rethinking the media business model

Fading newspapers around the world are showing how poorly planned cuts condemn a struggling business to failure

Last week Australia’s Fairfax Media announced the company will cut another 120 editorial jobs at the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age. What strategies beyond cuts can save old media companies as traditional advertising revenues dry up?

For decades, the print and broadcast media was incredibly profitable as they provided an advertising platform for businesses and individuals. While television revenues have held up, the rest of the media industry has seen their income collapse.

In the early days of the web the hope was display advertising would provide revenues for online publishers, however it turns out readers are blind to the ads and, should the messages become too intrusive or resource heavy, people will install ad-blockers.

One revenue channel for publishers is ‘content marketing’ or ‘branded content’ where advertisers sponsor specific stories. At the Sydney Ad:Tech conference earlier this week Asia-Pacific Regional Advertising Director for the New York Times, Julia Whiting, described what the iconic masthead finds works in this medium.

Whiting says there are five key factors in making branded content work for advertisers.

Give something of value. Be entertaining, informative, educative or provide some utility.
Tell an authentic story. Make the link between the brand and story as subtle as possible.
Produce high quality content. Consider how a newsroom cover the story and what would hook the reader.
Choose the right environment. Advertisers have to align with publishers that have the right brand values and audience.
Targeted campaigns. Use data to define and find target audiences then use that information to deliver relevant content.

The question with the branded content is how explicit the advertiser’s message or sponsorship can be before readers start losing trust.

Becoming creepy

Another aspect is creepiness. One of the campaigns Whiting showcased was The Creekmores, the story of a young family who travelled the world as the mother was dying of breast cancer that was sponsored by Holiday Inn.

On a personal level, this writer is uncomfortable with such a personal story being associated with a multinational brand and wonders if the family would have been happy for their tale to be part of a branded content campaign for a hotel chain.

For branded content to really work, that ‘alignment’ between the publisher, audience and advertiser is essential and in turn ultimately relies upon the credibility of the outlet.

In the case of the New York Times, that credibility rests upon good writing and strong editorial values, although the paper hasn’t been immune from scandal itself.

Good, well edited writing may turn out to be the greatest asset for today’s media outlets as smaller publications such as The Economist, Punch and The Spectator see readership and revenues increase.

The Guardian, ironically an outlet that itself is cutting 250 staff, reports these publications are succeeding due to well written articles. “If you produce journalism that is not just better but significantly better than what’s free on the web, people will pay for it,” says Spectator editor Fraser Nelson.

Which brings us back to Australia’s Fairfax where a succession of clueless managements have eroded editorial standards. Three years ago former editor Eric Beecher wrote a scathing account of his time at the company where an incompetent and unqualified board flailed in the face of market changes it could barely comprehend.

One of the villains of that tale, board chairman Roger Corbett, was a successful Chief Executive of the Woolworths supermarket chain. That he was so obsessed with a failed business model and protecting margins by slashing costs indicates much about the nature of Australia’s insular corporate world.

A consequence of Fairfax’s cost cutting obsession has been foreign outlets have stepped into the market with The Guardian, Daily Mail, Buzz Feed and a range of other sites setting up in the country – something that further squeezes the incumbent’s market position.

In opening her Ad:Tech presentation, the NY Times’ Julia Whiting noted Australia was the outlet’s fifth largest global market, something undoubtedly driven by the decline in the SMH’s and Age’s output.

The travails of Fairfax and the successes of smaller outlets show what might be an encouraging trend in the media – that a quality product actually attracts an audience and advertisers.

If that’s true, the managements that mindlessly cut costs that hurt the quality of their core product may be accelerating the demise of their businesses.

Cracking open the black box

Cisco looks to life in the API economy

One of the things confronting technology vendors in the past five years has been the commoditization of hardware and the opening up of standards. As software has eaten the computer hardware industry, those companies are being forced to make their systems more open.

In that world of open systems, it’s the ecosystem of developers and products around platforms that drives success. The best example being the iPhone where the range of third party apps available made Apple’s product the most compelling on the market.

At Cisco Live in Melbourne last week Susie Wee, the company’s Vice President in charge of the company’s DevNet developer relations program, described how the networking company is opening their systems with Application Program Interfaces (APIs) to build an ecosystem.

“What we want to do is help people with this transition,” says Susie. “With the network, with the infrastructure and with the cloud we want people to get more out of it.”

Cisco, like most hardware companies, are finding the shift to opening their data streams to be wrenching. The business model of a decade ago involved mysterious black boxes running on proprietary software with the data dished out sparingly.

While the the ‘black boxes’ still remain, becoming a ‘platform’ and making data available to all comers is very much a cultural shift for once dominant hardware companies like Cisco.

The question for IT hardware companies is how long they can defend their proprietary software systems – the hardware side is already slowly declining as software defined equipment takes over – while establishing dominance with their software and data feeds.

Users too need to be treading carefully as those APIs and the data being fed through them is subject to the business imperatives of the

Cisco hopes they can achieve this through their current market power and business networks, it is a hard ask for them though. For the entire tech industry, the shift to an API driven marketplace is going to be testing.

Paul travelled to Cisco Live in Melbourne as a guest of Cisco

Towards the post journalist media world

How will public relations people will deal with the post-journalist media landscape?

For years I resisted attending the Tech Leaders conference, formerly Kickstart, as I felt a bit of an imposter being invited to attend as a journalist. As a consequence I missed the peak days of the event.

In the ‘good old days’ dozens of journalists, most in the employ of profitable media companies, would fly to a Queensland resort to wine, dine and debauch themselves as PR agencies who were picking up the tab would try to introduce their clients and pitch to the group of hungover scribes.

Funding these events was relatively straightforward, public relations agencies and their clients were happy to pay substantial sums for access to journalists. In the golden days of technology journalism, large IT supplements were full of lucrative advertising for jobs and products.

That river of advertising gold has long dried up and in the technology industry that shift has been exacerbated by the collapse in IT industry margins which has further hurt advertising budgets.

As the industry has faded so too have the numbers of media professionals, many journalists have either moved into PR roles themselves or are now desperate freelancers.

The industry shift to freelancers has been problematic for the organisers as the remaining staff journalists are chronically time poor so can’t lightly take a day away from the desk and the independent reporters don’t offer direct access into trade journals and general news outlets.

Events like Tech Leaders are giving the PR industry a glimpse of the journalist free media landscape of the near future where the traditional pitching to outlets in the hope of being published is effectively obsolete. Looking at the numbers at Tech Leaders, it’s clear that world is not far off.

The question everyone in the industry has to ask is ‘how do people perceive I add value?’ For many, including myself, the answer is ‘we don’t’.

In an age where there is an almost unlimited supply of information and commentary, journalists and PR people have to find a new way to convince the market they add value.

Australia’s contempt for technology

The contempt shown towards the technology sector by Australian governments betrays a deeper problem in the Australian mindset

“The minister sends his regrets….”

Yesterday I commented how the Australian Tech Leaders event would be a good measure of the state of the country’s technology industry. Instead it illustrated the sheer contempt the nation’s political leaders hold the industry.

One of the government’s key platforms in the upcoming election is its Innovation Statement and the accompanying Ideas Boom so it wouldn’t have been expected that a minister or at least an informed backbencher would address a room full of technology journalists.

Instead the government drafted one of their local MPs, Fiona Scott, to make the short drive up the hill from her electorate to haltingly deliver a poorly written speech that focused on her local electorate issues.

To be fair to Ms Scott, the outer Sydney suburban seat she represents is a bellweather electorate which tends to swing between parties as government changes. It also happens to have a workforce that’s beginning to feel the effects of a shifting economy. Her focus on local issues is understandable.

However as a member of a government aspiring to drive a technology driven jobs boom and the representative of an electorate whose workforce is in transition, it is remarkable that Ms Scott is so poorly briefed on tech issues.

What’s even more remarkable is the contempt shown by the government towards the country’s technology sector, a long standing problem in Australian society but particularly stark with the current administration given the Prime Minister’s fine words on the topic.

One of the saddest things about Australia’s squandered boom is how the nation turned inwards at the beginning of the Twenty-First century and decided to ignore the global technological shifts.

The contempt shown by the current government towards the technology sector shows a much deeper problem in the Australian mindset, if the country is to rely on more than its luck in the current century then it’s essential to shake off that way of thinking.

The state of Australian technology – and journalism

Australia’s Tech Leaders conference brings together three industries that are being greatly disrupted.

Today I’m heading to the Blue Mountains just outside Sydney for the annual Tech Leaders conference.

With the conference bringing together tech industry vendors, public relations representatives and journalists, it’s an interesting snapshot of an industry in transition.

Technology vendors are dealing with the shift to cloud computing which destroys what were very comfortable and profitable business models.

Needless to say the journalists are the most disrupted group of all with most of the dwindling number now being freelancers and the few remaining staff reporters working under tough deadlines with few resources.

This leaves the Public Relations folk in the middle, as the traditional media channels decline they are having to work harder in getting their clients’ stories into the public domain. At the same time, the compressed margins for cloud affected vendors are cutting into PR budgets.

So Tech Leaders is interesting to see how three very different groups are dealing with their changing industries. I might also get to hear about some new technologies as well.

Amazon Web Services and the new rules of business

Amazon Web Service CTO Werner Vogels lists the lessons from a decade of AWS operations. These could be the new rules of business.

The one company that has driven both the adoption of cloud computing and the current tech startup mania is Amazon Web Services.

Later this week AWS celebrates its tenth birthday and Werner Vogels, the company’s Chief Technical Officer, has listed the ten most important things he’s learned over the last decade.

The article is a useful roadmap for almost any business, not just a tech organisation, particularly in the importance of building systems that can evolve and understanding that things will inevitably break.

Importantly Vogels flags that encryption and security have to be built into technology, today they are key parts of a product and no longer features to be added later.

Most contentious though is Vogels’ view that “APIs are forever”, that breaking a data connection causes so much trouble for customers that it’s best to leave them alone.

Few companies are going to take that advice, particularly in a world where changing business needs mean APIs have to evolve.

There’s also the real risk for businesses that their vendors will depreciate or abandon APIs leaving key operational functions stranded, this could cause major problems for organisations in a world that’s increasingly automated.

Vogel’s commitment to maintaining APIs may well prove to be a competitive advantage for Amazon Web Services in their competition with Microsoft Azure, Google and an army of smaller vendors.

Werner Vogel’s lessons are worth a read by all c-level executives as well as startup founders looking to build a long term venture, in many ways they could define the new rules of business.

Home delivery services fail to pass the Uber test

It appears the attempt to corner the home delivery market has failed

One of the group of businesses most affected by the downturn in Silicon Valley investments are the home delivery services.

For the last three years services such as Instacart and Doordash have attracted billions of investor dollars on the promise of become the “Ubers of home delivery.”

Like all Silicon Valley VC plays, the investors in these delivery services were prepared to throw vast amounts of cash at the businesses in the hope they could achieve a monopoly position.

“All these companies are massively subsidized to support growth and restrain growth of competitors.” Quartz magazine quotes Tim Young of San Francisco’s Eniac Ventures, “there’s a point at which the music stops, and investors are no longer willing to see their money go to those subsidies.”

That point seems to have been reached as it becomes apparent none of these businesses will dominate the industry which appears not to be so big after all.

History shows what happens when the money runs out as not being pretty. Already with cash problems looming, the companies are looking at ways to slow their cash burn through reducing contractor rates and slashing overheads.

Instacart is unlikely to survive and if the company does it will be as far smaller business than its investors hoped. Those are the risks when staking money in a tech mania.