Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Cranking up the phone wars

    Cranking up the phone wars

    According to All Things D, Apple will be announcing their next iPhone on September 10.

    With Samsung and Android phones steadily chipping away at Apple’s market share, it’s an opportunity for the company to recapture some of the brand’s allure after the passing of Steve Jobs.

    The market will be expecting a stunning announcement. Should the company disappoint, the pundits will be calling the end of Apple’s dominance and we can expect the firm’s share price can also expect to get further punished with it already down 35% from the $700 peak of a year ago.

    What Apple’s announcement will do is trigger another round of the phone wars as we approach the Christmas buying season. It might be a good time to buy a phone.

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  • Can Russia build a Silicon Valley?

    Can Russia build a Silicon Valley?

    Like many other countries, Russia is trying to build its own equivalent of Silicon Valley at Skolkovo on Moscow’s outskirts as Tech Crunch reports.

    Across the world governments are trying to find a way to replicate Silicon Valley – from London’s Tech City to Australia’s Digital Sydney, the hope is they can create the same environment that built California’s success.

    In some respects, Russia should be well placed to create their own Silicon Valley having had the same massive Cold War technology investments as the United Stated. The old Soviet system also left a deep scientific and mathematics education legacy.

    As the Tech Crunch article points out though, the Russian financial and legal systems are working against the nation with most local startups looking at incorporating in offshore havens like Luxembourg and Cyprus rather than taking their chances with the local tax laws and courts.

    If finance was the sole criteria for succeeding then Skolkovo would be almost guaranteed success with twenty billion US Dollars of private and government fundiing behind the project.

    Funding alone though isn’t enough, and most industrial hubs are the result of happy accidents of transport, natural resources and skills being found in one region.

    It might take more than a load of cash for Russia to build their own Silicon Valley, but with a shrinking and aging population the nation needs to find a way to diversify away from simply being an energy exporter.

    Image courtesy of Skolkovo Foundation through Flickr

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  • Hotels and 3D printing

    Hotels and 3D printing

    One of ADMA Forum’s second day speakers, Phil McAveety, EVP of Starwood Hotels, had a look at the hotel of the near future.

    In Phil’s view, the key to success in the hotel business lies in providing in a unique guest experience as the world’s middle classes explode.

    The role of the 3D printers in the hotel experience where guests can order a pair of sneakers or swimming goggles to be printed up when they’ve forgotten their own is one of Phil’s fascinating views on how technology will change the hospitality industry.

    Its a shame that most hotels have old style door keys, All Things D looks at a start up called KeyMe that stores details about door keys on the cloud which customers can download 3D printing files.

    These two examples illustrate just how a technology like 3D printing will change industries.

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  • Fighting the content wars

    Fighting the content wars

    I’m moderating keynote Q and A’s at the ADMA Global Forum today. One clear message from the international speakers’ presentations is how original, unique content is one the key planks of a modern media strategy.

    “Content will be king” says McKinsey’s Joshua Goff, a thought echoed by Weiden and Kennedy’s Husani Oakley.

    During one of the breakout sessions, the AFL’s Sam Walch explained the sporting code’s strategy of using content to retain supporters and expand the sport.

    The fascinating thing about this content strategy is how organisations are having to deal with gathering unique, compelling material.

    For many businesses, getting customers to contribute material makes sense. Josh Goff showed how some businesses, even in the B2B space, were using user generated content to get a buzz happening around their sites.

    Others are commissioning their own work with the AFL employing nearly fifty journalists to provide content.

    What’s particularly interesting about the AFL is how this threatens broadcasters and the print media business models which increasingly rely on ‘events’ like sports. This is something I might explore on the blog over the next few days.

    In the afternoon ADMA session Michael Bayle, formerly of ESPN, described how much of that content will be accessed on mobile devices. Interestingly ESPN has the greater share of mobile visitors for US Sunday football despite not owning the broadcast rights. This is both an opportunity and challenge for rights holders, sporting organisations and media disruptors.

    The key take away from this morning’s ADMA sessions though is that we are going to be drowning in content marketing over the next couple of years. The challenge for those businesses engaging in those wars is to make themselves heard over the noise.

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  • Whose priorities do IT departments really care about?

    Whose priorities do IT departments really care about?

    Earlier this week mobile security company Imation showed off their latest range of Ironkey encrypted USB sticks and portable hard drives.

    Accompanying the launch was a presentation from Stollznow Research on how Australian companies are managing data with a comparison against similar surveys carried out in the UK, US, Canada and Germany.

    Of the 207 senior decision makers in Australian medium to large businesses surveyed, there were some interesting results on the attitudes of the nation’s IT departments and CIOs.

    In the field of confidence about the security of their networks, Australian IT managers came out a lot more paranoid than their foreign counterparts with only 38% of Aussies confident their office data is protected from loss or theft against 73% overseas.

    That result is encouraging as the internet and the world of IT security has a habit of severely punishing those with a false sense of security.

    What was particularly notable though with the Imation research was what IT managers considered to be the consequences of a security breach.

    consequences-of-data-breach

    Around the world, IT managers see the headache of cleaning up the mess and bad media coverage as being the biggest consequences of a data breach. Customers come fourth in priority and even then the only concern is losing clients rather than the effects it could have on those people’s lives.

    One of the tragedies of the continued Sony data breaches in 2011 was the leaking of credit card details. Many of those customers on pre-paid cards were young or low-paid workers who quite possibly lost all the money in their compromised accounts – debit cards don’t have the same protections against fraud as credit cards.

    Even more terrible are the effects on those who become victims of identity fraud as consequence of a data breach. Letting that sort of information out is a fundamental betrayal of trust by organisations with sloppy security.

    Interestingly over a third of respondents feared losing their jobs as a result of data being breached, in a perfect world it would be higher although we don’t live in a period where those accountable take responsibility for their actions.

    What’s more likely in many smaller businesses is that a data breach could be the entire organisation to fold, something that should worry anyone running a startup or small business.

    It may be true that many CIOs and IT managers aren’t too worried about the business effects of a data breach or system outage which shows that security – both physical and digital – are the job of everyone in an organisation, not just one department or executive.

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