Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Airtasker and the future of work

    Airtasker and the future of work

    Tim Fung, the co-founder of Airtasker, has been previously been interviewed on this blog about micro tasking service’s mission to change the workplace.

    With the news that that Airtasker had gone into a partnership with employment site CareerOne it seemed Tim might be a good guest to kick off the first video for the Decoding the New Economy YouTube channel.

    During the interview Tim describes the motivations behind starting Airtasker, how he sees the relationship with CareerOne evolving and the benefits of operating out of a co-working space.

    The Tank Stream Labs working space is an interesting setup – based at the bottom of Pitt Street in the heart of Sydney’s financial centre, it’s not in the more edgy areas on the city fringes where the rest of the town’s workspace are located.

    Being away from the hipsters and grunge doesn’t seem to have hurt Tank Stream Labs as the space has now expanded to a second floor of the ten storey office block. The roll call of tenants is quite impressive too.

    For Tim being in the workspace has been a great benefit for Airtasker.

    There’s always the thing about sharing knowledge and more obviously there’s a lot of great contacts that everyone shares.

    Airtasker’s relationship with employment site CareerOne is an interesting development that sees the joint venture between News Limited and Monster move into the crowdsourcing field. It also gives job hunters an opportunity to find short term work while looking for a more permanent role.

    People are looking for more hours of work but equally businesses were coming to CareerOne and saying ‘hey, all you do is full time work’ and that’s only one piece of the employment puzzle.’

    For CareerOne it really allows them to build up the full spectrum – all the way from tasks to part time to full time and be a one stop shop for employment.

    How that works for CareerOne remains to be seen, but for Airtasker and Tim it validates their business model along with exposing their service to a wider audience.

    With the workforce evolving and the trend to informal, casualised employment; services like Airtasker and the US Task Rabbit will take a more prominent role in workers’ careers. While it’s debatable on how desirable or stable such employment is, it’s the reality of a process that started in the 1970s.

    Tim takes a more sanguine view of the challenges facing workers in an informal employment market.

    What I’m sharing on Airtasker is my free time. Currently we have this pool of literally tens of thousands of hours of people sitting around saying ‘I’d love to have a job’ and that’s an underutilised resource.

    Airtasker in many ways is one of the new breed of middlemen creating markets where one didn’t exist before. The service is an example of how new ways to communicate create opportunities to connect buyers and sellers.

    Services like Airtasker are part of the future that’s very different to the world we or our parents grew up. It’s going to be interesting to see how society and governments evolve around the realities of today’s workplace.

    Similar posts:

  • Can governments save declining cities?

    Can governments save declining cities?

    Following yesterday’s post on comparing the relative problems of Detroit and the Chinese ghost city of Ordos, The Fiscal Times has a somewhat wistful description of Motor City’s decline by one of the city’s sons, Eric Pianin.

    Pianin’s story charts the various attempts to revitalise the city following the disastrous 1967 riots that triggered the middle class and white flight from downtown.

    As last week’s events show none of these efforts worked, which begs the question of what governments can do to save cities and regions facing structural decline.

    Every city has an economic reason for existing — it could be transport links, natural resources or an industrial cluster. When that reason fades the population moves on.

    For Detroit, the high point was the late 1960s as the US motor industry reached its zenith. Through the 1970s the sector languished and was then displaced by smarter, better Japanese competitors.

    In the face of this there was little local, state or Federal governments could do. Detroit’s importance, wealth and population were destined to decline as industry left regardless of how much money was spent on grand schemes to revitalise the town.

    Perhaps sometimes we just have to accept there are limits to government power and the predicaments of cities like Detroit are the natural course of history.

    Over time, it may be Detroit manages to reinvent itself however the city will almost be very different, and smaller, city that it was in its heyday.

    View of Detroit Central Terminal Station by Jason Mrachina through Flickr.

    Similar posts:

  • Ordos and Detroit – A tale of two cities and two economies

    Ordos and Detroit – A tale of two cities and two economies

    This week bought news that that two cities, one in China and one in the US, had fallen into deep financial trouble.

    While the bankruptcy of Detroit is very different to the developers of the Ordos new city failing, there is a strange symmetry between the two stories.

    Detroit is the biggest US city ever to enter bankruptcy with an estimated $20 billion in debts, dwarfing the previous record of Alabama’s Jefferson Country’s $4 billion default in 2011.

    The fall of Detroit wasn’t unexpected as the New York Times tells.

    Detroit expanded at a stunning rate in the first half of the 20th century with the arrival of the automobile industry, and then shrank away in recent decades at a similarly remarkable pace. A city of 1.8 million in 1950, it is now home to 700,000 people, as well as to tens of thousands of abandoned buildings, vacant lots and unlit streets.

    Like most industrial hubs, Detroit grew became the centre of the US motor industry due to geographic and commercial advantages along with a few historical accidents but as the economy changed, the city’s importance faded.

    It’s sad for the people of Detroit but it isn’t the first industrial hub to fade away; Ironbridge, once the cradle of the English industrial revolution, is today an open air museum and a charming rural spot.

    Ordos on the other hand is an example of 21st Century government planning with the Inner Mongolian provincial leaders building the city of the basis of build it and they will come.

    They haven’t.

    The collapse of Ordos is going to be an interesting test of the Chinese economic model. Many of the country’s local and provincial governments – like Australia’s – have become dependent on the revenues from property sales. Now the market is  drying up, local councils are having trouble paying their bills as Bloomberg reports.

    Some Ordos district governments had to borrow money from companies to pay municipal employees’ salaries, Economy & Nation Weekly, published by the official Xinhua News Agency, said in a July 5 report on its website.

    So while Detroit illustrates the stresses in the US system, so too does Ordos tell us about the problems facing Chinese governments.

    The tale of these two cities also shows the difference between the US’ industrialisation of the early Twentieth Century and today’s economic development in the PRC and reminds why the results of ‘Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics’ may be very different to the modern American consumerist economy.

    For Detroit, at least there’s good news as one US city manages to works its way out of bankruptcy. For the developers of Ordos though, things must be looking very grim.

    Ordos image courtesy of Bert van Dijk through Flickr.

    Similar posts:

  • Google and Microsoft show how online business is changing

    Google and Microsoft show how online business is changing

    Both Microsoft and Google yesterday reported their second quarter earnings for 2013 and both missed the targets expected analysts. Does this really mean anything?

    Microsoft’s earnings were particularly notable as they included a $900 million dollar write off on Surface RT inventories, this almost certainly means a key part of the company’s tablet strategy has failed.

    What’s striking in Microsoft’s earnings report is the terrible performance of the Windows Division which saw sales increase 10% year-on-year to 4.4 billion dollars, but earnings collapse by over 50%. Excluding the Surface RT write off, the division would still have seen a ten percent fall.

    The company’s statement emphasised how the division is struggling with increasing costs.

    Windows Division operating income decreased $1.3 billion, primarily due to higher cost of revenue and sales and marketing expenses, offset in part by revenue growth. Cost of revenue increased $1.2 billion primarily reflecting product costs associated with Surface and Windows 8, including the charge for Surface RT inventory adjustments of approximately $900 million. Sales and marketing expenses increased $344 million, reflecting advertising costs associated with Windows 8 and Surface.

    At Google, the company’s 2nd Quarter report show trend is still upwards but the core business of online advertising is showing some cracks as the total number of paid clicks grows, but the value of each falls. At the same time traffic aquisition costs are rising at the same rate as revenues.

    This could indicate that advertisers’ appetite for online links is fading. For smaller businesses, the cost of adwords campaigns has been escalating to the point where the old days of newspaper classifieds and Yellow Pages listings start to look cheap.

    Couple the cost of advertising with the inevitable ‘ad blindness’ that web surfers have developed and a worrying trend for Google starts to appear. Overall Google’s net profit margin was 26%, down from 31% a year earlier.

    While both companies remain insanely profitable – Google earned $14 billion this quarter and Microsoft $6 billion – both businesses are showing stresses as their markets evolve. It proves no business can afford to be complacent in these times.

    Similar posts:

  • Why Australia is losing the digital race

    Why Australia is losing the digital race

    This story originally appeared in Business Spectator on 17 June 2013
    At the beginning of this century, Melbourne hosted a meeting of the World Economic Forum. Among the visiting luminaries was Microsoft founder Bill Gates who laid out his vision for governments in the digital economy.

    “The Government itself needs to become a model user of information technology,” Gates said at the time.

    “Literally seeing government work with its citizens, with its businesses will change how we do our taxes, licences, registrations, all these things, on a basis where you don’t have to know the organisation of government and its various departments, you don’t have to stand in line, you don’t have to work with paperwork.”

    Last month in Brisbane, the Federal government re-released their Digital Economy Strategy with the ambitious goal to make Australia a “leading digital economy by 2020”. A key part of the strategy is for the government to allow citizens to “fully complete priority services online”.

    Thirteen years after Bill Gates articulated the need for governments to move services online – and he was by no means the first person to do so – the Federal government has posted a target to partly achieve this by the end of the decade.

    It’s hard to see how achieving such a belated objective will put Australia in a position of leadership in a rapidly changing world, although this is a direct consequence of deliberate decisions made by the nation’s leaders, and society, over the last thirty years.

    Thirty years ago the debate on Australia’s position in the global economy resulted in the Hawke government’s Clever Country policies. In many ways, today’s Digital Economy Strategy is an echo of the Labor’s halcyon days under Paul Keating.

    Keeping things in perspective

    In Sydney on the day before re-releasing the strategy, Minister Conroy channelled Paul Keating in talking about the J-Curve of technology adoption at a lunchtime panel with the Australia Israeli Chamber of Commerce.

    Preceding Senator Conroy’s panel was Anna-Maria Arabia, general manager of the Questacon National Science and Technology Centre in Canberra, who described her trip to Israel to look at how the nation that derives 40 per cent of its export incomes from high tech industries is nurturing its technology sector.

    Arabia was accompanying Federal minister Bill Shorten and she described a meeting with the chief scientist of the Israeli Ministry of the Economy, Avi Hasson, where Shorten asked him about the success rate of Israeli government research and development projects.

    Hasson’s reply was very different to the risk averse response often heard from Australian bureaucrats, ministers and business leaders.

    “Had I been told that we enjoyed an 80 per cent success rate I would have concluded the government was investing in the wrong projects,” Hasson is quoted as saying. “Such a success rate would have meant we were investing in low risk projects and, quite frankly, the private sector could have taken care of that.”

    The risk-reward equation

    In Australia, there is no such vision or appetite for risk. At best the Federal government has announced another review of tax rules and industry support programs while the opposition is vague on its plans to support innovation and R&D should it occupy the Treasury benches later in the year.

    While it’s easy – and fair – to criticise both sides of politics, the business sector is equally negligent with its reluctance to invest in research and development while claiming R&D tax credits for projects that are closer to capital improvements rather than real innovation.

    Two weeks ago the ABC Business Insiders program had featured an interview between Business Spectator’s Alan Kohler, Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris and Australian Business Council chief Tony Shepherd where they discussed Australia’s role in the modern global economy.

    Australian born Liveris, who is also chairman of the US Business Council and sits on the Obama’s board of innovation, said Australia needs a vision building on the country’s strengths.

    At present he warns the country is in a state of rigor mortis having “lost the will to innovate.”

    Thinking beyond mining

    When Gates visited Australia in 2000, he warned that the nation needed to think beyond mining and agriculture and secure a place in the high tech economy.

    That warning was disregarded and Australia as a nation made the decision to focus on domestic consumption driven by rising property prices and mining exports.

    Reserve Bank of Australia governor Glenn Stevens summed up that national decision in a speech made to the Australian Industry Group in 2010 where he dismissed Bill Gates’ warning about ignoring high tech industries at the beginning at the decade.

    “Ten years on, though, it does not seem to have been to Australia’s disadvantage not to have built a massive IT production sector,” Stevens sneered. “On the contrary, the terms of trade are at a 60-year high, the currency just about equals its American counterpart in value and we face an investment build-up in the resources sector that is already larger than that seen in the late 1960s and that will very likely get larger yet.”

    Stevens’ speech illustrates the Australia we have today – high-tech industries along with the research, development and innovation are something other countries do.

    The vision for Australia being a global leader in the digital economy by 2020 is a laudable and equal to any of the noble objectives proposed in the Gonski education review or the Asian Century report.

    Unfortunately to achieve those aims, and to overcome the deliberate national decisions we’ve made over the last thirty years, it’s going to take more than the modest and belated objectives of last week’s re-released Digital Economy Strategy.

    Similar posts: