Paul Wallbank is a speaker and writer charting how technology is changing society and business. Paul has four regular technology advice radio programs on ABC, a weekly column on the smartcompany.com.au website and has published seven books.
The corporate world is taking security seriously says Cisco’s Chief Security and Trust Officer, John Stewart
“Cybersecurity is out of the dungeon and now selling itself as a business service,” says Cisco’s Chief Security and Trust Officer, John Stewart.
Stewart was discussing his company’s security challenges at a Cisco Live briefing at their Melbourne conference yesterday.
The shift to security as a business service follows the pattern of computerisation in business believes Stewart, “at first businesses said you can’t keep important documents on computers, then they said you could only keep important data on computers”
For Stewart, the fact c-level execs recognise the importance of cybersecurity is a positive sign that indicates organisations are taking IT and communications security seriously.
When asked what keeps him up at night, Stewart said it was worries about infrastructure security, the Ukrainian power network’s experience after an attack from a seriously motivated group of hackers indicates just how serious this is.
Interestingly Stewart remains focused on the risks of security breaches, as the Internet of Things rolls out it may well be the integrity of data streams becomes a far greater focus for system administrators and security officers.
Paul travelled to Cisco Live in Melbourne as a guest of Cisco
Software is eating the IT hardware industry which is a lesson for other businesses
I’m attending the Asia Pacific Cisco Live in Melbourne Australia this week which is starkley illustrating the shift in communications technologies and the business models around them.
Software Defined Networking uses basic computer hardware, basically glorified personal computers, to do the jobs of the expensive routers, switches and network appliances that were insanely profitable for companies like Cisco a few years ago.
It wasn’t so long ago when Cisco executives were taking technology journalists out to earnestly explain how Software Defined Networking (SDN) was feasible.
Today, SDN is defining both the telco and communications industries as companies like Telstra look at bundling IT networking and software services into their offerings to prop up their falling margins. India’s Reliance Communications are a good example of how providers are trying to shift into new marketplaces.
For telcos, communications vendors and IT hardware sellers the changing technologies illustrate what Silicon Valley entrepreneur Marc Andreesen meant when he described how “software will eat the world.’
Software is eating the IT hardware industry and telcos are seeing – hoping – it’s another lucrative opportunity. Businesses in other sectors should be thinking about how software is going to change their world.
Paul travelled to Melbourne for Cisco Live as a guest of Cisco
Uber cuts customer service, a worrying move for consumers
One of the greatest mistakes made by companies is cutting customer support. Nothing shows more a management focused on KPIs and financials than reducing its service staff.
According to Buzzfeed, this is what Uber is doing as the company struggles to contain costs and compete in China.
The ironic thing in Uber’s actions is the startup was so successful because in many cities the incumbent taxi operators had a culture of dire customer service.
It may be that having seen Uber win the battles, the poor consumer is about to lose the war for better transportation services.
Should that be the case, then Uber’s customer service woes shows the new generation of tech startups isn’t so immune to the old rules of business after all.
Much of the dislocation Dale Maharidge describes could have been written about factory workers twenty years ago and will be probably written about a whole range of white collar occupations over the next two decades. The disruption being felt by journalists is not unique to the media industry.
The costs of the 1970s economic shift are beginning to be recognised.
The single economic event that defines Generation X was the 1973 Oil Shock, the OPEC embargo on the west bought the post World War II era of economic growth to an end.
A notable aspect missing in the above graph is US productivity growth has since stalled as corporations have focused on stock buy backs rather than investment. The problem has been compounded by the use of tax shelters that have resulted in huge amounts of American corporate profits being locked away in offshore bank accounts.
While those stock buy backs and arbitraging tax regimes have benefitted executives and a small cabal of fund managers, the diversion of capital from productive investment has weakened the US and global economy.
For the baby boomers, even those of the Lucky Generation who preceded GenX, that lack of investment now threatens their retirement lifestyles as incomes and government spending stagnates.
The ‘big business friendly’ ideologies of Thatcher and Reagan defined the late Twentieth Century and continue to dominate government thinking in much of the western world, it may be though that we a reaching the end of that era as the costs to the broader economy are beginning to be recognised.
For GenX and their kids, the costs are being borne now but their parents may be about to feel the costs too.
Investor Steve Baxter talks about some of the strengths and weaknesses in Australia’s innovation statement
Four months ago, the Australian government launched its innovation agenda with the noble ambition to put the nation “on the right track to becoming a leading innovator.”
The keenly awaited innovation statement was seen as a defining the new Prime Minister’s agenda after two decades of complacent political leadership. At the launch of the paper Malcolm Turnbull said “our vision is for Australians to be confident, embrace risk, pursue ideas and learn from mistakes, and for investors to back these ideas at an early-stage.”
One of the early stage investors currently investing in Australia’s startup sector is Brisbane based entrepreneur, and Australian Shark Tank judge, Steve Baxter who spoke to Decoding the New Economy last week about where he sees the strengths and weaknesses in the proposals.
Beating the rhetoric
“Competitive threats are far more effective than rhetoric from a Prime Minister,” says Baxter in observing what really drives adoption and change while emphasizing that the announcement is a welcome shift, “the change in messaging from the government has been very important. It’s having an impact and a future looking message has been fantastic.”
While Baxter is positive about much of the incentives on offer and the importance of changes to regulations around bankruptcy and treatment of business losses, he flags the the delay in implementing the tax incentives as being a problem.
Too focused on commercialisation
Baxter though has been a long standing critic of Australia’s research sector and the emphasis on commercialisation of academic work is in his view one of the Innovation Statement’s major weaknesses, “commercialisation is a concept that we’ve failed at. It’s dead. We’ve put so much money into it, it’s actually embarrassing. We need a new mindset towards it.”
“there are seven hundred million dollars of a billion going to the research sector. That’s not entrepreneurship. In fact universities and research institutes are the least entrepreneurial organisations you’ll ever come across.”
“We need more business model innovation, we’re seeing too many people in lab coats with synchrotrons, square kilometre arrays which we have to do,” Baxter states. “What we’re not seeing the Dropboxes and the Instagrams and the Facebooks and the Wayze’s, the cool stuff that doesn’t need a two hundred million dollar building.”
Thin pipelines
As an early stage invest Baxter sees the real challenge for Australia lies in encouraging individuals to launch their own ventures, “I don’t think we’ve done enough yet to prove we have an investment problem when it comes to early stage companies,” he says. “I don’t believe we have a lack of capital”.
For those starting their own ventures, Baxter sees the word ‘innovation’ as being a barrier in itself.
“The entrepreneurs I back aren’t those who say ‘I’m going to innovate’ but those who say ‘I can see a problem’.”
While Baxter doesn’t say this, the real challenge lies weaning Australians off property speculation and encouraging investment and risk taking, something that requires major tax and social security reform.
Sadly, the Turnbull government has abandoned the prospect of any immediate taxation reform and even the Innovation Statement’s more modest agenda is now in doubt as the nation’s febrile Parliament prepares itself for an early election.
Baxter’s views, and his optimistic but guarded outlook towards the Innovation Statement reflect the opinion of many of those in the Australian investment community, it would be a shame for the country if the current opportunities are lost for short term political maneuvering.
For companies there are many good reasons for to have their own media centres, but to pretend they are twentieth century style Washington Post, Watergate journalism is probably hoping for too much.
Online display advertising is broken. Which should surprise no-one.
Understanding how a new technology will change industries is a challenge that has faced every generation in modern times.
Two of the industries most challenged by the rise of the internet have been the publishing and advertising sectors which have seen their established and wildly profitable ways of doing business demolished.
One of the mistakes almost every industry and business facing technological disruption makes is trying to apply their old models to the new methods which almost always produces poor results, the transition from live theatre to movies and then to television through is a good example of this.
So it’s not surprising that the advertising industry is now admitting that display ads on web pages have never worked and from that follows the maxim that print dollars equate to digital dimes.
It’s possible to see how a car manufacturer, steel maker or airline runs up a half billion dollars loss. But a social media company?
Twitter has lost its way and a complete change in management is needed. Maybe it’s time to time to turn the company into a user co-operative, at least the subscribers have an idea of how the products works.
The first virtual reality viewers start entering the market, but only early adopters will want these devices for the moment
After virtual reality viewers being the big item at both the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Las Vegas’ Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, it’s not surprising they are appearing on the market.
For those wanting a cheaper VR device, Google Cardboard has also come onto the market for $15 and while it depends upon a smartphone with the right software and lacks the features of more expensive and sophisticated devices, it is an affordable consumer product.
Like all early stage technologies, the current crop of VR viewers are expensive and somewhat cumbersome but over the next few years we can expect the price of these devices to collapse and become far more usable.
We’re in early times for the virtual reality industry. What we’re seeing today is laying the ground for much more exciting things.
Social media influencer campaigns are too focused on happy, positive messages and that is their fatal weakness.
“If you have anything negative to say, please don’t use the hashtag” implored the organiser to her stable of ‘influencers’ ahead of a recent social media campaign.
Like everyone in the PR, marketing and advertising industries, that organiser was desperately keeping a shiny patina on their clients’ brands at a time where they are one tweet away from disaster in today’s world of message obsessed management.
With influencer programs those risks are magnified as marketers co-opt amateurs to promote their clients in return for access and freebies*. Those unpaid posters on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook may be happy to give a positive view to everything but their fans may not be so kind.
Given their clients’ aversion to risk, it’s not unusual to see marketers setting out terms to ‘influencers’ demanding the brand has the right to vet posts – as one telco requested to this site last year – or outright prohibiting anything negative being said about their client.
Happy Shiny People
Perversely, selecting happy shiny people to promote brands on social media while suppressing critical thinking could actually create distrust of brands argues communications consultant Joanne Jacobs who states “this distrust is causedby campaigns of undifferentiated positivity and uncritical thinking.”
A good example of this potential damage is a recent influencer campaign by Chinese telecommunications Huawei where a group of influencers were flown to the 2016 Mobile World Congress to post about their experiences with the brand.
The Facebook post below shows the influencers enjoying the vendor’s hospitality but it also illustrates the lack of diversity in the group, something that was quickly called out in the comments.
For the Huawei influencers who had spent the previous week gushing about the vendor’s products and events this was an opportunity to provide leadership on the lack of diversity in the tech and telco industries..
Instead the critics – some of whom had more influential online audiences than the ‘influencers’ – were dismissed with the passive aggressive accusation of being ‘negative’, the cardinal sin of social media marketing.
For Huawei, there was a real risk their happy shiny influencers clumsy attempts to protect the brand would damage for the company and it was unsurprising the company’s professional PR managers stepped in to defuse the situation which in the hands of amateur ‘brand ambassadors’ threatened to become a self inflicted disaster.
Brittle brands of happiness
Huawei’s experience illustrates a key problem with the happy shiny influencer campaigns in their brittleness when faced with genuine criticism. The happy consumerist gleefully liking Instagram photos of shoes or hamburgers will quickly abandon the product should the brand be perceived as acting dishonestly or unethically.
For those influencers who’ve tied themselves too closely to brands, such a scandal could find their own names tarnished and their hard won audiences and reputation deserting them.
In an age of conversation where critical voices can be heard, the nice shiny facades can easily collapse. The days when the tobacco industry or brands like Coca-Cola could drown out critical voices simply by the weight of their advertising campaigns are long gone.
Struggles with a fragmented media
The struggles for the PR and marketing industries in dealing with today’s fragmented world are not to be underestimated – the old models of broadcast advertising and engaging with journalists and celebrities have lost their effectiveness and the industry is grappling with what works with the new channels.
In a building a brand that will last in today’s media landscape, pandering to shallow thinking consumerists is at best going to be a short term fix. To succeed, building a believable trustworthy name that tolerates dissent, allows complaints and acknowledges informed criticism is much more important and exponentially more valuable.
Shallow thinking and shiny people might have worked for Coca-Cola selling to young baby boomers in 1965 but fifty years later things the critics and deeper thinkers have a voice to. Co-opting those voices will only strengthen the brand.
*Disclaimer: This writer has been on a number of influencer programs and received various degrees of corporate largess including a Huawei smartphone.
Google have developed a tool that determines a location from a photograph
It’s hard to spot locations from a photograph and it’s something people can’t do this very well. MIT’s Technology Review reports Google’s researchers have developed a tool that figures out the location of an image with twice the accuracy of humans.
To illustrate their point Google have their Geoguesser game that allows people to pit their knowledge against the computer.
While this could be seen as a gimmick, it again shows how computing power is being used in areas that were seen as being immune from technology not so long ago and how artificial intelligence will be applied in various fields.
As artificial intelligence advances, a whole range of existing fields are going to be disrupted – particularly in ‘knowledge industry’ fields like law, consulting and management – while new industries and occupations will arise out of these technologies.
