Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

Dealing with the data explosion
“Last year’s mobile data traffic was nearly twelve times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000.”

That little factoid from Cisco’s 2013 Virtual Networking Index illustrates how the business world is evolving as various wireless, fibre and satellite communications technologies are delivering faster access to businesses and households.

Mobile data growth isn’t slowing; Cisco estimate global mobile data traffic was estimated at 885 petabytes a month and Cisco estimate it will grow fourteen fold over the next five years.

Speaking at the Australian Cisco Live Conference, Dr. Robert Pepper, Cisco Vice President of Global Technology Policy and Kevin Bloch, Chief Techincal Officer of Cisco Australia and New Zealand, walked the local media through some of the Asia-Pacific results of Virtual Networking Index.

Dealing with these sort of data loads is going to challenge Telcos who were hit badly by the introduction of the smartphone and the demands it put on their cellphone networks.

A way to deal with the data load are heterogeneous networks, or HetNets, where phones automatically switch from the telcos’ cellphone systems to local wireless networks without the caller noticing.

The challenge with that is what’s in it for the private property owners whose networks the telcos will need to access for the HetNets to work.

One of the solutions in Dr Pepper’s opinion is to give business owners access to the rich data the telcos will be gathering on the customers using the HetNets.

This Big Data idea ties into PayPal’s view of future commerce and shows just how powerful pulling together disparate strands of information is going to be for businesses in the near future.

But many landlords and wireless network owners are going to want more than just access to the some of the telco data — we can also be sure that the phone companies are going to be careful about what customer data they share with their partners.

It may well be that we’ll see telcos providing free high capacity fibre connections and wireless networks into shopping malls, football stadiums, hotels and other high traffic locations so they can capture high value smartphone users.

One thing is for sure and that’s fibre connections are necessary to carry the data load.

Anyone who thinks the future of broadband lies in wireless networks has to understand that the connections to the base stations doesn’t magically happen — high speed fibre is essential to carry the signals.

Getting both the fibre and the wireless base stations is going to be one of the challenges for telcos and their data hungry customers over the next decade.

Paul travelled to the Cisco Live event in Melbourne courtesy of Cisco Systems.

Similar posts:
March 6, 2013
Retail and the internet of machines
Online retail and payment giants Ebay and PayPal hosted a media lunch in Sydney yesterday to publicise their Australian Business Update.

While eBay dominates the online selling market, PayPal’s position in the payment market place is extremely powerful with Internet monitoring company Comscore reporting in their Digital Wallet Roadmap how PayPal dominates the US market and does likewise in other markets like Australia.

Their update confirms the trends which have been obvious for some time, particularly in how mobile devices are now driving retail. eBay’s research indicates properly implemented multichannel strategies drives six times more sales than just having an online presence.

What was particularly notable with eBay’s presentation was how the Internet of Machines is changing the retail and logistics industries as smartphones and connected point of sales systems are cutting out jobs and middle men.

Paypal are particularly proud of their US partnership with cash register manufacturer NCR that integrates smartphone payments with the point of sales systems in restaurants, convenience stores and gas stations.

eBay illustrated this with their examples of coupon offers being tied to smartphone payment systems so people paying for gas with their smartphone get a voucher offer for various up sells.

Studies in the US have found a $10 offer can result in sales of up to $100. A pretty compelling deal for most merchants.

With these technologies, we’re seeing how connected machines are changing even the most mundane business tasks.

It may well be that the days of the service station cashier are numbered; it’s quite possible that in one generation we’ll have gone from full staffed gas stations to totally automated facilities.

The example of gas station attendants and cashiers is just one example of how automation is changing many retail and sales tasks. It would be a brave person to say their job isn’t safe.

Similar posts:
March 5, 2013
Facebook’s struggle to stay relevant
Are we getting sick of Facebook? Tech magazine CNet stirred up the interwebs on the weekend with the claim that Teenagers are Tiring of Facebook a meme was pushed by the New York Times’ Nick Bilton dissecting his experience with the service.

It’s not just teenagers moving away from social media sites though, many adults are getting sick of intrusive adverts and promoted posts getting in the way of the news about family and friends.

As an example, here are the ads taken off the page of one fifty year old woman’s feed.

“I find these offensive” she says, “I’ve been posting my results from a fitness program and now my Facebook page is plastered with ugly weight loss advertisements.”

Clearly the targeted advertisements are working too well and clumsy marketers are destroying the user experience with ugly and offensive ads.

Not that those ads are working as Nick Bilton found when he decided to promote a post to his 400,000 followers.

From the four columns I shared in January, I have averaged 30 likes and two shares a post. Some attract as few as 11 likes. Photo interaction has plummeted, too. A year ago, pictures would receive thousands of likes each; now, they average 100. I checked the feeds of other tech bloggers, including MG Siegler of TechCrunch and reporters from The New York Times, and the same drop has occurred.

When he decided to advertise, his engagement went up by ten times. Leading Nick to conclude that Facebook were suppressing his unpaid posts while pushing the one’s he pays to promote.

Even for advertisers, a few hundred likes doesn’t translate into much of a return.

That suppression of useful posts is one of the reasons teenagers are moving, one 17 year old I asked about why he’s moved from Facebook said the ads cluttered up his feed.

Which leads us to the reason why people use Facebook – they use it to talk to friends and relatives; not to watch ads.

It took commercial radio and television a decade to figure out the right mix of advertisements and contents, a balance that is still tested today. Social media sites are going to have to get that mix right soon.

Facebook has the most at stake and their time is running out.

Similar posts:
March 4, 2013
Using big data to find the cupboard is bare
Last week this blog discussed whether telecommuting was dead in light of Marissa Mayer’s banning of the practice at Yahoo.

While I don’t think telecommuting is dead, Marissa Mayer has a big problem figuring out exactly who is doing what at the company and abolishing remote working is one short term way of addressing the issue.

If Business Insider is to be believed, Yahoo!’s absent staff problem is bad.

After spending months frustrated at how empty Yahoo parking lots were, Mayer consulted Yahoo’s VPN logs to see if remote employees were checking in enough.

Mayer discovered they were not — and her decision was made.

Business Insider’s contention is that Mayer makes her decisions based on data analysis. At Google she drove designers mad by insisting on reviewing user reactions to different layouts and deciding based on the most popular results.

If this is true, then Marissa Mayer is the prototype of tomorrow’s top executives – the leaders in business by the end of this decade will be the ones who manage data well and can sift what matters out of the information deluge.

For all of us this is going to be a challenge with the probably the biggest task of all being able to identify which signals are worth paying attention to and which should be ignored.

Of course, all this assumes the data is good quality in the first place.

An assumption we’ve all made when talking about Big Data is that it’s about marketing – we made the same assumption about social media.

While Big Data is a good marketing tool, it’s just as useful in areas like manufacturing, logistics, credit evaluations and human resources. The latter is what Yahoo!’s staff are finding out.

In age of Big Data it may not pay to a slacker, but it’s going to be handy if you want to know what’s going on your business.

Similar posts:
March 3, 2013
Employment’s changing face
Last Thursday recruitment company Talent2 launched its 2013 Market Pulse Survey looking at the employment trends across the Asia Pacific.

According to the survey, things are looking good with 61% of businesses across the Asia Pacific forecasting growth and 45% expecting to hire more staff.

However there’s an interesting underlying theme to the good news, employment is changing in large organisations.

One of the give-aways is the fact that while nearly two-thirds of businesses expect to grow in 2013, less than half intend to increase staff. Businesses are doing more with less.

Part of this is because of increased automation. Despite the headlines, productivity is increasing in workplaces – particularly offices – as technology automates many business functions in fields like logistics and workforce management.

Another aspect driving the lack of employment is outsourcing, Talent2 say the proportion of Australians working as full time employees dipped below 75% in 2012 with a four percentage point drop over the year.

With more businesses contracting work out, one could expect the number of sole proprietors to be increasing. However this seems not to be the case.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the number of sole traders is barely moving – between 2006 and 2011 the number of “non-employing Australian businesses” only increased 5% while the population grew over 8%.

This implies the proportion of contractors in the workforce is actually shrinking.

Much of this is probably due to the work going offshore, particularly to Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs) in countries like the Philippines, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.

Saturday’s Australian Financial Review looked at what the BPOs are doing in the Philippines and they aren’t carrying out the call centre and basic clerical work that’s made up most of the outsourcing over the last twenty years. Now it’s management roles that are going offshore.

The bigger issue confronting Australians, however, is not call centre workers being relocated to the Philippines. It’s low- to mid-level professional jobs, being moved out of companies, accounting firms and law offices.

Legal outsourcing has been growing for a decade as large law firms have moved many of their para-legal and routine tasks offshore to countries where legal graduates are plentiful but work at lower rates than their western colleagues.

An interesting aspect in legal offshoring is that much of the work that was done by young lawyers has now gone to overseas contractors, which probably means there’s going to be a shortage of experienced legal practioners in the medium term. This is going to have profound consequences for law firms and their partners.

It’s also going to mean law and associated degrees are going to be less popular with school leavers as career prospects dwindle.

The biggest impact though is for managers – we’ve grown used to the assumption that management jobs stay at head office while the lower level jobs go to the lowest cost provider.

Now is those lowest cost providers are offering good quality management staff along with support desk and call centre staff.

During the restructurings of the 1980s and 90s, it was blue collar workers who were the most affected by change. Now it’s the turn of the office workers and managers.

It will be interesting to see how many of the people who thought they were secure in their roles deal with the uncertainty they now have. For some it’s going to be a tough decade.

Similar posts:
March 2, 2013