Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

Closed data doors
“Sydney now joins global cities including London, New York and Hong Kong that also have public transport on Google Maps” boasted Gladys Berejiklian, New South Wales minister for transport, last week that Sydney’s complex and confusing public transport system will now appear Google’s mapping service.

The minister neglected to mention the other 400 cities that already offer this service including Perth, Adelaide and Canberra in Australia. What’s more concerning is the attitude of public servants and governments towards access to what should be freely available data.

It’s difficult to think of anything less innocuous than public transport timetables yet access to the data is carefully guarded by most Australian governments under the claim of ‘Crown Copyright’.

Underlying the idea of Crown Copyright is all the information held by governments is the property of the state – or the monarch in Australia – rather than belonging to the people. This is a great example of governments and the law living in the 18th Century which gives a modern perspective of what the US founding fathers were thinking of when they wrote their constitution in 1787.

This refusal to make data available is not the attitude of any single government, the Victorian government notoriously refused access to fire information during the tragic 2009 bushfires and Google are still negotiating to add Melbourne’s public transport information to the Maps service.

‘Open Data’ is a concept that many agencies pay lip service to, as do many politicians while they aren’t in government, but in practice information is a precious resource which should be hoarded and hidden.

In the public service itself, information is power – your position and status with an agency is directly proportional to the knowledge you possess and the contacts you can hoard. This attitude spills over into the way services are delivered, or not as the case may be.

For startup businesses, this hoarding of data hurts local industry – with transport timetables application developers have to negotiate on a case by case basis for data access meaning that only big companies with plenty of resources are able to get hold of the information.

The tragedy is government are trying to encourage smaller developers and startups. New South Wales had its Mobile Concierge program but these well meaning initiatives fall down when agencies won’t open their data.

It’s time to scrap the idea of Crown Copyright and the philosophy that all government data is the property of the public service, or the monarch of the day. Certainly there are plenty of areas where it isn’t in the public interest to release confidential information but bus timetables are not one of those areas and there are plenty of laws already in place to protect that sensitive data.

Like many things in our political and legal sectors, thinking is stuck not in the 1980s but in the 1780s. Maybe it’s time to grab our politicians and their learned lawyer friends and drag them by their horse haired wigs into the 21st Century.

Similar posts:
July 29, 2012
Redefining affluence
Finance writer Scott Pape always has an interesting perspective in his regular columns.

This week he talks about Melissa a mother of three who lives in the US state of Georgia who also happens to be Scott’s virtual PA.

Scott hires Melissa because she’s cheap; far cheaper than her competitors in Australia.

For the $8 an hour she earns, she gets no sick pay, no health insurance and no retirement benefits. Unless Melissa has a well paid partner and her work for Scott is just a sideline to help pay the bills, she will work until she drops.

This is the new reality for those in America, Spain, the UK and most of the West. It’s slowly becoming the reality in Australia as well despite the current hubris about the Down Under Economic Miracle.

Melissa’s job as a secretary or PA was safe and comfortable twenty years ago. Today – just like auto workers, shop assistants, accountants and even lawyers – secretaries are having to trade their secure jobs for precarious, and reduced, incomes in the globalised and casualised marketplace.

Scott makes perfectly valid points that individual drive and determination will be important in the globalised economy, but nothing changes the fact that Melissa and millions like her – including ourselves – will not have the living standards of her parents.

While we can talk about billions of Indians and Chinese improving their standard of living the new globalised world, we shouldn’t forget for a moment that living standards are declining for the most of developed world’s middle and working classes.

This decline isn’t totally due to globalisation and was probably going to happen regardless of the rise of China. The West’s prosperity was built upon the post World War II reconstruction and the credit booms of the 1980s and 2000s. Eventually the money – or the credit – had to run out.

How we as a society deal with this will define our nations and communities over the next fifty years. Our governments, business leaders and media commentators are ill prepared for the effects even if they recognise the problem.

Those most deeply affected are the businesses based on the twentieth century model of ever increasing prosperity. As our retailers are finding, this model is running out of steam.

While some expect the newly affluent Chinese and Indians to save their well padded hides, most will find Asian consumption patterns in the 21st Century will be different to US auto workers of the 1950s or English real estate agents of the 1980s.

Even financial planners like Scott are going to find things different – many financial planners thought they could get rich just skimming commissions off their clients’ portfolios which grew with the ever climbing stock and property markets. That model dropped dead in September 2008.

For those of us born and raised during the Western world’s era of great prosperity, we’re going to find we have to work a lot harder and not take affluence for granted.

Melissa and her eight dollar an hour secretarial service is the future and it’s probably Scott’s, yours and mine as well.

Some may say that’s a pessimistic view of the world, but a leaner, harder economy may be the best thing could happen for us as individuals and a society.

Similar posts:
July 28, 2012
Accounting for business change
Small businesses owe a lot to Craig Winkler – in 1991 he bought a obscure Mac based accounting package called Mind Your Own Business (MYOB) and built it into Australia’s leading small business accounting software.

Today Craig is a director and investor of Xero, a cloud computing service which is MYOB’s fastest growing competitor

At Xero’s Australian partner conference, Craig described how the development of business accounting software has evolved around technology opportunities.

MYOB’s massive growth happened as desktop computers became accessible to small businesses. Prior to 1990, it was rare to find a computer sitting on a business desk and they were largely confined to large financial, engineering and government organisations.

In the early 1990s computer prices dropped and as small businesses started using them, the need for desktop based office software exploded. This drove the growth of software like MYOB, Quickbooks and – most profitably of all – Microsoft Office.

Today a similar revolution is happening as computing moves onto the cloud, further reducing business costs and giving small organisations access to the same resources that only big corporations could access a decade ago.

Cloud based companies like Xero and Saasu are now threatening the incumbents like Quickbooks and MYOB who are responding with their own online products.

Tim Reed, the CEO of MYOB yesterday discussed how his business is moving to the cloud. With MYOB’s legacy of desktop based applications which they claim is used by 40% of Australia’s small to medium businesses it isn’t a straight forward process of dropping the old software and embracing the cloud.

Not that their customers are rushing to the cloud, Tim claims that a survey of their clients found that most want a ‘hybrid’ system where data is saved both on the cloud and on the desktop.

MYOB are catering for the hybrid cloud demand with a pilot program of their AccountRight Live product that adds online capabilities to their desktop software.

This is clear difference between MYOB and its cloud competitors. Xero’s founder Rod Drury maintains that those hybrid solutions are cumbersome and adds far more complexity into software. In Rod’s view, “cloud technologies are the right technologies.”

The difference between the philosophies of MYOB and Xero is reflected across the software industry – most notably this is the difference between Google and Microsoft or Apple.

Both Microsoft and Apple see cloud computing as an adjunct to their desktop, tablet and smartphone products. Data is synchronised between the cloud and the device while work is carried out on both.

Google on the other hand tries to do everything on the cloud.

Both approaches have their benefits, particularly in a world where Internet access cannot always be taken for granted which is the cloud’s biggest weakness. Although as mobile broadband becomes ubiquitous in the developed world, that disadvantage is quickly eroding.

Regardless of the differences in the philosophies, everybody agrees that cloud services are going to revolutionise small business. Both Tim Reed and Rod Drury see how the Big Data opportunities in the cloud are going to give business much more access to real time sales, banking and expense data while being able to benchmark their operations against industry performance.

As Craig Winkler described, we are on another big wave of change and there are great opportunities for the businesses that figure out how to use it.

Paul travelled to Melbourne attended the Xero Australian Partner conference courtesy of Xero. He received a private media briefing from MYOB.

Similar posts:
July 27, 2012
Eating the Old Man’s lunch
Optus today announced the purchase of restaurant review site Eatability for $6 million.

Eatability is one of the services that’s destroyed the business models of both the phone directory business and that of newspapers.

Thirty years ago the Sydney Morning Herald launched its Good Living section and it became the way people went found where the good places were to eat.

Diners wanting to make a reservation at the hip eating places being reviewed in Good Living picked up the phone book.

Now they do neither, they go to web sites like Eatabilty or Yelp where they get reviews, contact details and everything else they need about the venue.

Which killed the advertising revenues that newspapers and phone directories depended upon.

The sad thing is both the newspapers and Yellow Pages could have owned this space. Citysearch was setup by Fairfax to address the online market and it was sold to Telstra when the newspaper chain struggled to make it work.

Citysearch today languishes neglected and nearly forgotten under the Sensis umbrella. Optus now owning Citysearch’s biggest local competitor which must bring a hollow laugh to those involved in the early days of Fairfax’s digital experiment.

Whether Eatability thrives under Optus remains to be seen, but it illustrates just how incumbent strengths like telephone directories are being eroded in the online world.

Old men have to start moving quickly if they don’t want upstarts eating their lunch.

Similar posts:
July 26, 2012
Creating a fresh view for online commerce
When you’re running a part time business and holding down a full time job, selling is difficult and its hard to find the time to setup websites.

Online marketplace Andable provides an outlet for creatives and those entrepreneurs juggling full time jobs. The site’s mission is to be “an online marketplace where you can discover extraordinary things to buy and sell.”

The problem for those passionate entrepreneurs busy making things is they don’t have time – and often lack the skills – to sell their works. Co-founders Rupal Simian and Melissa Dean decided they would set up an online marketplace to help those businesses.

Central to Andable’s service is the ability for these small businesses to tell their stories. Most of the service’s merchants are part time businesspeople who hold down full time jobs.

Andable’s name comes from compressing “willing and able” and the site lets micro businesses list their products for free with a 5% commission from sales. Payments are handled through PayPal who they work closely with.

For sellers to qualify for a listing, they have to meet at least one of Annabel’s FRESH criteria; Fairtrade, Reused, Eco-friendly, Supporting local business or Handmade.

An interesting thing about Andable is how 10% of the sale goes into a Kiva microfinancing project. After six months that loan is repaid – Kiva boasts a 99% repayment rate – the 10% is rebated to the merchant.

Since the service’s launch in July, two investments have been made with Mel and Rupal looking at completing 600 loans by the end of their first year’s trading.

A month into operation, Andable has close to 200 shops including ranging from hand crafted jewellery, vintage lightboxes and hipster homewares. Sellers are based around the world from Germany and Indonesia through to Byron Bay and Fremantle.

What’s interesting about Andable is how we’re seeing different online marketplaces appearing to cater for different markets. For businesses, this means it’s becoming easier to get your products to market.

The challenge is to get attention in a marketplace that’s saturated with advertising and information. Platforms like Pinterest, eBay and Andable are ways motivated customers can find businesses.

Similar posts:
July 26, 2012