Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • The allure of free data

    The allure of free data

    It looks like a nice business model, you get users to generate your content for you. Many of the new digital media empires like YouTube, Facebook and Foursquare are built upon it.

    The Register’s Simon Sharwood looked at the downside of this business model – junk data.

    Even the most well intentioned users makes mistakes with thing like addresses and that’s before you get mischief makers or competitors putting in false information.

    There’s another aspect too, what one person thinks is relevant may not be to other users or to the people running the service, Simon cites the dozens of “mom’s kitchens” on Foursquare.

    For those who’ve added their mom’s house, that’s relevant and maybe even funny to them.

    All of this illustrates the downside to the free, User Generated Content (UGC) model; you have to accept what the users give you.

    Which means it isn’t free – it has to be collated, processed and the noise has to be filtered out.

    At worst, somebody has to make the decision what is relevant and what has to go. This isn’t easy and, as Google found with their Name Wars, can upset a lot of users if it isn’t handled well.

    Nothing in life is truly free and with data becoming increasingly important to business it’s worthwhile considering the quality of that free or cheap stuff you get from the net.

    Similar posts:

  • Investing in the future

    Investing in the future

    UK supermarket chain Tesco announced it intends to create 20,ooo new job over the next two years through “significant investment in customer service, refreshing existing stores and opening new ones”.

    That word – investment – is the key to business growth. Not whining about the internet stealing jobs or begging the government to bail out failed industries and their managements.

    Investment is more than just buying a shiny new machine, it’s also research, development, training and educating a business’ management, staff, suppliers and customers.

    Too many businesses and governments are locked into the the 1980s mindset that investments, along with things like customer service, are a cost that that has to be driven down.

    Driving down costs was profitable for many managers through the 1990s and early 2000s, in fact we could argue this was one of the big drivers of corporate profits and productivity through that period.

    While some of those costs were undoubtedly unnecessary and deserved, it’s now clear that many governments and businesses ran down investment as well.

    Today we’re seeing the results of that; crumbling infrastructure, skills shortages and businesses that can’t compete in a changing global economy.

    What we invest in our businesses – be it time or money is essential to its long term success. Only the biggest companies in the most protected industries can survive for a while without investment.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • Reinventing point of sale

    Reinventing point of sale

    One of the banes of running a business computer support organisation were cash registers.

    Retail Point Of Sale (POS) systems were almost always arcane, clunky and difficult to maintain, at PC Rescue we dreaded a call from a shop, pub or hairdresser having problems with their registers.

    Frequently this was by design, the POS system supplier would try to lock in their business customers into expensive support contracts.

    By making it difficult for anybody without intimate knowledge of the product to actually do anything with it, the retailer was stuck having to hire overpriced custom support.

    To make things worse, many of the POS systems ran on outdated hardware which offered the suppliers another opportunity to hit their customers (victims?) with high support costs.

    Since the iPad was released, I’ve been waiting for an application using cloud services for a back end that challenges the existing Point of Sale systems and today US online payments system Square has announced their Square Register app.

    While only available in the US, Square has been setting the pace for physical payment systems like taxi fares and coffees using online technologies so it’s hardly surprising they are leading this push.

    The iPad as a cash register is a logical step for the device and tied in with a robust Point Of Sales platform behind a simple to use app, it will probably make a huge dent in the point of sale market.

    It may be the Square service won’t be the point of sale leader – Square is more a payments service than retail platform – which means this field is way open for some savvy operators.

    One of the concerns with the Square service, and any iPad based application, is the spectre of vendor lock-in. Being fixed on the iOS platform means there is a risk of being held hostage to Apple’s business plans, also being locked into Square’s payment systems may not be the best choice for many merchants.

    The payments and point of sale industry is another that’s being radically changed by mobile devices coupled with cloud computing. It’s not a time for incumbents to rest on their laurels.

    Similar posts:

  • When tails wag dogs

    When tails wag dogs

    A recent Business Insider examination of how patent “aggregator” Intellectual Ventures works is a good example of one of the problems in modern business – essential ancillary processes have overtaken doing business itself.

    Intellectual property rights are an important part of doing business, however what should be an adjunct to doing business has consumed many enterprises.

    As the Business Insider article point out, Intellectual Ventures has become some sort of modern day privateer, extracting loot from hapless companies that cross its path.

    This problem with intellectual property is part of a larger problem with lawyers, where they have been given too important a role in business.

    In any civilised society lawyers are essential and carry out an important role but in western society over the last fifty the scope of the legal system has expanded so dramatically that now the legal tail wags the business dog.

    Today company directors, business owners and entrepreneurs live under the shadow of breaching some obscure law that they had no inkling existed. Of course, the lawyers can help with this.

    A similar thing has happened in the financial world, accountants have also moved from being an essential adjunct of business into being at the centre of most enterprises.

    Much of this explosion in lawyering and accounting has been due to the increased role of government in our lives; each time a new law or regulation is enacted it makes it harder for the average person, or business owner,  to understand the system.

    A cynic can argue this is by design but most government actions are intended to address some injustice or flaw in society. The problem is there are always unintended consequences.

    One can also argue that the increased growth in business overheads like lawyers, accountants and patent attorneys is because of fat, prosperous business conditions.

    So maybe what western business has seen in the last fifty years has been because of a favorable market place; politicians have introduced a morass of often contradictory financial and legal rules because they know business, and society, can afford it.

    Now times have changed and both business and society can’t afford unnecessary overheads it will be interesting to see exactly how our laws and regulations evolve to respond.

    Maybe they won’t and we’ll see a black economy develop where whole groups of society ignore the rules, dispense with lawyers and accountants and hope for the best. This would not be good.

    Possibly we’ll see legislatures and courts winding back and reigning in some of the more silly and egregious excesses as they recognise society can’t carry the burden and remain productive.

    Whatever happens we can be sure the lawyers, accountants and people like Intellectual Ventures will fight hard against any change that reduces their status and income.

    Similar posts:

  • Irrelevance and the media

    Irrelevance and the media

    It’s a shame we weren’t around when dinosaurs became extinct. Then again, maybe we are.

    News Limited business commentator Terry McCrann writes about the “Bleakest of views from the shopfronts” in his Sunday column describing the problems of retail.

    All of the problems Terry cited are from big retailers – Woolworths, Dick Smith, Harvey Norman and JB HiFi. To make it clear he was talking about corporate issues there’s even a reference to General Motors.

    Nowhere does Terry talk about smaller businesses or those challenging the big guys, folk like Ruslan Kogan or the Catch of the Day team. It’s all about the big end of town.

    Terry’s article illustrates the problem of relying on incumbent mainstream media commentary; that it is Big Media talking about Big Business and Big Government.

    “Small”, “ordinary” or “average” has no place in their conversation, if you can call the pronouncement of mainstream media commentators a conversation at all.

    We can understand this – for a journalist, it’s good for the ego and career to look like a “heavy hitter” in big business. For the politician, small business and community groups can’t pay the speaking and consulting fees paid by corporations to supplement their meagre retirement benefits.

    Increasingly what happens in the corporate board rooms or the once smoke filled rooms of political caucuses is out of touch with the real world.

    This has become particularly acute since the responses to the 2008 crash proved to the management classes that their bonuses and perks will be protected by government bailouts regardless of how many billions of shareholder wealth they manage to destroy.

    In the United States we see this in political controversies being focused on contraception – an issue settled forty years ago – while the country faces fundamental challenges to its economic base and the basic welfare of its citizens and industries.

    While in Australia the media ‘insiders’ rabbit on about pointless internal party politics and soothing articles on how everything else is fine, we just need to be more optimistic. Yet the real questions about how we take advantage of the country’s greatest export boom, position the economy for the next 50 years and the nation’s dependence on the Chinese economy are being ignored.

    Terry McCrann’s story is emblematic of just how out of touch Big Media, and their friends in Big Business and Big Government, are with the real world.

    All we can do is let them get on with it and not take them too seriously.

    Similar posts: