Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Thinking about networked thinking

    Thinking about networked thinking

    “We want to be the Wayze of enterprise software” is the line being repeated by executives at the Inforum2016 conference in New York today.

    This is an interesting strategy for Infor, who provides a range of enterprise software tools to help companies track what is going on in their business, as Wayze is built upon aggregating user data to identify traffic problems to improve commuting times. It’s no surprise that Google bought the company a few years ago.

    Infor position though is slightly different as it’s aggregating individual clients’ data for them. In a world where organisations are struggling not to be overwhelmed by information, Informa are in a good position, even if their executives do overdo it on the buzzwords.

    Which leads us to another buzzphrase – design thinking – which has been drifting in and out of fashion over recent years. During the opening keynotes one of the comments was about the rise of  “network thinking.”

    “Eighty percent of what most companies do deals with data from outside of their organisation,” says Kurt Cavano, Infor’s General Manager of their commerce cloud division. “We’ve seen in the power of networks with sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Wayze.”

    “Nobody wants to be on a network but everyone’s on a network. It takes a long time to build but once you have one it’s magical. That’s what we’re thinking for business, they need to evolve.”

    In one respect this is another take on the ecosystem idea, that one vital corporate asset in the connected world is an ecosystem of partners, suppliers and users, however the Infor view articulated by Cavano is much more about the flow of data rather than the goodwill of a community.

    So we may well be entering a world of ‘networked thinking’ where thinking about the effects of data flows and being able to understand them – if not manage them – becomes a key executive skill.

    Paul travelled to New York as a guest of Infor

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  • Seizing the collective insanity: Secrets of the happy creative

    Seizing the collective insanity: Secrets of the happy creative

    For a moment Yiying Lu seems a bit sheepish about her title of ‘Unicorn Whisperer’ at 500 startups. “It was Dave’s idea,” she smiles referring to the tech accelerator’s founder, Dave McClure.

    Yiying – whose more conventional title at 500 Startups is Creative Director and says her name translates to ‘happy creative’ in English – doesn’t do bashful very well, particularly when discussing the importance of design.

    “If content is king, engagement is queen.” Yiving says when we interviewed her at 500 Startup’s San Francisco office in May, “if you look at the Bay Area community they look at the content rather than the design.”

    Getting magic

    “When you put them together that’s when you get magic,” says the designer who’s best known for creating Twitter’s Fail Whale and now counts companies ranging from Disney and Microsoft through to Mashable and a range of startups as clients for her design practice.

    Captivating people with good design is the key to successful business, Yiying believes. “At the end of the day, it’s the engagement,” she says. “If you remember Google Wave, it was a great concept but it failed and look today – it’s Slack! Google Wave failed because there was no engagement. They didn’t really look at what the user wants.”

    As someone who now spends most of her time in the Bay Area having shifted from her Sydney base several years ago, Yiying laughs while describing her belief that the entire region has been gripped by a mania. “98 percent of startups won’t survive, but everyone in the Bay Area wants to do it. They’re collectively insane,” she says. “Everybody is giving it their best shot.”

    Seizing the collective insanity

    When she arrived in the city, Yiying embraced that collective madness, “When I first came to San Francisco, I immediately thought I was home” and cites the city’s small size but dense community of talented, committed people as the main reason for the region’s success.

    For areas wanting to copy the Bay Area’s success the key lies in getting all of the industry’s players improving their game. “If you want an awesome ecosystem then anyone should work. It shouldn’t be just one part of the ecosystem working,” she states. “Investors should get better as well.”

    One of the many things Yiying is passionate about is not focusing on money and her advice to those intending to make the move is to look beyond the cash, “A dollar exchange is a narrow view,” she states. “We have a lot of real smart people coming here to TechCrunch Disrupt and South by South West thinking about finding investors. That’s not the way to to it.”

    Looking beyond money

    “Don’t think about finding investors, that’s a fear based model.” Is Yiying’s advice, “look at putting things into the community. You can only become really successful if you’re prepared to let other people be successful.”

    For Yiying herself her priorities are a long way from cash. “When I make people happy, that’s more important than money,” she explains. “You can only become really successful if you’re willing to let others be happy and successful.”

    Having made the jump to the Bay Area, she’s philosophical about where home is, having been born in Shanghai and spending much of her life in Sydney, Australia. “Home is where your heart is, but if your heart is big enough you can live anywhere.”

    Seize the opportunity is Yiying’s advice to those looking at making the move, “a lot of things are in your head and things are more difficult if you let them worry you so it’s best to just do it,” she says. “Make it happen. Do stuff. There is no time to hesitate.”

    For the creative worker, it seems ignoring the money and not hesitating is the way to stay happy. For tech business, getting engagement in a noisy world is everything.

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  • Everyone’s a winner with Pokemon Go

    Everyone’s a winner with Pokemon Go

    It’s remarkable how the reworking of a 1990s video game is proving to be the first big augmented reality success.

    As I’m writing this in the Sydney Airport departures lounge, thousands of people are getting ready to trawl the city’s streets for Pokemon as the company’s servers struggle with the load.

    For Nintendo, a company that’s struggled to remain relevant in recent years, Pokemon Go’s success revitalises them while for Niantic, the augmented reality and mapping service spun off from Google, this validates their business.

    Niantic’s success after being spun off from Google probably indicates the future for many of Alphabet’s many companies. Freed from the constraints of Google’s sprawling bureaucracy, companies like Niantic are far more likely to be able to execute on their technologies.

    We can expect to see plenty of companies looking at replicating Pokemon Go’s success with their products and many millions of bits will created as the marketing industry ponders how it can make money from augmented reality games and applications. Most will fail.

    The big winner though from Pokemon Go’s success are those in the artificial and virtual reality communities, the great success of the product will have caught the imagination of many executives and entrepreneurs – particularly in the tech sector where the search for the next big is becoming a little frantic as investors and consumers become jaded with smartphones and social media.

    Pokemon Go marks the start of the augmented reality gold rush, who profits from it remains to be seen. It also gives Alphabet a strong indicator of how to monetize the companies under the Google umbrella.

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  • The dangers of hands free driving

    The dangers of hands free driving

    Last May 7 45-year-old Joshua Brown was killed when his car hit a truck just outside Willston, Florida. His Tesla was operating in ‘autopilot mode’ and he was the first death in a driverless car accident.

    Now the investigation and the speculation into the Mr Brown’s unfortunate demise begin. It’s worth watching to see how the accident will change public perception and government regulation of autonomous vehicles.

    What’s notable is Tesla are careful not to recommend leaving the car to its own devices, as The Verge reports.

    Tesla reiterates that customers are required to agree that the system is in a “public beta phase” before they can use it, and that the system was designed with the expectation that drivers keep their hands on the wheel and that the driver is required to “maintain control and responsibility for your vehicle.” Safety-critical vehicle features rolled out in public betas are new territory for regulators, and rules haven’t been set.

    Another aspect that should concern users and regulators is Tesla’s software industry attitude towards liability and safety in dismissing the car’s flaws as being an unfortunate consequence of imperfect beta software. That may cut it in the world of Microsoft Windows 3.11 but it doesn’t cut it when lives are at stake in the motor industry.

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  • When the Facebook tiger bites

    When the Facebook tiger bites

    Two years ago Buzzfeed’s head of global operations visited Sydney and laid out the company’s vision of being the New York Times.

    As Scott Lamb explained, an important part of the Buzzfeed model was generating traffic through social media shares — at that time a tactic which Iwas working well.

    Since then the gloss has gone off Buzzfeed as the company misses financial targets and traffic plateaus.

    Now Facebook has announced further changes to its newsfeed which sees more emphasis on users’ family and friends’ posts than news and brands.

    Sites like Buzzfeed are left in a bind as one of their key sources for traffic dries up and, once again, Facebook’s cahnges show how risky it is for publishers and marketers to rely on individual online platforms.

    In truth all of the major online services are predators with Facebook, along with Google and Amazon, being at the top of the food chain, just like tigers.

    For those riding the internet tigers, the risk of being mauled is real. As Buzzfeed and others are finding.

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