Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Juicing innovation

The Juicero’s expense, built in obsolescence and unnecessary waste is emblematic of everything that’s wrong with the current Silicon Valley culture.

Every tech boom has its excesses and it’s hard to go past the Juicero as the most egregious of today’s mania.

A number of high profile investors, including Google’s venture capital arm, have poured $120 million dollars into the internet connected device that squeezes juice from pre-prepared pouches of pulped fruit and vegetables.

Bloomberg found the devices don’t a great deal as the juice can be squeezed out of the packs by hand, which is just as well given the microchipped pulp containers can be disabled by the manufacturer.

While the Juicero aims to be the juicer equivalent of the Keurig coffee capsule, the device’s expense, built in obsolescence and unnecessary waste is emblematic of everything that’s wrong with the current Silicon Valley culture.

The fundamental question of any business idea is ‘what problem does this solve?’ It’s hard to think of anything the Juicero fixes.

Building the artificially intelligent business

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are a great opportunity for small business says Xero founder Rod Drury

It’s been another big year for Xero after the company passed its million user milestone, at the recent AWS Summit in Sydney founder Rod Drury to spoke to Decoding the New Economy about what’s next for the company and for small businesses.

For a company founded a decade ago, having a million paying customers is a substantial milestone and one Drury seems quite bemused by.

“It hasn’t really sunk in yet. When we did our IPO our promise was a hundred customers and I can remember when it was our first year our target was twelve hundred customers – I think we got to 1300 – so to pass a million is pretty nuts.

“What we’ve found is the accounting software market is probably one of the key industries where you’ll see the benefits of machine learning and AI. The reason for that is massive amounts of data but a pretty tight and structured taxonomy so we processed 1.2 trillion pieces of data in the last 12 months so the graph of data is huge.”

Far more modest volumes of data threaten to overwhelm smaller businesses and this is where Drury sees Artificial Intelligence and machine learning as essential for simplifying services and driving user adoption.

“One of the challenges is that small businesses might be great landscape gardeners or plumbers but they are terrible at actually coding transactions so we’re now seeing that wisdom of the crowd and all that data that we can code better than most normal people can. So the big epiphany was ‘why don’t we get rid of coding?’

“Effectively all a small business has to do make sure things like the data of the invoice is in the system and we can do the accounting for them and the accountants can check and see what’s going on.”

This automation of basic accounting tasks, and how these features are now embedded in cloud computing offerings, is changing how businesses – particularly software companies – are operating.

“You can’t run domestic platforms any more, because every accountant will have customers that are exporting and what we’re seeing now is global platforms connecting together so, for example, HSBC announced its bank feeds and what we’re doing with Stripe and Square.

All of the accountants need to be coaching the small businesses exporting. That’s what creates jobs.”

That global focus of business is now changing companies grow, particularly those from smaller or remote economies like Australia and New Zealand.

“What we’re finding now is the last generation of the late 90s and early 2000s was very much enterprise technology and normally companies would get to a certain point and then a US public company would have to buy them.

“Now we’re seeing truly global businesses that aren’t selling out quickly they’re actually creating businesses from this part of the world. People don’t have to live in Silicon Valley anymore, they can live in Sydney’s Northern Beaches or Auckland or Wellington and do world class work.

That remoteness is something that challenges Xero though as the company tries to get traction in the US market which is dominated by Intuit and fragmented across regional and industry lines.

“As you start off as a company listed in Australia and New Zealand it’s harder as you don’t get the benefit of the density in a smaller market. Now we’ve done enough to get these bank deals, we can now attract executives of the calibre that feels like long term leadership and that’s the benefit of doing the hard yards for a few years.

We’re past the beach head phase now and now we’re building the long term business. We want to be a big fish in a small pond.”

Overall Drury sees the cloud, particularly Amazon Web Services, as being one of the great liberators for business as smaller companies follow Xero’s footsteps.

“This is one of the amazing things AWS have done, they’ve created this flat global playing field.”

Crunching the middle classes

While the discussion around workplace automation has focused on ‘blue collar’ jobs, middle class occupations are those most likely to be affected in the near future.

This piece originally appeared in The Australian in July 2014. I’m republishing it here given the recent future of work related posts.

For the past four decades it’s been the working class that has suffered the brunt of the effects of globalisation and automation in the workforce. Now machines are taking middle class jobs, with serious implications for societies like Australia that have staked their future on white collar, knowledge-based service industries.

Yesterday, the Associated Press announced it was replacing business journalists with computer programs, following sports reporting where algorithms have delivering match reports for some years.

Some cynical media industry commentators would argue rewriting PR releases or other people’s stories — the model of many new media organisations — is something that should be done by machines. Associated Press’ management has come to the same view with business data feeds.

AP’s managing editor Lou Ferrara explained in a company blog post how the service will pull information out of company announcements and format them into standard news reports.

Ferrara wrote of the efficiencies this brings for AP: “Instead of providing 300 stories manually, we can provide up to 4,400 automatically for companies throughout the United States each quarter.”

The benefit for readers is that AP can cover more companies with fewer journalists, the question is how many people can afford to read financial journals if they no longer have jobs?

Making middle managers redundant

Many of those fields that cheered the loss of manufacturing are themselves affected by the same computer programs taking the jobs of journalists; any job, trade or profession that is based on regurgitating information already stored on a database can be processed the same way.

For lawyers, accountants, and armies of form processing public servants, computers are already threatening jobs — as with journalism, things are about to get much worse in those fields, as mining workers are finding with automated mine trucks taking high-paid jobs.

Most vulnerable of all could well be managers; when computers can automate financial reports, monitor the workplace and make many day-to-day decisions then there’s little reason for many middle management positions.

Removing information gatekeepers

To make matters worse for white collar middle managers, many of their positions are only needed in organisations built around paper based communication flows; in an age of collaborative tools there’s no need to gatekeepers to control the movement of information to the executive suite.

Irish economist David McWilliams — his television series on the rise of the Celtic Tiger, The Pope’s Children, and the causes of the Global Financial Crisis, Follow The Money, are highly recommended viewing – last week suggested that the forces that disrupted the working classes in the 1970s and 80s are now coming for middle classes.

“The industrial class was undermined by both technological change and globalisation, but rather than lament this, many people who were unaffected by this social catastrophe labelled what happened from 1980 to 2010 as the “inevitable consequences” of global competition.” Mc Williams writes.

Those ‘inevitable consequences’ are now coming for the middle classes, asserts McWilliams.

On the right side of progress

While this is sounds frightening it may not be bad for society as whole; the Twentieth Century saw two massive shifts in employment — the shift from manufacturing to services in the later years, and the shift from agriculture to city-based occupations earlier in the century.

A hundred years ago nearly a third of Australians worked in the agriculture sector; today it’s three per cent. Despite the cost to regional communities, the overall economy prospered from this shift.

Answers in the makers movement

The question today though is what jobs are going to replace those white collar jobs that did so well from the 1980s? The Maker Movement may have answers for governments and businesses wondering how to adapt to a new economy.

Two weeks ago President Barack Obama welcomed several dozen leaders of America’s new manufacturing movement to a Maker Faire at the White House, where he proclaimed “Today’s DIY Is Tomorrow’s ‘Made in America'”.

In Singapore, the government is putting its hopes on these new technologies boosting the country’s manufacturing industry in one of the world’s highest-cost centres.

“The future of manufacturing for us is about disruptive technologies, areas like 3D printing, automation and robotics,” Singapore’s Economic Development Board Managing Director Yeoh Keat Chuan told Reuters earlier this year.

Britain too is experimenting with modern technologies, as the BBC’s World of Business reports about how the country is reinventing its manufacturing industry.

Tim Chapman of the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre describes how the economics of manufacturing changes in a high-cost economy with a simple advance in machining rotor disks for Rolls-Royce Trent jet engines.

“These quite complex shaped grooves were taking 54 minutes of machining to make each of these slots. Rolls-Royce came to us and said can ‘can you improve the efficiency of this? Can you cut these slots faster?'”

“We reduced the cutting time from 54 minutes to 90 seconds.”

“That’s the kind of process improvement that companies need to achieve to manufacture in the UK.”

While leaders in the US, UK and Singapore ponder the future of manufacturing, Australian governments continue to have faith in their 1980s models of white collar employment — little illustrates how far out of touch the nation’s political classes are with reality when they proclaim Sydney’s future as an Asian banking centre or Renminbi trading hub.

Old business ideas

In the apparatchiks’ fevered imaginations this involves rooms full of sweaty white men in red braces yelling ‘buy’ into telephones as shown in 1980s Wall Street movies. In truth, the computers took most of those jobs two decades ago.

As McWilliams points out, the dislocations to the manufacturing industries of the 1970s and 80s were welcomed by those in the professions as the inevitable cost of ‘progress’.

Now progress might be coming for them. Our challenge is to make sure we’re on the right side of that progress.

Mining for jobs in an automated future

Increasingly automated mines show how the jobs of the future don’t lie in old industries.

While politicians clamour to ‘bring jobs home’, automation is increasingly taking those jobs away with the mining industry being the best example.

In 2015, McKinsey looked at the effects of automation in various US industries and found the production component of mining could lose over 80% of its jobs in coming years.

In a piece for Diginomica this week, I looked at a case study featuring Western Australia’s Fortescue Metal Group (FMG) from the recent AWS Summit in Sydney.

Slashing costs

When Fortescue planned their Solomon groups of iron ore mines in the Pilbara region of North-Western Australia in 2010, they estimated 75 manned trucks would be needed. As it turned out they only needed 49 robotic vehicles.

The savings, both in capital expenditure and operational costs was substantial and the entire operation saw its costs nearly halved.

It’s not just trucks becoming autonomous, functions like drilling and explosives laying are also being automated reducing costs and risks even further.

Dashed hopes

So mining communities like those in the United States hoping Donald Trump will bring back prosperity or Australians who believe a billion dollar subsidy to an Indian coal mining company will guarantee jobs are doomed to disappointment.

A modern mine is likely to employ more workers in an office thousands of miles away than on the site itself. Where once the surrounding region would get hundreds of jobs from a large mine, today it’s only going to be a handful.

It isn’t just the mine workers themselves though, McKinsey’s study also forecast the mining industry’s administrative workforce could see 90% of jobs going while senior management had the potential of being 99% automated.

Beyond blue collar roles

That this wave of automation will affect ‘white collar’ jobs as much as trades or unskilled workers isn’t new – this piece in 2015 for The Australian described how many of the ‘knowledge economy’ jobs will soon be done by robots or artificial intelligence.

Mining is a good indicator of where technology and employment is heading. We, and our political leaders, are going to have to think carefully where the future jobs are coming from as they aren’t going to be found in resurrecting old industries.

Small business and the importance of design

For most small businesses and founders hiring a professional designer could be a very good investment indeed.

One thing the iPhone era has taught us is the importance of good design.

In a piece for Fairfax Small Business this week, I had a look at some small businesses that had used compelling design to launch their products.

As part of the research for this I interviewed Murray Hunter, founder of Sydney’s Design + Industry, about what businesses should be looking for when taking a product to market.

One of the interesting points about the story was the two businesses featured, Elanation and Pod Tracker, didn’t use professional designers as the founders of both had expertise in that field themselves.

But it is clear, good design matters to users and it will avoid problems down the track with manufacturers shippers and possibly regulators so for most small businesses and founders hiring a professional could be a very good investment indeed.

Sydney’s digital humiliation

Google’s decision to pull out of Sydney’s White Bay startup hub project throws the NSW government’s tech industry plans into disarray.

It’s hard not to see Google’s decision not to move the mooted digital hub at Sydney’s White Bay as nothing short of a humiliation for the New South Wales state government.

The White Bay project is the centrepiece of the NSW government’s startup tech startup strategy and Google were hoped to be the anchor tenant for the refurbished power station that’s been abandoned for over thirty years.

With Google’s Sydney office currently overflowing and its staff numbers expected to increase from around 1500 today to 10,000 over the next few years, the White Bay precinct with its cathedral like power station made some sense.

For the startup community, having something similar to the London Google Campus would have been a valuable part of the city’s ecosystem.

However the location is in a traffic blackspot served by a woefully inadequate and unreliable bus service with a series of major road projects planned to start in the neighbourhood over the next five years which forced Google to rethink their plans.

Now it looks like the White Bay project getting underway this year is doomed and meanwhile the Victorian state government is spending big to attract tech companies to Melbourne.

This is far from the first time the NSW government has had ambitions for a digital hub and again a project stumbles in the face of poor planning by the NSW government.

We don’t know if the Victorian government has made an offer to Google yet, but it wouldn’t be surprising if they have. It could be New South Wales is about to pay the price for its lack of vision and forethought.

Small business and cloud computing

The story of one Melbourne clothing supplier reminds us just how basic most small businesses’ IT systems are.

This blog, and its predecessor, have long maintained that computers and the internet have levelled the playing field between large corporations and small business so it was interesting Telstra’s managers say that over lunch today.

Australia’s biggest telco was showing off their cloud services for small to medium businesses with a presentation from futurist Ross Dawson on the changing technology world then real world case studies from Darwin’s Abode New Homes, Canberra’s Red Robot and Melbourne’s Cargo Crew.

Narelle Craig of Cargo Crew led with one very good reason for adopting cloud services – Cryptolocker ransomware.

After an infection that locked them out of their systems and cost the business a hundred thousand dollars, they shifted their on premise software to the cloud.

It’s easy to imagine how Cargo Crew came unstuck, a basic system that met the needs of a four person company five years ago grew into an unwieldy beast servicing 25 staff today. As the business grew, the disruption of upgrading IT systems was seen as too time consuming and costly.

Until of course something happened. A ransomware infection for Cargo Crew and for Abode a fire in a neighbouring office the evening after they’d installed a new 20,000 dollar server, where thankfully they didn’t lose anything but the scare was enough for them to start looking at alternatives.

Cargo Crew’s tale is a reminder of how basic most small to medium businesses’ IT systems are and how rudimentary their IT security is. While technology does level the playing field, there are still some things smaller businesses struggle with.

Beating the bots: The evolving call centre business

The evolution of the call centre may well be a pointer for other industries as we all grapple with the effects of automation.

The call centre business is very much an example of an industry driven by technological change, having only coming into being over the last 50 years as telecommunications became ubiquitous and affordable before being one of the biggest offshored industries.

In an age of artificial intelligence, web based help pages and chatbots, it’s easy to think the call centre era may be coming to a close but Acticall Sitel Group’s Australian and New Zealand managers Steve Barker, the regional Chief Operating Officer, and Sally Holloway, Director of Business Operations, believe the industry has a long way to go yet.

Miami based Acticall Sitel Group operates call centres in 22 countries with 75,000 ‘associates’ providing services to over 200 major companies so their view on how the industry is evolving is worth hearing.

Technological shifts

Naturally technology is the driving force with the increasing availability of broadband meaning more ‘associates’ can work from home rather than in call centres while cloud services are reducing the cost and complexity of call centres.

The work from home aspect is proving popular with their clients as well as businesses see retaining skilled staff and the expense of real estate driving many organisations to extend their programs. An interesting observation given IBM’s and Yahoo!’s moves in restricting home office options in recent times.

Social media has also changed the type of interactions consumers are having with organisations while artificial intelligence and robots – chatbots – are automating many call centre functions.

A broader industry

Holloway though says she doesn’t see voice services going away, “some interactions still require the personal touch”, but technology is broadening the ways customers interact with businesses.

Interestingly, both Holloway and Barker believe that the commoditization of call centres is over as companies have realised the importance of good service in competitive markets although that varies between industries.

Added to that is the stripping out of costs in areas like customer service has largely run its course over the past few decades and in most organisations there is little fat left to cut from client facing functions.

Falling prices for technology, if not labour, does offer scope for smaller businesses to engage call centre providers that were once only available to larger corporates.

Like most industries, the relationship between workers and automation in call centres is playing out in complex ways as staff get to use more advanced skills and low value tasks are given to machines.

The evolution of the call centre may well be a pointer for other industries as we all grapple with the effects of automation.

Bootstrapping to success

Bootstrapping is the easiest and cheapest form of investment, maybe we should celebrate it more.

One of the downsides of the current tech startup boom is the obsession with investor funding, the race to be a billion dollar ‘unicorn’ like Uber or AirBnB obsesses most of us reporting on this space.

The paradox is while we gleefully report businesses raising hundreds of millions of dollars at ever increasing valuations, we’re also discussing how the cost of entering industries or launching new companies is collapsing, making it easier to launch a venture than every before.

Which leads us to good old fashioned ‘bootstrapping’ – funding a business’ growth out of sales.

A recent story I wrote on Sydney based HR tech company Expr3ss! reminded me of that where owner Carolyne Burns described how she financed her business initially through the sale of her house and has never taken a cent from investors over a decade of profitable operations.

Bootstrapping is the traditional way generations of business owners and entrepreneurs have funded their ventures and it’s only in recent years with the rise of the tech startup that venture capital or private equity has been seen as investment sources for most small businesses.

That rise of VC and PE investors though could be partly due to the banks stepping out of their role of financing small businesses as they’ve focused on financial engineering and funding speculators.

Also driving things in the last decade has been the flood of cheap money that’s washed across the world as governments and central bankers try to stave off deflation.

Many businesses needing money to fund capital investment or expansion have found it’s become harder to go to banks or traditional investors and that partly explains the rise of VC’s, Private Equity and the range of new online lender and crowdfunding platforms.

Venture Capital and investor money though never really comes cheap and having raised funds from investors, a founder or business owner’s job becomes as much about managing investor expectations as running the company.

For many business founders, the whole reason for starting their own company was to run their own show. So answering to a bunch of investors defeats the purpose of going on one’s own.

Carolyne Burns’ story is a reminder that the best, and cheapest, form of business financing is profitable sales. It’s something we should remember in an age that celebrates loss making companies dependent upon indulgent investors.

ABC Brisbane on the future of retail

Brisbane’s largest shopping mall reopening is an opportunity to examine the future of retail

This morning I’m talking with Steve Austin on ABC Brisbane about the future of retail as the city’s biggest shopping mall opens.

What does such a huge complex mean to the local economy and is it sustainable as the retail industry evolves?

Having had a massive upgrade, we can be sure Westfield Chermside will have plenty of technology to help customers spend money and we covered some of the ways modern retails have to understand consumer behaviour and predict what individuals will spend.

Prior to the segment (which starts around the 60 minute mark), Steve took calls from listeners about how retail has changed in Brisbane over the past fifty years. The demise of fondly remembered department stores is a reminder of how the sector changed as consumer behaviour changed over the last half of the Twentieth Century.

India’s technocracy

India’s Aadhaar national identity system is a huge and brave experiment to stamp out corruption and strengthen national security.

Buzzfeed today has an in depth look at India’s Aadhaar national identity system.

1.12 billion Indians are now enrolled in the system that’s rapidly becoming mandatory as everything from telephone companies to job interviewers demand an identification number.

Aadhar is far from without critics with warnings that the database has a rich potential for abuse and the risk of betraying Indians’ biometric data should the system be compromised.

The latter point is important as biometric data isn’t like passwords – once biometric data been compromised it can’t be changed which opens up massive possibilities for identity fraud.

Regardless of the risks, India’s state and Federal governments are pressing ahead with the system and making sure it is a fundamental part of national life. Coupled with the recent demonetisation of the economy, the nation’s governments now have a very good picture of most Indian’s lives.

For civil rights campaigners this is a worrying system while government officials and politicians claim it will stamp out fraud and strengthen national security.

India is leading the way in where many other nations are going in coming years, it would be worthwhile watching how Aadhaar develops.

Beating the shock clock

Dell Boomi’s CEO, Chris McNabb sees being part of an empowered Dell as his company’s advantage against the newly listed Mulesoft.

With a range of tech companies floating as corporations lose their appetite for acquisitions, companies like Boomi which was bought by Dell in 2010 believe they have an advantage over competitors like Mulesoft which have to answer to the public markets at sky high valuations following their recent stock market listing.

If Chris McNabb, CEO of Dell Boomi, is concerned about his competitor’s successful IPO, he wasn’t showing it when he spoke with Decoding the New Economy at a restaurant in a Sydney office park last week. With Mulesoft’s stock popping 45% on the first day of trade, attention was on how his company would react to such a vote of confidence in his market rival.

“We continue to grow very rapidly, well north of market growth rates. I think you’ll see us consolidate our position at the top of most boards in terms of the number of customers. If you look at Mulesoft’s S1 (the company’s official stock offering document) it shows them with around 1,078 customers while we have 5,300 customers. We almost have an unfair competitive advantage.”

Part of that unfair advantage McNabb cites is the breadth of services now offered by Dell’s merger with EMC where he flagged an increased push across the organisation’s sales team starting in the second half of this year.

“For us to say six months ago that we’d sit here and say that the merger of two 25 billion dollar plus businesses could be bedded down is really saying something. I think it’s one of the best integrations that I’ve ever seen.”

“For Boomi it’s been terrific and continues to be terrific. We get unequivocal support from executives, Michael Dell and the ELT – Executive Leadership Team – has been nothing but a hundred percent supportive.”

“Now we’re looking at what we can do with the EMC Solutions sales team, what we can do with our brothers in the strategically aligned businesses, specifically Pivotal, Virtustream and VMWare. What are the opportunities to go to market more collaboratively with them?”

Boomi’s recent ManyWho acquisition fits into that range of offerings and McNabb believes the workflow platform’s role as a tool helping CIOs manage their organisations’ transitions to cloud services will be a compelling offering.

“Workflow automation – redoing business processes in a structured and an unstructured way – was always a key strategy of ours.”

“Hybrid IT is here for the next ten years, so how do we enable it so customers can buy all the best of breed software they want yet still have a suite like experience?”

“We believe hybrid IT is creating challenges for CIOs and as you get all these different cloud applications from vendors you’re breaking apart your ERP and creating an integration problem and you’re creating a data management problem along with governance, API management and orchestration.”

“It’s our vision to give CIOs the unified platform the necessary fundamentals in cloud services to address these issues.”

With a solid market position in North America, McNabb sees the Asia-Pacific as the big growth driver for Boomi with channel partners leading the company’s expansion across the region.

“Worldwide EMEA is going through a ton of growth and this region (APAC) is going through a ton of growth. Our expectation is this region will have the highest growth rates – Australia, New Zealand, South East Asia, these are key target areas.”

“If I look at things strategically and how important the channel is to us, is it’s a force multiplier as it allows you to get entire teams being certified and ready to go across regions. It also helps execute in a better way in local markets, you have to be in a region in a big way and if you can get really good certified partners you can do that much better and faster than if you’re hiring and building it yourself.”

Returning to the topic of Mulesoft, McNabb sees not being part of a publicly listed company as one of Boomi’s big advantages.

“We don’t operate on a ninety day ‘shock clock’, we know what the market’s growing at, we know what our platform is capable of, we know we’re going to raise our targets. There isn’t increased pressure to perform.”

“As it turns out, those in the public eye do have the ninety day shock clock to attend to and it will be interesting to see how those first, two, three or four quarterly reviews go. I’ll certainly be an eager listener to their investor calls.”

Ultimately though, McNabb thinks Mulesoft’s IPO and it’s 45% pop on listing vindicates Dell’s ongoing investment in Boomi and the potential of the cloud integration marketplace.

“I look at it as a terrific validation of the marketplace…. It’s good for everybody.”