Paul Wallbank – Communications Professional
Comms, journalism and writing
MakerBot’s story shows the development of new industries is never smooth
Vice’s Motherboard details the remaking of MakerBot, the rescue of an early leader of 3D printing industry.
The story is great long read for any business owner or want to be startup founder and a reminder that the development of new industries is never smooth sailing.
Netflix’s move into China is part of a global shift in broadcast televison
Streaming video service Netflix is looking to launch in China reports Bloomberg Business.
The Chinese joint venture to be run with Wasu, a company backed by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, looks to increase Netflix’s global footprint.
Netflix plans “to be nearly global by the end of 2016,” the article quotes a company spokesperson answering questions about a possible China partnership.
The Netflix model is a major departure from the established broadcast television and movie business where studios and producers would enter distribution agreements with local TV stations and theatre chains.
With Netflix and the streaming model, the licensing of rights to local outlets becomes largely irrelevant with the producers – which increasingly includes Netflix itself – able to cut out the local licensees.
A similar thing is happening in sports, one of the mainstays of broadcast television, where the professional leagues are taking control of their own content and leaving the networks, at best, minor players.
Neflix’s move is part of a shift that’s affecting many industries, including those like broadcast television that thought they were untouchable.
Instead of asking what will happen to today’s jobs, we should be preparing the workforce for the economy of the future.
Once again the question of what happens to the jobs of today in the face of technology is raised in a Quartz story by Zake Kanter looking at how driverless cars will lost the US economy millions of jobs over the next decade.
Zake isn’t alone in this, just one study predicts half the US police workforce could be put out of work as autonomous vehicles take to the road.
Worrying about today’s jobs is understandable as it’s clear the news won’t be good for many occupations. However the discussion should be about what roles are going to be needed in the future.
Should we go back a hundred years there were a huge number of people, primarily young boys, employed in cleaning roads of horse dung. The equine industries provided work for tens of thousands of workers ranging from skilled blacksmiths and buggy makers through to those unskilled street sweepers.
Most of those people lost their jobs and their careers became redundant as the age of the motor vehicle took over.
Yet those displaced eventually founds jobs – as mechanics, panel beaters, traffic cops and gas station workers – although for many the dislocation was tough.
The motor car also stimulated a transformation in society as it made travel easier and wide scale logistics viable. Those changes allowed supermarkets, drive-in theatres and fast food chains to develop, all of which were unthinkable at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
Industries like fast food and the drive-in theatre were also driven by the demographic and social changes of the mid-Twentieth century as concepts like the teenager and the consumerist society were developed.
Those changes to demographics are important as well, the developed economies’ aging populations and shifting income patterns are going to determine the shape of society and the workforce even more so than technology.
For businesses and governments assuming the mid Twentieth Century consumerist economy is the future the next wave of change could be a difficult time. Even more so given that model of growth and employment was allowed to continue far beyond its natural life by the 1980s credit boom.
Credit, and banking, will be one of the challenging fields for the next decade as governments struggle with the consequences of guaranteeing institutions during the Global Financial Crisis along with the disruptions of higher frequency algorithmic trading, Big Data analytics and startups with new payments platforms.
The disruptive effect on the banking industry by new technology will be repeated across sectors with startups and new business models challenging everyone from retailers to window cleaners, it’s not just the automotive industry that’s challenges.
While it’s difficult to predict exactly what the world is going to look like in 2025, it is clear that many industries and occupations will be struggling with a very changed world. The task for managers and business owners is to be aware of unexpected threats and opportunities.
Some of the opportunities are going to lie in studying statistics – essential in a world of big data – and learning the basics of software coding. Design is another area that is going to need many new workers.
For today’s workers, it’s more important than ever to be grabbing the skills required to be employed in the industries of the mid Twenty-First Century.
Increasingly the Internet of Things is going to be split into different fields
One thing that’s becoming clear in researching and writing on the Internet of Things is how three distinct strands of the concept exist due to the different needs of industry and the marketplace.
This is articulated best by Bill Ruh, the Vice President of GEs Global Software Center, who in an interview this week – which I’ll post later – suggested the IoT is best divided into the industrial internet, the enterprise internet and the consumer internet.
At the base level the consumer internet includes the bulk of startups and the devices that get most of the publicity; the Apple Watches, Nest thermostats and smart door locks.
Largely operating on a ‘best effort’ basis, consumer IoT vendors don’t guarantee service and security is often an afterthought. This is going to present a few challenges for both consumers and retailers as the inevitable problems arise.
The IT industry vendors are at the next level, the Enterprise internet, where companies like Microsoft, Cisco and VMWear are adapting their businesses to the cloud and Internet of Things.
At this level, which Cisco calls the Internet of Everything, the security and reliability challenges are understood and the practices of the IT and communications industry lend themselves to the widespread transmission of data from smart devices.
Similarly most of the telcos with their machine to machine (M2M) technologies fall into the enterprise internet camp.
While the enterprise vendors are providing robust systems, the IT industry levels of service don’t quite meet the needs of mission – and often life – critical applications found in jet engines, precision manufacturing and most industrial processes.
Providing that level of security, precision, reliability and low latency is where the industrial internet is applied. This is where the companies such as GE and the other big engineering companies come in.
At the industrial internet level it’s far harder for startups to disrupt the existing players as it requires both specialist knowledge of their industry sectors and deep pockets to provide the necessary capital for product development.
However the existing industrial conglomerates don’t have all the skills in house and that’s an opportunity for smaller companies and startups to enter the industry.
The long product times are another aspect of the industrial internet, as Rue points out, GE are still supporting equipment that is over eighty years old. While that equipment will probably never be connected to the internet, the machines being designed today will be expected to have similar lifespans.
While the three different IoTs have their own characteristics, and in many instances overlap, all three are opportunities for savvy developers and entrepreneurs.
The difficulty some businesses, both as vendors and customers, will face with the IoT is applying the wrong technology set to their problems and industry.
Microsoft’s latest Windows roadmap may well be the last hurrah of the old software licensing model
In a post on Microsoft’s blog the company’s VP for Windows, Tony Prophet, yesterday laid out the final line up of the upcoming Windows 10 software.
As previously, Microsoft have decided to spoil the market with choice, offering Home, Pro, Enterprise and Education versions of the operating system along with two different versions of the mobile package and a stripped down product for Internet of Things devices.
In many respects this is Microsoft desperately holding onto the old model of operating systems where a consumer version bundled into a commodity PC offered less than an Enterprise version supplied as part of a lucrative corporate license.
That model still works – Microsoft’s licensing revenue was $19 billion last year – although it is in slow decline although the problem is operating systems are now commoditised and the old position of dominance in the PC industry doesn’t work in a world of cheap, lightweight devices interacting with cloud based services.
One theory running around the tech industry at the moment is that Windows 10 will be the last Microsoft operating system, if that’s true then today’s seven flavours of the software is the last grab at the old licensing model.
How one person’s problem becomes an invention
An old saying is necessity is the mother of invention and nowhere is this shown better than walking the exhibition floor of the Internet of Things World conference in San Francisco today.
The Wallflower is a good example of this, thought up of after the founder had to rush home when his partner thought she’d left the stove on (she hadn’t), he thought there had to be something that could monitor this on the market and when he discovered there wasn’t, he invented it.
Probably the sexiest device on the floor is the Hexo+, an autonomous drone designed for video shots. Use the app to tell you what shot you want and it the drone will take off and video you.
Hexo+ was founded by Xavier de Le Rue, a French professional snowboarder who wanted to get shots of his maneuvers but couldn’t afford a crew or a helicopter to do so. The preprogrammed flight patterns represent the most common camera sequences optimised for the GoPro camera.
Probably the most trivial is the MySwitchMate, a mechanical device that fits over a wall light switch. Set it up and you can use its app to flick your lights on and off.
The device was born out of the founder wanting to remotely control his college dorm lights from his bed. While the market seems to be those who don’t want to get out of bed, its main market are those who would like remotely controlled lights but can’t install a smart lighting system.
What all three of these devices show is how a need by an inventor spurred a product’s development, in that respect the Internet of Things is no different from any other wave of innovation.
So if you wonder “why doesn’t someone sell this?” it might be an opportunity to set up your own business or invent an IoT device to meet that need.
Keeping things simple for the home and selling efficiencies to big business are the way to make money from the IoT
How do companies sell the internet of things to consumers? This was the question at the opening panel of the Internet of Things World conference in San Francisco this morning.
Belkin’s Chief Technology Officer Brian van Harlingen took the lead in the panel stating that the opportunity lies in making sense out of the IoT’s complexity. “With data comes complexity, we have to make it simple for the end user,” said Van Harlingen
Van Harlingen’s view was backed up by Verizon’s Chief Data Scientist, Ashok Srivastava, who understandably sees the challenge of managing the information generated by masses of devices as being an opportunity for his company and data scientists in general.
That masses of data is being generated isn’t surprising seeing the other member of the morning’s panel was Jason Johnson, Co-founder and CEO of smart lock maker August. That the ordinary door lock may be generating masses of data indicates just how much information might be churning around the average smart home in the near future.
It may well be that all of this data and complexity isn’t necessary as Joe Dada, the CEO and founder of smarthome company Insteon, point out. “Leave the network as quiet as you can,” is his advice. “People over-estimate the amount of data that needs to be pushed across the network.”
Dada, a twenty-five year veteran of the smarthome industry, sees the over-complication of the IoT as being a weakness in many of the products and business models being touted today with his company selling their products on being convenient, safe and fun.
While Dada has a successful business model, many of the other business don’t and exactly how to make money from the IoT wasn’t really answered by the panel.
It may well be that for many the answer lies in making existing products better, in talking to Cisco’s Brad Bechtold who runs the networking giant’s Oil and Gas Industry Transformation division estimates that there could be operational savings of up to 11% for the sector through implementing IoT technologies.
With estimates of the oil and gas industry’s size being around four trillion dollars a year, that represents an opportunity of over a hundred billion dollars a year in the one sector alone.
So it may be that the way to sell the Internet of Things into the industrial sector is to point out the operational savings available. Should the promise of substantial cost reductions be realised then it may even trigger a new wave of capital investment as businesses decide it’s easier to upgrade equipment than retrofit it.
The analytics and management aspect will turn out to be lucrative for many businesses as well, however the key to success is going to be demonstrating how these services add value for customers.
For the consumer market however the key probably lies in Joe Dada’s advice – keep it easy, convenient, safe and fun.
Starting a business making IoT hardware is a tough challenge
Yesterday Internet of Things startup Ninja Blocks announced it was shuttering its doors after three years of operations, two successful Kickstarter campaigns and three successful fundraising campaigns that netted $2.4 million.
Ninja blocks aimed to become the centre of the smarthome with its simple controllable device but, as many other startups have found out, the costs and complexities of designing, manufacturing and shipping hardware are not trivial.
Last year I spoke to Ninja Blocks and a similar IoT startup which also failed, Moore’s Cloud, about their opportunities and challenges. In the light of both companies failing they are worth watching again.
Daniel Friedman, CEO of Ninja Blocks outlined the company’s plans along with the limits of crowdfunding.
The CEO of Moore’s Cloud, Mark Pesce, had much stronger views on crowdfunding and its limits.
From the Moore’s Cloud and Ninja Blocks story it would be tempting to conclude that pure IoT hardware startup plays are doomed to failure, however the lessons of companies like Fitbit and the Pebble watch show otherwise.
A very good example of success is Spanish IoT company Libelium whose founder and CEO Alicia Asin told Decoding The New Economy two years ago how the company had started under the shadow of the 2009 economic crisis and thrived since.
The failure of Ninja Blocks and Moore’s Cloud really tell us we’re in the early days of the IoT and the business models and technologies are not certain. It’s also a commentary on the risks involved in startup businesses, as investor Dave McClure says, “not every one will be a unicorn.”
As the markets grow and the technologies evolve we’ll be seeing many more IoT startups, few will become billion dollar unicorns and many will fail. That’s the nature of new industries.
Security continues to be a challenge for Internet of Things vendors
One of the ongoing discussions in the world of the Internet of Things are the security weaknesses in many devices that leave networks vulnerable to rogue devices or malicious hackers.
A good example of this is Craig Hockenberry’s post on his Furbo.org site on how bugs in Apple’s Bonjour software messes with networks.
While Apple won’t say what causes this issue – an ominous point in itself – Hockenberry surmises it’s due to older software in some devices that no longer have updates available, which is another problem facing the IoT.
On top of Hockenberry’s story, a piece in Threat Post reports the Open Smart Grid Protocol has serious security issues.
The writers of the package that’s installed on more than four million smart meters and similar devices worldwide decided to write their own encryption algorithm that has proved easy to break.
So the smart home which might feature both a slew of Apple devices and one of these exposed smart meters has a range of security holes that the occupier has no idea about. This hardly breeds confidence.
As the Internet of Things is rolled out, security is going to have to be at the front of developers’ and vendors’ minds. The stakes are too high for shoddy and ill thought out compromises or for vendors like Apple who rate secrecy over their customers’ security.
Adapting your business to survive change means an open mindset and a wide use of cloud software
A few weeks ago the source of all wisdom for micro-businesses, Flying Solo, and I did a webinar on Future Proofing Your Business.
During the presentation we looked at the big trends that will affect business over the next decade with a focus on some of the demographic, economic and technological changes that are happening today.
The technologies are evolving rapidly and some of those we focused on as being business changing are the driverless car, automation, robotics, the internet of things and cloud computing.
As with all good presentations we took as many audience questions as possible and the feedback was particularly pointed on one topic, “given the degree of automation, where do the jobs come from?”
While to some it might be surprising to hear this from a business audience, it’s very much a valid question given most of the solo operators tuned in are in consulting type roles that will probably be eliminated or affected by algorithms or robotics, if not outsourcing through o-desk, Airtasker or similar services.
Exactly what will be the jobs of the future is a difficult question to answer as predicting what tomorrow will look like is a fraught task, predicting in 1990 that web designers and online analytics would be a growth field ten years later is a good example.
What we can be sure of though is that business and employment does change and evolve around technological advances. The third slide of the presentation shows Sydney’s Circular Quay in the 1920s.
The economy though was still predominantly farm based, in Australia around a quarter of the workforce were in agriculture – in the US 27% of the population were farmers – in both countries today it’s below three percent.
All of those displaced eventually found jobs, although the transition costs were great as John Steinbeck documented in the Grapes of Wrath.
So the key to future proofing your business lies in not being one of Steinbeck’s Oakies and that requires a mental shift, we need to be data literate and deploy the tools that mean our companies are more responsive to changing markets.
One of the keys to business survival in a changing world is to use the right tools, particularly cloud computing services some of which I’ve listed below.
We only touched on a small number of ways that the world is changing, for instance the image illustrating this post is Microsoft’s Holo Lens and we haven’t mentioned Virtual Reality at all. The key is to keep an open and flexible mind.
One of the biggest costs for business is the software for writing letters and working on spreadsheet. There’s free and paid for services that you can use on the cloud that cut your costs and increase your office productivity.
Google Docs
Evernote
Zoho Docs
There’s plenty of free, or cheap, tools to get your name out on the web. Don’t forget to register you business name’s domain though.
In a crowded world good design matters, Canva is a good quick way to get a good looking logo and graphics for your business.
One of the greatest challenges for small business is doing their books and accounting software is a must have for every commercial operation. Online services reduce costs and increase flexibility for businesses of all sizes.
Saasu
Xero
MYOB Business Essentials
CRM software helps you monitor and understand who your customers are and what you’re doing for them.
Backing up is critical for your business. Having an online automated backup helps you ensure essential data is safe.
Sharing files with others helps your business be more efficient as teams can get work done without using the same computer.
Voice over IP, or VoIP, is a massive cost saver and most of them are cloud services.
Running and managing projects is a complex task made much easier with a good project management program to keep track of tasks and time.
Cloud computing and online services are making outsourcing possible for small businesses. With a browser and a credit card, you too can be in the outsourcing business.
The cloud computing war may have been won but the battles for profit continue.
“The cloud has won, the argument is over and any software company that hasn’t moved onto the cloud is doomed,” stated Netsuite CEO Zack Nelson at the Suiteworld 2015 conference in San Jose this week.
Nelson and Netsuite certainly can say their software is selling with revenues increasing thirty percent over the last year, although the company’s overall losses were the same as a year earlier at $22 million.
As with all conferences the focus was on big product announcements with Netsuite showcasing their enhanced Point of Sale services, European data centres and their alliance with Microsoft.
The video appearance of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to announce the partnership covering Azure web services and Office 365 is another step by Nadella to move Microsoft into strategic relationships with key cloud computing companies following another with Dropbox last month and with Netsuite’s fierce rival Salesforce last year.
For Netsuite the partnership offers the opportunity to integrate more tightly into Microsoft’s office productivity and enterprise tools that have been clawing their way back in marketshare after sustained attacks from Google and other cloud services.
In the product offerings, Netsuite was showing its push into ecommerce and retail showing off both its Point Of Sale system and its site builder capabilities with the big boast their back end services are “faster than Amazon’s.”
Taking the game up to Amazon is a big boast and it will be worthwhile seeing how the Seattle based giant responds, certainly for Netsuite’s customers having an e-commerce system that can match the industry leader will be a big attraction.
Data centers are always an issue for cloud computing services with the questions of redundancy, data sovereignty and latency being raised. The announcement that Netsuite will be opening centres in Europe will help the company in those growth markets.
For the Asia Pacific, there are no immediate plans for data centers in the region but the company’s main push is on developing deeper relationships into the Chinese markets with resellers and partners.
The international push is important for Netsuite with the proportion of its non-US revenues being stuck at just over a quarter for each of the last three years with Craig Sullivan, the company’s Senior Vice President for Enterprise & International Products, flagging China, Brazil and Germany as key growth markets in the coming years.
In all three countries the company is betting on partners growing market share through a Most Valued Players and reseller programs aided by the company’s claim the software works natively in 19 different languages.
“We want international users feel like NetSuite was designed for them,” is Sullivan’s ambition for the service’s global operations.
Cloud computing may have won the software wars but there’s still plenty of battles to be fought over who will make the profits from the online software market, a fight not helped by evolving business models.
Suiteworld was a good demonstration of what Netsuite is hoping to fight that battle with. Whether it’s enough to succeed either as a company or a takeover target remains to be seen.
Industry experts believe beacon technologies are being overhyped in the retail sector.
Are beacon technologies being overhyped? Some industry experts believe they are in the retail sector.
This week’s Netsuite Suiteworld conference had a heavy focus on the retail industry and one of the points being strongly made is that beacon technologies are a long way from prime time in the sector.
A reason for this is the current clunkiness of beacon driven apps points out Miya Knights, Senior Research Analyst of IDC Retail Insights, “customers have to go through the rigmarole of downloading apps, accepting permissions and so on. It’s too hard.”
One of the answers to this could be in creating compelling reasons to install the app, at the eBay Innovation Showcase last year the company showed off some of the potential with how a connected sports stadium could make ticketing easier while improving access to food and drink concessions.
However for many stores Knights’ point is going to remain a problem as creating a value proposition that encourages time and attention poor customers to enable apps will be difficult.
On the other hand, it may well be that beacon technologies are currently better suited in being used for the business operations in roles such as stock control and point of sale systems.
For the beacons themselves it’s likely we’re seeing the hype cycle in action with the technology grinding its way to The Peak of Inflated expectations.
Should it be the case that beacons could be about to become unfashionable, then we’ll start to see the technology find its industrial role.
