Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Uber’s ride into the future

In the wake of a billion dollar fund raising, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick promises to change the company’s culture.

Having just raised $1.2 billion in funding, Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick has written of the company’s next steps.

Kalanick flags the Asia Pacific as being the focus for the company with the latest fund raising which values the business as currently being worth over forty billion dollars.

That valuation is a massive achievement for a five year old business, with the growth pains involved being one highlighted in Kalanick’s post.

This kind of growth has also come with significant growing pains. The events of the recent weeks have shown us that we also need to invest in internal growth and change. Acknowledging mistakes and learning from them are the first steps. We are collaborating across the company and seeking counsel from those who have gone through similar challenges to allow us to refine and change where needed.

One of the big challenges for a high growth business is managing that growth; systems that work well for a ten person organisation with a few hundred clients fall over when you have a hundred staff, thousands of contractors and millions of customers.

Probably the biggest challenge for businesses like Uber is privacy; what’s clear is the ‘God View’ that allowed the company’s staff to monitor customers and drivers has been abused and is too easily accessed by employees. Tightening data security is going to be one of the major tasks for business.

Fortunately, taking swift action is where Uber shines, and we will be making changes in the months ahead. Done right, it will lead to a smarter and more humble company that sets new standards in data privacy, gives back more to the cities we serve and defines and refines our company culture effectively.

‘Giving more back to cities’ flags what could be a new strategy for growth in places where regulators and governments have been hostile to Uber. One of the reasons for Uber’s success in Sydney for example has been the utter disgust the general population and business community has for the local taxi companies, showing Uber as a good corporate citizen could help in more hostile European markets.

While Kalanick identifies the Asia Pacific as being the big growth market he doesn’t identify in what fields; it’s hard not to think Uber’s software has more potential in logistics than hire car dispatch and this is an area where the company could find more opportunities to expand the company’s services.

Regardless of the direction Kalanick decides to take Uber, the company is cashed up and ready to expand. As long as management keeps the confidence of investors, the business’ fate is in it’s own hands.

Uber is probably the most fascinating and complex of this generation of tech startups, Kalanick’s post shows it’s story has a long way to play out.

Customer service and the internet of things

A Verizon and Harvard Business Review of the Internet of Things market is a useful guide to the sector’s future.

Improved customer service is the main reason for companies investing in the internet of things reports the Harvard Business Review.

Having surveyed 269 businesses for their Internet of Things: Science Fiction or Business Fact? report commissioned by US telco Verizon, the Harvard Business Review team found 51% of companies expected improved customer service as being the main result from their IoT deployment.

Of those who have deployed IoT technologies, 62% reported they had seen improved customer responsiveness with authors citing jet engine manufacturers, share car services and stock feed companies having benefiting from their investments.

Tying together technologies that until recently have been stand alone is the key part of the returns realised by companies, allowing older monitoring systems to work better together and increase the value of the data they gather.

IoT can enable “an incredible unlocking of information about processes that companies never had before,” said Vernon Turner, senior vice president of research and IoT executive lead at International Data Corp. (IDC). Companies that take the time to review and analyze these workflows will quickly find that there are significant opportunities to be found, such as increased efficiency. But the biggest change IoT brings to consumer companies is the increased contact with customers, Turner said.

Of the IoT investments, the main area nominated for companies in the next year is asset tracking with 36% of respondents saying that will be their main focus. Combined with the 19% looking at fleet management, it shows that sector will probably the most lucrative for businesses servicing the IoT market.

Risks in the IoT

While tying together these technologies brings a lot of opportunities there’s no shortage of risks as devices that were never intended to be connected to the net are suddenly part of the global network. The survey shows some managers are aware of the risks that the IoT presents to their businesses with 46 percent citing privacy and regulatory compliance as being risks.

Another challenge facing IoT deployments is a lack of skills with two out of five respondents flagging they can’t find workers with the skillsets needed to leverage IoT data. The task of managing the volumes of data also worries a third of the managers surveyed.

The Verizon and HBR survey shows that managers and businesses are still in the early days of understanding the tasks and challenges presented by the internet of things — one suspects that were managers fully across the privacy and security implications the number of respondents flagging concerns would be close to one hundred percent.

For companies like Verizon who are catering to the M2M and IoT marketplaces this survey is a handy roadmap that lays out the market opportunities for the next two years.

Acknowledging the human costs of disruption

Disruption and change come at a human cost that we need to acknowledge

As we talk of the dramatic changes facing business and society today it’s worthwhile noting a much greater displacement happened in the Twentieth Century as electricity, the motor car and communications drove the greatest increase in standards of living that humans have ever seen.

Our great-great grandparents lived through a period of change far greater than that we will see as their lives and communities were radically transformed.

Many common jobs in the early 1900s had ceased to exist by the middle of the century as cars replaced horses, mains electricity replaced town gas and refrigeration changed shopping habits. In the second half of the century affordable motor vehicles and television saw our cities reshaped around suburban life, a process now being reversed.

The structural change to economies saw a shift in population and jobs; a hundred years ago thirty percent of the US labor force was employed in agriculture, today it’s around two percent. Despite the shift, jobs were eventually found for those displaced from farms.

Shifting from an agricultural economy to an industrial society didn’t come without costs however, the price paid by the affected communities and individuals was huge as documented by Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Dorothea Lange’s photos.

While it’s unlikely we’ll see the deprivation of The Great Depression repeated in a modern welfare state, it’s important to recognise the real human costs of technological change. For politicians and community leaders it could define how history judges them.

Rigging the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things offers many new opportunities for hackers

Hackers are infiltrating public companies to gain an edge on Wall Street warns a story on financial website Finextra.

This is not news, companies’ networks have been the target of insider traders since the early days of corporate computing. What is different today though are the nature of the risks as Chinese and even North Korean hackers are probing networks containing vast amounts of information to find weaknesses and confidential information.

For insider traders, it may be the internet of things turns out to be a boon. By hijacking delivery or supply data, traders may have an advantage over the market.

Things could get very nasty if those hackers subtly alter the data, say over reporting production yields, so a company gives the wrong income guidance based on faulty information.

Security is one of the big issues facing the internet of things sector and the consequences of poorly protected sensors or systems could be immense when governments, businesses and communities come to rely on a stream of data they can trust.

The bad guys are only just starting to explore the possibilities of the connected world.

Amazon solves its labour problems with robots

It looks like Amazon has found a solution to their distribution centre labour problems — replace the staff with robots.

A wired magazine article features the e-commerce giant’s new distribution centre east of San Francisco that is run largely by robots.

With its employment practice being an ongoing PR sore for Amazon, it looks like Jeff Bezos has found the solution to that problem.

For the moment the warehouse in Tracy, California still employs 4,000 workers during peak periods but it’s not hard to see how Amazon is working towards dramatically reducing that head count.

Building a startup community

It takes more than just cheerleading to build a startup community believes startup guru Mark Suster

Some interesting thoughts from startup guru Mark Suster on what it takes to build a tech startup community.

In Suster’s view, just being cheerleaders is not enough; a viable industry hub needs a combination of capital, resources and skills. It’s not an easy environment to create and one that governments alone cannot do.

Crowdfunding as product testing

Sony’s FES watch shows the future for companies using crowdfunding to develop new products

A story from the Wall Street Journal describes how Sony have crowfunded their FES watch project, a smartwatch with an electronic paper wrist strap.

Sony’s decision to crowdfund new projects is fascinating, not least because it gives researchers and entreprenuerial employees the opportunity to commercialise projects at little cost or risk to the company but also as a powerful way to judge the market demand for an idea.

The FES watch campaign is good example how companies, big and small, can use crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. As we see more creative applications of the two concepts we may well see some radically new management methods and business models arise.

Where will the digital leaders come from?

Exactly what is digital leadership?

Last Thursday in Sydney a group of industry groups, telcos and local councils launched their 2030 Communications Visions initiative; a project “to shape a digital vision and set of goals for Australia to achieve global digital age leadership”.

The project is a worthy one, particularly given the failure of Australia’s National Broadband Network, which I’m writing about early next week in Technology Spectator however one thing that bugs me is what exactly is ‘digital age leadership’.

If we look at the rollout of technologies like the motor car, electricity or telephone through the Twentieth Century it was a mix of private companies, community groups and governments that championed the development of roads, mains power and phone systems. People either demanded their towns became connected or raised the capital to do it themselves.

So on one level, the champions need to be us. We have to lead our communities and industries by using the technologies and showing what can be done, that also makes our businesses more likely to succeed in the future.

On another level, we need to consider the genuine leaders of the ‘electrical age’ or ‘motor car age’; people like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford built businesses that led the world and still exist today.

For countries, it’s no coincidence that the United States is the richest nation on the planet after having most of the leading business in their industries over the last hundred years.

That latter point is really what the Digital Visions project is about; do Australians want to remain a wealthy nation in the Twenty First Century?

Governments have a role in this, as the UK is showing, and political leaders need to be encouraged to take the digital economy however governments can only do so much and successes like Silicon Valley are more a fortunate by product of spending rather than the consequence of strategic policy.

Ultimately, leadership starts with us — we can’t afford to wait for governments, big business or someone else to take the reigns.

The Economist’s World in 2015

The Economist’s predictions for 2015 are a mixed bag

One of the annual features in The Economist is it’s World In… edition where the magazine makes predictions on the year ahead.

For 2015 the magazine has its usual wide range predictions; some safe, some risky and some out of left field, like Papua New Guinea topping the world growth lists for next year on the back on a new LNG plant comping online.

Economy: The fastest-growing economy in the world in 2015 will be Papua New Guinea, where GDP will expand by nearly 15%. China will drop its growth target to 7% (from 7.5%). Overall, global growth will be higher in 2015 (3.8%) than in 2014 (3.2%).

Business: Singapore tops the Economist Intelligence Unit’s global business environment rankings for 2015. Watch out for Xiaomi, a Chinese mobile-phone maker, as it continues its meteoric rise and goes global. And expect a welcome return, at least in some places, to the nine-to-five culture in the

Interest rates: In the United States and Britain, where growth is relatively robust and unemployment is coming down, interests rates will start to rise in 2015, ending a long period of ultra-low rates. In the euro zone and Japan, by contrast, central banks will continue to ease monetary policy, to battle against deflation. The diverging paths of the main central banks will lead to more volatility in equity,

Statistical landmarks: It will be a year of striking “crossovers”, as America overtakes Saudi Arabia to become the world’s biggest oil producer, China overtakes America to become the world’s biggest economy (measured at purchasing-power parity) and Facebook overtakes China in terms of its

Elections: Britain will have another hung parliament after its general election in May, with David
Cameron probably remaining prime minister. But Canada’s leadership is likely to change hands in an October election, with the Liberals’ Justin Trudeau taking the helm.

The environment: A deal of sorts will emerge from the Paris summit in December 2015. Hydrogen- powered cars will hit the road, as Toyota and Honda launch the first mass-market fuel-cell models. And Australia will be in the global spotlight as the UN decides whether the Great Barrier Reef should be put on the endangered list.

Technology: “Wearable” technology will be all the rage, thanks to the launch of the Apple Watch and other devices. Virtual-reality firms will overcome the cost and technology problems that have prevented their products from becoming mass-market hits. And mobile phones will become mind-readers, thanks to “anticipatory computing”, which enables them to trawl their users’ data to predict events

Sport: Australia will win the cricket World Cup, New Zealand will win the rugby World Cup and the United States will win the women’s football World Cup.

Space: America’s New Horizons spacecraft will fly by Pluto, after a journey of nearly nine years – maybe igniting a campaign to reinstate Pluto as a fully-fledged planet from its current “dwarf” status.

Some of the predictions are obvious while others may be a bit longer term than 2015. Overall it’s an interesting range of predictions and in the next few days I’ll post an interview with two of The Economist’s editors, Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran and Daniel Franklin, justifying their forecasts for the year ahead.

Where will the jobs come from? ABC Nightlife radio

The future of work in an age of robots and algorithms is this month’s Nightlife technology radio spot

If you missed the program it’s available from the Soundcloud site.

Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy on ABC Nightlife across Australia from 10pm Australian Eastern time on Thursday, November 27 to discuss how technology affects your business and life.

Last week a US company showed off its robotic security guard, with the boast it costs less than half the wages of a human officer. It isn’t just security guards, baristas or taxi drivers, many knowledge based jobs — from call centre workers to lawyers — can be done by computer programs, or algorithms.

Even the building industry isn’t immune from the robots as 3D printing moves into making houses by squeezing concrete out of computer controlled nozzles.

In almost every occupation technology is changing the way we work and reducing the number of workers needed to do a job. So where next for employment in the Twenty-first Century?

Meet the K-5 robot security guard

For this month’s Nightlife we’ll be discussing how the robots and algorithms are taking over the workplace and what this means for our communities and businesses.

Join us

Tune in on your local ABC radio station from 10pm Australian Eastern Summer time or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

A non toxic form of midlife crisis — Audible CEO and founder Don Katz

In an interview with Decoding The New Economy, Katz describes a startup journey that covers all the bases.

“I had what my wife describes as non toxic form of midlife crisis,” says Don Katz of Audible, the company he founded in 1994 and remains CEO of today. In an interview with Decoding The New Economy, Katz describes a startup journey that covers all the bases.

As Rolling Stone’s European correspondent Katz was engaged to write a book in the early 1990s about how digital technologies were changing music and what he realised was the industry was about to go through a fundamental change.

“I had a wonderful career as a writer, I was a long form magazine writer in the glory days of ten thousand word articles,” Katz says of his life in journalism. A book commission lead him to research the future of digital distribution of written works.

Survival in the digital economy

One of the driving ideas was how creators can sustain themselves in the digital economy, “my content was already being ripped off on the Unix internet and I thought ‘how will the profession creative class sustain themselves if there’s no ability to control the distribution?'”

Having founded Audible in 1995 at a time when few people were downloading or even using the net, Katz was in the box seat of the first tech boom and subsequent tech wreck in 2001.

At the peak of the dot com boom Audible was floated on the NASDAQ stock market, “In 1999 good companies that were leading categories went public and got massive amounts of free capital.” Katz recalls, “It was one of those weird moments, there were 1500 publicly listed internet companies at the beginning of 2000 and there were 140 by 2003.”

Surviving the dot com bust

Katz puts the company’s survival during that period to a conservative attitude towards capital and the alliances he had created with the industry’s major players — at one stage Microsoft held a 37% share in the company and Katz was one of Steve Jobs’ confidants during the early development of the iPod.

Eventually one of those alliances became critical when Katz became bored with running a listed company, “it was an amazing adventure being a public company CEO for nine and a half years. It was very exciting and an honour to serve shareholders.”

Katz’s patience ran out with being a public company CEO when automated trading came to dominate the daily operations of management, “suddenly you had this metaphysical sense of ‘who are you working for if someone wants volatility?’ That suddenly got old.”

Audible already had a relationship with Amazon who had taken five percent of the business in 2000 in return for bundling audio book links on the ecommerce giant’s book pages. Katz also found Amazon founder Jeff Bezo’s long term view towards investment and returns a much more satisfying business model than the day to day grind of meeting short term shareholder demands.

In early 2008 Amazon bought Audible for $300 million and retained Katz as the company’s CEO.

Building new startups

For new startups, Katz advises “make an absolutely fearless inventory of what you know is true about this idea and what you’re good at and what you’re not good at.”

“You need to have people you can trust and believe in. Beyond that, be very sober about business models that are sustainable. There’s a lot mistakes that people make where you’re solving a problem in a piece of a value chain that isn’t sustainable. It’s easy to get confused about who the customer is.”

“Figure out who the real customer is. Sometime people overplay the fact that the customer is the capital, the capital will come if people have the innovation and the passion.”

Hiding Hollywood

Changing maps devalues the trust in location services

What it comes maps, trust is everything. If you’re uncertain about what a map tells you then it’s pretty close to useless.

Gizmodo has an interesting story of how tourism and residents clash underneath the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles with the resultant changes to Google Maps and Garmin GPS systems.

It’s surprising that Google, Garmin and other mapping services have agreed to create misleading maps as this devalues the trust in their services.

That’s their business choice though, although in the long term this going to deeply hurt trust in their maps.