Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

A unicorn in the wine industry

The wine industry once thought the internet was a cute idea, now companies like Vintank are showing them what it means

“I was a closet tech guy until the 2000s,” says Vintank’s founder Paul Mabray in describing how digital technologies are changing the wine industry to the Decoding The New Economy YouTube channel.

We’d spoken to Paul before about the forces changing the wine industry and visiting him in the Napa Valley gives some perspective on the opportunity the sector has in capturing the enthusiastic US wine market.

Paul’s first venture into wine technology was with Inertia Beverage Group in 2002, “when I started Inertia I said ‘hey, there’s this thing called the internet'”, Mabray recalls. “They said ‘hey Paul you’re so cute, the internet won’t be around in a couple of years.'”

The internet being a fad turned out not to be the case and Vintank evolved out of the rising importance of social media to industries like wineries.

“Vintank is the mission control of social media, the one stop engagement platform for the wine industry,” says Paul of his social media listening service which he and co-founder James Jory established in 2009.

Wine is lagging other industries in adopting social media and other digital technologies because it’s avoided many of the disruptions other sectors have had to deal with.

“The wine industry is the last industry that hasn’t been changed by the internet,” Mabray says. “If you look at hotels with expedia.com or restaurants with Yelp or Open Table, that hasn’t happened yet.”

A key facet of Vintank is its use of the freemium business model in offering a basic service for free; a common practice in the consumer (B2C) market but fairly rare in business (B2C) software services.

“It’s a very different way to do freemium in B2B. Freemium in B2C you do mass adoption — that tiny fraction that pay makes it profitable because so many people have it.”

“In the B2B freemium model what you have to do is distribute it for free and then you measure the usage; who is using it the most is where you send the sales team in.”

For Mabray, we’re in early days of using digital media and the wine industry is one of the sectors that needs to adopt the technologies quickly: “The driver for me is this horribly complex problem that needs to be solved — the wine industry needs digital to survive.”

TVs unchanging face

Apple’s CEO considers how long the TV industry can go without disruption

In the wake of Apple’s big announcements this week, CEO Tim Cook has an interview with US talk show host Charlie Rose about the company and its strategy.

One of the notable views in the clips that have been released so far is how Cook sees television being stuck in the 1970s.

Apple has been trying to reinvent TV for nearly a decade and, despite consumers watching more content on their computers, the television industry’s revenues continue to stand up.

Cook’s almost certainly right that television is moribund, but it’s a medium that for the moment seems resistant to disruption.

How long television can stave off change might be one of the defining questions of the entertainment industry.

Changing the payments industry

The effects of Apple Pay are being felt by the payments industry

It didn’t take long for the effects of Apple’s payment service to be felt by the industry, within a day of the announcement Bloomberg reported Apple is negotiating with US banks to shift transaction fees from merchants.

At the same time Bank Innovation reports the major credit card companies are considering changing the definition of ‘cardholder present’ rules which would make app based purchases cheaper.

The changes Apple Pay is bringing in is part of a wider move to easier, frictionless commerce as Stripe co-founder John Collison discussed on this site last week.

For the banks and credit card companies this means a very different operating environment. What was once a very profitable business is now changing rapidly and profits may not be so easy to come by.

Apple and the long game

Apple’s real game is in controlling a large part of the payments industry and the internet of things. The iPhone6 and watch are key steps in that strategy.

As expected, Apple announced their new range of iPhones and a smart watch today with many digital trees being felled as the tech media falls over to describe all the shiny features of the new devices.

Buried in Apple’s announcements though are the company’s real long game in payments and the Internet of Things.

For the IoT, the various ‘kits’ Apple have announced in the last year — HomeKit, HealthKit and now CloudKit — are the serious plays in this space as they bundle together programs, devices and data streams across health and smarthome applications.

CloudKit moves Apple onto another level as it makes it easier for developers to build back end applications that tie into smart devices; even if someone isn’t using Apple equipment they still may find themselves firmly in the walled garden of Cuptertino.

The long awaiting release of Apple Pay leverages iTunes’ strength as a payment platform, bundling a secure chip into the new iPhone adds to the company’s pitch of being a trusted partner to merchants and payments processors.

What today’s announcements of new hardware, software and APIs indicate is Apple’s shoring up the perimeters of its walled garden.

For it’s competitors, this raises the ante; Google Wallet has nothing like the market penetration or customer acceptance that iTunes has and earlier this week Amazon effectively admitted the Fire smartphone has been a failure by slashing prices. Facebook has made promising noises about payments but still remains locked in an advertising driven business model.

While there’s no doubt the new iPhone will be a success, although the jury is out on the smart watch, Apple’s real game is in controlling a large part of the payments industry and the internet of things. Today’s announcements are a key step in that strategy.

Beating the 1980s business model

Overturning the payment industry’s 1980s business model gives the opportunity to create new industries believes Stripe co-founder John Collison

Interviewing Stripe co-founder John Collison in the company’s crowded, noisy lunch room in San Francisco’s Mission District is a good place to appreciate how quickly the online payment service has grown since it was founded three years ago.

Stripe was founded after twenty-four year old Collison and his brother Patrick encountered problems with online payments in their previous businesses, “we came to Stripe because we had built apps and webservices before and it was phenomenally difficult to take a product you had built and turn it into a business.”

“At the time you had two options; you could turn your business over to PayPal, which was problematic for a whole bunch of reasons, or you’d build something from scratch.”

“It was clear to us that neither of the options were very good so we went about building something better.”

Silicon Valley’s strengths

Since its establishment Stripe has grown from ten employees to 150, something the founder believes shows the strength of California’s Bay Area over areas like Collison’s native Ireland.

“One of the things that I like about Silicon Valley is that people here tend to be relatively risk tolerant. Joining an unknown internet payments company three years ago, most people would say ‘you’re out of your mind’. But the psyche around here is that’s a reasonable thing to do.”

Another aspect that attracts Collison to San Francisco is that most of his employees at Stripe have run their own businesses or startups themselves. Having a workforce of risk tolerant, independent self starters makes it easier to manage a fast growth company.

Pitching for funding

The Bay Area’s appetite for risk is reflected in how investors look at businesses; “in the startup world, people like to maximize the opportunity rather than reduce the risk,” observes Collison.

Collison’s advice for startups seeking funding is to get have users on board that validates the idea, “when we pitched Peter Thiel we had production user for four or five months. What made us think there was something here was that those users were really passionate.”

The other attraction for Thiel and other members of the ‘PayPal mafia’ – Thiel’s fellow PayPal founders Elon Musk and Max Levchin are also investors in Stripe – was their first hand dealings with the problem of online payments.

“With the PayPal guys specifically, they really get this. Early on this was what they were trying to do with PayPal – make it easy for people to move money around the world.”

Entering the era of mobile commerce

The problem today that Collison sees with PayPal is that it is a product based on a desktop view of online commerce in a time where the industry is moving to mobile.

“One of the things that has held online commerce back for so long is the purchasing experience has such a high barrier to it.”

”We’ve replicated the mail order form on the internet. It feels to me that in five to ten years time we will not be in the same world with people like Google and Facebook improving the identity story. That’s exciting because that helps merchants sell more.”

“That whole model comes from a desktop era so if your building a lyft or a mobile site it doesn’t make much sense.”

Beating the 1980s business model

For the credit card and banking industry, the payments sector is even further behind. Collison believes that until recently the payments industry was based upon a 1980s business model where the costs of inefficiency were pushed onto merchants and small business.

“All the banks and companies that offered services at the time were operating in the 1980s,” says Collison. “The business model was based on the old way of your customers being people within a fifteen block radius, on the internet your customer base is the whole world.”

Building new industries

With Stripe Collison sees an opportunity for new industries to develop out of easier ways of collecting payments, particularly given much of the world’s population in areas like Africa and China doesn’t have credit cards.

“If we just building a business to take transactions from PayPal and get them onto Stripe, that’s not that interesting. What is interesting is if we can create new types of transactions that would not have existed otherwise.”

“By providing better infrastructure for anyone to build a global business. That will change the kind of things people will build.”

Business benefits from blogging

Blogging can be useful tool for a savvy business

This post is the final of a series of four sponsored stories brought to you by Nuffnang.

Boring is the comment often used about business websites, however smart companies are using blogs to spice up their sites and boost marketing, customer retention and employee engagement.

A blog can make a company’s website more dynamic and a destination for visitors, it’s an opportunity for an organisation to demonstrate its depth of expertise and the qualification of its staff.

Best at this are the big global companies like GE, Cisco and IBM that have large pools of experts who can contribute to the company blog. These enterprise blogs are sprawling sites that cover multiple markets and industries which the companies operate across.

More than a marketing tool

For smaller tech companies, particularly Silicon Valley startups, their blogs have become vital marketing platforms where they often describe the company’s journey and new features being added.

Some companies, like Uber and Nest, use the company blog as their press channels with entries acting as media releases. This is particularly useful for smaller businesses without a PR agency or in house communications people.

At a more tactical level, blogs can be used as a weapon in a fight for marketshare. One of the toughest battles on the internet at the moment is going on between accounting software companies MYOB and Xero and their blogs are at the forefront of this fight.

In this battle MYOB are the incumbent with over a million users in the Australian business accounting market and a small army of Certified Consultants to help clients with using the software while Xero is the well funded cloud computing service that grew its Australian customer base by nearly 50% to 147,000 so far this year.

Small business thought leadership

So the battle is intense with both companies using their blogs to show their thought leadership in the small business space. Both of the blogs illustrate each company’s strengths and weaknesses.

MYOB’s blog is the longest standing and is more of a generalist overview of small business and accounting issues while Xero’s focuses on the new features being added to the product, both have fiercely passionate followers which shows in the comments fields of their blogs.

Blogs though need not be about pure marketing or advertising functions, in fact the best small business ones are those that just tell their customers what’s on. These are particularly good for the hospitality and retail industries.

One plus with business blogs is they help employees understand their business better, particularly when staff are invited to contribute.

Blogging isn’t just about lonely geeks or bored mums sitting in their spare rooms. A well thought out business blog can be a great tool for engaging existing customers, motivating staff and building new markets.

How Apple will have to think differently about the smartwatch

How Apple will have to think different about the smartwatch

Unsurprisingly the hype ahead of Tuesday’s media announcement by Apple is reaching a crescendo, with the consensus being that a smart watch will be the day’s main announcement.

The constant stream of targeted leaks by Apple to friendly outlets is quite tiring, however one thing that will be fascinating if all the stories are true is the software the device will run.

As Microsoft have discovered, the idea of running the same operating system across all devices just doesn’t work.

While how users interact with the devices will be the main factor, the most immediate problem will be power. If Apple Insider’s report that prototypes need to be recharged twice a day is true, then the limitations of smaller batteries are going to be considerable and software is going to have to be much more stingy with power usage.

The other big challenge for the iWatch, if that’s what it’s called, is the entire global watch market is a tiny fraction of the smartphone industry so expectations Apple’s new product will replace smartphones and tablets as a huge growth driver for the company are probably misguided.

So it’s good for Apple and its acolytes that the iPhone6 will probably be announced as well. If this has the features expected, then its likely to give the company’s slowing smartphone sales a boost.

Regardless of what’s announced on Wednesday, Apple does have the luxury of being one of the most profitable and richest companies on the planet. if a smartwatch is the major new product they have the resources and time to finesse the product and its software.

Making the case for engineers

Engineers need to start arguing the case for their profession

“It’s important to keep the engineers under control as they don’t understand costs,” a tech industry commentator said to me last week.

That was an interesting view and one that’s at odds with the core role of engineers – engineering is applied science where the job description is to create something within the sponsor’s scope, time and cost requirements.

It’s rare that a project doesn’t have cost constraints and it’s a very junior engineer who won’t be aware of those and how expenses are tracking against forecasts during the assignment. It’s a core role of the job.

Engineers as financial naifs

How this view of engineers being financial naïfs has developed is interesting in itself; there’s three factors that drove that commentator’s view.

The first factor is the financiers and accountants have hijacked project planning and management – sort of like how marketers have overrun the social media sector – so it is in their interest to portray their professions as being the only people who can be trusted to watch the books.

Giving the power of managing projects to the financiers has tragic results for many projects; invariably the money men misunderstand the costs required to meet a project’s scope resulting in a substandard result or, paradoxically, the project running massively over budget.

IT industry failures

The IT industry’s behaviour is a second factor which in itself can be split into two; the startup community’s model and the ‘rob the client’ mentality of the major outsourcing companies.

One of the greatest business failures of the last thirty years has been IT outsourcing where enterprises have essentially written blank cheques to the global outsourcing firms to save computing costs.

Because most of those projects have been run by moneymen with little understanding – despite their hubris – of either the business’ needs or the role of information technology in the organisation the results have often been catastrophic for shareholder or taxpayers, although very good for the salespeople and managers of the global outsourcing companies.

Usually a good indicator of project doomed to failure is when a CEO or minister announces the scheme with the justification it will save an improbably large amount of money for the organisation; tears usually follow.

The startup community’s attitude to project management has also twisted the engineer’s role. While there are some ventures that keep a very canny eye upon costs and deliverables – these are often the successful ones – many of the high profile, big funded companies take the attitude that engineers should focus on code while costs are a concern for founders and financiers.

In that view, the software engineers don’t have to worry about costs – it is none of their business.

Finally there’s a cultural element and it’s notable that the commentator speaking to me was Australian.

Australian mediocrity

One of the traits of modern Australian management is the culture of mediocrity and unaccountability that has crept into the nation’s business leadership from the early 1990s onwards. Tolerance of over budget or failed projects has become the cultural norm.

Probably the best example of this was the deeply troubled National Broadband Network currently struggling to stay alive in the face of a restructured management, government hostility and community indifference. Both the previous and current management have shown themselves to be particularly unsuited to meeting the engineering and contractual challenges of the project.

Interestingly, the engineers get blamed for the management’s hapless inability to deliver the project on time, budget or within the project scope.

The perverse, and tragic, thing about the NBN is had managers listened to wise voices from the engineering and construction communities in the early days the scheme would have had a chance of succeeding despite the political incompetence and bastardry that surrounded it.

Squandered resources

As the western world and developed economies move into more constrained times squandering resources on poorly thought out or badly managed projects is becoming an unaffordable luxury.

Engineers need to make the case they are not just a bunch of technology obsessed geeks implementing unrealistic and uneconomic solutions. Getting projects built properly is too important to be left to the accountants.

Image from Seattle municipal archives image of Engineers planning a freeway through Flickr

Skipping the trough of disillusionment

Will the IoT have a smooth transition from the top of Gartner’s hype cycle to general acceptance?

When consulting group Gartner placed the Internet of Things at the peak of their hype cycle last month it raised concerns that the technologies might be about to take a tumble.

Speaking to Networked Globe this week in San Jose; Maciej Kranz, VP and GM of Cisco’s technology group described how he believes the IoT’s evolution from the top of the hype cycle to the plateau of acceptance will be quick.

“We’re happy that Gartner put IoT on top as it means there’s awareness,” said Kranz. “We hope to prove Gartner wrong, that in IoT we don’t go through the classic hype cycle we go from hype into reality.”

Kranz’s reasoning while the IoT will suffer a short spell, if any at all, in Gartner’s ‘trough of disillusionment’ is because the major industry players are working closely together to build the sector and its standards.

“Where we think it’s a little bit different from some of the other hype cycles than some of the other hype cycles is that we continue to work very close at the industry,” Kranz explained.

“Because we’re all working as an industry to make it real it will go through the disillusionment and quickly into a reality.”

This may well turn out to be true if the big players like Cisco and GE in the industrial space along with companies such as Google and Apple in the consumer sector stay committed to the concept. If the major vendors stay the course, then it’s likely IoT technologies won’t suffer much at all.

Another aspect in the IoT’s favour is that it isn’t really a specific technology or product at all, instead being more of a concept bought about by various technologies such as home automation, industrial controls and cloud computing all reaching maturity.

Rather than one separate item on the Gartner hype cycle, the IoT is really made of dozens of different technologies that are mostly on the ‘plateau of acceptance’ themselves.

Kranz sees Gartner’s listing of the company as being on the top of the hype cycle as being a vindication for how the IoT has been adopted by industry and the community, “it is remarkable how we’ve gone in the last nine months from people saying it’s a vision to n

Making business more flexible with cloud computing

Businesses not fully using cloud computing are being left behind

This post is third in a series of four sponsored stories brought to you by Nuffnang.

One of the challenges for a growing business is the cost of equipping new workers, cloud computing is making this easier and making companies more flexible.

Not so long ago, the cost of setting up a new staff member with a computer, software and all the other oncosts was prohibitive. In industries like architecture, design or Engineering it was quite possible to spend $30,000 on a fully equipped workstation.

For most businesses it was quite typical to send $3,000 on a PC fitted out with Microsoft Office, line of business software and associated IT setup costs.

Often the employee costs were even higher as they spent days sitting around waiting for the IT people to get around to setting up an account or a new license to arrive for the critical business software tools.

For businesses with varying workflows — particularly those in project based industries like designers and architects — these costs were a major hassle if you were only taking on a contractor or temporary worker for a few weeks. It either meant wasting capital on expensive equipment that was unused most of the time or paying outrageous rental fees.

With the arrival of cloud computing all of this changed and the relatively cheap cost of setting up new workers is now one of the reasons why it’s so easy to start a business.

Another benefit of cloud computing is it allows staff to work from home and on the road. Not so long ago, remote working was a complex and expensive thing to set up, now the cloud services don’t care where you’re connected.

The modern cloud computing model is coming up to being a decade old and smart businesses are using its benefits to their advantage, those who haven’t explored the benefits are being left behind.

Tipping and mobile payments

During the recent switch over to chip and pin payments, many in the restaurant industry feared that tips would fall and waitstaff would lose jobs, the reality is somewhat different claims PayPal.

This post is the second in a series of four sponsored stories brought to you by Nuffnang.

During the recent switch over to chip and pin payments, many in the restaurant industry feared that tips would fall and waitstaff would lose jobs, the reality is somewhat different claims PayPal.

Last week I had the opportunity to tour the PayPal Innovation Centre in San Jose where they showed off the work they are doing in the retail and hospitality industries to change payment systems.

One of the products they showed was their Pay At Table app that integrates into a café or restaurant’s point of sale system and allows customers to pay their bills immediately.

The immediate reaction to this has been resistance from restaurant managers who were worried customers to skip without paying. For waitstaff, the worry was they could be replaced by an app.

It turns out the technology has had a different effect, the productivity of floor staff in the establishments where the app has been trialled has improved substantially.

“In a typical café it takes around ten minutes to get the check,” says the lead demonstrator of the Innovation Center, Michael Chaplin. “We find that freeing waitstaff up to help customers and letting them pay their bills faster means everybody is happier.”

With that ten minute per table improvement, management have found customers’ satisfaction has improved and the waitstaff have seen tips improve – partly because diners are happy and also because the tipping is integrated into the payment, calculating an appropriate gratuity is always a hassle in the United States.

That ease of payment from mobile phone and table apps is rolling across industries, it’s not just limited to the hospitality sector. Increasingly these technologies are being used by tradespeople, retailers and across the service industries

Increased productivity is more than just saving money and reducing staff numbers, it’s about giving the customer a more seamless and easy experience.

All business need to think carefully about how they can use technology to improve their service and increase revenues.