Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Apple’s security challenge

As Apple move into the internet of things, they are going to have to take cloud security more seriously.

This week’s news about celebrities’ personal photos being stolen from their iCloud accounts would be irritating Apple ahead of their September 9 media event.

Unfortunately for Apple they seemed to have walked into this by making things convenient for users rather than enforcing strong security measures.

As Arik Hesseldahl in Re/Code describes, this breach was probably due to Apple not encouraging two factor authentication and not limiting the number of password guesses.

The latter is particularly irritating as it shouldn’t be hard for a system to pick when a brute force attack — a computer guessing a password millions of times a second — is being staged against a user.

It’s also trivial to limit the number of guesses as most other services do.

For users, the best protection is to have complex passwords which reduces the effectiveness of brute force attacks. It’s also worthwhile being careful with your personal nudie photos.

The consequences of having your iCloud account compromised are more than just losing your embarrassing photos, Wired’s Mat Honan had his entire digital life hijacked through this method two years ago.

With Apple aspiring to control the smarthome and smartcar markets, the consequences of accounts being breached becomes exponentially greater. These are issues Apple and the rest of the internet of things industry need to take seriously.

Hopefully at Apple’s big media event next week, some brave journalist will stand out of the assembled masses of sycophant hacks and ask CEO Tim Cook some hard questions about security on the shiny new iDevices.

When disruption is more than a buzzword

As economies become more dependent on electronics, the risk of disruption becomes greater.

A briefcase sized device could wreak havoc in today’s networked world warns William Radasky in the IEEE Journal.

Fans of the wave of nuclear war movies like The War Game or The Day After will remember the first bomb detonated in the attacks was a high level explosion designed to knock out electronic equipment.

The resultant Electro Magnetic Pulse leaves everything from military radar to civilian communications systems unusable.

In both The Day After and The War Game the high altitude detonations over Rochester and Kansas City destroyed motor cars’ ignitions leaving a key part of the nation’s infrastructure paralysed.

Unlike a zombie TV series, the unlucky survivors of a nuclear strike weren’t going to leap into the nearest abandoned Camaro and speed away from the heaving hungry masses.

What should be considered is The War Game was filmed in 1965 when electronics were not ubiquitous. Even then the scale of the damage from an EMP was substantial.

In today’s world, an wide scale EMP would bring down a region’s entire economy.

I’m writing this post on the 28th Floor of San Francisco’s St Francis hotel and were such a blast to happen now I’m not sure I’d be able to find the fire escapes as the emergency lighting would be fried — it’s not even worth considering the lifts.

What a first world city like San Francisco would like after all its technology, including electrical and communications systems, were knocked out doesn’t bear thinking out.

On the bright side, this means a devastating nuclear war killing millions may not be useful military strategy any more. To bomb a first world nation ‘back to the stone age’ just needs a handful of well targeted high altitude nukes.

The IEEE article is a timely reminder of both the fragility of our systems and the society that depends upon them.

Collaboration and the cloud

There is no reason for businesses not to be using the cloud to work more effectively

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

A few months after the iPad was launched in 2010 I was at an event that showed how quickly cloud computing was changing the workplace.

The event was a demonstration on cloud computing services to a room full of company directors and the organisers had assumed they would be scarcely capable of using a web browser.

It turned out the organisers were wrong, one of the older directors waved his iPad around and declared the device had changed his life.

“We used to get a fat parcel of papers a week before a board meeting,” he said. “We’d be ringing each other up to discuss things and no-one knew if they were Arthur or Martha.”

“Now all the documents are uploaded and we can all work on them, take notes and see what each other has to say. It saves us a heap of work.”

This gentlemen was, to be polite, a pre-baby boomer and a director of a medium sized insurance company. This was not a business full of hipster Gen-Ys at a funky startup.

We should also keep in mind this conversation was four years ago when the online tools were far more basic, smartphones were not as refined as today and mobile internet wasn’t as affordable or accessible.

Today almost every employee has access to the web and collaboration tools through their smartphone, tablet computer or laptop and this gives every business the opportunity to be doing what that insurance company had in place for its directors in 2010.

Shortly after that conversation I was speaking at a technology conference in country New South Wales about this and during one of the sessions one of the attendees described how her timber yard had improved productivity through using online spreadsheets.

In the past the timberyard had used paper based systems to give customers quotes. From the salesman’s visit it could take up to two weeks for the business to get prices back to prospective clients.

Once on the cloud the sales team could access shared documents, price lists and brochures which allowed them to write up quotes on the spot, get them immediately approved by their managers and into the clients’ hands while still on the site.

“We were winning jobs simply because we were so fast,” the lady told me.

It’s tempting to think all of the airy talk about collaboration is just for sexy startup companies but as an old school insurance company in Melbourne and a timberyard in New South Wales shows, cloud services are delivering real productivity and sales improvements to all sorts of industries.

For all businesses, the greatest challenge is getting staff working together effectively, there’s now no reason for any company not to be using cloud services to give the workplace a boost.

Managing the job shock

We’ve barely begun to contemplate there remains the question of what happens to the communities that depended upon old industries.

One of the mantras of technologists like myself when challenged about where jobs will come from after existing industries are automated or become redundant is “we don’t know where they will come from, but they will.”

Assuming that is true and the jobs will come in industries we’ve barely begun to contemplate there remains the question of what happens to the families and communities that depended upon the displaced industries.

Two stories this week from opposite sides of the world show how how poorly we’re answering that question; in Tasmania the Idiot Tax describes what happens to a region with no economic value while in the UK the ongoing Rotherham sex abuse scandal portrays a community debilitated by unemployment.

In both regions local industries collapsed through the 1970s and 80s and the local working classes became the welfare classes, stuck on benefits with at best poorly paid casual work available.

As the Idiot Tax describes in Tasmania’s Burnie, retired older workers reaped the benefits of a life of full time employment that town’s youngsters will never know.

History has no shortage of examples of cities that disintegrated when their economic reason for existing became no more — a process we’re seeing in Detroit today.

Now we’re seeing almost every industry being changed with far greater potential for job losses and fractured communities.

That we’ve dealt so poorly with the process over the last fifty years means we have to start thinking about how we as a society manage this adjustment.

Jobs will come to replace the ones lost, just as through the Twentieth Century new roles developed to replace those displaced from as nations like the US, France and Australia evolved from largely agricultural economies into industrial and then service industries.

But the human cost is real and there are no shortage of shrunken or abandoned towns that were once thriving market or railway hubs at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

For technologists, this is an issue that has to be faced as we enter a period of economic and technological change far greater than the one we saw in the 1970s and 80s.

Car wreck photo courtesy of CBR1000 through sxc.hu

Rise and fall

We live in rapidly changing times. Incumbents and market leaders shouldn’t assume their positions are safe.

Twenty years ago UK supermarket chain Tesco was an also ran.

A decade ago it was the market leader.

Today Tesco is in trouble again as low cost European competitors like Aldi and Lidl have chipped away the British majors’ market share.

A few weeks later, Tesco shares plummeted on revelations the company’s profit guidance had been overtstated by 250 million pounds with the company’s chief executive Dave Lewis announcing several executives have been stood down as auditors investigate the descrepencies.

Tesco is a very good example of how quickly how competitors can come from behind in today’s marketplaces; first Tesco itself during its 1990s rise and then its crash in recent years.

We live in rapidly changing times. Incumbents and market leaders shouldn’t assume their positions are safe.

A land of grace and favors

The quiet abandonment of Google Authorship once again shows why businesses and creative workers shouldn’t trust online services to reward their work.

Yesterday the Search Engine Land website broke the news that Google Authorship is dead.

The quiet abandonment of Google Authorship once again shows why businesses and creative workers shouldn’t trust online services to reward their work.

Google Authorship was a subset of the company’s Google Plus service that let writers and journalist claim their work.

For authors Google Authorship was a useful tool in the battle against the verminous ‘content scrapers’ whose business lies in stealing other peoples’work. It was also a good way of building an online portfolio.

Google benefited from a huge improvement in the quality of its data as its algorithms authorship made it easier for the algorithm to identify original sources.

Using Google’s Authorship tool wasn’t easy, like many of the company’s services it was cumbersome to setup, opaque and subject to arbitrary rules.

Many journalists, bloggers and writers went through the process however as they saw the benefits and trusted Google to maintain the service.

Trusting Google to maintain any service is risky with the company’s well deserved reputation of axing services the moment management’s attention turns to the next shiny thing.

Which is exactly what’s happened to those who’ve invested their time in Google Authorship and they join the disillusioned masses who’ve been burned by the company previously with services like Google Wave.

The lessons from Google’s dropping of Authorship shouldn’t be lost on those working hard to build Google Plus profiles.

Right now, despite the propaganda for those with a lot invested in the service, Google Plus is not travelling well and it’s in a dangerous zone within the company with the departure of its internal management champion Vic Gundotra earlier this year.

The risk of investing too much time on Google Plus is clear, however it would be unfair to single Google out as being alone in presenting this risk.

Every social media service and publishing platform carries the same risk.

Those spending hours creating Facebook communities or carefully crafting LinkedIn or Medium posts need to remember they are only their by the grace and favor of the service.

Nothing replaces your own website as an online property. Your mission is to drive as much traffic to it as possible. Social media platforms can help you do this, but they are not your friends or business partners.

Don’t forget this.

Don’t be at the wrong end of the long tail

The state of the apps market shows how the long tail theory doesn’t work for businesses in digital markets

One of the most important characteristics of the technology industry is you have to be first or second in your market to guarantee profitability.

As more of the world become digitized this is becoming true in other sectors, as Tomi Ahonen’s survey of the app industry shows. This also demolishes the long tail theory of online economics.

The long tail idea was put out by writer Chris Anderson during the first dot com boom.

Anderson’s view was the long tail of older material would be a useful income source for creatives and businesses. For many, small payments on a ‘long tail’ of older work would add up to reasonable revenues.

I’ve always skeptical of that view as the internet tends reward the ‘one percenters’ — a tiny number with the most traffic or revenue make the money while the bulk of players fight over the few crumbs that drop from the table.

A sheer disaster industry

A good example of how digital markets favour a tiny group of leaders is in Tomi Ahonen’s survey of the 2014 mobile apps market that shows the vast majority of developers struggle for pennies.

Ahonen pulls no punches, describing the apps industry as a “sheer disaster industry with only one sector making money” and goes on to describe just how dire the predicament is for most developers.

The first point is where the money is being made; the first answer is by Google and Apple who skim five billion of the industry’s $21 billion in revenues. Just that stat alone shows where the real money is in the sector.

Of the remaining $15 billion the top 1.3% of the industry — around 27,000 developers — take $11 billion, or 73% of the revenue and leave four billion to be shared among the other 98%.

Slaves and huddled masses

At the other end of the scale those who Ahonen calls the ‘slaves’ and the ‘huddled masses’ there’s only 400 million dollars to be shared around two million developers. Implying 87% of the industry barely make a few hundred dollars a year.

On Ahonene’s figures two out of five developer make nothing.

HUDDLED MASSES IN APPS ECONOMY 2013
Revenues left . . . . . . . . . . 0 million dollars
Bottom 39% developers . . 819,000 developers
Bottom 39% earn . . . . . . . 0 million dollars
Bottom 39% earn . . . . . . . 0% of all revenues
Bottom 39% earn . . . . . . . 0% of developer revenues
Average per dev . . . . . . . . 0 dollars
In above numbers:
Beggars failed to earn . . . . 400,000
Hobbyists don’t care . . . . . 250,000
Branded utility app devs . . 170,000
Source: TomiAhonen Consulting analysis on Vision Mobile survey Aug 2014

The Apps industry is a stark indicator of just how brutal the economics of digital distribution are. The long tail is real, it’s just that it describes a massive imbalance in income within markets.

For all of us trying to make a dollar in the digital world, we need to find the niche where we fit into the profitable part of the curve.

Being on the wrong end of the long tail is a recipe for poverty.

Frenemies in the age of tectonic shifts

In an age where business is changing dramatically it’s worth keeping your rivals close.

“Apple lives in an ecosystem,” Steve Jobs told the 1997 MacWorld conference. “It helps other partners and it needs the help of other partners.”

A few minutes later Jobs unveiled Apple’s deal with Microsoft, much to the disgust of many of the company’s true believers in the audience – something not helped by Bill Gates appearing on video midway through the presentation.

“We have to let go of the idea that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose;” said Jobs after the booing died down.

I was reminded of Jobs’ and Gates’ deal when talking to Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of virtualisation software company VM Ware at their annual VM World conference in San Francisco this week.

Gelsinger was discussing the myriad deals VM Ware has made with companies that are their superficially their rivals as markets radically change. The company has even gone as far to embrace the open source Open Stack that was originally set up as competition to VM Ware’s proprietary technology.

“The idea of frenemies – or co-competition – isn’t new to the IT industry.” Said Gelsinger, “as we are in this period that we’ve called the tectonic shifts that are underway.”

“All of us need to be somewhat careful about who’s our friends and who’s our enemies as we go through that period and be as nice as we can to everybody because who’s our friends and who’s our enemies in six months or twelve months could change a whole lot.”

That lesson has been harsh in the IT industry as various unstoppable businesses have found the market has shifted rapidly against them. A process that’s accelerating as cloud computing changes the software industry.

“I always quip that ten years ago or fifteen years ago Sun would have been buying Oracle. Those shifts can occur quite rapidly,” Gelsinger says.

VM Ware itself is on the brunt of one of those shifts as its core business of creating virtual services in company’s data centres is being disrupted by cloud computing companies like Amazon, Google and – ironically – Microsoft.

Adapting to that changing market is the key task for Gelsinger and VM Ware’s management team, “our philosophy has been about doing the right thing that technology enables us to do.” Gesliner states, “do the right things for our customers and enable the ecosystem to join us on the journey.”

For companies like VM Ware and Microsoft no-one predicted that one of their biggest threats would come from an online book retailer, yet Amazon Web Services has upended the entire software industry.

The challenges for VM Ware today or Apple nearly two decades ago are being repeated in many other industries as competitors appear from unexpected directions, which is why it’s important not to ignore and sometimes co-operate with your competitors.

We shouldn’t also ignore the other main reason why companies like Apple, Microsoft and, possibly, VM Ware have survived massive market shifts over time – a deep and loyal customer base.

Understanding and responding to your customers’ needs is possibly the greatest management skill needed in every business today. Are you listening to what your market is telling you?

Paul travelled to VM World in San Francisco as a guest of VM Ware

Picture of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates via Joi Ito on Flickr

Driving the hybrids — VMWare and the case for hybrid cloud computing

VM Ware is pivoting its business to a mix of cloud and onsite technologies for its long term survival

A decade ago VM Ware disrupted the corporate IT world with its virtualisation software that changed the way big organisations used their servers. Today the company is facing up to the challenge of dealing with its own business being disrupted.

In the late 1990s when a big business wanted a new server it had to get someone to physically install one, VM Ware’s founders came up with the idea of ‘virtualisation’ with their software creating a virtual server that looked to the network like it was a discrete, real computer.

Naturally this was quicker and cheaper than buying and setting up a whole new server and VM Ware was an immediate success that upended the ‘big iron’ end of the computer industry.

Today VM Ware is valued at $42 billion on the stock market and is one of the IT industry’s giants.

However the virtualisation market itself is being disrupted by cloud computing. For many businesses, it’s even cheaper to pay Amazon, Microsoft or another cloud service to provide the servers for you.

So VM Ware is reinventing itself with a range of services to meet the challenge from the cloud providers. One of it’s key strategies is to provide a ‘hybrid’ cloud where customers run some IT services on their own servers and others on the cloud, the idea is this offers the best of both worlds.

This is almost the same challenge that Microsoft faces as both companies see their core business models being threatened by internet based technologies, something that VM Ware CEO Pat Gelsinger concedes.

“We think of Microsoft having a strategy much like ours, given they have on premise and in the cloud,” says Gelsinger. “We sort of agree on the shape of the market. We would say that Amazon and Google see a different shape in the market.”

Amazon and Google’s view is a ‘pure cloud’ model where companies and consumers run all their IT on web based services. In that world, purists like Xero’s Rod Drury are openly disdainful of the hybrid model believing it to be cumbersome and adding complexity to a simple business solution.

For companies like VM Ware and Microsoft their future lies upon the hybrid model being adopted by business. This is a high stakes industry battle which will define the careers of many IT workers and the shape of the businesses they work for.

Paul travelled to the VM World conference in San Francisco as a guest of VM Ware.

Big Bertha is getting old

The 747 era ends for Air New Zealand with its tired service between Auckland and San Francisco

Air New Zealand, like most airlines, is about to end the era of the 747 with the airline’s last jumbo plying the transpacific route between Auckland and San Francisco until early next month.

With three weeks to go before decommissioning and being replaced by a 777-200ER, The City of Christchurch is showing its age. Although not quite as badly as United’s jumbos that were withdrawn late last year.

Catching the old bird in its final days was a touching note of nostalgia for the end of the jumbo jet age but also showed why its time for these older jets to be retired.

The first problem was a delay for ‘operational reasons’ – we never learned what those operational reasons were for the two and a half hour delay although we learned from the crew later that the flight came “within a whisker” of being cancelled – and NZ8 left shortly after 10pm.

On boarding, the age of the plane becomes quickly apparent with the interior fittings looking very much their age.

The economy seats themselves though are substantially wider, more comfortable with greater leg room than the connecting Dreamliner service from Sydney. This is good thing on a fourteen hour flight.

While the seats were travelling well with age, the IFE system wasn’t. For the first hour there was no sound until the cabin crew rebooted the system, even then both the video and music channels were often distorted and choppy.

Once the in flight entertainment system was fixed, it was onto the meals. Dinner was a choice of ham pasta, a mumbled chicken dish and a beef curry. Everyone in our row took the beef which was a touch greasy but fine when mixed with the rice. The ice cream was a nice touch but serving it with the hot dish meant you had to each quickly.

In between the meal services, the crew were friendly and efficient and somewhat wistful about the last days of the 747; most of them had spent their careers on these planes.

Breakfast was the choice of a cold cereal or hot omelette, baked beans and chicken sausage both of which were accompanied with fruit salad, roll and yoghurt. The hot breakfast was a standard but not unpleasant economy class airline breakfast.

Eventually the plane arrived in San Francisco two hours late, and then I found a prominent analyst had pinched the car hired by VM Ware to take us to the hotel. But that’s another story.

Many people will be sad to see the last of the 747, but Air New Zealand’s last jumbo shows they have reached the end of their days.

Paul travelled on Air New Zealand as a guest of VM Wear to attend the VM World conference in New Zealand.

Reinventing online publishing

Has the Daily Mail cracked the business model for online publishers?

Is the Daily Mail the future of online publishing? In USA Today Michael Wolff posits that the British media outfit might be the first newspaper company to navigate the transition from print to digital.

Certainly the 180 million unique visitors a month make it the English language’s most popular news site which, despite the unease and criticisms about its brand of journalism, shows the model might be working.

Wolff puts the success down to the digital arm being autonomous to the print operations, making the point its hard to simultaneously defend the old, but still profitable, print mastheads while growing the digital platforms.

It would be sad if it were a crusty incumbent that becomes the David Sarnoff of the digital era rather than some smart and hungry kids from a barrio or ghetto, but there’s no reason why one of the established newspaper groups couldn’t be the people who reinvent the media for modern times.

There’s plenty of competition though from groups like Vice, Buzzfeed and dozen of others. Despite the Daily Mail’s successes, there’s still no shortage of opportunity

Land of the sore white bum

Air New Zealand are proud of their Dreamliner service but does it meet their hype?

“Welcome aboard the world’s first Dreamliner,” is Air New Zealand’s proud announcement on boarding at Sydney for the three hour flight to Auckland.

The plane is shiny with lots of new fangled gadgets, the most notable being the polarised glass window shades that electronically ‘open’ or ‘close’. The toilets are like something from the Jetsons and one wonders what the Japanese fitout of this plane offers in the lavatories.

A serious downside with the plane is the three-three-three economy configuration that makes for a very cramped seat and on the packed flight like NZ104 it’s difficult to work on a laptop even with an accommodating partner one side and a nice old lady on the other. Two adjoining road warriors would be playing duelling elbows for the entire flight.

To add to the disappointment with the seats they aren’t particularly comfortable. For the three hour journey between Sydney and Auckland they are tolerable but they would be a painful experience on a longer haul flight.

One area Air New Zealand excels in is with its inflight entertainment system with an excellent range of movies, TV series and music. The favourites playlist actually works, unlike its equivalents on Qantas and United Airlines. A nice little touch is you can email your favourites list from the seat.

The touchscreen is responsive although not quite as intuitive as one might expect on a modern airliner.

A downside with the 787 entertainment system is the sound levels are quite low, the volume has to be cranked up until nearly the maximum before you can hear soundtracks. If you have your own headphones with volume control then this is the time to use them.

If you’re bringing other equipment, there are two power socket for every three seats which are easily accessible in the base of the seats in front. This is a lot easier than hiding them in the armrests — on the Qantas business class flight last month I had to ask the cabin crew where they were hidden after half an hour searching.

Despite the plane being full, there’s ample room in the luggage bays. This is possibly due to Kiwis not pushing the limits the way Asian, American and Australian travellers do with carry on baggage.

The cabin crew are the usual friendly and helpful bunch that Air New Zealand does well although they seem a bit overworked in the early stages of the flight. Service is a bit slow out of Sydney with nothing but a glass of water for the first hour. Tough if you haven’t eaten and you’re waiting on a lunch.

Once service begins the food is good standard economy fare with the choice of piri-piri chicken or lamb tagine and complimentary bar if travelling on ‘Works’ or ‘Full Works’ tickets.

The lamb tagine, a combination of diced lamb and sausage on couscous is touch greasy while the chicken salad was bland and inoffensive.

Travelling on the ‘Works’ or ‘Full Works’ package includes meals and beverages with drinks ordered through the IFE menu are quick to arrive which were much needed after the long wait for the initial food service.

Arrival in Auckland was fifteen minutes early despite the almost predictable ground delays in Sydney and overall the experience was pleasant, even if one gets off the plane with a sore bum and bruised elbows.

Overall, the Air New Zealand 787 Dreamliner service is an efficient way of getting across the Tasman with some nice quirky touches although in economy though you wouldn’t want to be travelling too much further.