Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Startups as a dream job

Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins describes the design service’s journey

“It’s my absolute dream job” says Melanie Perkins of her role as CEO and co-founder of online design app Canva in the latest Decoding the New Economy video.

Since being set up ten months ago, Canva has grown to over a half a million people using the tool to create graphics for applications such as books, marketing banners and website logos.

The idea for Canva came out of the difficulties Melanie found in using design software while lecturing at university and it’s growth has been as a result of the idea catching the imagination of investors like Lars Rasmussen, one of the driving forces behind Google Maps, and Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s original Mac evangelist.

“We’ve got some great things coming in the next few months,” says Perkins. “So stay tuned.

Staying healthy with Big Data

Doctors are starting to match shopping patterns to health problems

US medical centre chain Carolinas HealthCare has started mining patients’ credit card data to predict health outcomes reports Bloomberg Businessweek.

The idea is that by looking at credit information and purchasing records, doctors can anticipate what ailments their patients will present with.

Carolinas Healthcare’s matching of spending patterns to healthy is an obvious application of Big Data which illustrates some of the benefits that mining information can deliver for individuals and the community.

Should the project overcome patients’ valid privacy concerns, this is the sort of application that is going to be increasingly common as organisations figure out how to apply software to their mountains of information.

Jumping the queue

Reservation Hop illustrates all that is wrong with the current startup culture

Reservation Hop is a good example of many of the current breed of parasitic startups that want to create a new class of middleman.

The hospitality industry is tough work and something guaranteed to irritate restauranteurs are reservations that don’t show up.

One startup that seems almost certain to attract the ire of the restaurant industry is Reservation Hop – “We make reservations at the hottest restaurants in advance so you don’t have to.”

Reservation Hop makes table reservations at popular restaurants and then sells them through their website.

We book up restaurant reservations in advance. We only book prime-time restaurant reservations at the hottest local establishments, and we mostly list high-demand restaurants that are booked up on other platforms.

This is probably one of the worst examples of the middleman culture that dominates much of the current startup thinking.

Almost certainly there’s a market need for proxy queue jumpers – although one wonders how profitable it is when the transaction fees are under $10 – but this service will deeply irritate restaurant owners and diners who are crowded out by these ‘parasite’ services.

In many ways, Reservation Hop illustrates the problems with this phase of our current startup mania; the rise opportunistic businesses that are more akin to parasites than services that add value.

The Reservation Hop website assures patrons that there’s a 99% chance their booking will be honored by the restaurant on the night, we can expect establishments to start messing with that statistic as they wise up to the business.

Many in the startup sector speak about how new technology improves the world, services like Reservation hop illustrate that not every idea is a step forward.

Fighting a loss making business

Uber follows the Amazon tactic of hurting the market with its deep pockets

Having deep pockets is a great help in business as the online cab war in San Francisco shows.

As competition heats up on the streets of San Francisco, Uber is trying to put Lyft out of business by offering fares below what they pay drivers.

This has been the long term tactic of Amazon; raise a lot of money and then run your main line of business at a loss.

Amazon have shown you can do this for a long time if investors stay patient. Fighting it is difficult if you don’t have deep pockets yourself.

In the long term though you can’t see this being good for customers, although in the meantime San Franciscans can enjoy cheap taxis.

Self publishing and the cloud

The book publishing industry is being disrupted by cloud services

Today design site Canva hosted a media breakfast with their founders and chief evangelist, Guy Kawasaki.

One of industries Canva cite in their case studies is designing book covers as part of the publishing industry which Kawasaki points is an area where incumbent giants are falling down badly.

In Kawasaki’s view services like Canva, Amazon and the various publishing tools have made the major publishing houses redundant.

Publishers were once necessary to get a book to market; today there’s little a moderately well funded individual can’t do.

For publishers, it means they have to lift their game – automate their processes, harness their corporate knowledge and help good products get to market.

Instead most are riding a dying business model as cloud based services make it easy and simple to get a project to market.

Times get tougher for journalists and the middle class

Business and sports reporting is increasingly being done by computers, many other middle class jobs are going the same way.

Journalists have had a tough time over the last twenty years and it’s about to get tougher.

Last July The Associated Press announced they will automate most of their business reporting. AP’s Business News Managing Editor, Lou Ferrara explained in a company blog how the service will pull information out of company announcements and format them into standard news reports.

instead of providing 300 stories manually, we can provide up to 4,400 automatically for companies throughout the United States each quarter

This isn’t the first time robots have replaced journalists, three years ago National Public Radio reported how algorighms were replacing sports reporters.

Ferrara admits AP has already automated much of its sports reporting;

Interestingly, we already have been automating a good chunk of AP’s sports agate report for several years. Data comes from STATS, the sports statistics company, and is automated and formatted into our systems for distribution. A majority of our agate is produced this way.

Reporting sports or financial results makes sense for computer programs; the reciting of facts within a flowing narrative is something basic – Manchester United led Arsenal 2-0 at half time, Exxon Mobil stock was up twenty cents in morning trading and the Japanese Yen was down three points at this afternoon’s close don’t take a super computer to write.

Cynics would say rewriting press releases, something many journalists are accused of doing, could be better done by a machine and increasingly this is exactly what happens.

The automation of commodity reporting isn’t just a threat to journeyman journalists though; any job, trade or profession that is based on regurgitating information already stored on a database can be processed the same way.

For lawyers, accountants and armies of form processing public servants the computers are already threatening jobs – like journalists things are about to get much worse in those fields.

It could well be that it’s managers who are the most vulnerable of all; when computers can monitor the workplace and prepare executive reports then there’s little reason for many middle management positions.

This is part of the reason why the middle classes are in trouble and the political forces this unleashes shouldn’t be underestimated.

Apple builds the iHome

Apple makes its stake for the smarthome while Canada builds the smart fridge

On the seventh anniversary the release of the iPhone, Apple makes it clear they see smarthome as the next opportunity.

The latest Apple ad showcases the iPhone at the centre of the connected home controlling baby monitors, GPS enabled pet collars and smart lights. The massage is Apple’s iHome brings families together.

While Apple is showing its cuddly side, those vendors who think an iHome is going to a great opportunity may well find they’re working with a ruthless competitor as reports claim Apple is about to launch its own range of smart home devices.

Meanwhile in Canada, they have better things to do with smart kitchen appliances…..

Demoting the newspaper

Newsagents are adapting to a digital world which is seeing every industry being disrupted

You know a product has problems when retailers start start moving it out of key retail positions. When the product was the retailers’ core business, you know the entire industry is in serious trouble.

Mark Fletcher describes in the Newsagency Blog how he’s moved his city’s number two selling paper off the main level of his newspaper display.

“Sales are not paying for the space,” Mark says bluntly.

Newsagents relegating newspaper fits nicely into Ross Dawson’s Newspaper Extinction Timeline, in the case of Mark Fletcher’s newsagency Dawson sees the Australian newspaper industry vanishing by 2022.

For newsagents the signals have been clear for some time that they have to adapt to a society where paper based products – newspapers, stationery and greeting cards – aren’t in demand.

The process of adapting isn’t easy or smooth – many experiments will fail and even the smartest business people will make expensive mistakes. That’s the nature of evolution.

Newsagents though are just one example of changing marketplaces, there’s few industries that aren’t being disrupted by the technology and economic changes of our times. All of us are going to have to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

Shifting disruption to the middle classes

Irish economist David McWilliam points out how the middle class are the next in line to be disrupted.

This is where things get interesting.

The rise of the business digital native

Today’s new businesses are the true digital natives.

‘Digital natives’ has been the term to describe people born after 1990 who’ve had computers throughout their entire lives.

The theory is these folk have an innate understanding of digital technologies from being immersed in them from an early age.

It’s doubful how true that theory is; the generation born after 1960 were born into the television generation yet the vast majority of GenXers would have little idea on how to produce a sitcom or fix a TV set and the same could be said for the war generation and motor cars.

Digitally native businesses

For businesses, it may be the digital native concept is far more valid. Ventures being founded today are far more likely to be using productivity enhancing tools like social media, collaboration platforms and cloud computing services than their older competitors.

What’s striking about older businesses, particularly in the Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) sectors, is just how poorly they have adopted technology. The Australian Bureau of Statistics report into IT use by the nation’s businesses illustrates the sectors’ weak use of tech.

The most telling statistic is the number of businesses with a web presence; the SME sector lags way behind the corporate sector that has almost 100% penetration.

Many of the zero to four business can be disregarded as most of them are sole trader consultants who’ve had to register a businesses for professional reason, although there is an argument even they would benefit from a cheap or free web presence to advertise their skills.

The ABS statistics show small business is lagging behind the corporates in social media and e-commerce adoption as well so the argument that local businesses are ignoring the web and using services like Facebook, LinkedIn or Google Places to advertise their services doesn’t hold water.

Old man’s business

Part of this reluctance to use digital tools is age; many SMEs were born either in the era when faxes were a novelty or when Windows computers were first appearing on small businesses desktops. They are creatures of another era.

In the current era cloud, social media and collaborative services are running business. The idea of buying a workstation for a new employee and waiting for the IT guy to set them up on the network is an antiquated memory; today’s workers have their own laptops, tablets and smartphones to do the work – all they need is a password.

Those services offer a different way of organising a business and this is the most worrying part of the statistics – large organisations are slowly, and not always successfully, adopting modern management practices while many small businesses are locked into a 1970s and 80s way of working.

For businesses being founded today, this isn’t a worry – they are the true digital natives and are reaping the benefits of more efficient ways of working. Something emphasised by Google’s updates to its Drive productivity services announced overnight.

That’s something that should focus the plans of established businesses of all sizes as they adapt to working in a connected society.