Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Riding the rails of the global economy

    Riding the rails of the global economy

    Irish economist David McWilliams reflects on how a train ride between Boston and New York illustrates how a lack of investment in the US and over capitalisation in China has affected the global economy.

    A lack of public investment is hurting the US in McWilliams view and that’s exacerbated by a reluctance of the private sector to commit to new productive assets and projects. Weak investment affects household wealth and savings, it also means the low interest rates are encouraging speculation rather than economic growth.

    Meanwhile in China, the nation’s massive expansion has created a global glut in manufacturing capacity. That makes business even more reluctant to invest in plant and equipment while creating risks for the commodities based economies like Russia, Brazil and Australia that feed that machine.

    One aspect that McWilliams overlooks is another shift in the global economy – the shift to smaller scale manufacturing and automation, “real investment tends to be in big machines that make big stuff,” he says.

    That investment in big machines may not be the economic driver they were half a century ago as building and maintaining the machines themselves are no longer labour intensive. Furthermore, the manufacturing of tomorrow may well be much more distributed and on a local, smaller scale.

    McWilliams’ points though are well made. We need to be looking at how to stimulate private investment in productive assets while looking at the public investments that will enhance our economies and improve our living standards.

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  • Amazon takes on the world

    Amazon takes on the world

    Yesterday I had my first piece in Diginomica about the threat Amazon Web Service’s new business analytics service creates for ‘old school’ companies such as Oracle and IBM as well as the up and coming firms such as Qlik and Tableau.

    Diginomica’s Dennis Howlett followed that piece with one of his own flagging consulting services and systems integrators are under threat from AWS’s new partnership with consulting firm Accenture which also further puts the screws on IBM.

    Today, AWS’s announcements of new Internet of Things services threatens a range of businesses creating data connectors and management software for connected devices.

    Historically Amazon has been a fierce and brutal competitor and there’s little indication things will be different with the new web services.

    Things could be about to get tough for a lot of sectors in the computer industry as Amazon expands its services and territory.

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  • Amazon and the customer focus

    Amazon and the customer focus

    I’m currently attending the Amazon Web Service Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.

    One of the constant themes in writings about Amazon is founder Jeff Bezos’ focus on delivering the best service and cheapest prices to the customer, even if it does sometimes rely on some less savoury tactics to chase out smaller competitors.

    That ethos is on show at this convention with AWS Senior Vice President, Andy Jassy saying at the post opening keynote press conference,  “our strategy is to be customer focused, not only do all of our strategies and tactics work backwards from what our customers want but ninety percent of our roadmap is driven by what customers tell us matters to them.”

    He did however fall for the temptation of dissing some of his competitors in the IT market saying, “most technology companies, particularly old guard companies, have lost their will and the DNA to invent. They acquire most of their invention that’s expensive and it really doesn’t fit that well together.”

    “We’re extremely long term orientated,” Jassy continued. “We don’t call you on the last day of the quarter and say ‘boy, have we got a deal for you’. You won’t see us auditing our customers and fining them. We’re trying to build relationships with our customers that will outlast everyone in this room.”

    Jassy’s points are pertinent to the current business world, the old model of seeing your customer as being a milk cow – something the older software companies were terribly guilty of – is dying. The future needs a lot more focus on treating the customer with respect.

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  • Designing a secure IoT ecosystem

    Designing a secure IoT ecosystem

    Ensuring the next generation of IoT devices is secure and a good citizen of the wider ecosystem will be one of the challenges facing the next generations of designers.

    Diego Tamburini, Manufacturing Industry Strategist of design software company Autodesk, spoke to Decoding The New Economy about how the IoT will change the design industry. “We’ve been designing equipment to connect to the internet for a generation,” he said. “What’s changing is that now the addition of software, electronics, networking and communication is breeding into objects that were purely mechanical.”

    Melding the physical and software worlds doesn’t come without risks however, something that worries Internet pioneer Vint Cerf who foresees headlines like ‘100,000 fridges hack the Bank of America’ in an interview with Matthew Braga of Motherboard Canada.

    Apart from the fact it could be a hundred million, Cerf has good reason to be worried. Most consumer IoT devices are hopelessly insecure and the recent stories of hacked cars only emphasises the weaknesses with connected household items.

    Cerf and Braga make the point the ‘I Love You’ worm of the year 2000 became a crisis because the world had reached the point where personal computers were ubiquitous. A similar piece of malware in a world where everything from kettles to wristwatches are vulnerable would be exponentially worse.

    These risks put a great onus on product designers, even more so given much of the functionality is based upon those devices communicating with others across the internet and cloud services, something that Tamburini emphasised.

    “One important thing that is happening with thing being connected is we are not just designing things that function in a vacuum, we’re increasingly designing members of a larger ecosystem.” Tamburini states, “now we have to think of how the product will have to connect to other products and how they will collectively perform a function.”

    Part of that risk is that should those devices malfunction, either deliberately as part of a botnet or malware attack, or accidentally as we saw with the connected home being disabled due to a defective smart lightbulb flooding the network with error messages, then the wider community may be affected in ways we may not expect.

    Cerf believes it’s going to take a big, catastrophic hack on a grand, connected scale before a shift in security begins to happen, and before people begin to even consider that such a vulnerabilities even exist.

    If that’s the case, it will be that society has ignored the clear warning signs we’ve seen from events like the Jeep hack and the Stuxnet worm, not to mention the massive privacy breaches at Target and Sony. For designers of these systems hardening them is going to be an essential part of making them fit for today and the future.

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  • Apple CEO Tim Cook on Privacy and Profits

    Apple CEO Tim Cook on Privacy and Profits

    “Privacy is a fundamental human right”. A short, but sweet and fascinating, NPR interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook.

    Cook goes onto to avoid discussing the likelihood of Apple Cars and expounds the advantages of repatriating corporate profits back to the US, something we can expect cash rich companies like Apple to start agitating for after the next Presidential election.

    The interview, which is only eight minutes long, is well worth a listen as Apple positions itself against competing internet giants Google and Facebook over the topic of privacy.

     

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