Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Does the Internet of things need a killer app?

Cisco System’s search for an Internet of Everthing killer app may not be necessary.

Today was the opening of Cisco System’s Internet of Things conference in Barcelona, Spain and in the morning sessions there was constant question of what will be the killer app for this range of technologies.

A killer app is the application that drives adoption of a new technology – for the Personal Computer, it was spreadsheet programs that made systems attractive to company accountants and from there the PC made its way into the workplace.

Right now, you’d have to say parking systems are the great hope for the industry and this makes sense in that it’s an easy to explain to the general public and it helps solve an ongoing problem for local governments.

But does the Internet of Everything really need a killer app?

The Internet of everything is the coming together of various different technologies — cheap processors, pervasive internet, cloud computing and big data are all reasons why the concept has taken off.

In fact, many of the applications aren’t new, telemetry systems have been around since the early days of networks and even parking technologies like number plate recognition and space meters have become common over the last decade.

Across industries like logistics, mining and agriculture the Internet of Things or Machine to Machine (M2M) communications has been steadily growing with each new generation of connected equipment.

The difference with the next wave of technology is that devices are smarter and able to talk to each other which is where companies like Cisco see the opportunity of tapping into what they believe will be a 14 trillion dollar market by the end of the decade.

What concerns many in the industry is the risk of the technologies become proprietary islands where each major company has its own standards that don’t talk to the others.

The risk of vendor lock in is probably greater than the search for a killer app, indeed there’s no particular reason why anyone should be waiting for a compelling application to come along.

Instead of waiting for a killer app it’s probably better for industries to find their own uses for these technologies and steadily implement them.

While Cisco are almost certainly right about the impact of the Internet of Everything, it’s one of these pervasive technologies that changes everything in ways that aren’t immediately apparent like the motor car or the internet itself.

Travel review – the joy of a half empty plane

Singapore Airlines’ Changi to Barcelona service is nice if you can get a row of seats in economy to yourself.

The unusual Singapore Airlines service to Barcelona and Sao Paolo service is a long journey made easier by it not being very full.

Singapore Airline’s SQ 68 is a truly long haul flight with a 14 hour leg between Singapore and Barcelona followed by another nine hours onto Sao Paolo.

The Singapore to Barcelona leg departs just after midnight and arrives at dawn on the same day, for all but the last hour the flight is in complete darkness. It’s a flight made for sleeping.

Luckily for those of us in Economy Class, the flight was only one third capacity and sitting down the back of the Boeing 777 in seat 54A meant getting a full row of seats — perfect for stretching out on the three abreast seats.

Even without the spare seats, the Singapore Airlines 777 has the same seat dimensions as their A380 services which makes the seats reasonably comfortable with adequate rest room.

Being able to stretch out does make a difference and it was possible to get a fairly solid eight hours sleep by stretching across the three seats.

As usual with Singapore Airlines the food was good with a nice dinner of roast fish in white wine sauce shortly after leaving and a breakfast choice of barbecue pork noodles or a standard eggs and chicken sausage – the noodles are good.

With 14 hours in the air KrisWorld, the inflight entertainment system, gets a solid workout and in many ways the service is bizarre with a few informative business or news channels but an impressive collection of crappy reality TV shows including My Cat From Hell and the Totally Insane Guinness World Records Christmas Special.

Like the Sydney-Singapore flights, satellite Internet access is available on this service and coverage is constant through the flight.

A notable point for Australian travellers on Singapore Airlines’ 777 services to Europe is that the inseat power sockets are 110v and don’t support Australian plugs. So take a European or Asian adapter if you want to charge devices enroute.

Staff did have a habit of vanishing into the galley during the night, but they were obliging in providing water, juice and snacks during the long night time leg if you asked.

Were the flight full, this journey wouldn’t have been fun as the 777 economy class cabin would struggle with toilets and food service during the trip but when half-full it’s quite a pleasant way to fly.

It’s hard to see how the Singapore – Barcelona – Sao Paolo is going to be sustainable if the load factors on my flight were normal but in the meantime, getting a row to yourself means it’s a nice way of getting to Southern Europe from East Asia.

Validating your market

Sometimes your competitors are your greatest marketing assets.

Last week I interviewed Anthony Foy, CEO of Workshare about his business and the growth in the online sharing and collaboration markets.

When researching Workshare the obvious message is the business can be best described as a Dropbox for enterprises.

It always pays to be cautious when comparing a business to a competitor as often the managers or founders don’t like mentioning marketplace rivals.

Frequently, it turns out the rival in the market helps you define what your service delivers.

A good example of this was a gay and lesbian dating service run by a pair of acquaintances.

Naturally the obvious comparison was with the Grindr app but the two founders – who we’ll call George and John – had completely different views about this.

George’s view was “don’t mention the G word” as Grindr was the feared rival while John’s view was that their opposition validated their market and actually made it easier for them to explain their business.

John’s view turns out to be that of Anthony Foy’s – that Dropbox actually makes it easier for Workshare to articulate its business.

Investors, customers and staff understand what Dropbox does so there’s no need to for Workshare to convince people there’s a demand for what they do or to explain exactly what their service does.

This has proved true for many successful businesses. Facebook needed Friendster and Myspace to prove the market for social media existed while Google had Yahoo! and Altavista to show there was a need for an online search engine.

Just because you aren’t first to the market doesn’t mean you won’t be successful. Sometimes your competitors are your greatest asset in helping the rest of the industry understand exactly what you do.

Pay Pal and the Modern Spice routes

PayPal trace the modern online spice routes with some important messages for retailers.

Online payments company PayPal has released a paper on the The Modern Spice Routes which describes the pattern of online trade across the US, Germany, UK, China, Brazil and Australia.

The results are a snapshot of how online commerce patterns are evolving.

PayPal commissioned the Nielsen Company to survey 6,000 online shoppers about their cross border online buying habits to determine some of the characteristics of global internet commerce.

What immediately stands out in the report is the United States’ dominance with 45% of global market share, China follows with 26%.

At the bottom of the pack is Australia with 16% and, surprisingly, Germany with 13%.

The US itself is an interesting study with the most preferred overseas shopping destination being the United Kingdom followed by China.

Why are people shopping online?

American respondents were overwhelming shopping overseas to access more variety, with 80% of respondents citing the reasons for shopping offshore being “more variety that cannot be found locally”.

Finding more variety was the key factor in all the markets. Even in countries like China and Australia were respondents cited saving money as their main reason for shopping internationally online, more diversity in offerings came a very close second.

That in itself show the opportunity for companies selling internationally – be unique and don’t offer what can be found at the local WalMart or Tesco.

Illustrating this, the PayPal report cited Australia’s Black Milk clothing and Germany’s Hatshopping as two international success stories.

Intra-region trading

An understated point with the report is just what proportion of international shopping is of each country’s spend – in the United States’ case it is only 18% while in Australia it’s 35%.

Illustrating those internal trading patterns are the British and German figures that show online shopping in other European nations is substantial, so intra-EU trade is a considerable factor.

Similarly, the second popular destination, after the United States, for Chinese online shoppers is the Hong Kong SAR. In fact the Chinese statistics show that intra-Asian trade is just as substantial as EU commerce with Japan, Korea and Singapore all feature highly on the list of shopping destinations.

This illustrates a problem for Australia as it has neither the United States’ massive domestic market or a group of closely integrated neighbours and the high level of international online shopping indicates just how poorly local merchants are doing with their internet strategies.

Indeed, for Australia that the proportion of online shoppers buying overseas is so high should be a worry for local merchants.

Today’s modern trade of bulk carriers, courier companies and shipping containers is very different to the spice routes of Marco Polo’s day, the world is evolving around new trading patterns right now.

For businesses like Australia’s retailers those changed trade routes may not be kind to those who can’t change.

Travel review – As good as economy class flying can get

A travel review of Singapore Airlines flight SQ222 from Sydney to Singapore

The twice daily Singapore Airlines A380 flights between Sydney and Singapore is probably as good as economy class air travel can get if you’re able to snag a seat on the upper deck.

On the way to Barcelona to attend the Cisco Internet of Everything conference I took seat 71K in that upper deck economy section for what turned out to be a pleasant seven hour trip to Singapore before a 14 hour trudge to Spain.

Window seat 71K has the advantage of being just forward of the rear exit door so there’s no passenger behind, the upper deck economy section also has the advantage of only being a 2-4-2 seat configuration which makes relations with your fellow passengers a lot more comfortable if you’re in the window seat.

For someone just on six foot like me, the leg room is fine and there’s plenty of space to stretch the legs out under the seat. Power sockets are inside the ends of the moveable armrests so in the case of these seats, the single power outlet is shared.

If you choose the Window seat so you can sleep against the fuselage then A380 on all airlines is a disappointment as the cabin wall’s curve means there is a wide gap between the seat and the windows. The advantage of this is are the useful storage bins by the window

During the flight the crew were friendly and quite happy to keep the alcohol flowing to the more enthusiastic passengers over and above the three regular drinks services.

Being upstairs in the smaller economy cabin also means slightly better service and the toilet to passenger ratio is somewhat more friendly too.

The food was tasty with the Sydney caterers doing a good job with the Asian options.

Dinner service was a tasty Thai beef on rice with a Cornetto ice cream dessert.

Chicken Noodles were a delightful evening snack before landing, the vegetables in this dish were so good they’d have been a nice meal in themselves.

A nice touch with Singapore Airlines are the toiletries and complimentary tooth brushes and combs in the toilets. This something that’s largely been lost with most airlines.

The inflight entertainment is what you’d expect of a modern airline with several hundred channels offering everything from language services to recent movies.

Watching World War Z on the system was an interesting experience. The plane crash was edited out with a strange leap in the narrative as no doubt showing air disasters isn’t a good idea on flights.

The IFE also had a strange bug where the movies would be in different languages when you switched between them. It took five attempts to get Brad Pitt to speak English.

In Flight Internet

Singapore Airlines is now offering inflight internet which is nice but insanely expensive. An attempt to run Speedtest blew through the 15Mb limit and hit $20 US in twenty minutes. Choose the plan that disconnects you on reaching the limit to avoid nasty surprises.

For those looking at working online for the flight it’s worth noting the service wouldn’t have worked the whole route, while Australia has granted regulatory approval for inflight internet, Indonesia hasn’t so a third of the flight wouldn’t have approval.

This is an interesting problem for the on air service as approval hasn’t been granted by other large countries – most notably India and the United States.

One quibble with the flight was the cabin was quite warm and without individual air vents, there’s no way to cool yourself.

Apart from some minor quibbles, the Singapore Airlines Sydney to Singapore service is probably as good as it gets in Economy.

If you can snag a seat upstairs on an A380 it’s probably the best place for long haul travel in economy class.

MYOB’s journey into the cloud

How MYOB is responding to the cloud computing threat by moving their boxed software products onto the cloud

The big winners of the Personal Computer era were the software companies. During that time firms like Microsoft, Oracle and Adobe became some of the most profitable companies on the planet.

With the arrival of cloud computing those profits started to dry up and those software companies that did so well out of the PC era are now scrambling to develop new products to meet a very different market.

Accounting software provider MYOB is a good example of this changing industry – a business that dominated the Australian small business market and supported an army of certified consultants now finds cloud based competitors like Xero nibbling away at their industry position.

MYOB Chief Technology Officer Simon Raik-Allen describes his company’s journey to the cloud in the latest Decoding the New Economy video clip.

“The cloud has amazing benefits for small business,” says Simon. “For twenty-two years we’ve had desktop products and for the last three or four years we’ve had cloud based services.”

“It’s been a really interesting journey, we’ve been on it for three or four years now where we’re converting the company to a cloud company.”

“But it’s also a cultural journey,” Simon observes. “I love seeing how people start to think differently when stuff is in the cloud.”

“Having things in the cloud opens the opportunity for employees to start slicing and dicing data in different ways.”

“It opens up the innovation curve to what’s possible.”

Bringing partners on the journey

Like Microsoft, one of MYOB’s strengths is its partner community – in particularly the company’s twenty thousand strong Certified Consultant program.

Those consultants, like Microsoft’s partners, are seeing their traditional revenue streams challenged as their business models change, a topic discussed with Growthwise’s Steph Hinds in a previous video interview.

“Everybody takes the cloud journey at their own place,” says Simon. “For bookkeepers in particular this is an opportunity to change their business in a positive way.”

“Normally a bookkeeper would drive around and visit two, three or four customers a day and help then with their books. Now they can help twenty customers in a single day.”

Looking beyond the cloud

Simon sees more than cloud computing changing accounting software with connected devices like the Pebble Watch, voice and gesture recognition along with Near Field Communications technology all being built into MYOB and computers in the near future.

“NFC is a very powerful technology,” Simon states. “Imagine in the accounting world where you are doing your books by moving your phone.”

“In retail NFC is going to be big where you can walk up to a product, wave your phone in front of it and it will tell you about the product.”

“We are very much driven by what our clients want,” says Simon. “It comes down to the use case of will it add to our customers’ business.”

An enthusiastic advocate

One of the things that’s impressive about talking with Simon Raik-Allen is his enthusiasm for technology, whether it’s Pebble Watches, NFC enabled robots or gesture controlled accounting software.

MYOB needs that enthusiasm in its move away from the once immensely profitable box software business onto the cloud where margins are thinner, the advantages of incumbency aren’t great and the competition from well funded competitors like Xero is immense.

As with many other ventures, MYOB is dealing with a huge disruption to their core business and the challenges are immense.

Image courtesy of Morrhigan through sxc.hu

Lessons in crowdfunding from an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign

Crowdfunding is in its early days and Moore’s Cloud founder Mark Pesce explains some of the lessons we have to learn about this new way of raising capital.

“I’d rather eat a bullet than do a Kickstarter campaign again,” says Moore’s Cloud founder Mark Pesce in the latest Decoding The New Economy video when asked about crowdfunding his project.

Moore’s cloud is an internet of things company that focuses on lighting, “we think it’s interesting and something that expresses emotion” Mark says.

With their first project, Moore’s Cloud looked to raise $700,000 to build their first project but fell well short of their target.

Falling short lead to Mark and his team executing a classic business pivot from a static lights to Holiday, a system of intelligent fairy lights.

“We took exactly the same technology and put it into a different form factor,” said Mark. “It’s as if we took the light and unwound it.”

The failure of the Kickstarter campaign gave the Moore’s Cloud founders an education on how crowdfunding works.

Customer focused from day one

An important aspect of crowdfunding is it’s very customer focused. From day one of the campaign, the venture has to devote resources on relations with those who’ve pledged a contribution.

Most startups don’t have those resources, or the time and skills, to deal with those relations.

“People say it’s a better way of getting investors. I would have to say ‘it’s not better, it’s different.'” Mark says about crowdfunding.

The psychology of investors

One of the differences is the psychology of investors. Mark was urged by the CEO of Indiegogo, Slava Rubin, to set a low target as participants like to back successful campaigns.

“There’s a whole bunch of psychology I didn’t understand going in,” says Mark. “If we’d had a goal of $200,000 we probably would have filled it in the first two weeks.”

“Once a campaign is fully funded, it tends to get overfunded.”

A truism of business is that banks will only lend to you when you don’t need the money and it strangely appears the same thing applies to crowdfunding.

We’re in the early days of crowdfunding and there’s more to be learned about the way it works and for which ventures the fund raising technique works best.

The experience of campaigns like Moore’s Cloud are part of how we’ll discover the nuances of crowdfunding and the psychology of the crowds that contribute.

For God’s sake get a website

Setting up a website is one of the easiest, and most important, things a new business should do.

The annual MYOB Business Monitor was released earlier this week with the depressing news that half of the Australian businesses surveyed didn’t have a basic website.

MYOB’s survey reinforced the finding of PayPal’s Digital Literacy Report a week earlier that found only 34% of Australian small businesses list their contact details online.

This is madness – over a decade ago consumers moved online and now with the mobile internet any business without a website is almost invisible in the marketplace.

What is really dispiriting about these reports is that listing with the various online services and setting up a website is not hard, at worst it should take half a day for a simple site and to complete Google Places, Facebook and Yellow Pages listings.

The easiest way to create a website is to setup a free Blogger page, it takes about twenty minutes and is more than adequate if you just need a site that lists your services, location, contact details and phone number.

While Blogger is good for the basics, it does run the risk of locking a growing business into Google’s walled garden which is why WordPress is the better alternative for more advanced companies or proprietors.

Most readers of this site already know how important an online presence is for any organisation, but it’s almost certain that everyone knows a business owner who doesn’t have a website.

If one of those business owners is someone close to you, then the best thing you can do for them is to sit down with them and setup their basic online presence.

Unless you think it’s time they went out of business. In which case you won’t have to wait long.

Finding the data editors

Data journalism is the future of news media, but who will check and edit the data?

Data journalism is one of the buzz words of the media industry as it deals with its own issues of extracting information from the flood of data swamping business and society.

One of the media organisations leading the move to data journalism is The Guardian who have an excellent video on what a data journalist does.

The question though is where are the data editors? Like traditional journalism and writing, a good sub-editor is essential to clean up copy and check that the story makes sense.

With data, it’s even more important for other pairs of eyes to look at the numbers.

Last week I was asked by an editor to check a story that lots of number – and those numbers didn’t make sense. In fact, the numbers as they were presented argued against the writer’s point. Had the story run, both the writer’s and the publication’s would have been damaged.

Many news organisations are cutting back on their sub editing teams and the resulting drop in quality is hurting their publications.

Poor checking of data is even more risky and it’s going to be interesting to see if media organisations start devoting scarce resources to editing their data driven stories.

Breaking the break-fix business model

Fixing broken products was a profitable business for many companies, the Internet of Everything is changing that industry model.

One of the most profitable areas for many companies has been in fixing broken products, now the internet of everything promises to put an end to that business model.

‘Break-fix’ has always been a good profit earner with business ranging from construction companies to washing machine manufacturers making good money from fixing failed products.

Speaking at a lunch in Sydney earlier today GE’s CEO of Global Growth and Operations, John Rice, described how the Internet of Everything is changing in the industrial landscape.

One of the big business changes Rice sees is in the ‘break-fix’ model of many industrial suppliers.

“We grew up in companies with a break fix mentality,” Rice says. “We sold you equipment and if it broke, you paid us more money to come and fix it.”

“Your dilemma was our profit opportunity,” Rice pointed out. Now, he says engineering industry shares risks with their customers and the break-fix business is no longer the profit centre it was.

Goodbye to the TV mechanic

This is true in many other industries as products become both more reliable and less economical to repair – the local TV repairman has largely vanished and the backyard computer support businesses are going the same way.

For many businesses, this means a change to how they service their customers and the nature of their operations. For many, it means close monitoring of their products will be essential to manage risk.

Rice also flagged how grid computing will improve the reliability of equipment and networks citing how giant wind turbine talk to each other.

“Every wind turbine has an anemometer on top that’s used to judge wind speed and direction,” says Rice. “If you had a problem with the anemometer the wind turbine shut down until someone could come out – maybe a week later – to climb to the top of the turbine, diagnose the problem and start the thing back up.”

“Today the technology is such that the wind turbines talk to each other so if you’re in a wind field of thirty turbines you don’t rely on one anemometer,” points out Rice. “This is a very simple example of machine to machine interface.”

Wind turbines and the road toll

Rice’s example of wind turbines talking to each other is similar to Cisco’s scenario of using the internet of everything to reduce the road toll where cars communicate with road signs, traffic lights and each other to monitor conditions on the highway ahead.

Those machines talking together also give early warnings of problems which reduces downtime and risk for industrial users, it also means less money for businesses who’ve made money from those problems.

Building business communities

Businesses have the opportunity to build global brands and dominate their industries with the online tools we have available.

Industrial designers and engineers are probably the last thing most of us think of when discussing online communities.

Last week two very different events illustrated just how successful businesses benefit from building communities around their products and services.

Over lunch at a nice restaurant overlooking Sydney Harbour Dassault Systemes launched their their latest Solidworks 3D design software where they described the two million members of their global user community as being key competitive advantage in the industrial design market.

In the business sector, having that ecosystem of users is the key success as shown by businesses ranging from AutoCAD to Photoshop. Almost every industry has some software package that dominates the sector because ‘everyone uses it’.

Building social media communities

At the other end of the scale earlier in the day PayPal Australia launched their latest Driving Business Online campaign showcasing online commerce tools for the small to medium business sector.

One of the companies they profiled was Brisbane fashion company Black Milk Clothing, a Brisbane based business that has grown from a startup to employing 150 staff in four years entirely through its 560,000 strong Facebook community and 655,000 Instagram followers.

While there’s risks with relying on social media platforms as a primary marketing channel, Black Milk is a good example of what a retail business can do with building an online community.

Older examples

None of this is really new, Apple are probably the best example of a tech community with millions of adoring fans prepared to queue around the block for the latest iPhone.

Microsoft’s continued profitability despite being in a declining market comes from its army of developers, system admins and IT support services who are deeply committed to the company’s products.

At it’s most basic, every business needs a core of dedicated customers, committed staff and enthusiastic evangelists — with today’s tools companies like Black Milk are able to build a global brand.

Not every business can build a global brand out of their communities of enthusiastic customers and dedicated employees but the goodwill in those groups are quite possibly the biggest asset any organisation has.

With today’s online collaborative tools and social media services there’s no excuse for a business not be nurturing and growing their communities.