Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: business advice

  • The what and the why

    The what and the why

    “People are drowning in big data,” SurveyMonkey’s CEO Dave Goldberg says in the latest Decoding The New Economy video.

    Goldberg sees SurveyMonkey as bringing order to the world of big data in allowing organisations to put their information in context, “We want people to ask the right questions so we can get better data.”

    “Here’s a question I need to answer – how happy are my employees? what do customers think of my new product? What are my students doing at school this year?”

    Growing the survey industry

    One group that’s uncomfortable with the rise of SurveyMonkey, a privately listed company that’s worth $1.3 billion after a capital raising last year, are traditional market research firms who see the service as putting a powerful tool in experienced hands. Goldberg sees it as an opportunity for the market research industry.

    “We’re not replacing market researchers,” says Goldberg, “most people who come to SurveyMonkey haven’t used a market researcher before. It actually probably creates more demand for more sophisticated research down the line.”

    Goldberg himself isn’t from a market research background, instead he hails from the tech sector having set up LAUNCH in 1994, one of the early music streaming companies which he sold to Yahoo! in 2001 and became the company’s Director of Music.

    He left Yahoo1 in 2007 and spent two years in the venture capital industry before joining SurveyMonkey as CEO in 2009.

    Understanding the data

    From his experience, Goldberg sees understanding data the key business skill for today’s workers, firmly believing that kids should be taught statistic rather than coding.

    “Everyone is going to have to learn how to use data.” Says Goldberg, “someone was asking me the other day about sort of skills should we teach our kids to prepare them for the future and I think the thing we’re not doing enough of is teaching them how to use and analyze data.”

    To Goldberg we’re still in the early days of understanding how mobile and social media are going to change business with understanding data being one of the great opportunities.

    “Implicit data is really interesting but it tells you ‘what’, it doesn’t tell you the ‘why’, believes Goldberg. “We think what we do is the explicit side, we gotta ask people to get the ‘why.”

     

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  • Solving a global capital crisis

    Solving a global capital crisis

    “We face a global capital crisis,” states Julia Hanna, the chair of crowdfunding platform Kiva.

    In a story written with Kiva board member and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Hanna discusses how crowdfunding platforms are replacing banks as the source for businesses around the world.

    Throughout world  banks have effectively stepped out of the small business market, despite the world being flooded with cash to keep the global economy afloat over the last five years. Hanna writes about the US experience;

    big banks currently reject more than 8 out of 10 loan applicants, and small banks reject 5 out of 10. Some estimates suggest that investment in small businesses has dropped as much as 44 percent since the Great Recession in 2008.

    While the Great Recession had a lot to do with the collapse in small business lending in the US and Europe, the decline in bank support for main street dates back to the first Basel Accords established in 1988.

    Basel judged banks’ risks on the classification on their assets – government bonds were the safest and domestic property was the preferred private sector asset with small business lending being a long way down the risk.

    Following the cues from regulators, banks favoured mortgages which they could them securitize and onsell to investors; this gave rise to the sub-prime lending markets, Collateral Debt Obligations and eventually the Great Recession itself.

    Six years after the great recession started and despite massive amounts of capital being injected into the banking system, the small business sector is still being capital starved.

    As Hanna and Hoffmann state in their article, crowdfunding sites like Kiva and community initiatives are changing the banking system and it could well be that today’s trading banks.

    Having neglected their core purpose of funding business and industry, are now as vulnerable to disruption as other industries as small businesses, entrepreneurs and communities look elsewhere for their capital needs.

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  • Too far in front of the curve

    Too far in front of the curve

    Today Telstra’s CEO David Thodey launched the company’s new public Wi-Fi network that the telco hopes to roll out to two million locations across Australia.

    In using Telefonica’s Fon service, the idea is to equip customers on landline connections – ADSL, cable TV or Fibre – with a public wireless hotspot. The telco can then offer public Wi-Fi as a service.

    With well over half the country’s Internet market, Telstra can deliver reasonably good coverage with such a network in the same way BT does with their Wi-Fi that’s already providing this service in the UK with the same technology.

    Today’s announcement isn’t the first time Telstra has launched a municipal Wi-Fi service, five years ago they launched a product that quietly slipped into obscurity.

    At today’s launch, David Thodey mentioned that previous service and put it down to the immaturity of the technology.

    Several generations of Wi-Fi technology later, it may be the new product is more reliable and stable than the last failed attempt and sees far better take up rates.

    Which leads us to a truism in the technology industry – everything old is new again.

    In fact, most of the technology we talk about today such as cloud computing, social media and citywide Wi-Fi has been around for years under different names.

    What makes say cloud computing today more successful than software as a service a decade a go is that the current technology makes the products more reliable and accessible.

    That’s another affect of the Gartner hype cycle, that as one technology recovers from the trough of disillusionment it gets renamed and spawns the adoption of a bunch of other neglected concepts or ideas.

    As with much in businesses, the adoption of technology is as much a matter of timing as it is expertise.

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  • Three business lessons from the New York Times

    Three business lessons from the New York Times

    “The New York Times is winning in journalism,” starts the newspaper’s much discussed internal Innovation Report. Then in great detail it goes on to describe how the audience is being lost to upstarts like the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed.

    Given the number of digital forests that have been felled discussing the report in the last week, it’s not worthwhile giving an in depth analysis of the study – particularly given Nieman Labs’ comprehensive dissection of the document.

    What does stand out though are a number of over-riding themes that apply to almost any business, not just struggling traditional media outlets.

    Being digital first

    A constant mantra in the NY Times report is about being ‘digital first’ – if you’re thinking about that today, then you’re probably too late in your industry.

    Every industry is now digital: If you’re designing widgets, you’re doing it on CAD system; if you’re selling real estate, you’re listing online (one of the great killers of the old metropolitan newspaper model) and if you’re selling doughnuts, you’re placing your suppliers’ order electronically and maybe 3D printing your icing patterns in the near future.

    There isn’t one industry that isn’t being radically changed by digital technology.

    Breaking down silos

    One of the areas that’s been most resistant to digital change, and yet is the most threatened, is management.

    Silos within organisations are a triumph of management power and make it difficult for a business to be dynamic when it’s necessary to negotiate with different fiefdoms just to change the colour of paperclips.

    Those silos are fine when industries are cosy and there’s little competition but when disruptors enter the market those management empires become a dangerous, and expensive, weakness.

    The New York Times study spends a great deal of its pages discussing how to break down silos within its own organisation and this is something every business owner or manager should be exploring.

    With modern communication, information management and workplace collaboration tools many management roles are no longer needed.

    For smaller businesses, this is the greatest strength when competing against larger corporations as Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and Business Insider  have shown in stealing the market from the New York Times.

    You need to be found

    One of the toughest conclusions from the NY Times study is that the quality of content actually doesn’t matter in the marketplace; The Huffington Post and Buzzfeed do an excellent job of taking the NYT’s work, repackaging it and redistributing it in a way readers prefer.

    That might be a transition effect – it’s hard not to think that should original content creators like the NY Times be driven out of business then Buzzfeed will have to start employing more journalists and Arianna paying her writers – however right now gloss beats quality.

    Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post are attracting audiences because their stories are easy to find online and their headlines almost beg you to read them.

    For non-media businesses, the lesson is you need to be found; you may be the best restaurant, electrician or accountant in town but if you’re on the fifteenth page of Google in search results for your industry and suburb then you’re doomed.

    The New York Times faces its own unique set of challenges, as do the publishing and media industries, many of the lessons though from the NYT  Innovation paper though can be applied to many businesses.

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  • If you need government money, do you really have a business?

    If you need government money, do you really have a business?

    Australia’s new Federal government handed down its first budget yesterday with savage cuts to scientific research, training and business support.

    I dissected the implications of the budget for businesses in a piece for Technology Spectator with the conclusion that modern Australia is turning its back on technology, the young and the entrepreneurial.

    None of which will come as a surprise to this site’s regular readers.

    Some of the critics of my Tech Spec piece made the point that if your business relies on government grants then you aren’t really an entrepreneur.

    I’d tend to agree with that, having spent a few months working for a state agency responsible for business development programs I realised that for most businesses the time cost of applying for and administering a government grant was often greater than the value they received from the programs.

    So government grants aren’t the entrepreneurial manna that many people believe.

    What’s worse, governments can axe these programs at short notice which leaves the businesses short handed. Which is exactly what happened last night.

    Indeed that’s the problem for Australian businesses, each time a government changes the new administration axes the previous one’s programs and this lack of certainty and continuity is one of my concerns about the viability of Australia’s startup scene.

    The truth is though, if your business does need government funds to survive then you’re at the mercy of bureaucrat’s whim rather than the rigours of the market.

    If you’re comfortable with owing your existence to a bureaucrat then you probably don’t really have a business and you certainly aren’t an entrepreneur.

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