Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: cloud computing

  • Bringing social networking to life

    Bringing social networking to life

    One of the highlights of the 2013 Australian Microsoft TechEd was a startup panel featuring local startups CoOpRating, Project Tripod and Nubis.

    All three startups are interesting projects and Nubis in particular illustrated how various internet and smartphone technologies which are coming together.

    Nubis is an Augmented Reality platform that projects social media onto the viewer of a smartphone’s camera. By pointing the camera at someone, the idea is a user can bring up details about a person.

    “We’re bringing social networking to life,” says founder Uzi Bar-On.

    As part of their Alphega project, Nubis has teamed with Glass Up, an Italian startup attempting to create a Google Glass competitor, the aim is to create a wearable computer that feeds social media information to the wearer.

    While it’s not clear what the benefits will be of that – or whether Glass Up, Nubis or Alphega will be successful – the project is interesting as it brings together Augmented Reality, geolocation, wearable technologies and social media.

    Over the next few years we’ll be seeing more products like Alphega tying together different technologies and using the Internet of Everything to talk to each other.

    It’s these sort of projects that will show us how our businesses and lives are going to change over the next decade as smart people figure out the ways to mash together these technologies.

    Paul travelled to Microsoft TechEd 2013 courtesy of Microsoft Australia

    Similar posts:

  • Security and the hackable baby monitor

    Security and the hackable baby monitor

    Imagine a baby monitor that can be hacked, that’s the story that Forbes magazine tells about the Foscam baby monitors that can be owned by anybody using the Shodan search engine to find unsecured video devices.

    Like all similar stories, the Foscam monitors’ weaknesses are born out of good intentions, the idea is parents can keep an eye on their children across the internet.

    The problem, as always, is convenience and ease of use trumped security with Foscam making it easy for parents to by having trivial, if any, security on their devices.

    It’s a lesson that should have been learned a million times, yet manufacturers continue to disregard the risks of poor security on internet connected devices.

    As these internet connected devices become critical to business and public safety, this lack of security won’t be acceptable.

    Slowly, companies like Foscam are being forced to take security seriously — hopefully consumers will accelerate the process by voting with their wallets.

    In the meantime, it might be a good idea to make sure your home or business router has a good firewall before setting up internet connected devices.

    Similar posts:

  • Building the post-agile workplace

    Building the post-agile workplace

    “I personally believe we haven’t seen a major change in how companies work since the industrial revolution,” says Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni. “We’re, I think, on the brink of a change as large as that.

    Pisoni was speaking at Microsoft’s Australian TechEd conference on the Gold Coast and gave an insight into how Yammer’s development philosophy is being implemented at Microsoft since the smaller company was acquired last year.

    He believes all businesses can benefit from collaborative, cloud based tools like Yammer however software companies like Microsoft are the ones being affected the earliest from their adoption.

    “We sometimes joke that Yammer’s development methodology is post-Agile, post-Scrum” says Pisoni. “Because they were not fast enough and don’t respond to data quickly.”

    Understanding modern workplaces

    This will strike fear into the minds of managers who are only just coming to understand Agile and Scrum methodologies over the traditional ‘waterfall’ method of software development.

    “We focused primarily in the past on efficiency,” states Pisoni. “In many ways things like scrum attempt to make you more agile but still focus on efficiency. Everyone is tasked based and hours and burn down points and all that”

    “The name of the game now is not efficiency, it’s how quickly you can learn and respond to information.”

    “Yammer is less of a product than it is a set of experiments running at all times. We take bold guesses about the future but then we try to disprove our hypotheses to get there.”

    “So we came up with this ‘post-agile’ model of a small, autonomous, cross-functional teams – two to ten people for two to ten weeks who could prove or disprove an hypotheses based on the data.”

    “This lets us quickly move resources around to double down on that or do something else.”

    Flipping hamburgers the smart way

    Pisoni sees this model of management working in areas outside of software development such as retail and cites one of his clients, Red Robin burgers, where the hamburger chain put its frontline staff on Yammer and allowed them contribute to product development.

    The result was getting products faster to market – one burger that would have taken eighteen months to release took four weeks. The feedback loops from the customer and the reduced cost of failure made it easier to for the chain to experiment with new ranges.

    With companies as diverse as hamburger chains, telcos and software developers benefitting from faster development times, it’s a warning that all businesses need to be considering how their employees work together as the competition is getting faster and more flexible.

    It remains to be seen if this change is as great as the industrial revolution, but it’s now that can’t be ignored by managers and entrepreneurs.

    Paul attended Microsoft TechEd Australia as a guest of Microsoft who paid for flights, accommodation and food.

    Similar posts:

  • Beautiful software and changing the world

    Beautiful software and changing the world

    Can cloud computing change the business world? Xero’s founder and CEO Rod Drury believes so and he has a grand vision for the future of business.

    Interviewing Xero CEO Rod Drury at the company’s Australian roadshow in Sydney last week, it’s hard not to be impressed by his pride in the company he founded and the vision for how cloud computing will change business.

    “It was only about three or four years ago we started thinking we’d have a trade show with multiple tracks and great guest speakers.” Drury said.

    Xero was celebrating its 200,000 customer at the conference and Drury sees the business growing further, “we want to get to a million customers as soon as we can.”

    “We’ve been doubling every year and we think that’s going to keep going. Looking at the numbers, we’re only at four percent market share.”

    Markets for Xero

    In Australia, that market is the 1.2 million small business the company believes needs accounting software. But it’s not just down under that Drury is looking at for growth.

    “We’re operating in four main markets at the moment. We have 90 staff in Australia and that’s our main market.” Drury says, “the UK is doing really well at the moment and we’ve had a team for the last twelve months in the US.”

    New Zealand Startup community

    Xero is probably the brightest star in New Zealand’s startup community which, while small, is punching well above its weight internationally, Drury has some views on why such a small business community is doing so well.

    “What’s cool about New Zealand is that it’s nice and small and everyone knows everybody so once a company gets to scale so there’s a nice, healthy ecosystem that lifts everybody up.”

    “The small companies building apps alongside Xero don’t have to build a marketing team or sales team.  If they are clever and partner with us they can access our 200,000 customers and 6,000 accounting partners.

    “It’s also interesting starting from New Zealand because we have the largest banks as customers so are able do some neat things with the next generation of banking, where online banking and accounting are closely tied together.”

    The Generational Change in accountants

    Drury doesn’t see much of a generational divide between those adopting cloud technologies, he finds the new way of doing business is liberating older accountants and business owners as much as it is enabling younger ones.

    “One of the neat things I’ve seen is that a lot of people come up to me who are in their fifties and sixties who say ‘I was thinking about getting out of the industry as I’m bored with accounting but you guys have made it exciting again.”

    On beautiful software

    A marketing tag line of Xero is “beautiful software”, something you don’t expect when talking about accounting technology. Drury sees this more as a philosophy than an advertising slogan.

    “We came up as part of the Apple generation. Beautiful isn’t just about being pixel perfect – it’s all about having great values and having software that delights people. “

    “WE did surveys at the start and people hated doing their books, they actually used the word ‘hate’. Now they love doing Xero.”

    Building a partner ecosystem

    The key to success in the software industry lies in building a developer and partner community. For cloud computing companies that requires having an open Application Programming Interface so other businesses can access data and provide complementary services.

    “When we saw the way the small business market was changing on the cloud, we made sure we had a nice, open API. We said ’lets make it really cheap for people to buy a commodity general ledger but super easy for developers to build these line of business applications,’” said Drury.

    “One of the really neat things we’ve seen is a lot of accountants are now moving over to the product side, so you go to the trade show and you see people we were selling product to with their bookkeeping hat on and now they’re selling software, so that change has been remarkable as well.”

    Building the supply chain

    One of the great opportunities Drury sees is in growing the logistic chain where cloud services become electronic data interchange (EDI) platforms plugging small businesses into larger businesses’ data and procurement systems.

    “Take Coles supermarkets, they have probably have 2,000 very small suppliers who drop off a pallet of jam every six weeks, it’s very expensive for them to deal with all of these companies.” “Now there’s so many small business running in the cloud it’s effectively providing an electronic data interchange.”

    “So we see a lot of interest from large businesses seeing how much they can improve their supply chain by now electronically connecting to small business.”

    Connecting business, customers and governments

    “In this early stages of this transition of accounting moving to the cloud you think it’s just moving from MYOB or QuickBooks to Xero, it’s actually that we’re connecting businesses, we’re connecting the banks” “we’re also seeing a lot more interest from government.”

    Drury cites the New Zealand government’s $1.5 billion revenue department’s IT upgrade as an example where open data and APIs could save taxpayer funds and improve the delivery of services.

    “The impact of the cloud is a whole lot different, it’s not just the next interface for accounting, it’s a fundamental change where everything connects. Big business to small business and business to government as well,” says Drury.

    The aims of Rod Drury and Xero are big and audacious, we’ll see how well both the company and cloud computing can deliver in revolutionising the way businesses, banks, governments and consumers communicate.

    Similar posts:

  • Google’s lost Docs mojo

    Google’s lost Docs mojo

    Last week I spent the day at Xero’s Australian convention speaking to various cloud service companies, bookkeepers and accountants.

    One of the notable organisations missing in the conversations was Google – two or three years ago, Google Apps would have been at the front and centre of conversations about cloud services and integration. Yesterday the company was barely mentioned.

    Part of the reduced buzz around Google Apps at XeroCon is due to Xero’s closer relationship with Microsoft, but it also betrays how Google Docs is no longer the smartest, newest product on the block.

    “We tried to eat their dog food, but our staff rebelled,” one manager of a marketing agency who worked with Google told me. “We thought we’d go Google Apps for all the work we were doing with them but we just found the products lacked the functions we needed.”

    The main problem for business users are Google Docs’ slimmed down feature. While most people don’t use 95% of the tools included in Microsoft Word or Excel, each person uses a different 5% and find something critical missing from the cloud based challenger.

    For writers, Google Docs’ lack of a word count function is a deal breaker. Speakers find the Presentation function far too basic concerned to the Microsoft Powerpoint or Apple Keynote packages.

    In the cloud computing industry, Application Program Interfaces (APIs) are all important as these allow other services to plug into data and enhance value for users. Over the last two years, Microsoft have done a good job in cultivating their developer community while Google have taken theirs for granted.

    Most importantly though is that Google seems to have lost focus on their productivity suite, it may be another example of the company’s corporate attention deficit disorder, or it may be be that Microsoft have seen off another challenge to their dominance in that sector.

    If it is the latter, then Microsoft have done a good job with Office 365 in seeing off the threat that Google posed.

    Despite the company’s challenges in the post-PC, post- Gates era it would be dangerous to write Microsoft off.

    Similar posts: