Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: consumer

  • ABC Weekend Computers – should you buy an iPhone 5?

    ABC Weekend Computers – should you buy an iPhone 5?

    With the usual hooplah, Apple announced their new iPhone last week. Should consumers drop their existing phones and buy the new iPhone?

    On ABC 702 Sydney Weekend computers this Sunday, September 16 from 10.15am Paul Wallbank and Simon Marnie will be looking at the choices in the smartphone market.

    Some of the topics we’ll discuss include;

    We love to hear from listeners so feel free call in with your questions or comments on 1300 222 702 or text on 19922702.

    If you’re on Twitter you can tweet 702 Sydney on @702sydney and Paul at @paulwallbank.

    Should you not be in the Sydney area, you can stream the broadcast through the 702 Sydney website and call in anyway. Everyone’s views are welcome.

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  • Will write, play and cook your dinner for free

    Will write, play and cook your dinner for free

    From the Internets;

    Craigslist Ad:
    We are a small & casual restaurant in downtown Vancouver and we are looking for solo musicians to play in our restaurant to promote their work and sell their CD. This is not a daily job, but only for special events which will eventually turn into a nightly event if we get positive response. More Jazz, Rock, & smooth type music, around the world and mixed cultural music. Are you interested to promote your work? Please reply back ASAP.

    A Musician’s Reply:
    Happy new year! I am a musician with a big house looking for a restauranteur to come to my house to promote his/her restaurant by making dinner for me and my friends. This is not a daily job, but only for special events which will eventually turn into a nightly event if we get a positive response. More fine dining & exotic meals and mixed Ethnic Fusion cuisine. Are you interested to promote your restaurant? Please reply back ASAP.

    Shamelessly lifted from the Telecaster Guitar Forum via Bob Lefsetz’s blog.

    The discussion about Amanda Palmer offering unpaid gigs for local musos on her US tour has been heated and the perspectives are interesting.

    What’s missed is the difference between artist and workers – the local violin player or trombonist getting up on stage with Amanda Palmer in Poughkeepsie isn’t going onstage to make a buck, it’s because he or she loves playing and is honoured to get an opportunity to perform with a big act.

    On the other hand, one of the sites that’s been critical of Palmer advertised for a “insightful, knowledgeable and talented writers to contribute to the ongoing and ever-intriguing discourse on music and film.”

    For submitting three 200 word blog posts a day, the lucky writer will receive a grand payment of six dollars. That’s one cent a word. Plus a cut of advertising revenue.

    Should anyone be tempted to think that revenue could amount to much, they should keep in mind the web is awash with crap content that’s worth one cent a word; there’s no reason why any half decent writer couldn’t set up their own blog and stick adwords on it for a better return.

    A few decades ago when printing was expensive and distribution networks difficult to set up, indy magazines offering little but an outlet to their writers served a purpose.

    Today you can setup an outlet in five minutes on Blogger or WordPress and let the web do the distribution for you.

    Any business that relies on free or cheap content is doomed – we’re in a world awash with cheap, crappy content and the public don’t see much reason to pay for it.

    That there is no market for crap is something our once esteemed newspapers, magazines and TV stations should keep in mind as they sack subeditors, retrench journalists and increasingly source material that was available on Twitter a day earlier.

    There’s a big difference between a musician or blogger creating something for love versus a business ripping contributors off  – one needs a market to succeed, while the other just does it because they want to.

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  • Moving on from the gadget era

    Moving on from the gadget era

    Yesterday at the launch of the next generation of Kindle e-readers Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos observed why the various Google Android based tablets have failed.

    Why? Because they’re gadgets, and people don’t want gadgets anymore. They want services that improve over time. They want services that improve every day, every week, and every month.

    Throughout the industrial revolution progress and innovation was about creating products that improved people’s lives – whether it was Josiah Wedgwood making affordable crockery, Thomas Edison commercialising the light bulb or Henry Ford making cheap motor cars available to the masses – these innovations changed the way we lived or did business.

    In the late Twentieth Century business focused more on creating gadgets and our lives became a race to accumulate more useless tat to store in our big McMansions to store the junk in.

    We wore out our credit cards and home equity in “buying stuff we don’t need to impress people we don’t like” throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.

    Today that’s changed, consumers are now more cautious and, despite the efforts of governments to prop up the broken system, the great credit boom is over.

    Jeff Bezos is onto this, instead of Amazon offering me-too products that don’t add value,  “people don’t want gadgets anymore. They want services that improve over time.”

    The word ‘service’ is notable — one of the things Amazon have achieved is changing how customers use books and DVDs from outright purchases that they can trade and sell to licensed products where Amazon and publishers control distribution.

    Amazon are consolidating their position as one of the big four Internet empires. How Google, Apple and PayPal respond to Amazon’s suite of services will define much of the online economy.

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  • Do we really want fibre broadband?

    Do we really want fibre broadband?

    Despite the enthusiasm to be the first US city to have the high speed broadband offered by Google Fiber, it turns out interest in the Kansas City rollout is only running at half the rate expected.

    This is consistent with the Australian NBN experience, with the takeup rate so far a dismal with less than 20% of Tasmanian properties passed taking the opportunity to get connected – only 10% of accessible premises are projected to sign up in 2012 according to NBNCo’s corporate plan.

    Both the poor take up rates in the US and Australia raise the question “do we really want fibre broadband?”

    The main difficulty are the incumbent players. In Kansas City reports are that Time Warner, the incumbent cable operator, is offering deals to lock their customers into existing plans.

    A similar thing has happened in Australia with the major operators locking customers into existing ADSL and phone plans so subscribers face penalties if they churn across to an NBN service.

    Most of those subscribers don’t need to churn right now, for most users the data plans they are currently on are fine and the NBN prices aren’t substantially different to the existing ADSL charges. In Kansas City, Google’s prices are lower, but the service is some way off and Time Warner can offer a connection now.

    Another problem is demographics, neither Tasmania or Kansas City are major digital industry hubs and parts of both regions are economically distressed, which means they are less likely to take up the offer – or be able to make the investment – to get get connected.

    That latter problem is the most concerning, as regional disadvantaged areas have the most to gain from being connected to broadband.

    Just as towns lobbied in the 19th Century to get railways routed through their communities, in the 21st Century fast Internet connectivity is seen as essential to a region’s development.

    But if individuals won’t get connected then it makes the business case for setting these networks up difficult to justify for corporations like Google or Governments like Australia. In future, it will make it harder to get incumbent network operators to replace aging copper infrastructure with modern and faster fibre.

    As both projects mature, hopefully we’ll see a greater takeup, in the Australian case greater acceptance should be inevitable as the incumbent Telstra copper network is shut down and subscribers migrated across to NBN infrastructure.

    The question does remain though of just how useful homes and businesses see fibre Internet connections to their homes, if they remain unconvinced about the value of a high speed data link then it maybe our communities miss out on the vital communications tool of the 21st Century.

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  • A world of criminal sheep

    A world of criminal sheep

    Notorious unpaid blogger Michael Arrington recently described his battle with a bank over direct debit charges.

    To overcome a fraudulent recurring charge on his credit card, Arrington cancelled his account only to find the bank moved the recurring charges to the new card, a ‘service’ designed to avoid fraud and save customers the hassle of re-establishing legitimate direct debits after a new card is issued.

    Both of those are noble reasons but the core of this philosophy lies in a contempt for customers which can be summarised in two principles.

    A customer is;

    1. A sheep to shorn of any available cash through sneaky fees and shady business practices
    2. A criminal

    In the 1980s business school view of the world, customers are criminally inclined sheep who have to be regularly shorn to enhance profits and controlled so they don’t go anywhere else.

    Only businesses operating in protected environments can get away with this today and the two obvious sectors are banking and telecommunications.

    The telco industry long soiled its nest with consumers with dodgy charges and a contempt for customers which reached a peak (nadir?) with the ring tone scams where kids had their phone credits pillaged by fees they never knew they had signed up for.

    While those dodgy charges paid the handsome bonuses of telco executives, it proved to another generation of consumers that these companies see their customers as sheep to fleeced on a regular basis.

    Ironically it’s that lack of trust that dooms the telcos in the battle to control the online payment markets – their practices of the 1980s, 90s and early 2000s mean few merchants or consumers will trust them as payment gateways.

    One of the strengths banks bring to that market is trust. Like cheques, credit cards succeeded as a payment mechanism because people could trust them.

    In screwing customers over direct debit authorisations, the banks are damaging that trust as Arrington says “I really don’t think I’m going to be giving out my credit card so freely in the future.”

    That’s a problem for businesses as direct debiting customers have been a good way to ensure cash flow and reduce bad debts but when clients perceive there is a high risk of being ripped off they will stop using them.

    Businesses that insist on direct debits will be perceived as potentially dodgy operators who rely on locking customers into unfair contracts rather than providing a decent service for a fair price.

    So the banks’ position of legal power works in their short term interest and against them – and the merchants using their services – in the longer term.

    While bank and telco executives with safe, government guaranteed market positions will continue to treat customers like criminal sheep it’s something the rest of us can’t get away with.

    The winners in the new economy are those who deserve to be trusted by their customers and users, if you’re abusing your market and legal powers then you better hope politicians and judges can protect your management bonuses.

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