Category: Innovation

Too far in front of the curve

Even the best technologies can fail if they are too far ahead of the marketplace

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

The New York Times Innovation study has important lessons for all business owners and managers.

“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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Leading the disruptive wave

Uber’s fight with taxi regulators is part of a broader business disruption

I’ve a story up on Technology Spectator that pulls together Uber’s fight with taxi regulators around the world with the Australian government’s Commission of Audit.

While the story is written in an Australian context, the key message about business disruption is universal; as barriers to entry fall, no incumbent can assume they are immune from having their business upended.

For Australia, this is a particularly important message as the affluent economy is kept afloat by consumer spending underpinned by a favoured and protected housing market.

The economy though is nowhere near as untouchable as it looks; along with being way over invested in property, Australia’s industries are hopeless uncompetitive and have a cost base similar to Germany’s.

It’s an entire country ripe for disruption, it will be interesting to see if the Lucky Country’s luck holds in the 21st Century.

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4D printing and the quest for elegance

Many of us are still getting comfortable with the idea of 3D printing, but MIT’s Skylar Tibbits is working on a fourth dimension.

Many of us are still getting comfortable with the idea of 3D printing, but MIT’s Skylar Tibbits is working on a fourth dimension that he hopes will move us into a more elegant era of design.

Ahead of Skylar’s visit to Sydney for the Vivid Festival in June, Decoding the New Economy had the opportunity to interview him about what 4D printing is and his quest to create materials that can build themselves.

What is 4D printing

“We called it 4D printing because we wanted to add the ability for things to change and transform over time,” explains Skylar. “Time is the fourth dimension.”

Skylar’s mission at MIT’s Self Assembly Lab is to create materials that assemble themselves. In a TED presentation he demonstrates how these materials may work and the philosophy behind them.

Part of that search involves developing techniques for building large and complex structures from small components. “People know and utilise this in biology, chemistry and material science domains and we’re trying to translate that into larger scale applications.”

Avoiding big machines

“We don’t want to build bigger machines than the things we want to build, we want to build distributed systems,” Skylar continues. “If you want to build a skyscraper, you don’t want to build a skyscraper sized machine.”

Not only does this philosphy offer benefits for manufacturing and building but it may also save energy, transport and labour costs as things can automatically build themselves once they’re delivered to a customer.

“Materials should be able to assemble themselves or at least error correct or respond to active energy. There’s a whole application of packaging and minimising volume after manufacturing and transforming on site.”

Over time they could also adapt to changed conditions Skylar believes: “There’s also how products themselves can transform and be smarter adapt to my demands or adapt to the environment as it’s fluctuating around.”

Redefining the makers’ movement

Worldwide we’ve seen the rise of the makers’ movement as affordable 3D printing and cheap electronics has made it possible to build new things; Skylar sees the Self Assembly Lab as being part of, but slightly apart from this group.

“We make machines that make things, we’re integrated into that theme. We’re arguing that people can collaborate with materials and materials can be collaborative. It’s not just us making stuff and forcing materials into place, it’s materials making themselves.

“A lot of methods are top down, big machines force materials into place and we’re trying to argue you can have bottom up applications in manufacturing.”

So more than just simply printing components, Skylar sees the opportunity for embedding the intelligence into components so they can assemble themselves; the real task lies in programming the materials.

 The internet of elegant solutions

Similarly, Skylar sees the internet of things as being a far more passive, perhaps even friendlier, field than that dominated by machines and plastics.

“It’s not about the number of sensors and electronics and motor and things so that we can make these smart devices, we’re interested in how materials and fundamentally elegant solutions responding to external energy can have the same capabilities.”

“We certainly believe in a connected internet of things, but it’s more a material based internet of things.”

“I think that any solution in the beginning you throw a lot of money, technology and motors at it but over time you find more elegant solutions where materials can do more for you.”

“The wearable space is a good example where people don’t want to wear electronics all over their bodies, they don’t want bulky things that are expensive and hard to assemble and clunky to wear.”

“You want materials that you want your skin to touch, so we’re trying to find elegance in the solutions with smart devices.”

Seeding the forest

The challenge for Skylar, the Self Assembly Lab and those looking at changing the worlds of design and manufacturing is – like many other fields – funding.

Material sciences, particularly those being explored at the MIT, have long lead times that aren’t suited to the current Silicon Valley led model of innovation and Skylar believes we need a different model.

“We need to invest in super, long term radical innovation, to seed the economy and global technology development. We gained substantially in the Silicon Valley model with short term wins – with apps and simple technologies with incremental progress.”

“It’s sort of like we need to seed the forest, we can’t just keep taking all these things from the top like low hanging fruit we need to create a forest effect so that we create many new technologies.”

What comes out that forest of 4D printing and smart materials is anyone’s guess; but if Skylar Tibbits has his way, it will certainly be elegant.

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NASA and the five technologies that will change business

The Chief Technology Officer of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discusses the technologies that will change business.

What will be the next five technologies that will change busines? CITE Magazine has an interview with Tom Soderstrom, the chief technology officer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on what he sees as the next big game changers for business.

The list features many of the topics we’ve discussed on this blog; data visualization, the Internet of Things, robots, 3D printing and new user interfaces.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a good place to start when looking at what technologies will become commonplace in business as the organisation is testing the limits of modern engineering.

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A life in photojournalism

Photographer Charles O’Rear talks about wine, Windows XP and the future of photography

The latest Decoding the New Economy video is an interview with wine photographer Charles O’Rear.

Charles was on tour with Microsoft to promote the end of Windows XP, it was his photo of a Napa Valley hillside that became the background feature the system’s default ‘Bliss’ theme.

The interview is a long ranging discussion on how photojournalism has changed over the last four decades along with the evolution of both the art and science of photography itself.

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Kickstarter and ownership

Has Kickstarter funded startup Oculus discredited crowdfunding with its sale to Facebook?

The purchase of virtual reality headset designer Oculus by Facebook has raised some interesting questions about crowdfunding sites.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, many of those who contributed to the Kickstarter campaign that Oculus ran now feel betrayed by the company selling out to the social media giant.

Founder Palmer Luckey explained the companies sale to the WSJ as a quest for more funds; “a lot of people don’t understand how much money it takes to build things — especially to build hardware.”

Crowdfunding is tough

That ties into what founders have told Decoding the New Economy about crowdfunding startups; it’s tough and it easy to underestimate the capital required to launch a project.

Ninja Blocks’ Daniel Friedman told Decoding the New Economy last February that the main thing the company had learned from its successful Kickstarter campaign is that crowdfunding is a good way to raise funds for specific projects but a lousy way to fund a business.

Moore’s Cloud wasn’t as successful as Ninja Blocks and in his Decoding the New Economy interview, founder Mark Pesce described how he’d “rather eat bullets” than crowdfund a hardware startup again.

Startups are always hard, but it’s difficult not see how the high moral purpose often citing from Kickstarter project founders clashes with the ruthless moneymaking of Silicon Valley.

Discrediting crowdfunding

The criticism of Oculus also illustrates how crowdfunding lies between traditional investment and sales; those contributing to crowdfunding projects are true believers, not just customers and certainly not investors in a legal sense.

In recent times Kickstarter has been discouraging hardware startups from using their service; mainly because of the high risk of failure and disaffected contributors. The unhappiness with Oculus vindicates that move.

Oculus’ sale to Facebook may make many Kickstarter contributors doubly wary of Silicon Valley style startups trying to raise funds through crowdsourcing campaigns.

Lords of the Digital Manor

Looking at Oculus’ move, it’s hard not to conclude we’re seeing another cynical version of the Lords of the Digital Manor business model where enthusiasts are exploited by entrepreneurs looking for the big Silicon Valley pay off.

For Kickstarter and the other crowdfunding platforms, this is a problem as cynicism about the motives of those posting projects is probably a greater risk than the fear of being ripped off.

It may well be that Oculus marks a big change in the types of projects that get successfully funded, certainly the next hot hardware startup that tries crowdfunding is going to find things much harder.

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