Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: Innovation

  • Continuing the online payments battle

    Continuing the online payments battle

    Today Mastercard announced their PayPass service, a “digital wallet” that allows consumers to pay through various online channels including the web and their smartphones.

    Mastercard’s PayPass is the latest move in the battle to control the online payments industry as consumers move from plastic cards to using their mobile phones and Internet devices.

    One of the interesting aspects of PayPass is how it is a direct challenge to PayPal who in turn recently launched their PayPal Here service which threatens incumbent credit card services like Mastercard and Visa along with upstarts like Square.

    While its early days yet in the mobile payments space as consumers slowly begin to accept using smartphones and tablet computers to pay for goods and services, its clear the industry incumbents are moving to secure their positions in the market place.

    It’s going to be interesting to see how this develops, many merchants will be hoping this competition starts to drive down transaction costs.

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  • Is the Paperless Office promise about to come true?

    Is the Paperless Office promise about to come true?

    For as long as personal computers have been around the paperless office one of the holy grails of the IT industry.

    Paper is messy, difficult to file or store and cruel to the environment. So being able to move and save information electronically made sense.

    Despite the promises of the last twenty years, the quest for the paperless office seemed lost.

    While the networked PC gave us the ability to get rid of paper, its advanced word processing functions and graphic capabilities along with the data explosion of email tempted us into generating more paper.

    To compound the problem, over the last thirty years paper manufacturers found cheaper ways to make their product which meant the price of paper dropped dramatically just as we found more ways to use it.

    So rather than delivering on the promise of eliminating paper, computers generated more than ever before.

    Just as it seemed all was lost in IT’s War On Paper, the tablet computer came along. Coupled with cloud computing services and accessible fast wireless Internet, suddenly it appears we might just be on the verge on delivering on those promises of the last twenty years.

    At a suburban football game I saw this first hand as I watched the ground officials electronically filing match information with their league.

    “This used to be a pile of paperwork that used to take until Tuesday to be filed and collated” the ground manager told me, “today it’s done within half an hour of the game ending with almost no paper involved.”

    For amateur sports clubs, money isn’t so much the problem as time. There simply are never enough volunteers to meet the workload of getting a team on field.

    This is true with almost any community based organisation – from volunteer firefighters to community kindergartens organisers struggle with rosters and finding helpers.

    In business the same resource constraints exist except we know we can fix these problems by paying a worker to do it. The problem there is few businesses have unlimited funds to employ filing clerks and form fillers to handle the paperwork.

    By killing paper in the office, we’re making business and the economy more efficient. We’re about to deliver on that promise.

    Bill Gates once wrote that in the short term we overpromise what technology can deliver while in the long term we underestimate its effects.

    This is true of the paperless office – now that promise is being delivered the effects on business and government will be profound.

    Is your business prepared for these changes?

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  • It’s all in the timing

    It’s all in the timing

    This morning I sat in on a corporate breakfast and heard a well known presenter talk about social media for business owners and managers.

    The advice was terrible and what was valid could have come from a 2008 book on business social media marketing.

    But the room loved it and obviously the client – a major bank – thinks the speaker’s work is worthwhile. He has a market while many of us who’ve been covering this field for a decade don’t.

    Timing is everything in business. Earlier this week stories went around the Internet about how Microsoft could have invented the first smart phone.

    Microsoft could well have done it, they tried hard enough with Windows CE devices through the late 1990s and there was also the Apple Newton and the Palm Pilot.

    While all these companies could have developed the smartphone in the 1990s it wouldn’t have mattered as neither the infrastructure or the market were ready for it.

    Had Microsoft released the smartphone in the mid 199os it would have been useless on the analogue and first generation GSM cellphone networks of the time.

    Customers were barely using the web on their personal computers, let alone on their mobile phones, so the smartphone would have been useless and unwanted.

    Ten years later things had changed with 3G networks and real consumer demand so Apple seized the gap in the marketplace left by Motorola, Nokia and the other phone manufacturers with the iPhone and now own the market.

    Apple weren’t the first to market with a smartphone, just as Microsoft weren’t the first with a Windows-style operating system and Facebook weren’t the first social media platform.

    Those who were first to the market stood by while upstarts stole the market they built.

    Plenty of people have gone broke when their perfectly correct investment strategies have been mistimed – “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” is often proved true.

    That’s the same with the speaker this morning; he’s not the first to discover social media’s business benefits but his timing is impeccable.

    Being first is no guarantee of success if your timing is wrong.

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  • Rivers of gold

    Rivers of gold

    Google’s announcement that their revenues have increased by 24% over the last year shows the search engine juggernaut keeps rolling on.

    It’s tempting to think that Google is untouchable and that’s certainly how it appears when you’re on track to earn forty billion dollars a year and book close to 40% of that income as profits.

    On the same day, Sony announced a massive restructure including with 10,000 redundancies and the company’s CEO, Kazuo Hirai, spoke of a sense of urgency to address the once dominant corporation’s drift into irrelevance.

    Twenty years the thought of Sony – one of the world’s innovators in consumer electronics – would be wallowing in the wake of companies like Apple and unknown upstarts like Google was unthinkable.

    Fortunes are won and quickly lost in a time of great change and this is something we should keep in mind about Google when we look at their rivers of gold.

    “Rivers Of Gold” was a term coined to describe the advertising riches of the newspaper industry in the 1980’s. Google’s online advertising is partly responsible for destroying that business.

    Today Google is a search engine business that makes its money from the advertising that deserted print media and went online.

    It may be that manufacturing mobile phones, running “identity services” disguised as social media platforms or augmented reality spectacles are the future of Google but right now they it’s search and advertising that pays the bills and books the massive profits.

    The challenge for Google is not to lose sight of its current core business while building the future rivers of gold.

    If Google’s leaders can’t manage this, then they risk following the newspaper industry that they themselves disrupted.

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  • What if Bill Gates had been born in Australia?

    What if Bill Gates had been born in Australia?

    Microsoft founder Bill Gates is today one of the world’s biggest philanthropists having built his business from an obscure traffic management software company to what was at one stage the world’s biggest technology corporation.

    But what if he’d been born in Sutherland, New South Wales rather than Seattle, Washington? How different would things have been for an Australian Bill Gates?

    The first thing is he would have been encouraged to study law; just like his dad. In the 1970s lawyers had far more status and career prospects than software developers in Australia.

    Causing more concern for his parents and career counselor would have been his determination to run his own business. It’s far safer to get a safe job, buy a house then start buying investment properties to fund your retirement.

    The Funding Drought

    If Bill still persisted with his ideas, he’d have hit a funding problem. No bank wouldn’t be interested in lending and his other alternatives would restricted.

    In the Australia of the 1970s and 80s they’d be few alternatives for a business like Micro Soft. Even today, getting funding from angel groups and venture capital funds depend upon luck and connections rather than viable business ideas.

    Bill Gates’ big break came when IBM knocked on his door to solve their problem of finding a personal computer operating system; the likelihood of any Australian company seeking help from a small operator – let alone one run by a a couple of twenty somethings – is so unlikely even today it’s difficult to comprehend that happening.

    Eventually an antipodean Bill Gates would have probably admitted defeat, wound up his business and gone to work for dad’s law firm.

    Invest in property, young man

    Over time a smart, hard working young lawyer like Bill would have done well and today he’d be the partner of a big law firm with a dozen investment properties – although some of the coastal holiday properties wouldn’t be going well.

    While some things have changed in the last thirty years – funding is a little easier to find in the current angel and venture capital mania – most Australians couldn’t think about following in Bill Gates’ path.

    Part of the reason is conservatism but a much more important reason are our taxation and social security systems.

    Favoring property speculators over entrepreneurs

    Under our government policies an inventor, innovator or entrepreneur is penalised for taking risks. The ATO starts with the assumption all small or new businesses are tax dodges while ASIC is a thinly disguised small business tax agency and assets tests punish anyone with the temerity to consider building an business rather than buying investment properties.

    At the same time a wage earner is allowed to offset losses made in property or shares against their income taxes, something that those building the businesses or inventing the tools of the future are expressly forbidden from doing.

    Coupled with exemptions on taxing the capital gains on homes, Australian households – and society – is vastly over invested in property.

    Making matters worse, the ramping up of property prices over the last thirty years has allowed generations of Australians to believe that property is risk free and doubles in value every decade.

    That perception is reinforced by banks reluctant to lend to anyone who doesn’t have real estate equity to secure their loans.

    So we have a society that favours property speculation over invention and innovation.

    Every year in the run up to Federal budget time tax reform becomes an issue, the real effects of negative gearing and other subsidies for housing speculation – the distortion of our economy and societies investment attitudes – are never discussed.

    In Australia there are thousands of smart young kids today who could be the Bill Gates’ of the 21st Century.

    The question is do we want to encourage them to lead their generation or steer them towards a safe job and an investment property just like grandpa?

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