Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: Innovation

  • Is your business dying?

    At the release of a report into technological change and the accounting profession last week, Melbourne University’s Professor Colin Ferguson said “I could see as many as 25% of companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) disappearing in the next decade because of the proposed National Broadband Network (NBN) roll out and other rapid technological change.”.

    Professor Ferguson could be optimistic. The Internet today is where the automobile, telephone and mains electricity were eighty years ago — all were established technologies that had been around for a while, but the society wide benefits only began to be felt in the 1930s.

    Many industries failed as motor vehicles became common and communities were connected to electricity grids and phone networks. Businesses who didn’t recognise those changes simply ceased to exist while those who survived embraced and adapted to the new technologies.

    The best example of why more that a quarter of enterprises will probably fail this decade is that 44% of businesses still haven’t bothered to get a website despite three quarters of consumers and almost all business now researching their purchases online. These businesses without websites are invisible to those customers.

    The tragedy is business websites are free with both Sensis and Google offering free Local Business Centre and Yellow Pages online listings. While these websites aren’t flashy, they give the basic information about your business that prospective customers are looking for and filling in the forms only takes a few minutes.

    Business Internet though is far more than just a bit of brochure ware on the web, a few weeks ago we discussed location based services like Foursquare and bar code readers like Red Laser. These are small examples of how technology is changing entire business processes and models, not just the marketing.

    Like the car, telephone and mains electricity, the Internet fundamentally changes business methods and the markets they sell to. If you aren’t adapting to those changes then your business won’t be around to talk about it in three years time.

    The truth is Australia’s National Broadband Network has little do with it. These changes are happening now as pervasive broadband is being rolled out across major population centres. The role of initiatives like the NBN and Google’s US Fibre network is to make sure those benefits are being applied equally across nations and not just in downtown Melbourne, New York or Beijing.

    Regardless of where your business is, it’s almost certain your industry is being radically changed right now. Is your business aware, prepared and flexible enough to adapt to those changes?

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  • Twenty three great ideas

    A few weeks ago more than 40 of Australia’s most exciting innovators showed off their products at Tech23. Twenty-three of those business were selected to give a four minute pitch to industry leaders in front of several hundred spectators at a Sydney auditorium.

    All the inventions were great – the highlights included Heard Systems; a bovine pregnancy detector, We Are Hunted; a music charting system that tracks a work’s popularity across the Internet and Posse; a ticket seller that harnesses a band’s fan base to fill venues.

    The intriguing thing about two of these companies is they rely on communities. The fact both these businesses come from the music industry isn’t surprising. This is a sector where social and peer power has been long understood through sales charts and fan clubs.

    With all of us having grown up with Top 40s and music videos we have an intuitive understanding of how these communities work.

    An advantage all three businesses had were passionate, informed presenters who believed in their product and who could explain the benefits in 240 seconds. Those 23 presentations showed was just how important a good pitch is to communicating how a great idea is going to change the world and make investors happy.

    Another thing that stood out was how a well done Powerpoint enhances a speaker while a poorly done one distracts and irritates the audience. Interestingly only one of the three pitches mentioned had a memorable overhead shows how a passionate speaker who believes in their product trumps even the most elaborate presentation.

    In some ways it’s another variation of the rule of threes in that you have a three second pitch, a 30 second pitch and the three minute extended version. Indeed the ReadWriteWeb site has an extended rule of threes, describing how an “insanely great” service is being spoken about after three days, three months and three years.

    While you can’t control what people will say about your business three years after hearing about it, you should be able to get across what your business does in three seconds.

    Funny enough, that’s pretty close to how long it takes to read a 140 character SMS or Twitter message. Can you describe your business in one tweet?

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  • The new global businesses

    It’s old hat to point out the internet is changing business and globalisation is making the world smaller. But last Tuesday I saw three businesses that showed just how profound these changes are.

    That Tuesday morning Mark Fletcher’s Australian Newsagency Blog had a post about the Strange Light Magazine, a collection of photos around Sydney during the recent dust storm.

    Some notable points about Strange Light – it was self-published in 31 hours using HP’s Magcloud, the photos were all sourced from Flickr and Derek Powazek, the publisher/author, did everything from San Francisco.

    Publishing on demand using services like Magcloud and Amazon’s Createspace is worthy of many blog posts in themselves. Derek’s story of Strange Light on his own blog is a terrific step-by-step guide to creating a self-published magazine. Notable are his points about obtaining permissions and proof reading.

    It isn’t one-way traffic between California and Sydney, Australians are also doing business in the US without leaving home. The same day I read the Strange Light story, I had a coffee with Andrew Rogers from Sydney’s Anchor Systems, who set up a new data centre for US-based developer management system, GitHub.

    All of GitHub’s hardware is in the US and their new data centre equipment came completely bare, without operating systems or software. Andrew’s team was able to build, configure and test the systems from their Sydney office.

    The fact GitHub were prepared to accept a quote from a business 11,000km away and have full confidence the job could be done from across the world shows just how distance no longer matters to forward-thinking enterprises.

    Finally, that day I managed to catch up with an old contractor who now runs a remote support business for homes and small offices. You call him and he logs into your computer to fix the problems.

    Nothing particularly special there except he operates out of Thailand. So he gets to run an Australian business from a Phuket beach hut. He has business he enjoys without sacrificing the lifestyle he wants.

    These entrepreneurs are showing how the globalised economy is really working. Each are using freely available tools that allow individuals and small teams to offer their talents across the world.

    You might want to have a look at the tools which are revolutionising your industry, you can be sure your competitors around the corner and around the world are already doing so and might soon be offering innovative new ideas to your customers.

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  • The Future Summit 2: Artificial divides

    I took a lot from the Melbourne Future Summit, much of it good and some of it worrying.

    One of the worrying aspects was the hostility from the “creative thinkers” towards Engineers and scientists.

    This was apparent in the Innovation Imperative seminar where many of the panel’s and audiences’ comments were notable for their hostility towards Engineers and scientists along with their view it was time for some “creative thinking”.

    Most of questioners from the floor went as far to blame Engineers and scientists for the Global Financial Crisis.

    This is odd as scientists and Engineers are no more responsible for the banking sector’s financial engineering any more than artists are responsible for the bankers’ creative accounting.

    Creating artificial barriers between “creative” and “scientific” thinkers is dangerous and foolish. Our greatest Engineering and scientists are creative thinkers by definition. Many great artists have applied science to their work.

    If we force people into these pigeon holes where an Engineer can’t be creative and an artist can’t use science then we are all the poorer for it and less equipped for the challenges ahead of us.

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  • Ignoring your customers

    The new Facebook design has picked up lots of critics with nearly 800,000 users giving it the thumbs down.

    However Dare Obasanjo claims Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg doesn’t care. Apparently Mark’s view is “the most disruptive companies don’t listen to their customers“.

    That’s true – Steve jobs ignored the howls of protest when Apple dropped support for floppy disks and the Apple Desktop Bus which left millions of Mac users stranded with obsolete equipment.

    Even more famously, Henry Ford told customers they could have any colour Model T they liked as long as it was black.

    Both were right and the customers followed them, although not without some grumbling.

    So you can succeed by knowing your customers needs better than they know them, but it’s a risky ask as Microsoft found with Windows Vista, Ford with the Edsel and Coca-Cola with New Coke.

    Time will tell if Mark Zuckerburg’s right. It’s a high risk strategy though.

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