Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: Internet

  • The rise of new business models

    The rise of new business models

    As always Mary Meeker’s State of the Internet report hits us with mass of information, this year compressed onto a 355 slide Powerpoint presentation.

    There’s a wealth of detail in the report but two big trends stood out – that global internet advertising spend will overtake TV ad revenues and music industry revenues have reversed a 16 year decline as subscription services gain market share.

    Subscriptions becoming the main revenue source for music companies suggests ]new internet business models are slowly evolving although how that lessons can be applied to other industries remains to be seen.

    In the world of advertising, that online is now attracting a greater spend than TV is a major milestone in the shifting marketplace. Although Facebook and Google’s dominance – Meeker estimates 85% of revenue growth is going to the two companies – will present challenge to advertisers and agencies.

    Also notable is how mobile revenues and handset sales are slightly better than flat, indicating the biggest market of last decade is now mature.

    There’s many other insights in this report so it’s worth spending a few hours on it to reflect on how some of these trends may affect your industry.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • Keeping the cyber utopian dream alive

    Keeping the cyber utopian dream alive

    “I stand before you as a failure,” was how I opened my presentation at the Talking Justice conference last weekend. “If I were giving this talk ten or fifteen years ago, I’d have described how the web and social media were going to usher in a new era of democracy and accountability.”

    “Like most of the cyber utopians, I was very, very wrong.”

    Basically we were wrong because we didn’t see how the internet would concentrate rather than diffuse power or the extent of how new gatekeepers and monopolies would be replaced the old ones.

    My friends and I were not alone, in a somewhat rambling interview with the New York Times Twitter co-founder Evan Williams describes how “the internet is broken” and how he thought the messaging service could make the world better.

    “I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,” Mr. Williams says. “I was wrong about that.”

    Instead Twitter has become home to trolls, harassment and misinformation, something that saddens Williams and most of us who thought the web would bring about a more open and fair society.

    Hope isn’t completely gone though, we are still in the early days of social media and the internet so the current trends may only be a transition effect as audiences, markets, regulators and the community get to grips with the new medium.

    There’s also Amara’s law which states we overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

    So it’s best to be a pessimistic optimist where one accepts in the short run things are dire but over time things will turn out well.

    We can only hope.

    Similar posts:

  • Alternatives to the National Broadband Network – ABC Nightlife

    Alternatives to the National Broadband Network – ABC Nightlife

    If you missed the show, you can listen through the ABC Nightlife website. Sadly we didn’t get to half the topics but our callers, as well as the NBN PR guy, were fabulous.

    Paul Wallbank joins Phillip Clark on ABC Nightlife across Australia from 10pm Australian Eastern time on Thursday, February 16 to discuss how technology affects your business and life.

    Last week the NBN announced a third of the country was now covered by their services and the company’s CEO, Bill Morrow, said Australians really don’t want super fast internet. A few weeks before, Telstra announced a new service that will deliver gigabit broadband over their mobile network. We can expect their competitors to offer similar products soon.
    At the same time we’re seeing a blast from the past as Nokia are rumoured to be soon releasing an updated version of their classic 3310 phone – are we going to see the ‘tradie phone’ making a comeback?
    While the old phone is nice, many people need fast broadband so how is the NBN going and, if you can’t get it, what can you do? Some of the questions
    • So how is the NBN going?
    • Wasn’t the government’s revised plan going to mean the whole thing is going to be cheaper and faster than the original project?
    • Who can get it?
    • Is it as good as promised?
    • So what alternatives to the NBN are there?
    • Doing the sums on those mobile plans, using them can be a pretty expensive business?
    • It seems we’re going backwards. How does Australian broadband compare globally?
    • How is this affecting regional communities and businesses?

    Join us

    Tune in on your local ABC radio station from 10pm Australian Eastern Summer time or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

    We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

    You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • A gigabit milestone for mobile networks

    A gigabit milestone for mobile networks

    Yesterday communications vendors Qualcomm, Netgear, Ericsson and Telstra, unveiled their Australian gigabit LTE service that gives users high speed internet connections over the 4G mobile network.

    Billed as a world’s first, Telstra will offer customers the Netgear supplied hotspots that can connect up to twenty devices over WiFi.

    Listening to the Telstra spiel yesterday, it wasn’t hard to conclude the company is making a pitch for the market frustrated by the National Broadband Network’s tardy rollout and patchy service.

    The service doesn’t come cheap though, as Finder’s Alex Kidman points out, an hour’s movie streaming on one device could easily cost $4500 dollars on Telstra’s current plans with one of the company’s executives emphasising the product is “aimed at the premium end of the market.”

    Being aimed at the premium end of the market is shame for Qualcomm as their spokespeople were keen to show off the gaming, AR and VR potential of the Snapdragon CPUs driving these devices. It would be a brave or very affluent family that bought one of these devices for their kids given the data costs.

    While the Telstra Gigabit LTE service might be an NBN replacement for deep pocketed customers, telco veteran John Lindsay points out the mobile network can’t support too many people doing so unless many more cells are deployed.

    For the moment the Telstra service is going to be attractive for companies needing high speed. low volume connections in the central business district and as the gigabit LTE upgrades roll out across the country, it will be useful for travellers as well as frustrated NBN customers.

    Ultimately the gigabit LTE product is another step toward the 5G networks that we’ll be seeing appear at the end of the decade, something that both the Ericsson and Telstra PR folk were keen to highlight.

    The key message for consumers and businesses is the rate of innovation in the mobile communications market is not slowing and another generation of connected devices is coming that will change things as dramatically as the smartphone did.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • A Chinese cure for internet addiction

    A Chinese cure for internet addiction

    Internet and electronic games addiction is a problem that regularly surfaces in the media. In 2015 a Taiwanese man died after three solid days of gaming while in 2010 a South Korean couple allowed their three month child to starve while they concentrated on playing with a virtual child.

    Some Chinese families have taken to dispatching their kids to boot camps to cure their addictions with the New York Times reporting how some are resorting to electrotherapy treatments to wean children off games and the web.

    Three years ago the Times posted a fascinating and somewhat distressing video story on those Chinese boot camps with tearful teenage boys writing letters home telling their parents how they felt betrayed.

    More telling are the comments by the Addiction Specialist Director of the Daixing rehabilitation camp, Tao Ran, who believes the parents are responsible for what their children’s addiction to what he calls ‘electronic heroin’.

    “One of the biggest issues among these kids is loneliness,” he tells a parent group. “Did you know they feel lonely? So where do they look for companions? The Internet.”

    The problem of internet and electronic game addiction is real – exacerbated by the incentives for developers and social media sites to maximise the time users spend on their platforms.

    It’s also not just an issue for parents and children. For adults and business owners the lost time, productivity and health issues of spending too much time behind the computer are immense – not to mention the distorted view of the world that comes from a narrow slice of information and opinion.

    While electroshock therapy certainly isn’t the answer, we do need to be asking questions about responsible and safe use of computers and the internet.

    The Chinese response is an extreme, and probably unworkable, solution to the problem of electronic addictions however we will have to find ways to manage it.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts