Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: Internet

  • Commoditising cafe Wi-Fi

    Commoditising cafe Wi-Fi

    Over the past decade the idea of offering Wi-Fi internet connections to customers has become standard in the hospitality industry, today it’s pretty well a commodity.

    Not so long ago it was difficult to find a cafe that offered Wi-Fi and many of those that did either charged for it or were part of a provider’s networks that you had to be a member of.

    Today, Wi-Fi has become pretty standard in cafes and places like airport terminals although interestingly the hotel industry has been slow to adopt it.

    In the hotel industry a perverse rule of thumb seems to apply that the more expensive the property is, the pricier internet access will be as backpackers hostels invariable have free Wi-Fi while six star hotels charge anything up toe $30 a day for a connection.

    While the hotel industry still has to be dragged into the 21st Century on this front, cafes seem to have reached a point where having Wi-Fi is no longer a commercial advantage but not having free internet is now a distinct disadvantage.

    This was the point made by Nicholas Carr in his 2003 essay IT Doesn’t Matter where he suggested that computers, and other ‘infrastructural technologies’, don’t offer a competitive advantage once they are widely adopted.

    For a brief period, as they are being built into the infrastructure of commerce, these “infrastructural technologies,” as I call them, open opportunities for forward-looking companies to gain strong competitive advantages. But as their availability increases and their cost decreases – as they become ubiquitous – they become commodity inputs. From a strategic standpoint, they become invisible; they no longer matter.

    Carr’s proposition also implies that businesses who don’t adopt these technologies once they’ve become widespread risk being irrelevant and marginalised.

    For cafes, this means that customers will be ignoring them unless they do offer Wi-Fi and it will be another cost of doing business for the proprietors of coffee shops.

    Which begs the question of how do cafes differentiate themselves.

    Perhaps the answer lies in the dog bowl shown in the photo, making a venue pet, or child, friendly may be one way to attract customers.

    One thing’s for sure, just having good coffee and tea might not be enough to cut it in the future.

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  • Measuring an industrial hub’s success

    Measuring an industrial hub’s success

    A short article appeared on London’s City AM website yesterday discussing the successes of Google’s Campus and the government’s Tech City initiative.

    What jumped out of that story is the quote from Benjamin Southworth, the former deputy chief of the Tech City Investment Organistion, that London’s first tech IPO is “probably 18 to 24 months away”

    Southworth’s comments raise the question of how do you measure the success of initiatives like Tech City, does a stockmarket float indicate success of business or tech cluster?

    The debacle of Australia’s Freelancer float which saw the shares soar over 400% on the first day of trading certainly doesn’t indicate anything promising about the startup scene down under apart from the opportunities for those well connected with insiders on Australian Security Exchange traded stocks.

    In London’s case, Google’s Campus gives a far better indicator of what tech hubs and industrial clusters can add to an economy – £34m raised from investors in the 12 months to October 2013, 576 jobs created and 22,000 members of its coworking space.

    Google’s statistics raise an interesting point about the different objectives for the stakeholders in incubators and hubs; entrepreneurs want money or glory, investors want returns, corporate backers want intellectual property or marketing kudos, governments want jobs and politicians want photo opportunities with happy constituents.

    These different objectives means there are different measures for success and one group’s success might mean bitter disappointment for some of the others.

    What the various partners define as success is something anyone involved in an incubator or hub should consider before becoming involved, in that respect it’s like a business or a marriage.

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  • Becoming an all mobile executive

    Becoming an all mobile executive

    “I don’t want to use a laptop again,” Marc Benioff told the closing Dreamforce 2013 customer Q&A. “The desktop remains the biggest security threat to corporations — it’s a nightmare. The PC and laptop we never designed to be connected to a network.”

    Benioff was walking his talk in promoting his company’s Salesforce One mobile platform, claiming at the Dreamforce conference opening that he hadn’t used a PC or laptop or nine months as he’s moved over to tablet and smartphone apps.

    That push to move the company and its customers onto mobile services was emphasised by Peter Coffee, Salesforce’s Vice President for Strategic Research.

    “Your mobile device is no longer an accessory,” says Coffee. “It’s the first thing you reach for in the morning and it’s the last thing you touch at night.”

    Salesforce’s push into into the post-PC market follows Google and Apple’s lead, much to the distress of Microsoft and its partners.

    “We saw the phenomenal engineering work of Scott Forstall at Apple and the visionary work of the late, great Steve Jobs,”  Benioff told his cutomers at the final Dreamforce Q&A. “When we saw the iPhone we sat up and thought ‘wow, what are we going to do about this?’”

    “This is a paradigm shift, we’re moving from the desktop world to the mobile phone world and then of course we saw the iPad world emerge and that amplified it.”

    Salesforce’s impressions were shared by much of the business community as senior executives, board members and company founders quickly embraced the first version of the iPad, which on its own triggered the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend in enterprise computing.

    In a mobile age, Benioff now sees three key priorities for Salesforce; “we want to be feed first, we want to be mobile first and we want to be social first.”

    Regardless of Benioff’s vision, not everyone will go mobile which is something that Peter Coffee acknowledges.

    “The laptop will occasionally be used to author creative work like a presentation or to deal with something that needs a large screen like pipeline analysis,” says Coffee.

    Marc Benioff though is adamant. “Honestly I don’t ever want to use a laptop again,” he told his audience.

    It will be interesting to see how many business leaders follow him in abandoning their desktops and portable computers as the post-PC era of computing develops.

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  • Will the internet’s insecurities damage economic growth?

    Will the internet’s insecurities damage economic growth?

    “No country is cyber-ready” warns Melissa Hathaway, author the Cyber-Readiness Report.

    Hathaway’s warning is that the economic benefits of the internet are being lost to the various vulnerabilities in our information infrastructure.

    Dutch research company TNO claims that the Netherlands lost up to 2% of their GDP to cybercrime in 2010 and Hathaway claims similar losses are being incurred in other developed countries.

    Supporting Hathaway’s views at a function in Sydney today, Cisco System’s Senior Vice President and Chief Security Officer, John Stewart, made a frightening observation about corporate networks.

    “Every single customer we have checked with, and these are the Fortune 2000, has high threat malware operating in their environment – every single one of them.”

    So the bad guys are in our networks and causing real economic damage. The question for businesses and governments is how do we manage this threat and mitigate any losses?

    On our more intimate level, how do we manage our own systems and online behaviour to limit our personal or business losses?

    Hathaway makes the point that the internet was never intended to do the job we now expect it to do and as consequence security was never built into the net’s design.

    Today, we rely upon the internet regardless of its lack of inbuilt security. With everyone from governments through to organised crime and petty scammers wanting to peek at our data, we have to start taking security far more seriously.

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  • IT becomes the plumbing

    IT becomes the plumbing

    One of the things that jumped out of last week’s smart city tour in Barcelona is that Nicholas Carr’s IT Doesn’t Matter is coming true — IT is now the plumbing.

    That’s not to depreciate IT, it means the technology is now becoming so embedded in society and business that people no longer notice.

    Like roads, electricity and water people assume it will be available but don’t notice the massive effort or investment required to make sure these services work.

    With cloud computing, pervasive internet and connected devices, most business never need to see an IT worker.

    For telco executives, IT managers and tech support people this is a blow to their egos as they always wanted their industries to be more than utilities.

    In one way being a utility legitimises IT as it makes the industry more important than just a bunch of geeks playing with computers.

    That also means that things have to work, ‘best effort’ services no longer cut it when you’re a utility and things have to work 99.99% of the time. Just like in plumbing.

    Becoming the plumbing could be the best thing that happened to the IT industry.

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