Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: Internet

  • The madness of crowds – ABC Nightlife with Tony Delroy

    The madness of crowds – ABC Nightlife with Tony Delroy

    Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy on ABC Nightife across Australia to discuss how technology affects your business and life. For May 2013 we’ll be looking at crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.

    The show will be available on all ABC Local stations and streamed online through the Nightlife website.

    If you missed the show, you can download it from the Nightlife with Tony Delroy webpage.

    Some of the topics we’ll discuss include the following;

    • what is crowdfunding?
    • how does it differ from crowdsourcing?
    • some people say crowdsourcing is a huge cost saver for business, is it?
    • crowdsourcing can be controversial as well, who get upset by it?
    • for creatives like musicians, writers and artists a lot are trying crowdsourcing, how is it going?
    • can crowdsourcing save journalism?
    • what are the ptifalls with crowdsourcing and crowdfunding

    Some crowdsourcing and outsourcing resources we’ll mention include;

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

    Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

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

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  • Take ten engineers and the internet of everything

    Take ten engineers and the internet of everything

    It seems a far jump from running a gaming platform to a remote access software company with a focus on the internet of machines, but that’s the journey remote access company LogMeIn and its CEO Michael Simon has travelled.

    “Anything that could be connected will be connected in the next decade.” Micheal told me in Sydney last week and it’s where he sees the next step for the company he has led since its founding in 2003.

    LogMeIn grew out of a team that formerly worked for uproar.com, an online gaming company sold to a division of Vivendi Universal for $140 million in 2001.

    Two years after the sale Michael, who had been CEO of Uproar, and a team of ten engineers who formerly worked for the company thought they could solve the complexities of accessing computers remotely.

    For geeks and big business, accessing your computer across the internet in 2003 wasn’t much a problem however it involved configuring software, punching holes in firewalls and configuring routers.

    The LogMeIn team wanted to find a way to make this technology cheap and easy for small businesses and homes to use.

    A decade later they employ 650 staff, half of whom are engineers, and have twenty million users of their product.

    Building the freemium model

    The vast majority of those users are using LogMeIn’s free services – Simon estimates that over 95% of users are using the free version.

    In this, LogMeIn is one of the leading examples of the freemium business model – offering a free version of a software product and premium paid for edition with more advanced features.

    One leader of the freemium movement was the Zone Alarm firewall, a product which earned its stripes in the early 2000s at the peak of the Windows malware epidemic.

    Today one of Zone Alarm’s veterans, Irfan Salim, sits on the LogMeIn board along with two former executives of Symantec, the company whose PC Anywhere and Norton Internet Security products competed with both Zone Alarm and LogMeIn.

    While LogMeIn has done well over the last ten years, the market today is very different to that of a decade ago with cloud computing technologies taking much of the need for remote access software

    Mike Simon sees these changes as an opportunity with the computer industry having gone through three phases – the PC centric era, the mobile wave and now we’re entering the internet of things.

    To cater for the mobile wave LogMeIn has released Cubby, a cloud based storage system that competes with Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft’s Skydrive, but Simon has his eye on the next major shift.

    Controlling the internet of machines

    The internet of things is a crowded market, but Simon believes companies like LogMeIn have an advantage over the telco and networking vendors as businesses with freemium and startup cultures look for ‘pennies per year’ rather than the ‘dollars per device’ larger corporation hope to make.

    It’s a big brave call, but with the market promises to be huge – General Electric claimed last year nearly half the global economy or $32.3 trillion in global output can benefit from the Industrial Internet.

    That’s a pretty big ticket to clip.

    Whether Michael Simon and LogMeIn can achieve their vision of being integral part of the Internet of things remains to be seen, but so far they do have success on their side.

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  • Exploiting the weak points

    Exploiting the weak points

    The Great ATM Heist, where a crime gang subverted the credit card system, could well be the digital equivalent of the Great Train Robbery of the 1960s.

    While the logistics of the operation are impressive with hundreds of accomplices across twenty countries, the real moral from the story comes from how the gang targeted outsourced credit card processing companies to adjust cash limits.

    Again we see the risks of throwing your problems over the fence, a system is only as reliable or secure as the weakest link and, regardless of how tight commercial contracts are, outsourced services can’t be treated as someone else’s concern.

    No doubt banks around the world will be having a close look at their systems and how they can trust other organisations’ outsourced operations.

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  • Is there a tablet to cure the reality distortion field?

    Is there a tablet to cure the reality distortion field?

    It’s hard not to be impressed by the calibre of guests CNBC’s Squawk Box when they’re able to get Warren Buffett and Bill Gates on together for an interview.

    During the interview Bill Gates made an interesting assertion about Apple’s iPad, ““A lot of those users are frustrated, they can’t type, they can’t create documents, they don’t have Office there.”

    Bill’s undoubtedly right, some iPad users are frustrated by the device’s limitations. However for every irritated iPad user there are a dozen baffled by the lack of a Start button on Windows 8.

    The reality distortion field though is strong, “Windows 8 really is revolutionary,” says Bill. “It takes the benefits of the tablet and the benefits of the PC and it’s able to support both of those.”

    The Microsoft founder is enthusiastic about the company’s Windows tablet, “you have the portability of the tablet but the richness, in terms of the keyboard and Microsoft Office, of the PC.”

    It’s notable Gates mentioned Microsoft Office, particularly given the question was about the cloud. It’s clear one of Microsoft’s priorities is to maintain their strength with productivity applications and move with their customers onto the cloud.

    The problem though for Microsoft is that Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android are dominating the cloud focused operating systems, leaving Windows behind.

    Making matters worse for Microsoft is it’s clear Windows 8 tablets are never going to catch their competitors. Consulting group Gartner last year predicted the global market for tablet computers will double over the next three years, but Microsoft will capture barely 10% of the sales.

     OS

    2011

    2012

    2013

    2016

    iOS

    39,998

    72,988

    99,553

    169,652

    Android

    17,292

    37,878

    61,684

    137,657

    Microsoft

    0

    4,863

    14,547

    43,648

    QNX

    807

    2,643

    6,036

    17,836

    Other Operating Systems

    1,919

    510

    637

    464

    Total Market

    60,017

    118,883

    182,457

    369,258

    Sitting in a reality distortion field is fine when things are going well and you dominate your world, but Microsoft – despite still being insanely profitable – no longer dominates the markets that made it into one of the world’s leading companies.

    The challenge for Bill Gates and Microsoft’s management is adapting to those changes, projecting your own frustrations onto the users of a competitor’s product, isn’t a recipe for success.

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  • Taxing the internet

    Taxing the internet

    One of the competitive advantages for online shopping has been the difficulty in levying taxes on internet transactions.

    This has been particularly true in the United States where individual states, counties and cities have different sales taxes, meaning a consumer in Birmingham, Alabama might pay 10% more than their friends in Billings, Montana.

    Amazon in particular has been aggressive in exploiting these price differentials, right down to threatening states where ‘Amazon taxes’ has been proposed.

    Now the US Congress looks set to pass a law which would make online sellers responsible for buyers’ state sales tax obligations.

    The next stage will be treaties between countries on the collection of sales or value added taxes.

    For many retailers though this won’t be particularly good news as price differentials are more than just the 10% GST or VAT and online shopping sites compete as much on product range and customers service.

    What the US Congress’ bill really shows is how online retailing is maturing – rather than thinking of companies like Amazon, eBay or niche operators like Shoes Of Prey as being disrupters they are the new normal.

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