Internet | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Twitter is like CB radio and this isn’t a bad thing

Of all the predictions we can make for 2010 one good bet is social networking is approaching, if not past, the fashionable peak of the hype cycle. Particularly Twitter which we’ve seen pronounced dead by various writers over the break.

Last week’s Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show illustrates the Hype Cycle we discussed just before the Christmas break. If there’s one thing for sure, we can say tablet computers, 3D televisions and Google phone are racing to see which will be the first to the “peak of inflated expectations”.

Funnily, we’ve been here before with mobile phones, tablet PCs and 3D entertainment so it will be interesting to see where these are in 18 months or so.

While it’s entertaining looking at the new gadgets, the interesting action is happening on the other side of the peak where real uses for technology and gizmos are found after the hype moves on to something newer and prettier. When the bored fashionistas move on from a product that’s no longer the newest and shiniest we see if something is genuinely useful or just a pointless fad.

My favourite comment was from an weekend newspaper entertainment columnist stating the Twitter hype was driven by “Boring Old Farts Suddenly Discovering Technology” and the whole thing is now dead because an MTV host declared she was over Twitter. The Luddites are crowing that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the entire Internet thingummybob can join CB radios in history’s discount bin of overhyped technology.

Citizens Band radio is a good lesson of what happens as a product moves through the hype cycle. In the mid 1970s peak, songs were being written about it and the media was awash with spookily similar stories of how CB radio was ushering in a new era of participatory democracy. Within a couple of years, the hype had passed and those who had a use for it, such as truckies, farmers and service people, got on with their work without the kids and newbies hogging their radio channels.

Exactly that process is happening now with the various online networking tools. The naysayers will crow they were right all along about a fad for boring old farts while unknown to them entrepreneurs will be figuring out ways to make money from these tools and smart businesses will be using them to stay ahead of their slower competitors.

As well as the trendies moving on, the social media snake oil sellers who’ve traded on the social media hype over the last two years will also move on to the Next Big Thing or go back to selling multi level marketing schemes. The honest consultants and genuine experts who survive the shakeout will be able to genuinely add value and help their clients achieve more with the tools.

So a product or technology passing the peak of the hype cycle is an excellent opportunity to use it do great things for your business without the fashionistas and snake oil merchants distracting you. Don’t be afraid to experiment just because the PR machines and fashion victims have moved on.

It’s all about trust, baby

Imagine losing all your contacts, emails and calendars – you know have a meeting with an important client next week but you can’t remember which day and you can’t ask the customer because their contact details are gone.

That’s been the fate of a million Sidekick mobile phone owners in the United States over the last two weeks when the servers storing the Sidekick data went down.

The Sidekick is an unusual mobile phone that saves all its data “on the cloud”, a big group of servers run by the device’s designer, Danger, who were bought out by Microsoft in early 2008. Unlike other phones and PDAs, the Sidekick doesn’t synch with your own computer and stored data may get wiped if it can’t find the cloud servers.

This is exactly what happened a few weeks ago when the Sidekick cloud stopped. Owners of the Sidekick, a phone that’s never been sold in Australia, have been through a harrowing fortnight hoping their data will be recovered which Microsoft now believe can be done.

Sidekick’s outage is a major embarrassment for Microsoft who are pitching their Azure cloud product as alternative to other cloud services provided by competitors like Amazon and Google and the failure certainly deserves to be one of the technology disasters of the decade.

The question now is how badly this outage will affect cloud and software as a service providers. These service rely on customers trusting data and critical business applications to a third party and the Sidekick saga doesn’t inspire confidence.

It would be a shame if this is the case, as cloud services offer a lot of advantages to smaller businesses. In many ways they offer the same advantages big business have had through outsourcing services at a fraction of the price and complexity.

We need to remember that all technology breaks. People press the wrong buttons, unexpected software bugs appear and sometimes things just break or go wrong. Every business needs a contingency plan if things stop working.

While a data backup regime is a critical part of a contingency plan, you still need to consider other aspects such what happens if the power grid fails and leaves your without electricity for three days, if bushfires and floods stop workers getting to the office, or what will happen if you forget to pay your phone bill and suddenly you have no Internet access for a week.

Technology is complex and we have trust a lot of things are reliable and sometimes some of our partners aren’t as trustworthy as we’d like.

So have fall back systems just in case your trust in technology, partners and vendors is misplaced and test them regularly.

The new global businesses

The business of going global is even easier than before. Services like Magcloud, Createspace and remote access tools are making it easier than ever to get a product out to the world.

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.

Cannes Lions: Day One

The first day of the Cannes Lions illustrated how the advertising and marketing industries are not alone in being challenged by the rise of always on consumers and employees.

Day one of what’s going to be an extremely busy week at Cannes showed how digital technologies and the Internet are changing not just the advertising industry but all sectors of industry.

Schematic’s Dale Herigstad showed, among other things, where Microsoft’s Project Natal is pointing the direction of where computer controls are going.

Being able to remotely control equipment with body movements and facial expressions is going to be a massive change for entertainment, communications and many other sectors.

This theme was expanded upon by Andy Pimental of Razorfish who demonstrated his vision of where television is going.

In Andy’s future, the game controller and console are doomed. Movement recognition like Project Natal coupled with games being on the cloud means the game industry is going to be very different in a few years time.

An interesting aspect with Andy’s presentation is that most of the technology is already available to achieve his vision, as he put it “it’s the business constraints, not technology, that limits us”.

From a presenter’s point of view, the use of mock Tweets to illustrate points was a nice touch, too.

Kevin Eyres of LinkedIn probably had the most impact. While much of the presentation focused on how LinkedIn can be used as a marketing tool, Kevin’s comments at the beginning about every individual is now entreprenuer thanks to reduced job tenure and security really illustrated the challenges businesses and governments are going to face in the connected world.

There’s some interesting challenges for all businesses ahead, not just the advertising industry. There’s a lot more to come.

A failure of trust and communication

Webcentral’s much publicised e-mail failure left thousands of small business owners without email last week.

The most breathtaking aspect of this saga is the total lack of communication by WebCentral. They failed on every level to keep their customers informed.

A simple, short message stating there was an outage on the front page of their website and on their support lines would have saved many of their customers hours of troubleshoting and stress.

The amazing thing is after this embarrassment, WebCentral still launched their new online backup service.

The success of software as a service depends upon trust and Webcentral has shown they cannot be trusted with their client’s critical systems.

The joke is Webcentral’s parent company, Melbourne IT, uses the slogan “trusted for online success”. Webcentral has shown they cannot be trusted.

Why your business should have its own domain

In our society where half the population seems to be on the road at any given time, having signage on your company vehicles is one of the most effective ways of publicising your business.

Because I spend too much time sitting in traffic jams I get the opportunity to study a lot of this advertising. All too often I see terrific, well done designs let down by poor email or website addresses.

No matter how much you spend on snappy slogans and flashy logos, an email address along the lines of fredtheplumber@biginternetprovider.com.au will spoil the effect. Addresses like these make it hard for passers-by to remember, and they smack of someone who can’t afford the less than $200 to set up a business internet domain.

One of the great things about the internet is it allows smaller businesses to punch above their weight. With your own domain name, even the tiniest microbusiness is on the same basis as their multinational competitors, and they can do this for less than the cost of a cappuccino a week.

Another big plus is your own business domain unties you from your internet provider. In Fred’s case, if he decides to change internet providers, he can’t have his address follow him. With his own domain, he can change internet providers every week without affecting his email and website addresses.

Setting up your own business domain is a two-step process; first you register your domain with a registrar and then arrange for a hosting service to look after it for you. To simplify things most registrars, hosting companies, internet providers and web site developers can do it all for you.

Whether you do it yourself or get someone to do it for you, it’s important to make sure someone at your business is designated as the administrative contact. This means you have ultimate control over the domain and you are the first to be told when fees are payable or domains are expiring.

There’s no reason in my mind why even the smallest business doesn’t have its own domain. Compared to the costs of a Yellow Pages listing, local newspaper ad or even car signage, a domain and the associated hosting costs are almost nothing.

Your business name is an important asset. If your organisation doesn’t have its own domain, regardless of its size, then you aren’t getting the most from that asset.

Does your business need a blog?

It’s fashionable to tell business owners they need to embrace every aspect of the web. But do you really need a blog in your small business?

There’s no doubt a blog is worthwhile for many. It can give another perspective to the business and enhances their story. It can help smaller businesses cut through the noise to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

A good example is Mark Fletcher’s Newsagency Blog which has publicised Mark’s software company and his associated newsagencies while establishing him as a leader in the industry.

Not all businesses have Mark’s energy or some simply don’t have the time. For others, their markets don’t really care about blogs.

Also a blog is not an end in itself. A newsagent with an interesting blog is still going to fail if they don’t deliver service to their customers and the same applies for PR agencies, marketers and management consultants.

If blog is going to distract you from your core business, then maybe it isn’t a good idea.

Every business is unique and what works for one enterprise is not necessarily right for another. A blog is a business tool, just like every other aspect of the Internet, and you need to choose the right tools for your business.

Respecting your network

This article originally appeared on SmartCompany on November 25, 2008

Australia’s Spam Act is just over five years old, and it’s had some success in keeping locally sourced junk email to reasonable limits along with catching the odd perpetrator.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has plenty of Spam Act information for business owners on its website and the requirements can be summarised in three principles – get consent, identify yourself, and make it easy to unsubscribe.

Before you can send commercial emails to people, they need to ask for them. In itself, this requirement eliminates your emails being classified as spam given the definition of spam is unsolicited emails.

Identity is important, as the recipient needs to know who the email is from. All legitimate businesses should have no problem with this.

Finally, unsubscribing is simply good manners. For a business owner there is absolutely no point in irritating potential customers and partners who don’t want your messages.

The sticking point in all of this is defining consent. The loophole in the act defines “inferred consent” if you have an “existing business relationship”. The current interpretation of a business relationship is merely having the business card of the recipient.

Sadly this gives any dolt you’ve been foolish enough to give a business card to at a networking function permission to bombard you with invites to get-rich-quick seminars and share boat schemes.

I can’t tell you how irritating I find idiots sending me three pointless emails a week because I put my card in the door prize bowl or gave the courtesy of exchanging cards while talking.

Even worse are the dills who start sending SMS messages to your mobile phone. In fact I’m amazed that anyone thinks ultra intrusive text spam is an effective way to generate goodwill for a business.

A particular difficulty with spamming people in your network is that your paths will almost certainly to cross again, which can put all parties in a difficult position.

So don’t simply add everyone who gives you their business card to your mailing list. By all means send them a follow up email, phone call or postcard, and certainly offer to connect to them on social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, but spare everyone the spam.

Understanding your responsibilities under the Spam Act will help you get more from your mailing lists. Adding some common sense and manners goes a long way too.

Why you shouldn’t use Internet Explorer

Why you shouldn’t use Internet explorer

Last week’s zero day exploit is just getting worse and wise heads are advising users to ditch Internet Explorer.

This is good advice and I expand on that on the IT Queries site today with some alternatives to IE.

I tied the zero day exploit into my Smart Company column on Tuesday. It illustrates why you shouldn’t be diving on to the net straight after starting your computer from a two week break.

Web 2.0 is dead?

Tim O’Reilly’s Twitter feed put me onto Peter Schwartz’s Death of Web 2.0 article.

It’s an interesting idea the future of web2.0 technologies rests in the hands of social networking sites like Facebook.

Facebook incurs most of Peter’s wrath and I can understand that countless hugs, vampire bites and who knows what else is banal, but 16 year olds getting sick of this sort of thing doesn’t affect the business model.

The real question is whether Facebook can make money from those kisses and “most people like you” surveys.

Personally I think they will struggle because, as Peter points out, people aren’t prepared to pay for this stuff.

Whether this means Facebook is doomed remains to be seen, however it’s clear the site is not worth 15 billion dollars and online advertising is going to decline with the rest of the economy.

I suspect Peter’s right about Facebook being way overvalued, as was MySpace, Second Life and countless other web 2.0 properties, but that’s simply the effect of the hype that surrounded this space over the last few years. It really has nothing to have nothing to the underlying web 2.0 technologies.

Peter has a good point about the sustainability of many of these sites and it’s going to be very interesting to see how the business models develop as try to convince users these services are worth paying for.

But to call the web 2.0 as being dead simply because some web sites fail is a bit of a long bow.

What may be true is the term “web2.0” is dying. That probably wouldn’t be a bad thing as it was a bad, overused label anyway.

Keeping Costs Down On The Net

This article originally appeared in the November 2008 Sensis “Small Business, Big Opportunity” newsletter.

There are few areas in business that change as fast as the Internet, particularly when it comes to business connection plans. What was good value two years ago can be pretty ordinary today.

Now we’re in uncertain times it’s a good opportunity to review what your Internet provider is giving you for your money. The right plan can help your business get the most from the Internet.

It’s often said there are three factors in an Internet plan: price, speed and reliability. You can choose any two of them.

I’d like to say price shouldn’t be the deciding factor, but in reality none of us have bottomless budgets. So the first step is to look at what you currently spend and decide what you can afford.

Budgets can vary dramatically between businesses. A $50 a month plan is fine for a home based business while tens of thousands per month isn’t out of the question for a larger business with heavy needs.

Regardless of your business size, forget the super cheap consumer plans. You need a supplier you can rely on. Business grade providers will also offer important add on features like fixed IP addresses and priority support.

Nothing breaks a technology consultant’s heart more than seeing a business struggling with a substandard Internet connection. The lost productivity dwarfs the fifty or hundred dollar a month saved from scrimping on connection charges.

So having set a realistic budget, we have to choose between speed and reliability.

Reliability is non-negotiable. The net, and in particular email, is a key business function and telling customers “sorry, the Internet is down” simply doesn’t wash anymore. As businesses move more towards Voice over IP, software as a service and web 2.0 applications, always-on fast Internet becomes essential.

This leaves us with speed. Internet speeds are split into two parts; download, the data that comes into your system, and upload, the data that goes out.

Internet plans usually state their speeds along the lines of 1500/256 which in this case means the download speed is 1500kbps and the outgoing speed 256. This is called an asynchronous connection which is the “A” in ADSL.

Home plans usually use ADSL connections because web surfing downloads far more data than it sends but office applications like email, remote access and Voice over IP need a higher upload speed.

So if you have lots of people working remotely, or you’re making phone calls over the Internet you’ll have to consider plans that have higher upload speeds.

There’s also data allowances, these can be tricky for all Internet subscribers as the fixed price plans shape the connection, meaning they slow you down once you go over the limit. For businesses that rely mainly on email, these plans are fine.

If your business Internet needs are more demanding though, the alternative is excess use plans where you are charged once you exceed the limit. This can mean horrendous bills if the wrong plan is chosen.

The good news with data allowances though is this is one of the areas that has dramatically changed in the last few years. So this is an area where the canny business can get more value for their Internet spending.

Even if your Internet Service Provider won’t come to the party on reducing your prices, there’s a very good chance you can negotiate a better deal in data allowances and speeds to help your business have the edge in these uncertain times.

How the ACMA blacklist works

One of the comments to my Smart Company column took me to task on how the Australian Communications and Media Authority compiles the website blacklist. I’ve put the comment and my reply which explains the process below.

I should also add the blacklist only applies to sites hosted outside Australia. ACMA will direct an Australian hosting serivce to take down any site rated X18+ or refused classification .

Paul, you incorrectly write that it is up the classification board to decide what is blacked out. That is incorrect as they only have jurisdiction on what is published within Australia. The blacklist is currently maintained by ACMA, so which minor public servant gets the job of surfing the web looking for something they can add (as well as responding to any ministerial hints about “unwanted” material).

If it was a transparent process, the material had been vetted against Australian standards then maybe. Or rules by a court. But not a secret list. No way.

Thanks for your comment, Richard. One of the big concerns about filtering is exactly how an appeals process or independent oversight of a blacklist will work.

ACMA refers any complaint about a website to the Classification Board. The board then classifies the site under the same system used for computer games and movies. If the board refuses classification or gives the site an X18+ rating then ACMA adds the site to the blacklist. The details are on the ACMA and Classification Board websites.