Decoding the new economy

ABC Nightlife Computers: The Internet Name Wars

How the Internet’s name wars can affect you

The online empires want our names and identities, are the real costs of social media now being exposed? Our September ABC Nightlife spot on September 22 from 10pm looked at these issues and more.

Paul and Tony discussed how Google’s “Name Wars” or “nymwars” came about, why social media sites like Facebook and search engines want you to use to use your real names.

The podcast from the program is available from at Nightlife website, more details of Tony’s programs can be found there as well.

Is this a good thing or are there costs we should consider before handing over our intimate details to a social media or free cloud computing service?

Some of the topics we covered included;

What are the “name wars’?
Why do companies like Google and Facebook want us to use our ‘real’ identities?
How can they use the information they gather?
What problems does that cause for Internet users?
Can these problems spill into real life?
Are all web services doing this?
What are the risks to businesses using social media?
Is this the real cost of social media?

Some of the information we mentioned can be found here;

The cost of lunch: Google and Information Revenue
Google’s real names policy explained
Google’s Eric Schmidt on being an “identity service”, not a social network
Google’s company philosophy (note item two)
Why Twitter doesn’t care what your real name is

We’ll be adding more resources in the next few days, the next ABC Nightlife spot is on 20 October and our events page will have more details. If you have any suggestions for future programs or comments on the last show, please let us know as we love your feedback.

Cloud computing and Small Business September Digital Day

How can online tools help grow your business?

As part of the NSW state government’s Small Business September Digital Day for Startups and Growth Businesses, we’ll be looking at exactly what cloud computing is and how it can help businesses.

Some of the services we discuss in the presentation are listed in the Netsmart’s web post on the 5 essential cloud computing tools for business. Although there’s many more we’ll mention that can help organisations of all sizes.

Given the time constraints and the event’s focus is on the specific social media and cloud computing tools available to small business, much of the background information to the Online Tools to Turbocharge Your Business session is available in the previous series of posts about cloud computing previously done for the 2011 City of Sydney Let’s Talk Business series.

Detailed information from that presentation can be found on the following pages;

The networked business Part 1: What is cloud computing?
The networked business Part 2: The benefits of cloud computing
The networked business Part 3: Managing risk in the cloud
The networked business Part 4: The business case for cloud computing

All of the tools discussed in the Small Business September presentations are available in our ebook, Online Business Essentials which is available for all subscribers to our newsletter.

If you’d like to see the presentations themselves, both The Networked Business and Online Tools to Turbocharge your Business are available through the Slideshare service.

Seats are still available for both of the Digital Day presentations at the Telstra Experience Centre, Level 4, 300 George Street, Sydney. The Start Up session begins at 8.00am and the presentations for growth businesses begins at 1.00pm.

Come along if you’d like to learn how social media and cloud computing can help your business improve productivity while building an online brand.

The quiet revolution

Productivity gains of the 1990s were based on accessible computer technology, are we about to see a cloud computing revolution in our workplaces?

Earlier this weekPricewaterhouseCoopers released their Productivity Scorecard, which showed Australia’s business efficiency isn’t improving as fast at it once was and the country’s relative performance is steadily slipping down international tables.

One of the notable things in the PwC report is the massive growth of productivity in the 1990s, a point emphasised by the accompanying paper on business productivity in a presentation by economist Saul Eslake last month to the Reserve Bank of Australia.

Economists attribute most of this late 20^th Century growth to deregulation and privatisation by governments in the 1980s and 90s but the driving force was really computerisation that allowed most businesses to do much more with less.

Immediately noticeable for an Australian walking into a British, European or Japanese office during the early 1990s was the lack of desktop computers.

Australian businesses adopted technology a lot quicker than their counterparts outside of North America and this alone was probably responsible for the country’s relatively good productivity growth in that decade.

The arrival of computers – followed by desktop printers and Internet access – suddenly gave small businesses access the means to do jobs that even the biggest corporations had struggled to do previously and drove a rapid reorganisation of most offices.

Everybody from secretaries to architects and graphic designers to lawyers – even economists – suddenly found they had the tools at their fingertips to do work they could have only dreamed of prior to 1990. This drove massive productivity gains in businesses of all sizes.

From 2000 onwards, things became tougher as the easy gains had been made and the incremental improvements in technology, such as smartphones, cloud computing and web publishing didn’t have the same substantive effect the early PCs delivered with spreadsheets, word processing and desktop publishing.

The real challenge we now face in business – and government – is to start harnessing cloud computing driven online services that promise to deliver similar productivity gains to what we saw twenty years ago.

We have the tools; online office apps, Customer Relation Management services (CRM) and sharing platforms all deliver major improvements in the way we work within our businesses and with external partners like contractors, suppliers and event clients.

One of the most powerful aspects of cloud computing services is reduced capital cost meaning reduced barriers to entry into markets we previously may have thought were safe.

This easy access into established sectors is one of reasons the retail industry’s giants are now struggling as online competitors can setup cheaply and quickly while offering better prices and service.

Retail is only one of the more obvious sectors being changed by these technologies and as the decade continues we’re going to close to every industry be radically changed by low cost computers accessing the Internet.

As business owners and managers we need to look at our own processes and systems with an eye on how we can improve workflows and customer service within our organisations.

Those of us who manage to get these new technologies are going to reap the benefit of the next productivity wave, those who don’t are going to go the way that many uncompetitive and slow to respond industries did in the 1980s.

How Google’s identity obsession hurts

How the search engine giant is damaging business and its own reputation

Imagine giving a presentation at a conference where you fire up a live demonstration of a product you’ve been urging the audience to use and the audience start giggling.

You turn around to find a bright red message at the top of the screen stating your account has been suspended. It wasn’t there the night before and you certainly didn’t receive an email warning you this had happened.

Embarrassing or what?

That happened to me with Google Local earlier this and the many stories like it illustrates a serious management problem within the world’s biggest search engine company.

Local search – where businesses can be found online based on their location – is one of the main web battlefields with Google and Facebook, along with outliers like News Limited and Microsoft, are competing to get business of all sizes to sign up.

Recently though Google seems to be going out of its way to squander the massive opportunity they have in this sector despite the CEO, Larry Page, identifying local services as one of their priorities.

Despite Google’s intention to promote Places – as their, and Facebook’s, local search platforms are called – many businesses are finding the company’s arbitrary and often incorrect application of its own rules and Terms of Service difficult to understand and use.

“I have found that with the ‘moving target’ Google is presenting to businesses” said Bob, a commenter on one of my blogs, “is paralyzing them from doing exactly what Google wants, which is updating and providing fresh content on their listings pages.”

In many ways, this is a small front on the “nymwars” that has broken out since Google introduced their Plus social media service and started enforcing their “rules” on “real names”.

Unfortunately their real names “policy” – and I use inverted commas deliberately – is vague and arbitrary with users finding their accounts suspended despite signing up with “the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you” as required by Google.

Account suspensions are wide and varied; some people, quite legally, have a name without a surname, others have a combination of languages such as Chinese or Arabic, while others have simply fallen foul of the computer and Google’s secretive bureaucratic culture.

This secretive bureaucracy would be funny if it wasn’t so downright hypocritical. Any correspondence with Google about account suspensions either on Places or Plus is signed off by an anonymous functionary from “no-reply” email address. So it appears real identities, and accountability, don’t extend to the company itself.

Last week at the Edinburgh International TV Festival, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt, announced Plus is not a social media platform, but an “identity service”. Good luck with that, Eric as your staff’s arbitrary and often incorrect interpretation of the company’s own rules doesn’t engender confidence in any identity verified by Google.

That announcement by Google’s chairman should worry investors, as this is a company that is first and foremost an advertising company powered by the best web search technology.

Management distractions such as becoming an “identity service” or buying a handset manufacturer distract focus from the core business and result in the mess we’re seeing around business and private accounts.

For the moment, Google Places remains a service that businesses must list on given the visibility the results have when customers search the web for local services and products.

If you aren’t already on Google Places, do sign up but make sure you get your listing right first time as editing your profile once it’s up risks your account being suspended or cast into “pending” purgatory.

Should you have already an account, leave it alone as any change risks coming the attention of Google’s anonymous bureaucrats.

Hopefully, this madness will pass and Google will clarify their policies, ground them in the real world then enforce their terms fairly and consistently. Until then, you can’t afford to rely on your personal and business Google accounts.

Is the PC dead?

Has the personal computer era come to an end?

The Personal Computer may not be dead, but Microsoft are still going to be challenged in a world where consumer and business buying behaviour has changed.

Last week Frank X. Shaw, Vice President of Corporate Communications at Microsoft, pondered the question of whether the Personal Computer era is over

Given the PCs importance to Microsoft’s business it wasn’t surprising that Frank decided it’s not, declaring the personal computer barely middle aged at 30 and ready to take up snowboarding.

Leaving the image of using a Windows Vista equipped laptop as a snowboard aside, the question for many businesses and households is should they buy a personal computer, either as a desktop or portable, in an era where smartphones and tablet computers like the iPad are becoming common? This is even more pronounced given the low cost of ownership for a smartphone or tablet.

The first thing is to consider is can the non-PC devices do what PC can?

For most people the answer is “yes”, particularly given most users are accessing cloud based and social media platforms that run on any web browser. However many prefer to have the options to connect keyboards, printers and scanners, which is expensive and clunky with tablets and smartphones.

While many users could do most of their tasks on a tablet or smart phone, many prefer the utility and expansion options of desktop and portable PCs not to mention using a keyboard and mouse, although the latter points may change as the current generations give way to workers and computer users more used to touch screens as an input device.

The cost of ownership is always a killer and the traditional rule of thumb that the purchase price of computer only represents a third of its cost over the device’s life has become skewed as PC prices have dropped along with other costs like Internet access and expensive printer consumables have increased.

For PCs, the problem is tablets and smartphones have far fewer of the ancillary costs like anti virus software and apps through iTunes, Android or Windows Marketplaces tend to be either free or substantially cheaper than their personal computer counterparts, which skews decisions towards buying a tablet.

Those apps however tend to be far more lightweight than the equivalent PC counterparts and tablets or smartphones don’t have the editing capabilities found on personal computers.

Probably the biggest win for PCs however is that smartphones and tablets are still designed to be tethered to a PC or laptop. While a user can get away with a mobile device that never connects to a computer, they’ll almost be certainly missing out on a lot of the device’s functionality.

So the PC isn’t dead yet, its role in the home and office is evolving and this is recognised by most businesses and consumers as they tend to be buying them to complement desktop and laptop computers.

For Microsoft this is not necessarily good news as the PC sales model is broken.

Until the mid-2000s, most corporate and home users replaced their PCs every five years and this was reflected in Microsoft’s product roadmaps.

The overdue arrival of Microsoft Vista in early 2007 changed this as not only was the product late, it was also bad and customers stayed away.

As a result customers have now learned that they don’t have to upgrade every few years and today nearly half of Microsoft’s customers are still using Windows XP, a ten year old operating system.

So for Microsoft, the good news is the PC is not dead in an era of cloud computing and social media, but making money out of it is becoming harder.

What services does Google Plus really threaten?

Facebook is the obvious target of Google’s new social media platform, but it might not be the only one.

Google+, the search engine giant’s latest attempt at competing with services like Facebook and Twitter, has seen 25 million people joining the service in the month since its launch at the end of June.

Such a stellar growth rate – it took three years for Facebook to reach the same number of users – means it could be one of the most popular social media services ever. What does this new platform mean to business owners and start ups and how does it affect other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Yammer and LinkedIn?

Google+ differs from most social networks – particularly Facebook – in that you can divide your online connections into different groups called circles and restrict shared information to those segments.

This addresses the biggest problem with social media; that what we share with our friends is not necessarily what we want our family or work colleagues to see, an issue identified last year by then Google designer Paul Adams, who has not co-incidentally since moved onto Facebook.

Along with Circles, Google+ has a few other unique features such as Hangouts which allow impromptu video conferences and Sparks which are random popups of things you might be interested based upon your search history and posts.

The collaboration aspect as the ability to create Circles and Hangouts for specific projects is one of Google+’s great strengths – and probably to be expected from an Engineering organisation like Google – which may make it an alternative to corporate social media services such as Yammer and possibly even LinkedIn groups.

At the core of Google+ is the Google Profile which is shared with most Google services such as Gmail and Blogger which gives rise to quite a few privacy concerns as those you share with can get access to this information, although this is the same with most other social media services.

Marketing is one area where businesses have focused on in the social media world and the lack of broader take up is one of Google+’s drawbacks as Facebook has a much bigger diverse spread of users and so marketing reach.

At present the discussion of Google+ for marketing is moot as businesses aren’t allowed to create Google profiles which is another powerful advantage for Facebook.

The question remains on how Google is going to integrate their other services, the obvious one is to incorporate Places in a similar way to Facebook so that businesses can create profiles that can then plug into local search.

Coupling social media with local search along with Google’s Android mobile phone service pretty well touches all the bases of the SoLoMo revolution which is redefining the consumer world and is almost certainly part of the bigger game plan.

Adwords will prove to be the greatest challenge, although we’re already seeing concerns being expressed about the potential for Google to misuse their databases and profiles of users and as social media tool plugged into profiles and personal search may be a bridge too far form some.

Indeed there’s a question of how Google+ will affect other social media tools like LinkedIn and Twitter. Right now it’s difficult to see either being affected by the new service however we shouldn’t underestimate the size of Google’s war chest or how compelling a service that integrates email, search, local search and applications like documents will be.

Another big advantage of Google+ is the lack of clutter as the game invites and people sending pictures of fluffy cats or their big night out aren‘t around – though this may change as the service moves from being used primarily by business geeks to the general public.

Whether Google+ supplants Facebook or any of the other social media services remains to be seen as we’re only a few years into the decade where personalised services are changing how we use the web, it would be dangerous to make any bets on who will succeed.

The stakes are quite high for Google with this product as the overwhelming amount of data at every Internet user’s fingertips is seeing people seeking out sources they trust for answers, recommendations and advice. The social aspect of the online world is going to define the web in this decade just as search did in the previous decade.

For businesses, or anybody interested in social media who wants to experiment with the new service, it’s worthwhile having a play with the program to see if it works for you but abandoning Facebook, Twitter or even your own website for Google’s service is probably making too early a call at this stage.

Anyway, the beauty of social media services are that you aren’t forced to use all or any and you may well find that other channels work better for your business regardless of Google’s success.

So you want a freebie?

If you want something for free, you’ll need to ask nicely. Here’s some tips on making a polite request.

It’s human nature to want something for free and in these days where consumers and businesses don’t expect to pay for information and skills it often doesn’t seem unreasonable to think contributors to your project – be it an event, publication or a start up business – wouldn’t be prepared to do help for free.

That might be how it seems, but you’re asking someone to contribute their most valuable and scarce asset, their time. So what should you be doing to make it easier for someone to donate their time to your project?

What’s in it for the giver?

Your cause could be great or you could be offering some great exposure, either way you need to make the proposition compelling to those you want to do a freebie.

Keep in mind if you’re an employee of a industry group, university or private business and you’re expecting others to donate their time for free. If your organisation is such a noble enterprise, why aren’t you and your managers donating time?

Be prepared for rejection

People have a right to value their time and skills and may be offended at a request for doing something gratis. Unfortunately that’s something you’ll have to deal with as the cost of asking for a free service.

Just be thankful you aren’t asking author and scriptwriter Harlan Ellison for some work or permission to use some of his work.

Tell the truth

Respect those you’re asking to contribute by being up front about your event and the other speakers. It’s absolutely unforgivable to lie about your project when you expect people to donate their time and skills.

Be discrete

If someone agrees to participate for free, don’t blurt it to the entire world. That person has made a donation to your project and they deserve respect.

For a professional, particularly speakers and writers, that lack of discretion could cost them money for future event fees and devalue their brand. Show respect.

Don’t nickel and dime people

Again, those who agree to do something for free deserve your respect. Don’t screw them around on parking fees, taxi, or trivial charges, they’ve done you a favour and the least you can do is make it easier for them to get there and home, even if you are too darned cheap to buy them lunch or dinner.

Don’t get contractual

Even with paid contributors or speakers things can go wrong as misunderstandings happen, people get sick and volcanos disrupt airline schedules. If something goes wrong, threatening a damages suit against someone who has done you a favour is a bad look.

Expect to be stood up

While most professionals will honour their obligations, paid assignments have to take priority. As a freeloader, you have to accept your project will not have the same priority as those the contributor will get paid for.

Say thank you

After the event, show some appreciation. It’s good manners to at least send a card and maybe a small gift. For many professional writers and speakers a written testimonial or a LinkedIn recommendation is a nice way of saying thank you.

Should you be asking for a freebie?

There’s no shortage of third rate events, webinars and magazines on this Earth you have to ask if you can’t afford to pay for talent, then is your project really adding value? The fact that attendees or customers won’t pay could be an indicator that you aren’t adding value.

Similarly with the contributors, they may be free because they don’t add a great deal of value. You may want to consider a smaller project where you can pay your speakers, writers or other creatives for higher quality work.

There’s many good reasons for organisers to run free events or participants to donate their time, probably more than the excuses not to do so. Unfortunately in the Internet age, free is being abused and many creatives aren’t getting paid for their time and skills

For free to work, there has to be respect and some mutual obligation. Someone who does something for free to help your project deserves your respect and support.

Category: Internet