Decoding the new economy

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.

Category: Internet

It’s all about trust, baby

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