Uncategorized | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Regent Street fights back

London’s Regent Street shows how main street retailers can use new technology to reinvent themselves

Main street shopping strips have had a hard time over the past forty years as supermarkets and big box stores have steadily drained customers away, however the new wave of retail, manufacturing and logistics technologies may be an opportunity to revitalise them.

A good example of shopping strips using new technologies is London’s Regent Street with its smart shopping app that integrates with iBeacon location devices, the website Contactless Intelligence reports how shopkeepers, landlords and the local authorites are rolling out an initiative as part of a £1 billion regeneration project.

London’s Regent Street is a fairly unique mainstreet in that it’s extremely upmarket which gives it a lot of advantages over most neighbourhoods, but it does point the way for how other shopping strips can use new technologies to reinvent themselves.

Riding the slowkansen

Taking the long route between Newcastle and Sydney via the Broken Bay ferry

Newcastle, a 160km north of Sydney is a drive easily done in less than two hours but for masochists and commuters there’s the three hour train trip affectionately known as the shitkansen by the locals.

The train trip itself has parts that are genuinely spectacular as it winds through the hills and rivers of the New South Wales’ Central Coast, albeit at speeds that are slower than in the 1933 timetables.

One of the reasons for the slow and spectacular trip is the Hawkesbury River and Broken Bay and that presents a natural barrier between Sydney, the Central Coast and Newcastle.

That natural barrier also presents an opportunity for a third, prettier route between the two cities using the private ferry service that runs between Central and Sydney’s northernmost suburb of Palm Beach.

Catching the slow train

Starting from the original Newcastle Railway Station, the trains run twice an hour during the day with one ‘fast’ service taking two-and-a-half hours and slow trips taking three.

Inside the trains things are relatively comfortable although quite grubby. The purple colour scheme are the refurbished older carriages, the original 1970s ones being in a fairly awful green. The news trains feature a modern vandal proof colour scheme although the seats are more uncomfortable for a three hour journey.

Another weakness with the train service is the spartan facilities, apart from graffiti covered toilets there are absolutely no passenger amenities so bringing your own food and drink is essential along with fully charged electronics as there are no power outlets available.

Amazingly, rather than improving the railway service to the state’s second biggest city the government plans to abandon the last five kilometers and replace the trains with buses. If there was one example of the 1960s thinking that dominates Australian politics, this venal and ill-thought out proposal is a wonderful example.

The Central Coast

While the parts of the ride between Sydney and Newcastle are spectacular, the stretch south to the Central Coast are the boring parts featuring little more than housing estates and low grade scrub until arriving at Gosford where the train runs alongside Brisbane Water until Woy Woy.

On alighting the train at Woy Woy, the immediate impression is a town that won’t win any heritage awards with its neglected main street and an anonymous shopping mall. All of which is a pity as its location between the hills and waterways is sensational.

Sadly there’s little reason to hang around so getting a bus to Ettalong is the best thing to do.

From Woy’s Woy’s dismal transport interchange – a fate that waits Newcastle’s truncated railway service – buses leave every few minutes for the 15 minute journey to Ettalong. If you have a Sydney transport travelpass then your ticket is valid on the private bus service.

Ettalong

If you’re stopping for lunch or a break during the journey, Ettalong isn’t a bad choice with a lot more coffee bars, restaurants and bakeries than the rather depressing choices at Woy Woy.

Since this writer’s last visit to the town three years ago when its centre was struggling with many empty shops; its fortunes have improved dramatically and it’s gone back to being a good destination for a day trip in itself.

Catching the ferry

The ferry itself is a twenty minute trip including a brief stop at the village of Wagstaffe. Its route winds through the sandbanks of Brisbane Water before getting to the open water of Broken Bay.

Midway across the bay, the ferry passes Lion Island and the mouth of the Hawkesbury River before entering Pittwater and the Northern Suburbs of Sydney.

Palm Beach

The wharf at Palm Beach is a classic wooden structure in a lovely location. Across the carpark and road is a general store, the Barranjoey House restaurant and a fish and chip shop.

For a takeaway meal, the fish and chip shop is nicer than the general store but you can enjoy either at the park alongside the ferry wharf.

For a sit down meal, Barrenjoey House has an expensive restaurant along with a bar with an outdoor seating area if you’re looking for a cold drink while waiting for a bus to Sydney.

The bus to Sydney

The bus back to Sydney takes about 90 minutes. It isn’t the most comfortable journey however the views of the city’s gorgeous Northern Beaches are worthwhile if you’re sittiing on the left side when heading south.

Once past Long Reef, the journey is mainly suburbia except when crossing the Spit and Harbour Bridges. A more interesting option that will add another hour to the journey is to switch buses at Warringah Mall and travel to the city via the Manly Ferry.

Taking the Slowkansen from Newcastle to Sydney isn’t the trip for anyone in a hurry with it adding up to two hours to an already slow three train hour journey but it’s a lot more interesting than the regular way to travel between the two cities.

Digital natives and iPads

Is tech necessary for attracting younger workers or volunteers?

I’m writing up a review of the Emergency Services Integrated Communications Vehicle that was showcased at the Melbourne Cisco Live event a few weeks back.

An comment by one of the National Safety Agency people during the tour was notable; “we need to have modern technology if we want to attract young people.”

The spokesperson was talking about offering iPad and Android apps for the emergency services workers, particularly in the context of firefighting volunteers having an average age approaching 50.

Needing the latest technology to attract younger volunteers or workers is an interesting view which I’m not wholly convinced about.

Do we really need the latest technology do attract younger workers and volunteers or are is this another example of trying to apply tech to a more fundamental problem?

A life in photojournalism

Photographer Charles O’Rear talks about wine, Windows XP and the future of photography

The latest Decoding the New Economy video is an interview with wine photographer Charles O’Rear.

Charles was on tour with Microsoft to promote the end of Windows XP, it was his photo of a Napa Valley hillside that became the background feature the system’s default ‘Bliss’ theme.

The interview is a long ranging discussion on how photojournalism has changed over the last four decades along with the evolution of both the art and science of photography itself.

Bill Gates and the fight for trustworthy computing

Microsoft’s task of securing its software was a huge undertaking, one that isn’t over yet.

One of the great, and possibly under recognised, business achievements of the computer age was Bill Gates’ recognition that Microsoft’s online strategy was flawed shortly after releasing Windows 95. A few years later he had to repeat the task when the company found its products were almost dangerously insecure.

In a sprawling account of the company’s response to the security problems at the turn of the century, Life In The Digital Crosshairs, describes how Microsoft’s engineers responded to their then CEO’s call for Trustworthy Computing.

The problems at the time were vast, compounded by Microsoft’s failure to take security seriously – the first version of Windows XP came out without a firewall which ensured thousands of users were quickly infected by the computer worms rampant on many ISPs networks at the time.

As the story tells, it was a long difficult task for Microsoft to change complex and interdependent computer code involving 8,500 of the company’s engineers.

One suspects the cultural challenges were even greater in getting the managers supervising the army of engineers to understand just how serious the security threat was to Microsoft’s users.

The biggest challenge though was Microsoft’s own product line; because the company hadn’t ‘baked’ security into its software, key products like Microsoft Office relied on lax security practices to work properly.

Office and Windows also had the problem of legacy code and applications; one of Microsoft’s selling points over Apple and other competitor systems was that the company took pride in supporting older hardware and software, this in itself creates security risks when programs designed in the MS-DOS days still want to write to the system kernel.

For Microsoft the journey isn’t over, although the shift to cloud computing has changed – and simplified – the company’s security quest by making legacy issues in Office and Windows less important.

Microsoft and Gates’ success in seeing off the threats posed by the internet gave the company another decade of computer industry dominance, however dealing with security issues was nowhere near successful.

In the end however it wasn’t security issues that saw Microsoft lose its dominance; the internet eventually prevailed as Apple revolutionised mobile computing while Amazon and Google improved cloud services.

With Bill Gates reportedly finding himself getting more involved in the company he founded, the challenges of both the internet and security are two that he’s going to be very familiar with. It will be interesting to see what we write about Microsoft in 2022.

Software’s modern loom weavers

Are we coming to the end of the hand crafted era of software development, Pegasystem’s Alan Trefler thinks so.

Are we coming to the end of the hand crafted era of software development? Pegasystem’s Alan Trefler thinks so.

“Technology has completely dis-served the modern economy;” Alan Trefler, the founder and CEO of software vendor Pega Systems, told the audience at the opening of his company’s new office in Sydney yesterday.

Trefler sees there being an ‘execution gap’ between what software promises and actually delivers; that development is too slow and programs don’t give users what they need.

Ending the hand crafted software era

A key reason for this in Trefler’s view is that too much software is ‘hand crafted’ and that his company’s object orientated methods speeds up development time and delivers a better product.

This may well be true, Pegasoftware’s client list is impressive, however moving from the age of ‘hand crafted software’ may well spell the end of many IT industry worker’s careers.

One of Pegasystem’s key Australian customers is the Commonwealth Bank and the company’s CIO, Michael Harte, gave some comments at the opening that illustrated how the software industry is changing.

Freeing up resources

“Does an IT organisation want to change fast enough to adopt a new model driven approach so they can free up capital and free up resources?” Harte asked.

That freeing up resources and capital is exactly what befell the Luddites when the 18th Century mill owners decided to change the technology they used.

For modern IT workers, the last decade has been tough as a whole generation of business analysts, software engineers and project managers have found the enterprise computing industry has been offshored and automated; Harte and Trefler are describing how that process is by no means over.

“Older project models necessitated people to build a use case and then to design something, go through requirements and start crafting software, that’s on old idea,” says Harte who sees a model orientated approach as being more effective for modern enterprises.

Let the machines do the grunt work

That’s not to say that either men are pessimistic about the future of the software industry; both see an improved industry delivering better results for business.

“Let’s move people into higher order things and allow the machines to do the grunt work,” Harte urges.

“Not that long ago when I was learning how to do this stuff we’d have to fill in punch cards and then fill in Word Documents to write out technical requirement, that’s not much fun.”

“Lets have some fun and get some work done.”

Harte is describing a very different IT industry and workplace, one that doesn’t need older skills and – more importantly – doesn’t need as many clerks or middle managers carrying out routine administrative tasks.

It should be noted that both Harte and Trefler were adamant that their visions did not mean job losses when asked by this writer about the employment consequences, but it’s impossible not to come to the conclusion that a fundamental industry change means many skill sets become redundant – again this is what happened to the Luddites in the 18th Century fabric mills.

“What we think the next ten years are going to be about is changing those metaphors,” says Trefler. “There can be a more highly evolved communication between IT and business folk.”

Both Trefler and Harte see design as the future of software with most of the human work being in creating the interfaces that work for the people using the computers, this is where the high level, high value work is to be done.

The changes that Pegasystems are describing is not just an IT industry issue; these are changes that are happening across the workforce and in all sectors. For both managers and workers, it’s a time to refresh skillsets and understand where the value lies in what they do.

Many industries have products handmade by skilled tradesfolk become a thing of the past, it now appears the time has come for the IT industry’s craftsmen and women.

Solving intractable problems

How are consumers like terrorists and what does this teach businesses about solving problems?

Developing counter terrorism strategies is an unlikely path to founding a business that deals in organisational change, the latest Decoding The New Economy video covers exactly this in an interview with David Snowden.

Snowden is the Chief Scientific Officer and founder of UK based consulting network Cognitive Edge that assists organisations with change and solving ‘intractable problems’.

A failing Snowden sees with the way most businesses approach organisational change and problem solving is “the case based approach that dominates most of society.”

“The idea is you find what other companies have done and you imitate it.” Snowden explains; “apart from the fact you can’t imitate the context, no company has succeeded other by imitating other people – they succeed by doing things differently.

“We take what we know about how the human brain works and we help people work those problems out.”

Safe to fail experiments

In approaching ‘intractable problems’, Snowden believes there are two ways to approach them; one is to set up ‘safe to fail’ experiments where smaller experiments are run in parallel within the organisation to see what innovative solutions arise.

The other approach involves using Snowden’s software based approach where staff or customers’ views are captured in real time to create a crowdsourced view of problems and their possible solutions.

“You can’t afford, for example, in market research to spend three months commissioning something, two months gathering the data and one month interpreting it.”

“If we create a sensor network of your customer we can give you data in real time.”

Consumers and terrorists

Dealing with real time data in public security are the origins of Cognitive Edge; “we started in counter terrorism where you have to deal with weak signal detection, you need fast real time feedback loops and you need to intervene very quickly.”

“There’s no difference between a terrorist, a customer, a citizen and an employee,” says Snowden. “They all represent the same problem which is how the hell does a large authority make sense of fragmented data.”

Developing human sensor networks

Snowden sees ‘human sensor networks’ where groups contribute their stories to create a narrative around a topic, as being one of the strongest intelligence and communications channels.

“Big data can tell us where you travelled, a narrative approach can tell why you travelled. If something goes wrong, I can also use that network to communicate.”

One project Snowden is looking at brings these concepts together to create new communication channels at airports, an idea that came to him after being stuck for two days at Toronto airport in a snowstorm, “frequent fliers have smartphones, they can be activated by the airlines and used as a communication mechanism.”

The interview with David Snowden is one of the most information and concept dense videos that I’ve done to date. It’s worthwhile listening this a few times to understand some of the fascinating fields he and Cognitive Edge are working in.

Learning to ask the right questions

What a three time Oscar winner can tell us about managing the data generated from the Internet of Machines

How do we make sense of the masses of data entering our businesses? Tableau Software founder – and multiple Academy Award winner – Pat Hanrahan thinks he has the answer.

A major challenge presented by the Internet of Things is in understanding the data that’s generated by devices, data visualisation companies like Tableau Software are making easier to interpret what machines are telling us.

“The streaming data coming from sensors is a very interesting opportunity,” Tableau co-founder Pat Hanrahan told Network Globe when discussing machine to machine technologies, “there’s so much potential.”

A Stanford Professor and winner of three academy awards for Computer Generated Imagery, Hanrahan founded Tableau with Christian Chabot and Chris Stolte in 2003 with a mission to help people to understand data. Today the company employs a hundred people after going public last year.

The origins of Tableau came from Hanrahan tiring of the movie industry which he’d been part of since joining Pixar on graduating in 1987, “I was thinking could we use computer graphics for other things, I want to find something more work related so I got interested in data visualisation.”

Hanrahan teamed with Stolte, who was one of his students, to set up a company called Polaris that became the basis of Tableau; “it was a classic Stanford start-up, Google was literally right next to us. I remember when the company started, Larry Page came to our office party.”

Making data accessible

“I’ve always been fascinated with taking the high end stuff and making it more accessible” says Hanrahan. “We’re in a transition phase, where we’re tying to figure out how to make it more accessible.”

Helping those who are passionate about facts and reasons is one of Tableau’s missions,”we have fanatical customers,” says Hanrahan.

“If you’re one of the rare people who use facts and reasons to solve the world’s problems then you are persecuted, you are on a mission, you’re going to convince those crazies that you’re right and you’re wrong and that’s why they’re so fanatical about our product.”

“There’s a little bit of hype around big data right now, but it’s a very real trend;” states Hanrahan. “Just look at the increase in the amount of data that’s been going up exponentially and that’s just the natural result of technology; we have more sensors, we collect more data, we have faster computer and bigger disks.”

A good example of the exponential growth in computing power is in how the smartphone has developed, citing how far computers have come since 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat Kasparov, “at the time both Kasparov and the computer were rated 2700, the best chess programs now are rated 3800.”

“The chess program running on my iPhone is rated above 3000,” observes Hanrahan.

Despite the leaps in power, Hanrahan doesn’t see algorithms completely replacing the human touch, “you have the technology and resources to do this but you still need someone to figure out how to make it accessible.”

One of the keys to understanding information is to be literate in using it, “every student should be efficient in using data,” Hanrahan says and he sees data analysis skills as being essential in the future workforce; “we have to know how to ask the right questions.”

Making the data generated by connected machines accessible to the public, workers and managers is going to be one of the big challenges for organisations over the next decades; it’s an area where companies like Tableau are going to do well.

Neglecting the small business sector

The IT industry continues to neglect the small business sector

I’ve previously flagged how the IT industry fixates on the consumer sector, the Kickstart forum on Australia’s Gold Coast emphasised this with vendors, particularly those in the Internet of Things market, focusing on home users.

This is mindset is understandable given the huge numbers being cited for consumer applications, but the sneaking suspicion is that home users simply aren’t going to pay for these technologies and that the real money will be made in helping the retail sector deliver services to customers.

On Networked Globe today we discuss that quandary, it’s something that both vendors, consumers and small businesses should be thinking about given the way it’s going to change supply chains and entire industries.

Hitting the eighty percent of needs

Cloud computing has changed the way we expect software to work and changed the entire industry’s philosophy.

“I don’t use ninety percent of what’s in Microsoft Word” has been the complaint of computer users for years as they struggled through the myriad features of box software products.

In the days of floppy disks and CDs, software developers tried to deliver as many features as they could; despite the fact that the ordinary user only needed a core set of functions and that most items on the menus went untouched.

The result was bloated, difficult to use software. The cloud computing model changes this, particularly in business fields like accounting software.

Last week saw a blitz of releases from cloud accounting services with Xero, Intuit and MYOB all making big announcements.

MYOB announced a wide ranging product refresh, Intuit their mobile service and Xero its new board directors that point the direction for its US expansion.

A key part of all the announcement was how the services are all boasting of their partner ecosystems developing add ons that improve users’ functionality.

Once consequence of having an army of developers plugging into the product means that companies don’t have to ship bloated packages that have dozens of features that are irrelevant to each users’ needs.

Xero’s Australian CEO, Chris Ridd, put this well during the week by observing that company aims to “address the basic eighty percent of needs”.

This is the exact opposite of the box software model of the past where vendors would try to pack more features into their products which gave rise to the term bloatware.

Microsoft’s Office package was probably the best example of this massive growth in the product size, with the installation files eventually taking up a full 4.3Gb DVD to deliver something that most people were happy with when WordPerfect 2.0 shipped on three floppy disks.

That change to the software model is a good example of how business practices and methods change as technology evolves; it also illustrates just one of the fundamental changes older software companies are having to deal with as cloud services change their industry.

We can still have all the features we want in a software package, but we’ll just have to connect – and probably pay for the add ons.

Today, we’re more likely to be scrambling to find an add-on rather than complaining about features we don’t need.

Nothing is stabilising – welcome to an era of exponential innovation

John Hagel of Deloitte’s Centre for the Edge joined Decoding the New Economy to discuss his view that we’re living in an age of exponential innovation.

“Increasingly our view is that it’s creating a challenge for companies, traditional businesses who say ‘we’ve been operating in a linear fashion for decades or in some cases centuries or more’ but how do we move to an exponential approach to technology so we don’t get overwhelmed.”

I’ll be writing the interview up in more detail later, but for the moment enjoy the video.

Image of John Hagel by Trycatch though Wikimedia

Refining the pitch

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman has some great advice for businesses

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman has a great post on his website dissecting his original investor pitch in the light of what he’s learned in the subsequent decade.

The post is full of excellent advice from a business leader; the importance of finance versus product strategy, the risks of confirmation bias and finding what makes your business stand out from a crowded market are just three good points.

Hoffman also flags how pitching a business to sceptical investors helps entrepreneurs figure out what the real risks are in their business.

Another important point is that investment come into and go out of fashion, with 2003’s investment climate being very different to today’s.

In 2013, it’s whether you can break through the noise. Today, there are probably a thousand consumer internet startups founded every quarter — how do you become one of the 1 to 3 that matter in a 7-year timeframe? Those are the kinds of objections you need to steer into at the beginning of your pitch.

Ultimately though, Hoffman emphasizes how a business needs to be defensible, saying of LinkedIn: “It’s a network effects business, which means it has inherent defensibility with a network.”

Even for businesses that aren’t tech or web startups, Hoffman’s post is a great guide to developing a business plan and promoting a venture to investors and customers.