Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: web

  • Transferring risk to the customer

    Transferring risk to the customer

    AirBnB is one of the poster children for the “collaborative consumption” model of internet businesses where people can put their spare resources, in this case rooms, out into the marketplace.

    Like most web based businesses though the customer service is poor and the proprietors try to push responsibility for the platform’s use back onto the site’s users.

    A good example of this is an article this week in the New York Times where AirBnB hosts risk fines and eviction for breaching their leases or local accommodation laws.

    When Nigel Warren rented out his New York apartment while he was out of town, he returned to find he was facing eviction and up to $40,000 in fines. Fortunately he avoided both but AirBnB did little to help him except to point him in the direction of the terms and conditions which required him to obey all local laws.

    The New York Times asked AirBnB for comment and received corporate platitudes about how their service helps struggling home owners but no real response to the risks of falling foul to local government, landlords, building owners or insurance problems by sub-letting their residences.

    Failing the customer service test is not just AirBnB’s problem, Vlad Gurovich was scammed by a buyer on eBay and now he finds PayPal is chasing him for outstanding money.

    This is a pretty typical problem for PayPal and eBay customers – as Vlad has found, the various seller protections often prove to be useless when dispute resolution favours scammersand PayPal’s philosophy of shutting down accounts unilaterally and without appeal exposes sellers to substantial risks.

    Interestingly, PayPal’s president David Marcus claimed earlier this year that he was trying to change this culture within the company. It seems that’s not going well.

    PayPal, eBay and AirBnB are alone in this of Soviet customer support model – Amazon, Google and most web2.0 businesses have this culture.

    In many ways it’s understandable as dealing with customers is hard. In the view of the modern business world, cutting deals is glamorous while looking after customers is a grubby, low level task that should be outsourced whenever possible.

    Pushing the risks onto users also makes sense from a business perspective, that makes the billion dollar valuations of these services look even better.

    For the founders of these services, none of this is a problem. By the time the true costs and risks are understood, the founders have made their exit and the greater fools who bought the businesses have to deal with the mess.

    While the greater fools can afford to carry the costs, the real concern is for users who may found themselves out of money and out of a place to live.

    That’s why the founders of these businesses need to be called to account for their ethical lapses.

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  • 702 Sydney mornings – watching TV on the net

    702 Sydney mornings – watching TV on the net

    On 702Sydney Mornings this month with Linda Mottram, we’re looking at at how the Internet is changing the way we watch TV.

    How much do you use ABC’s iView? Okay it’s not every program for forever  but it’s a godsend when you’re time poor – and who isn’t these days.  So you can catch up with the programs on ABC TV you’ve missed or you knew you couldn’t watch it live.
    We’d love to hear from you if you’re now watching TV programs – ANY TV programs – primarily on the Net, through your internet browser rather than sitting in front of a telly.
    Aside from catch-up services like iView, ABC is already providing programs LIVE. If you log on to ABC News 24 website, you’ll be watching a live TV news straight away. And then of course there’re a number of avenues for pay–per-view services.”
    Some of the things we’ll be discussing are;
    • Differences between different services and how they work and how much they cost.
    • Free-to-air or Pay-per-view. Just how much is available for free and how much isn’t?
    • Limitations of catch-up services. How long are programs kept, how comprehensive is their collection?
    • Limitations caused by copyright laws. Some overseas programs are either very difficult to view or impossible to view online. Will the technology advance mean these limitations will be irrelevant soon if not already?
    • Nobody wants to squint at smartphones to watch nature documentaries do they? Is the quality really up to scratch? Alternatively, what do YOU as a computer/smartphone/tablet user need to know that your viewing experience is as enjoyable as possible?
    • While catchup services are becoming more popular than ever, take up of internet based TV (IPTV) remains very low. Will this ever change? What will cause the change?
    • If the catchup services’ popularity continues to grow – and there’s nothing to suggest it’ll slow down – wouldn’t commercial television need to re-examine their advertising based business models seriously?
    • Main takeups of TV-watching on the net will be younger audiences, but it is quite often more mature and older audience who complain about the permeating advertising. What will it take older audience to flee further and significantly to Net-TV?

    Some of the material we’ll be referring to in the program is the ACMA report on Online Video Content Services in Australia and Screen Australia’s What to Watch in an Online World.

    Join us on 702 Sydney from shortly after 9.30am. We’ll probably take some calls on 1300 222 702 and we’d like to hear your views, comments or questions.

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  • Disrupting the education ripoff

    Disrupting the education ripoff

    British Columbia’s government has announced they are going to make most undergraduate textbooks free online or printed at low cost as part of their BC Campus program.

    One of the first lessons for university students is that they are going to be robbed at the campus bookshop – text books are one of the greatest rorts on the planet.

    This scam takes several forms with faculties stipulating the latest editions as course material through to individual professors having a nice little earner in demanding their, often poorly written and out-of-date, textbooks being essential reading for any unfortunate student taking their classes.

    Naturally all of these books are sold at eye wateringly high prices far in excess of what equivalent texts are selling for outside the university bookshop.

    Given all of this it’s no coincidence that the publishers who specialise in academic texts have been the least affected by the online models that have undermined the business models of the mainstream book sellers.

    Over the years there’s been a range of business ideas to setup exchanges to circumvent this legally sanctioned extortion racket and most have failed as the universities and faculty members have protected their cash cows with various tricks to prevent students from buying reasonably priced textbooks.

    That British Columbia’s government now sees that this is a barrier for cash strapped and debt ridden students is an encouraging sign and one that recognises the 1990s model of treating students – particularly international students – as easy money is over.

    For the Canadian and Australian education sectors which had come to depend upon an expensive “bums on seat” model of financing their faculties, the waves of change and competition is now threatening them.

    Probably the biggest threat to this model is from the top tier universities offering courses online. This is radically changing higher education as it’s making it easier for poorer people to access the best institutions.

    For the second rate institutions, this means they have to be providing real value for the fees they charge. A certificate purporting to be a degree is not going to be good enough.

    While it’s too early to call the end of the textbook ripoff – people don’t let juicy little rorts go easily – its days are numbered. Although we may find the old scams replaced by something DRM related.

    Image from Visual Notes of Honourable John Yap’s announcement at #opened12 / Giulia Forsythe / CC BY-NC-SA

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  • Posting without permissions

    Posting without permissions

    A client of mine once had a angry worker scream at him when she found out he’d posted photographs of all his staff on the company’s website.

    “My ex is a psycho, he doesn’t know where I live or work. If he finds this, he might come around here and kill us all,” she cried.

    The photos went down immediately and Kevin made sure he got explicit consent before he posted any details of his staff onto the website.

    It was a valuable lesson on why you shouldn’t just post people’s details online without first asking them. We all have reasons why we’d like to keep certain facts out of the public light.

    A Texan gay choir’s organiser posting the details of members onto Facebook is another reminder of why it’s a bad idea to put someone else’s details online without asking them first.

    For two members of the Queer Chorus at the University of Texas, having their sexual orientation pasted on their Facebook feeds caused terrible damage with their families and it should serve as lesson to every manager, business owner or community group leader that this stuff matters.

    One of the worrying features with Facebook is how other people can add you to groups without your permission – almost certainly a recipe for misunderstanding and mischief.

    What’s even more unforgivable with Facebook’s conduct is the privacy settings for those groups overrides an individual’s own privacy settings.

    As one of the victims said in the Wall Street Journal of when his father saw the status update, “I have him hidden from my updates, but he saw this,” she said. “He saw it.”

    So even though both the individuals had chosen to lock their profiles away from public view, Facebook and the organiser of the group decided they knew better.

    We shouldn’t let the administrator of the Facebook off the hook on this lapse, Christopher Acosta decided to make the group open and public. “I was so gung-ho about the chorus being unashamedly loud and proud,” he’s quoted as saying.

    That’s nice when you have a tolerant family and you’re from a liberal community but for others that ‘transparency’ can lead to damaging family relations for years, if not lifetimes. In some communities the consequences could be far worse.

    “I do take some responsibility,” says Mr Acosta. Which is a nice way of accepting you might have screwed somebody’s life up by doing something you didn’t understand.

    Ultimately responsibility lies with the person who presses the button which causes the email or status post to be published. In this case Christopher Acosta was responsible.

    To be fair to Mr Acosta, the ability to add people to Facebook groups without their permission is a deeply flawed as are those groups’ setting overriding an individual’s privacy preferences.

    Facebook have to understand there are real life consequences to ‘transparency’ which can ruin careers and even cost the lives of people. The damage to families and communities can be immense.

    Coming from a secure upper middle class white background, Mark Zuckerberg probably doesn’t quite understand the risks his company’s policies pose to people in vulnerable situations, hopefully some of his older and wiser advisers will explain why ‘transparency’ and ‘openness’ are not always a good idea.

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  • Playing in the big boys’ sandpits

    Playing in the big boys’ sandpits

    The Cool Hunter is a site whose mission is to “select and celebrate what is beautiful and enduring from all that is sought-after in architecture, design, gadgets, lifestyle, urban living, fashion, travel and pop culture.”

    In posting cool stuff they find on the web, Cool Hunter always runs the risk of copyright infringement complaints as people have the unfortunate habit of slapping images up onto the Internet without permission from the rights holders.

    Last August Cool Hunter’s founder Bill Tikos found the site’s Facebook account had been wiped for ‘repeat copyright infringements’ without warning or recourse.

    Anybody following this site won’t be surprised to read this – an exposed nipple can get you thrown off Facebook faster than you can say “New Yorker cartoon” or “it’s only a porcelain doll, for chrissake!” – so one can only imagine the paroxysms of rage that alleged copyright infringement sends Facebook’s puritan bureaucrats into.

    It’s not just nipples at Facebook though, thousands of small traders have seen their accounts arbitrarily suspended on sites like eBay and PayPal.

    Google too are quick to suspend businesses from their local and search services without warning or recourse. Usually business owners only notice they’ve been locked out when they log into their control panels only to find a terse message that their account has been suspended.

    What usually follows is a Kafkaesque tale of trying to understand exactly what they’ve done wrong and how to get their accounts reinstated. In some cases the businesses get cryptic messages saying their accounts are still in breach while others get no response at all. In a few examples, the offending page goes back online only to be shut down again a few days later.

    Rarely does someone in this situation find a calm, helpful voice to explain exactly what they have done wrong and how to fix it.

    This hostile attitude is a result of the “hands off customer service” model of web 2.0 companies and it’s their biggest achilles heel as, paradoxically, customers and users take to social media to complain about bizarre and arbitrary account suspensions.

    For some, like Cool Hunter, it’s a monumental pain and loss of a valuable platform while many of those small eBay and PayPal traders may have thousands of dollars tied up in suspended accounts they can’t access.

    Unfortunately this uncertainty is the cost of doing business on social media sites and it’s one of the reasons why owning your own business website is essential.

    When you choose to use one of these service, understand you’re playing in the big fat kid’s sandpit and you risk him throwing a tantrum and chucking your toys out of the playpen.

    Simply put, don’t base your business on Facebook, don’t keep all your money in PayPal and always have a plan B.

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