Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: business

  • Google focuses on the short term

    Google focuses on the short term

    Just over two years ago Google acquired high profile robot developer Boston Robotics, at the time it appeared a major step both the search engine giant  and the industry.

    Today, Bloomberg reports Google are looking at divesting Boston Robotics as the company is not proving to be fit into the company’s other divisions while management sees better revenue prospects in other ventures.

    If the latter is true then the sale marks a shift in Google’s attitude towards long term investments. That may mark a turning point in the company’s development.

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  • Australia’s contempt for technology

    Australia’s contempt for technology

    “The minister sends his regrets….”

    Yesterday I commented how the Australian Tech Leaders event would be a good measure of the state of the country’s technology industry. Instead it illustrated the sheer contempt the nation’s political leaders hold the industry.

    One of the government’s key platforms in the upcoming election is its Innovation Statement and the accompanying Ideas Boom so it wouldn’t have been expected that a minister or at least an informed backbencher would address a room full of technology journalists.

    Instead the government drafted one of their local MPs, Fiona Scott, to make the short drive up the hill from her electorate to haltingly deliver a poorly written speech that focused on her local electorate issues.

    To be fair to Ms Scott, the outer Sydney suburban seat she represents is a bellweather electorate which tends to swing between parties as government changes. It also happens to have a workforce that’s beginning to feel the effects of a shifting economy. Her focus on local issues is understandable.

    However as a member of a government aspiring to drive a technology driven jobs boom and the representative of an electorate whose workforce is in transition, it is remarkable that Ms Scott is so poorly briefed on tech issues.

    What’s even more remarkable is the contempt shown by the government towards the country’s technology sector, a long standing problem in Australian society but particularly stark with the current administration given the Prime Minister’s fine words on the topic.

    One of the saddest things about Australia’s squandered boom is how the nation turned inwards at the beginning of the Twenty-First century and decided to ignore the global technological shifts.

    The contempt shown by the current government towards the technology sector shows a much deeper problem in the Australian mindset, if the country is to rely on more than its luck in the current century then it’s essential to shake off that way of thinking.

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  • Amazon Web Services and the new rules of business

    Amazon Web Services and the new rules of business

    The one company that has driven both the adoption of cloud computing and the current tech startup mania is Amazon Web Services.

    Later this week AWS celebrates its tenth birthday and Werner Vogels, the company’s Chief Technical Officer, has listed the ten most important things he’s learned over the last decade.

    The article is a useful roadmap for almost any business, not just a tech organisation, particularly in the importance of building systems that can evolve and understanding that things will inevitably break.

    Importantly Vogels flags that encryption and security have to be built into technology, today they are key parts of a product and no longer features to be added later.

    Most contentious though is Vogels’ view that “APIs are forever”, that breaking a data connection causes so much trouble for customers that it’s best to leave them alone.

    Few companies are going to take that advice, particularly in a world where changing business needs mean APIs have to evolve.

    There’s also the real risk for businesses that their vendors will depreciate or abandon APIs leaving key operational functions stranded, this could cause major problems for organisations in a world that’s increasingly automated.

    Vogel’s commitment to maintaining APIs may well prove to be a competitive advantage for Amazon Web Services in their competition with Microsoft Azure, Google and an army of smaller vendors.

    Werner Vogel’s lessons are worth a read by all c-level executives as well as startup founders looking to build a long term venture, in many ways they could define the new rules of business.

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  • The cost of media disruption

    The cost of media disruption

    What happens to journalists when no one wants to print their words anymore?

    The Bill Moyers website has striking accounts of sexism, ageism and exploitation of younger journalists as the industry deals with its Twentieth Century business model collapsing.

    Much of the dislocation Dale Maharidge describes could have been written about factory workers twenty years ago and will be probably written about a whole range of white collar occupations over the next two decades. The disruption being felt by journalists is not unique to the media industry.

    While the media industry struggles to find the 21st Century’s David Sarnoff, the human cost is real. The price workers pay when an industry is disrupted shouldn’t be understated.

     

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  • Disrupting professional services

    Disrupting professional services

    As Irish immigrants, the founders of San Francisco payments company Stripe, John and Patrick Collison, know too well the difficulties of setting up a US based corporation.

    So the company establishing Stripe Atlas, a service to help foreign entrepreneurs set up their US presence makes sense and the payments services bundled into the package may also generate business for the brothers.

    The Stripe Atlas service also illustrates the challenges facing professional services businesses as the service automates many of the bread and butter tasks that were good earners for lawyers and accountants.

    Until recently it was thought those ‘higher level’ occupations would escape disruption, now it appears software will eat the professions as well.

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