Yesterday Google open sourced many of the features in its Tensorflow artificial intelligence service.
Making the services available to the community will mean many more opportunities to develop the technology. It could well prove to be a turning point for Artificial Intelligence in making it more accessible to the general public and business community.
“I’m not sure what to do with this,” frowned the public service executive to a group of blank faced departmental staffers. “I’ll take it,” I said to break the silence.
With that, I was on a journey into exactly what Sydney’s startup and digital media communities looked like and learning why governments struggle to build technology hubs.
I’d been working for the state government for two months after a specularly unsuccessful exit from a business and in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis getting a public service job seemed like a good idea.
The project being discussed by Bob, my then director, was a single line in the recommendations from the then Premier’s Jobs Summit which was convened in the panicky dark days of the 2008 global financial crisis – “A digital hub will be setup around the Australian Technology Park.”
Bob, and the management of the New South Wales Department of Trade and Investment had little idea of what a ‘digital hub’ was and my position of ‘Manager, Creative Industries” – with a staff of precisely zero – was vague given the state’s support to the creative industries was, and remains, based on throwing big buckets of money at the Hollywood movie studios.
So the Sydney Digital Hub was born and the quest to find out exactly was was needed, or at least would keep the Premier’s office happy, was on.
It immediately became apparent the Australian Technology Park wasn’t going to be the centre of anything as far as Sydney’s startup community was concerned. The complex was too far away from the city and too expensive for most of the businesses.
“We already have a digital hub,” was the other response. “It’s Surry Hills.” Which was a far call as a large part of the Sydney startup and digital media communities were based in the suburb on the edge of the city’s centre.
This actually worked well as the exact wording of the committee’s recommendation was “create a digital hub around the Australian Technology Park.” In this case, Surry Hills was ‘around’ the ATP.
Eventually the project became Digital Sydney and by the time it was launched, the state had gone through two Premiers, elected another party into government and I was long gone from the department, having lasted just 19 months.
Before leaving, I had managed to steer through a million dollars in funding for the project from the then Labor minister – since caught up on corruption charges surrounding coal mine leases – which, to their credit, was honoured by the incoming Liberal government that took power shortly after.
That funding was renewed and the project died a slow death, which didn’t really matter as Sydney’s startup and digital media communities had developed despite of, not because of, any government policies. Indeed, the New South Wales’ government’s economic development policies were, and remain, focused on property development and coal mining.
Which brings us to the present day, where the Sydney startup community is upset at the Sydstart conference being poached by the Victorian government and moving to Melbourne on the promise of a million dollars in support as part of the state’s startup program.
The promoters of the now relocated and renamed conference are adamant it matters, but the truth is it doesn’t. In fact the biggest ticket item of NSW government support to the IT sector is the annual CeBIT conference that in truth has added little to the state’s technology industry and many similar initiatives in Victoria have had a similar lack success.
Part of the reason for that lack of success is a lack of consistency and long term strategies, in fact the Australian Technology Park itself is under threat as the state government looks at selling the site to apartment developers despite the protests of the tech community.
Another aspect is state sponsored conferences, hubs and initiatives are not enough to create an industrial centre. There has to be an organic, or business, reason for a hub to develop.
For industry hubs, be they tech startups or anything else, the core need is a critical mass of investors and skilled workers with easy access to markets. For internet based businesses, the latter isn’t an issue which is why Wellington in New Zealand has done better than either Sydney or Melbourne in recent years.
The role of governments in this is to provide a stable framework for businesses to work within, something that hasn’t been a feature of state or Federal Australian politics in recent years with leadership instability and the increasing prevalence of policy by thought bubble, a good example being the latest scheme to create a new technology hub even further out of downtown Sydney on the site of disused power station.
While the talk of government sponsored initiatives is nice and keeps my former colleagues at the state government occupied writing ministerial briefings on pink paper, building the tech hubs of the future needs motivated entrepreneurs, investors and skilled workers. The best thing governments can do is make sure they encourage all three groups and leave the community building to the community.
The Public Relations industry has been mismeasured and undervalued, believes Rebekah Iliff, the Chief Strategy Officer of PR analytics company AirPR.
San Francisco based AirPR is an analytics company founded in 2011 on technology tracking the performance of PR campaigns. Despite being relatively young, the business counts among its customers Fortune 1000 companies such as Rackspace, Experian and the New York Stock Exchange.
The idea behind AirPR is by analysing the responses to stories, be they articles in mainstream media sites, social media posts or the client’s own content, PR people are able to get a much better insight into what is working in the marketplace.
“You can no longer just throw out a PR campaign and say ‘oh, we got 200 million impressions.’ No CEO is going to buy that,” says Iliff. “You’re going to have to have deep data that you can dive into and then report the things that are going to work.”
Part of the reason PR is failing, Iliff believes, is because practitioners are only making decisions on ten to twenty per cent of the data they have. To make the most of the information they have available involves a rethink on how companies get their message out to the community.
“We’re trying to shift people from thinking about PR in a linear fashion to get into thinking about it in a networked fashion. A really good PR strategy or narrative looks like a spider web, there’s all these things connected to each other.”
Making those connections is creating a new set of demands on the PR industry as new tools and communications methods evolve.
“The PR professionals of the future who are be best placed to be successful will be the ones who take an interest in the analytics, who understand how to talk about so they can improve the storytelling.”
In Iliff’s view part of the PR industry’s problems lie with how new entrants are taught is how to pitch to journalists, rather than to evaluate what works for their clients. “The second someone comes into an agency on a green level they should be bought into the analytics conversation and be taught how to measure it.”
“Instead they are taught ‘your job is to create storylines and pitch to journalists’, which by the way ninety percent of what you pitch no-one’s going to return because it’s irrelevant.” She says.
“Journalists give you credibility and they’re a third party endorsement but they can’t tell the story the way you want to tell it. There’s a disconnect between the role of journalist is, the role of the journalist is not to sell to your customers, the role of the journalist is to tell the story from an objective viewpoint that puts you in the context of where you fit in the industry. I don’t think people get that.”
“You should be writing the story, following it through and understanding the metrics around it so you can go back and create a better story. It’s like that connective tissue between parts of PR instead of siloing.”
The siloing of the analytics functions of PR and marketing remains a problem for the industry as well, Iliff stays and her advice to communications professionals entering the fields is to understand the data aspects.
“Get a Google Analytics certification, it’s very simple to do,” she states. “Take a couple of Coursera courses on basic statistics and how to analyse data – what’s the difference between prescriptive, descriptive and predictive data – very simple things that if you know how to talk about so you can have a discussion with the engineers.”
As the media industry evolves as it becomes even harder to pitch to fewer journalists working for a shrinking number of traditional outlets, Iliff thinks the future for the PR industry is with making its own content.
“I think in the next five years a lot of things will change because of a couple of things, one is that we have access to data so owned media programs will become stronger for the people who are focusing on it and it will become a huge component in driving leads and sales. So people will stop spending so much time pitching.”
“Things like owned media will be used in a more comprehensive and compelling manner to offset a lot of the things that aren’t working on the earned marketing side.”
“My hope is that brands just hire an internal storyteller like Dell has done and Adobe has done and HP to tell you the story and connect with their customers. That’s the closest point between A and B.”
Ultimately Iliff believes PRs will be taken more seriously in business is if they show they can use the data they have to show companies how to more effectively communicate.
“The only way you’re going to get a seat at the table, the only way you’re going to be taken seriously, is if you have data and you have the most relevant data.”
With data analytics reshaping most industries, it’s hard to see how the PR sector can resist those fundamental changes. How public relations practitioners apply that knowledge to their work is going to be key to their relevance in the business of the future.
Three years after the Jobs Act was signed into law by President Obama, the US Securities and Investment commission has proposed the rules for crowdfunding business capital.
Behind the Jobs Act was the idea that new ways of funding businesses are needed in an era when banks, thanks to the flawed Basel Accords, have stepped away from what could be argued is one of the key functions of a financial systems – funding the wheels of commerce.
So the new regulations are needed and the idea that funding can be raised quickly from crowds of supporters is one that ties well with the current ideas of crowdfunding products.
Crowdfunding a business, particularly where equity is involved, is a very different matter than asking supporters for a few hundred dollars to manufacture a smartwatch, produce a music album or write a book. Modern securities law is based upon three centuries of charlatans defrauding investors.
The SEC’s caution is clear in the guidelines that restrict crowdfunding to a small group of businesses seeking funding through Federally approved services and drastically limit the amounts that can be raised.
For companies the eligibility for crowdfunding even tighter with the following prohibited;
That latter provision presents a problem for the tech startup based upon the current Silicon Valley ‘greater fool’ business plan however luckily for them, crowdfunding equity won’t be countered for companies worth under $25 million for other securities reporting requirements.
What will be interesting is how savvy startup founders can use these rules – perhaps use this system to create a company structure and then use product specific crowdfunding projects to raise working capital.
Just like project based crowdfunding, it’s likely these schemes will be used as a market test to measure community interest in a business. This may well also be a way to attract investors hungry for hot new startups to invest it.
What is likely though is the current insider driven model of startup funding will remain. While there’ll be many worthy businesses seeking capital through crowdfunding, we can be sure the bulk of startup money will come through the insular world of VCs and tech investors.
The main criticism though of these proposals are the low limits. This will make crowdfunding unworkable for all but the earliest and smallest of new ventures. The money will be handy for those who qualify, but more needs to be done to spark investment in the businesses of the future.
“The cardinal sin of the computing industry is the creation of complexity,” is quote attributed to Oracle founder Larry Ellison and often repeated at the company’s Open World forum which I’m attending at the moment in San Francisco.
For the computer industry that complexity has been a very profitable profitable business with everything from the local computer shop through to the big technology vendors and integrators.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of that complexity were the salespeople, big complex enterprise deals meant big commissions.
With the shift to cloud services and apps, those fat margins and commissions have evaporated, leaving the lucrative old models of business stranded. IBM are probably the greatest victim of this while Microsoft are, once again, showing the company’s ability to evolve in the face of a fundamental market change.
For the salespeople the days of fat commissions are over, with thinner margins it’s not possible to pay big lump sums for winning contracts.
The simplification of the computer industry is changing the fortunes of many IT businesses, but that change isn’t limited to the tech sector or their salespeople as those fundamental changes are rippling into other sectors.
A constant claim by Internet of Things evangelists is that the IoT will squeeze inefficiencies out of businesses and this is exactly what we’re seeing with cloud and mobile based services like Uber and AirBnB.
If you’re in a business that profits from market inefficiencies then it might be time to figure out how to survive in a low margin environment. The challenge facing companies like Oracle is one whole industries are now having to face.