Tag: business

Crowdfunding as product testing

Sony’s FES watch shows the future for companies using crowdfunding to develop new products

A story from the Wall Street Journal describes how Sony have crowfunded their FES watch project, a smartwatch with an electronic paper wrist strap.

Sony’s decision to crowdfund new projects is fascinating, not least because it gives researchers and entreprenuerial employees the opportunity to commercialise projects at little cost or risk to the company but also as a powerful way to judge the market demand for an idea.

The FES watch campaign is good example how companies, big and small, can use crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. As we see more creative applications of the two concepts we may well see some radically new management methods and business models arise.

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Where will the digital leaders come from?

Exactly what is digital leadership?

Last Thursday in Sydney a group of industry groups, telcos and local councils launched their 2030 Communications Visions initiative; a project “to shape a digital vision and set of goals for Australia to achieve global digital age leadership”.

The project is a worthy one, particularly given the failure of Australia’s National Broadband Network, which I’m writing about early next week in Technology Spectator however one thing that bugs me is what exactly is ‘digital age leadership’.

If we look at the rollout of technologies like the motor car, electricity or telephone through the Twentieth Century it was a mix of private companies, community groups and governments that championed the development of roads, mains power and phone systems. People either demanded their towns became connected or raised the capital to do it themselves.

So on one level, the champions need to be us. We have to lead our communities and industries by using the technologies and showing what can be done, that also makes our businesses more likely to succeed in the future.

On another level, we need to consider the genuine leaders of the ‘electrical age’ or ‘motor car age’; people like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford built businesses that led the world and still exist today.

For countries, it’s no coincidence that the United States is the richest nation on the planet after having most of the leading business in their industries over the last hundred years.

That latter point is really what the Digital Visions project is about; do Australians want to remain a wealthy nation in the Twenty First Century?

Governments have a role in this, as the UK is showing, and political leaders need to be encouraged to take the digital economy however governments can only do so much and successes like Silicon Valley are more a fortunate by product of spending rather than the consequence of strategic policy.

Ultimately, leadership starts with us — we can’t afford to wait for governments, big business or someone else to take the reigns.

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A question of ethics

Uber’s missteps remind us that ethics matter in business

At this week’s Australian Gartner Symposium ethics was one of the key issues flagged for CIOs and IT workers; as technology becomes more pervasive and instrusive, managers are going to have to deal with a myriad of questions about what is the moral course of action.

So far the news isn’t good for the tech industry with many businesses failing to deal with the masses of data they are accumulating on users, suppliers and competitors.

A failure of transparency

One case in point is that of online ride service, Uber. One of Uber’s supposed strengths is its accountability and transparancy; the service can track passengers and drivers through their journey which should, in theory, make the trip safer for everybody.

In reality the tracking doesn’t do a great job of protecting riders and drivers, mainly because Uber has Silicon Valley’s Soviet attitude to customer service. That tracking also creates an ethical issue for the company’s management and one that isn’t being dealt with well.

Compounding Uber’s ethical problem is the attitude of its managers, when a Senior Vice President suggests smearing a journalist who writes critical stories then its clear the company has a problem and the question for users has to be ‘can we trust these people with our personal data?’

With Uber we may be seeing the first company where data management and misuse results in senior management, and possibly the founder, falling on their sword.

Journalists’ ethics

Another aspect of the latest Uber story is the question of journalistic ethics; indeed the apologists for Uber counter that because some journalists are corrupt that justifies underhand tactics from companies subject to critical articles.

That argument is deeply flawed with little merit and tells us more about the people making it than any journalist’s ethical compass, however there is a discussion to be had about the behaviour of many reporters.

As someone who regularly receives corporate largess — I attended the Gartner Symposium as a guest of BlackBerry and will be going to an Acer event tomorrow night — this is something I regularly grapple with; my answer (or rationalisation) is that I disclose that largess and let the reader make up their own mind.

However one thing is clear at these events; everything is on the record unless explicitly stated by the other party. This makes Michael Wolff’s criticism of Ben Smith’s original Uber story in Buzz Feed pretty hollow and gives us many pointers on Wolff’s own moral compass as he invites other writers to ‘privileged’ dinners where the default attitude is that everything is off the record.

Playing an insider game

Ultimately we’re seeing an insider game being played, where journalists like Wolff put their own egos above their job of telling their audience what is happening; Jay Rosen highlighted this problem with political coverage but in many respects it’s worse in tech, business and startup journalism.

It’s not surprising when a game is being played by insiders that they take offense at outsiders criticizing them.

Once the customers become outsiders though, the game is drawing to an end. That’s the fate Uber, and much of the tech industry, desperately want to avoid.

Uber in particular has many powerful enemies around the world and clumsy management mis-steps only play into the hands of those who see the company as a threat to their cosy cartels. It would be a shame if Uber’s disruption of the many dysfunctional taxi markets was derailed due to the company’s paranoia and arrogance.

Eventually ethics matter. It’s something that both the insular tech industry and those who write on it should remind themselves.

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Reframing the economic debate

It’s time to change the political and economic discourse says Irish economist David McWilliams

“We need to stop the drift in politics and economics,” says Irish economist David McWilliams.

McWilliams is talking about Ireland and asking where the nation goes for the next two decades as European agricultural support programs wind up and Irish tax advantages erode.

That conversation though is one that every economy, every nation and every community needs to be having in the face of a rapidly changing world.

Assuming that what’s working, or muddling along, today will be successful tomorrow is a brave belief.

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Fiddling with the feeds

Twitter hopes their changes will grow the social media service and beat the curse of Facebook

Finally Twitter have announced the changes they will be making in an effort to attract more users.

The changes are risky, and controversial, as messing with people’s feed risks alienating loyal users. If the changes prove unpopular it may make Twitter’s problems worse.

Whether the changes are enough to justify Twitter’s sky high stock market valuation and can attract the numbers of users the company needs to keep the faith of investors remains to be seen.

Zuckerberg’s Curse is biting Twitter hard and the company needs to figure out whether frantically trying to entice uninterested users and meet high, and possibly impossible, benchmarks is the best course for the service’s future.

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Microsoft and the transition effect

Things are getting tougher for Microsoft in the productivity space

So it turns out Microsoft’s river of gold with productivity software was a transition effect with the company now offering the product essentially free on iOS and Android devices.

While the profits in that product line were nice while they lasted we may start seeing Microsoft’s revenues, which have stood up pretty well in a changing marketplace, start to decline rapidly.

 

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Riding the startup roller coaster with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick

Starting businesses is not a cushy job as an interview with Uber founder Travis Kalanick shows

A great interview with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick by Kara Switzer in Vanity Fair touches on the mental difficulties facing startup founders.

 

He was depressed after his first start-up failed badly and his second went largely sideways. He was, as he recalls, deeply afraid of failure. “I had gone through eight years of real hard entrepreneuring. I was burned. So, I just wasn’t ready yet,” says Kalanick. In fact, he had been living at home with his parents in his childhood bedroom not long before his trip to Paris, after those two start-ups had failed to flourish.

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