Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: disruption

  • Jumping the queue

    Jumping the queue

    Reservation Hop is a good example of many of the current breed of parasitic startups that want to create a new class of middleman.

    The hospitality industry is tough work and something guaranteed to irritate restauranteurs are reservations that don’t show up.

    One startup that seems almost certain to attract the ire of the restaurant industry is Reservation Hop – “We make reservations at the hottest restaurants in advance so you don’t have to.”

    Reservation Hop makes table reservations at popular restaurants and then sells them through their website.

    We book up restaurant reservations in advance. We only book prime-time restaurant reservations at the hottest local establishments, and we mostly list high-demand restaurants that are booked up on other platforms.

    This is probably one of the worst examples of the middleman culture that dominates much of the current startup thinking.

    Almost certainly there’s a market need for proxy queue jumpers – although one wonders how profitable it is when the transaction fees are under $10 – but this service will deeply irritate restaurant owners and diners who are crowded out by these ‘parasite’ services.

    In many ways, Reservation Hop illustrates the problems with this phase of our current startup mania; the rise opportunistic businesses that are more akin to parasites than services that add value.

    The Reservation Hop website assures patrons that there’s a 99% chance their booking will be honored by the restaurant on the night, we can expect establishments to start messing with that statistic as they wise up to the business.

    Many in the startup sector speak about how new technology improves the world, services like Reservation hop illustrate that not every idea is a step forward.

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  • Fighting a loss making business

    Fighting a loss making business

    Having deep pockets is a great help in business as the online cab war in San Francisco shows.

    As competition heats up on the streets of San Francisco, Uber is trying to put Lyft out of business by offering fares below what they pay drivers.

    This has been the long term tactic of Amazon; raise a lot of money and then run your main line of business at a loss.

    Amazon have shown you can do this for a long time if investors stay patient. Fighting it is difficult if you don’t have deep pockets yourself.

    In the long term though you can’t see this being good for customers, although in the meantime San Franciscans can enjoy cheap taxis.

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  • Self publishing and the cloud

    Self publishing and the cloud

    Today design site Canva hosted a media breakfast with their founders and chief evangelist, Guy Kawasaki.

    One of industries Canva cite in their case studies is designing book covers as part of the publishing industry which Kawasaki points is an area where incumbent giants are falling down badly.

    In Kawasaki’s view services like Canva, Amazon and the various publishing tools have made the major publishing houses redundant.

    Publishers were once necessary to get a book to market; today there’s little a moderately well funded individual can’t do.

    For publishers, it means they have to lift their game – automate their processes, harness their corporate knowledge and help good products get to market.

    Instead most are riding a dying business model as cloud based services make it easy and simple to get a project to market.

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  • Mapping AirBnB in San Francisco

    Mapping AirBnB in San Francisco

    The San Francisco Chronicle has a great feature mapping apartment rental service AirBnB’s effects on the city’s economy.

    By trawling through the AirBnB database, The Chronicle found 4,800 properties for rent in the city to glean a great deal of information that the company is not keen to share.

    A key point from the survey is that over 80% – 3200 – of the properties are householders renting out spare rooms or their places while they are away, which is exactly what AirBnB claim their service is designed for.

    The other, professional hosts are what’s attracted the wrath of regulators in cities like New York, where it appears unofficial hotels are skating around taxation and safety regulations.

    A new breed of middleman

    Catering for these professional hosts has seen another group of middlemen service pop up and The Chronicle features Airenvy, a service that helps landlords manage their properties.

    Airenvy is now the biggest San Francisco host, managing 59 properties on behalf of its clients and charging 12 percent commission for dealing with the daily hassle of looking after guests. Since launching in January it employs twelve staff.

    Unlike many of the internet middlemen, Airenvy does seem to add value to the renting process above being a simple listing service. For absentee hosts, the fees would seem to be worthwhile in reducing risks and problems.

    Filling the gaps

    A unique thing about San Francisco is the concentration of hotels around Union Square with 20,000 of the city’s hotel rooms within a ten minute walk of the Moscone Centre.

    For non-convention visitors, particularly those visiting family or friends, AirBnB is an opportunity to get a place out of downtown.

    The price ranges reflect the service’s diversity as well; from $18 a night for a couch through to $6,000 for a mansion. The average though is close to a typical hotel rate of $226 a day.

    The effects of AirBnB

    What the survey shows is AirBnB has diversified San Francisco’s accommodation options without the problems being encountered in New York.

    That isn’t to say there aren’t problems – the Silicon Valley model of pushing responsibility and consequences onto users leaves a lot of risk for the both the service and its customers – however AirBnB is another example of how industries are evolving as information becomes easier to find.

    Another thing this survey shows is the new breed of data journalism and how analysing the numbers can be the foundation of building great stories.

    The AirBnB and the changing global travel industry is a great story in itself as the San Francisco Chronicle has shown.

     

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  • Three business lessons from the New York Times

    Three business lessons from the New York Times

    “The New York Times is winning in journalism,” starts the newspaper’s much discussed internal Innovation Report. Then in great detail it goes on to describe how the audience is being lost to upstarts like the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed.

    Given the number of digital forests that have been felled discussing the report in the last week, it’s not worthwhile giving an in depth analysis of the study – particularly given Nieman Labs’ comprehensive dissection of the document.

    What does stand out though are a number of over-riding themes that apply to almost any business, not just struggling traditional media outlets.

    Being digital first

    A constant mantra in the NY Times report is about being ‘digital first’ – if you’re thinking about that today, then you’re probably too late in your industry.

    Every industry is now digital: If you’re designing widgets, you’re doing it on CAD system; if you’re selling real estate, you’re listing online (one of the great killers of the old metropolitan newspaper model) and if you’re selling doughnuts, you’re placing your suppliers’ order electronically and maybe 3D printing your icing patterns in the near future.

    There isn’t one industry that isn’t being radically changed by digital technology.

    Breaking down silos

    One of the areas that’s been most resistant to digital change, and yet is the most threatened, is management.

    Silos within organisations are a triumph of management power and make it difficult for a business to be dynamic when it’s necessary to negotiate with different fiefdoms just to change the colour of paperclips.

    Those silos are fine when industries are cosy and there’s little competition but when disruptors enter the market those management empires become a dangerous, and expensive, weakness.

    The New York Times study spends a great deal of its pages discussing how to break down silos within its own organisation and this is something every business owner or manager should be exploring.

    With modern communication, information management and workplace collaboration tools many management roles are no longer needed.

    For smaller businesses, this is the greatest strength when competing against larger corporations as Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and Business Insider  have shown in stealing the market from the New York Times.

    You need to be found

    One of the toughest conclusions from the NY Times study is that the quality of content actually doesn’t matter in the marketplace; The Huffington Post and Buzzfeed do an excellent job of taking the NYT’s work, repackaging it and redistributing it in a way readers prefer.

    That might be a transition effect – it’s hard not to think that should original content creators like the NY Times be driven out of business then Buzzfeed will have to start employing more journalists and Arianna paying her writers – however right now gloss beats quality.

    Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post are attracting audiences because their stories are easy to find online and their headlines almost beg you to read them.

    For non-media businesses, the lesson is you need to be found; you may be the best restaurant, electrician or accountant in town but if you’re on the fifteenth page of Google in search results for your industry and suburb then you’re doomed.

    The New York Times faces its own unique set of challenges, as do the publishing and media industries, many of the lessons though from the NYT  Innovation paper though can be applied to many businesses.

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