Tag: future

Journalism’s managerial challenge

How will newsgathering evolve as media managers remains in denial?

Yesterday I had lunch with a group of retirees who aren’t particularly connected to technology. It was a contrast to the previous three days spent with startup and media companies talking about social media and the internet.

One thing that really seemed to disturb them was the idea that printed daily newspapers may not be around in a few years time.

Which makes Elizabeth Knight’s Media Rivals Facing a Brave New World this weekend a timely read in the contrasting strategies of News Limited and Fairfax.

From Knight’s report it’s hard not think News Corp CEO Robert Thomson is deluded;

”Print is still a particularly powerful medium … 43 per cent of Wall Street Journal readers are millionaires.”

Old millionaires. Like the people I had lunch with yesterday.

The problem Thomson has if this is indeed the strategy of the New News Corporation then he’s locked into a dying, declining market.

A bright spot for both News and Fairfax are the digital properties that evolved out of their old classified and display newspaper advertising, specifically the real estate sites Domain and realestate.com.au.

These sites don’t involve substantive news reporting or journalism beyond regurgitated realtor media releases, although if you take the attitude that newspapers were really only advertising channels with some news to attract an audience then this is a natural development.

For journalists, and those who want to be informed about the world around them, that view is a problem as it doesn’t answer the question of how do you pay for news.

With earnings expected to be 30% lower this year compared to 2012, this is something concentrating the minds of Fairfax’s management given they don’t have the profitable Pay-TV revenues of News.

The problem for the legacy news operations is that the focus is on cost cutting while denying the reality that expensive printed newspapers are dying in both readership and advertising revenue.

Desperately hanging onto the daily printed newspaper model threatens to consume resources needed make both Fairfax and News successful online.

Which makes the venues of the investor events that Knight describes a interesting counterpoint to the ruthless cost cutting going on at both News and Fairfax.

Sydney’s Mint and the Four Seasons Hotel are lovely venues and no doubt the executives and analysts enjoyed some nice canapes and drinks after their briefings.

But genuinely cost conscious management would have put their status to one side and held the meeting at their own premises and, if the analysts were nice, offered them a cup of tea and a biscuit, just like shareholders get.

At time when fast, responsive and small management is needed to make fast decisions in rapidly changing markets it seems the companies most threatened by change are those with the most inflexible, and entitled, managements.

It may well be that Fairfax or News discover the magic formula that makes digital media profitable, but it’s not going to happen while they deny the realities of today’s market places and a radically changing economy.

Not that this will worry the older executives of over-managed businesses who will spend their sunny days of retirement enjoying nice lunches and wondering what happened to the days of the printed newspaper.

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Enniskillen and the G8’s Potemkin Village

Britain puts on a brave, if false, face for the G8 leaders summit

In the middle of this month the G8 group of world leaders will meet in Northern Ireland when the UK takes their turn to host the annual conference.

With the leaders of eight of the world’s biggest economies – which includes Canada but not China – coming to visit the Northern Irish government is anxious to present a prosperous face to the world, including allocating £233,000 to give Enniskillen’s town centre a ‘facelift’.

It seems a good chunk of the facelift money has been spent on creating fake shops in the distressed town’s centre.

In a little over two weeks they and other leaders will gather for a G8 summit at a golf resort in Enniskillen. And as the date approaches the cleanup is moving into high gear. It includes new coats of paint on houses, tidying up lawns, and putting up fake storefronts on shuttered businesses.

For the visiting dignitaries, their advisors and the media caravans that follow them, Enniskillen’s shops will be looking prosperous when the reality is very different.

“The County of Fermanagh has suffered terribly as a result of the credit crisis and the resulting recession,” says Dan Keenan of the Irish Times.

Fermanagh County’s efforts to present a brave, if false, face to the world is symptomatic of the Western world’s refusal to accept the consumer based economy that drove the Corporatist model of government over the past fifty years is over.

Just as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signalled the end of the Soviet experiment, the global financial crisis of 2008 marked the end for the big spending, big debt era which had driven the Western economies through the last half of the Twentieth Century.

Unlike the Soviets, we refused to accept the game is up and have kept a failing economic philosophy alive with massive borrowing and money printing. In this respect, we’re dumber the Russian communist leaders who accepted the reality of the world they found themselves confronting in 1989.

All of which will probably amuse Russian President Vladimir Putin as his motorcade speeds past the repainted shopfronts of Enniskillen and no doubt he’ll be thinking of the face Russia will present next year when they host the G8 Summit.

Perhaps its time for the G8 leaders to invite the People’s Republic of China to join their privileged club – at present Japan is the only non-‘white’ nation.

If the G8 decide to let the Chinese join, there’s the South China Mall that would be a perfect counterpoint to the Potemkin Village of Enniskillen and the world’s great leaders can continue to believe that the business rules of the 1980s still hold true today.

Yesterday’s men are still pursuing yesterday’s dreams, dressing up Enniskillen may cater to their fantasies but it won’t help today’s economy.

Picture of a propped up facade courtesy of Ingolfson through Wikipedia Commons.

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Open source manufacturing

Open source hardware promises to change manufacturing and resurrect the art of soldering

Chinese business website Caixin Online has a great video on China’s Open Source Hardware Movement, this is an area that promises to change the manufacturing industry.

Open Source is the philosophy of sharing intellectual property and allowing anyone to improve the idea on the proviso they share their changes with the rest of the world.

The hope is that open sourced products end up being more reliable than proprietary designs due to scrutiny from hundreds, or thousands, of reviewers.

Until recently, open source has been largely restricted to the software world but now it’s moving into broader Engineering and manufacturing circles.

As the Caixin video shows, the open source hardware movement is introducing geeks to a tool which many thought was dead – the soldering iron.

I noticed this a week or so ago when I walked into a co-working space and found the lady I was meeting hunched over a soldering iron putting together a part for a quadcopter.

Right now soldering parts to build quadcopters or game controllers is just the beginning, the really interesting things start when open source meets 3D printing – then we’ll see some real game changing things happen.

Soldering iron picture courtesy of Bomazi through Wikimedia Commons.

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Skills, data scientists and the decade’s big IT trends

As the amount data flooding into our lives explodes, we’ll all need to think about how we can get the skills to manage and understand data.

As we all get buried under a tsunami of data, the challenge is managing it. The MIT Technology Review this week looks at the rise of the data scientist, a job title unknown a few years ago.

The problem for industry is the skill sets required to become a data scientist are fairly esoteric.

Data scientist has become a popular job title partly because it has helped pull together a growing number of haphazardly defined and overlapping job roles, says Jake Klamka, who runs a six-week fellowship to place PhDs from fields like math, astrophysics, and even neuroscience in such jobs. “We have anyone who works with a lot of data in their research,” Klamka says. “They need to know how to program, but they also have to have strong communications skills and curiosity.”

Over the last twenty years we’ve done a pretty poor job teaching maths and statistics which is going to create a skills shortage as industry struggles to find people qualified to figure out what all of this data means.

While Big Data might be to this decade what plastics were to the 1960s, it’s not the only technology change that’s affecting business as the McKinsey Quarterly describes the ten IT trends for the decade ahead.

The thing that really stands out with McKinsey’s predictions is the degree of reskilling the workforce is going to need, today’s workers are going to need an understanding of programming, logic and statistics as much the kids currently at school.

If you’re planning on being in the workforce at the end of this decade right now may be the time to consider getting some of these skills.

Just as businesses will be separated by how they use Big Data, workers may too find those skills divide the winners from the losers.

As the amount of data flooding into our lives explodes, we’ll all need to think about how we can get the skills to manage and understand data.

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Rethinking the middle class

Has the internet destroyed the western world’s middle class lifestyles?

Technologist Jaron Lanier says the internet has destroyed the middle classes.

He’s probably right, a similar process that put a class of mill workers out of a job in the Eighteenth Century is at work across many industries today.

Those loom workers in 18th Century Nottingham were the middle class of the day – wages were good and work was plentiful. Then technology took their jobs.

Modern technology has taken the global economy through three waves of structural change over the past thirty years, the first wave was manufacturing moving from the first world to emerging economies as global logistic chains became more efficient.

The second wave, which we’re midway through at the moment, is moving service industry jobs and middleman roles onto the net which destroys the basis of many local businesses.

Many local service businesses thrived because they were the only print shop, secretarial service or lawyer in their town or suburb. The net has destroyed that model of scarcity.

The creative classes – people like writers, photographers and musicians – are suffering from the samee changed economics of scarcity.

Until now, occupations like manual trades such a builders, truckdrivers and plumbers were thought to be immune from the changes that are affecting many service industries.

The third wave of change lead by robotics and automation will hurt many of those fields that were assumed to be immune to technological forces.

One good example are Australia’s legendary $200,000 mining truck drivers. Almost all their jobs will be automated by the end of the decade. The days of of relatively unskilled workers making huge sums in the mines has almost certainly come to an end.

So where will the jobs come from to replace those occupations we are losing? Finance writer John Mauldin believes the jobs will come, we just can’t see them right now.

He’s almost certainly right – to the displaced loom worker or stagecoach driver it would have been difficult to see where the next wave of jobs would come from, but they did.

But maybe we also have to change the definition of what is middle class and accept the late 20th Century idea of a plasma TV in every room of a six bedroom, dual car garage house in the suburbs was an historical aberration.

Just like the loom weavers of the 18th Century, it could well be the middle class incomes of the post World War II west were a passing phase.

If so, businesses and politicians who cater to the whims and the prejudices of the late Twentieth Century middle classes will find they have to change their message.

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Have we come to the end of the middle class era?

Was the middle classes’ growth during the Twentieth Century an aberration?

Technology has transformed workplaces over the last century, drove huge income growth and moved many into the middle classes. Are we now seeing computers and robots displacing those middle class jobs?

At Tech Crunch Jon Evans warns Get Ready To Lose Your Job  as “this time it’s different” – unlike earlier periods of industrialisation where jobs shifted to the new technologies such coach builders became car makers – robots and computers are making humans redundant.

So I see no mystical Singularity on the horizon. Instead I see decades of drastic nonlinear changes, upheaval, transformation, and mass unemployment. Which, remember, is ultimately a good thing. But not in the short term.

In The Observer John Naughton, professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University, says Digital Capitalism Produces Few Winners.

Professor Naughton’s view is that high volume, low margin businesses like Amazon mean there’s fewer well paid jobs available and many of the lower positions will be soon replaced by robots.

At the other end of the digital marketplace, the high margin businesses like Apple, Google and Salesforce don’t need many staff to generate their profits, so wealth is concentrated among a small group of managers and owners.

While the low paid and manufacturing workers have been squeezed for decades in the West, it’s now the turn of the middle classes to feel the pain of automation, outsourcing and restructuring.

There’s two ways we can look at these changes, the optimistic is that our economy is going through a transition to a different structure; those out of work coachbuilders a hundred years ago didn’t immediately get jobs building cars and the same adjustments are happening again.

A more pessimistic view is that the Twentieth Century was an aberration.

It may be that Western world’s steady climb into middle class prosperity was itself a transition effect and we’re returning to the economic structures of the pre-industrialised age where the vast majority of people have a precarious income and only the fortunate few can afford middle class luxuries.

The next decade will give us some clues, but the portents aren’t good for the optimistic case, the Pew Research Centre shows America’s middle classes has been shrinking for forty years.

For those Americans still in the middle class, the Pew research shows their incomes have been falling for a decade.

Regardless of which scenario is true, the dislocation is with us. As individuals we have to be prepared for changes to our jobs, however safe they look today. As a society we have to accept we are going through a period of economic and social upheaval with uncertain long term consequences.

What’s particularly notable is how today’s political and business leaders seem oblivious to these changes and are locked in the ‘old normal’ of thirty or fifty years ago.

One wonders what it will take to wake them up to the changes happening around them and what will happen when reality does bite them.

Picture of a nice, middle class house by Strev via sxc.hu

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Our evolving view of robots

It’s interesting how our perceptions of robots have changed over the decades

Ahead the Ovations Speaker Showcase on Tuesday, I’ve been looking at robots as one of this decade’s trends.

What’s interesting is how our perception of robots has evolved over the last half century.

The idea of Robots in the 1950s and  60s were ones with human shapes – four legs, a torso, two arms, shoulders and a head – otherwise known as anthropomorphic. Lost in Space and the Day the Earth Stood Still are two good examples of those human like machines.

How robots looked in the 1950s
1950s robot chic – the day the Earth stood still

Today’s robots have much more utilitarian shapes, like the Winbot window cleaner pictured at the beginning of this post.

Many of the robots look like the machines we use today, mainly because they are today’s technology with the driver or operator replaced. A good example being the Google self driving cars.

google self driving car

The idea of a robotic car isn’t completely new though; the 1980s action series Knight Rider featured KITT, a robot car with an almost equally mechanical David Hasslehof as its sidekick.

The Hoff and KITT

More interesting still are the tiny robots who look, and act, like insects. Wait until these guys infest your internet fridge.

All of these technologies had to wait until computers became small and cheap enough to fit into the systems. In the 1980s a computer with the capabilities to run KITT or a Google Car would be the size of a large warehouse, today it can fit inside a cigarette packet.

Of course the real power for robots comes when computers talk to each other and form a collective intelligence. This is the Internet of machines.

The terminator
Skynet has told The Terminator to destroy us all.

Which brings us to Arthur C. Clarke’s and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the 1980s vision of Skynet which gave birth to the Terminator.

Hopefully those visions of the future of network connected robot are just as misguided as those of 1950s movies.

If they aren’t, we’re in a lot of trouble.

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