Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: innovation

  • Ransomware and innovation – links of the week

    Ransomware and innovation – links of the week

    Last week finished with a big bang as the Wannacry ransomware attack spread around the world with a curious twist which led one New York Times columnist to suggest software companies need to take more responsibility on security.

    In the meantime the world goes on companies still struggling with the definition of innovation and Facebook crushing anyone who dares to try out-innovating them.

    On a lighter note, Cary Grant spend much of his Hollywood years on LSD but it all turned out well and VentureBeat asks do humans have a role in a world run by Artificial Intelligence?

    The future of humans

    Is there a future for humans in a world run by artificial intelligence controlled robots? Venture Beat staged a panel in New Orleans that looks at where we fit into the automated world.

    Ultimately the panel concluded, it’s up to us to make some serious choices. Something we shouldn’t leave to engineers.

    The ethics of driverless cars

    Autonomous vehicles should give priority to occupant over passers by in the case of an emergency suggests a Mercedes Benz engineer.

    Christoph von Hugo, Mercedes’s manager of driver assistance systems, probably hasn’t helped the development of autonomous vehicles with his comments but the ethics of driverless vehicles is a discussion we should be having.

    Defining innovation

    Innovation is very simple, it’s about trying new ideas says Pete Williams, Deloitte Australia’s chief edge officer.

    “You need ideas, they need to be new, new for you. If everyone in the world is doing something and you haven’t done it and you do it for the first time, you’re innovating. You’ve got to try stuff. Not just have new ideas, you’ve got to try stuff. Innovation is something you do,” he said.

    Rethinking public transport

    British transport app Citymapper is to launch its own ‘popup’ bus service in London with the promise of a modern and user friendly operation. An interesting twist for a software service.

    “There will be a large screen that shows riders where they are in real time, and what’s coming up on the route — similar to how its smartphone app works. And they also have USB charging ports.”

    Snapchat feels the market chill

    One the darling unicorns of the tech industry, Snap, reported its first results as a listed company and the results were not good as Facebook’s shameless copying of the service’s features takes its toll.

    Sadly Facebook seems to be following the Amazon playbook of crushing upcoming competitors that refuse to be bought out. This is a part of a broader problem with modern American capitalism.

    What is Wannacry

    Security researcher par excellence, Troy Hunt, gives a full run down on the Wannacry ransomware and how to combat it.

    Towards the end of his article he has a list of eight actions computer users – from major organisations to households can do to protect their systems. Depressingly these are exactly what the computer tech support industry has been telling people to do for the past twenty years.

    Wannacry’s accidental hero

    An anonymous British IT security researcher realised the malware has a ‘kill switch’ – so he activated it. He does have an important message for computer users though.

    “This is not over. The attackers will realise how we stopped it, they’ll change the code and then they’ll start again. Enable windows update, update and then reboot.”

    An age of insecure machines

    One of things that might bring down an AI controlled world is insecure machines as Wannacry shows. In the New York Times technology commentator Zeynep Tufekci suggests we can’t stop the wave of attacks taking advantage of systems running out of date software and vendors need to take responsibility.

    “It is time to consider whether the current regulatory setup, which allows all software vendors to externalize the costs of all defects and problems to their customers with zero liability, needs re-examination.”

    100 trips in tinseltown

    Cary Grant got through his Hollywood years by microdosing on LSD claims a new documentary. When he retired from the movies he quit the speed and lived happily every after.

    Interestingly, microdosing is one of the strategies used by today’s Silicon Valley workers to get by in their stressful and demanding roles. Some things never change.

    Earworm of the week

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  • Monopolies and innovation

    Monopolies and innovation

    An interview with Media scholar Jonathan Taplin, author of the new book Move Fast and Break Things, on the Pro-Market website poses some interesting questions about the direction of the digital economy and innovation as market power coalesces around the big four internet giants. 

    This power is particularly marked in online media with Facebook and Google pocketing most of the global advertising spend which leaves little for content creators.

    I kept coming back to these three—Google, Facebook, and Amazon. All have extraordinary market shares. Google has an 88 percent market share in search advertising and an 80-plus percent market share in Android. Amazon has a 74 percent market share in e-books, and Facebook controls 70-plus percent of mobile social media when you add Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. What more empirical evidence does one need to prove concentration?

    Over the past decade we’ve seen the power of the big four online gatekeepers growing although ironically Apple’s light seems to be dimming as the company’s innovative vision fades following Steve Jobs’ passing.

    The monopoly problem is broader than just the tech industry though, as The Atlantic pointed out last year, market dominating corporations are suppressing innovation throughout the US. The problem is even greater in Australia and some other countries.

    The rise of the monopolies shouldn’t be a surprise as the neo-liberal policies of the United States and most of the western world for the last 40 years have been largely focused on increasing the wealth and power of corporations and their managers. It’s fair to say those policies have been successful.

    Where we go next is the big question. An economy dominated, and suffocated, by a handful of well connected and powerful corporations is not going to drive wealth creation, particularly in a world where more businesses functions are being automated.

    One short term step may be to break up the monopolies, something that Taplin himself suggests.

    This just goes to show how quickly the ground is shifting. I now have a piece coming out in the New York Times that explores the idea of breaking them up, but when writing the book, I tried to be reasonable. I thought no one would buy the idea of breaking them up. And now people are raising that idea.

    While that’s a start there’s vastly more that needs to be done from bankruptcy reform – the last 40 years have seen governments make it harder for small businesses and households to seek financial protection – through to intellectual property reform.

    Generational change may turn out to be the solution though as the lucky generation of business and government leaders – those born between 1935 and 55 – responsible for the ideology and policy that allowed such an accumulation of corporate power move on.

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  • Labor’s pitch to repair Australia’s broken technology dreams

    Labor’s pitch to repair Australia’s broken technology dreams

    “It’s like we lived through five minutes of innovation sunshine,” says Federal shadow treasurer Chris Bowen about the Australian government’s innovation policy.

    Bowen was appearing at the Future of Innovation panel at Sydney’s Stone and Chalk fintech hub with his colleague Ed Husic where laid out the Labor Party’s platform for the tech industry and the changing workforce.

    Both Husic and Bowen represent Western Sydney electorates which, along with outer suburban Melbourne, are key election battlegrounds and the districts dealing with most of Australia’s surging population growth.

    Uneven spoils

    As Bowen indicated in his speech, those regions haven’t shared in the country’s economic growth over the past ten years.

    Some parts of the Australian economy are doing well.  Other parts are doing it tough.

    Half of all the jobs created in Australia in the last decade have been created right where we are: in a two kilometre radius of the Sydney and Melbourne CBDs.

    The economy feels good from this vantage point.

     

    Not understanding the mismatch between different parts of the economy was one of the failures of the government’s 2015 Innovation Statement. The multi million dollar advertising campaign was full of fine buzzwords but none of the rhetoric resonated with the broader electorate, something not helped by the Prime Minister retreating from his policies at the first opportunity.

    Spreading the gains

    Bowen and Husic made a good case for their policies being focused on the wider population as a changing workforce is going to affect all parts of the economy.

    So I spend a lot of time travelling to and talking to people in regional economies.  It doesn’t feel as good there.

    Regional central and North Queensland. Tasmania. South Australia.

    Here, unemployment and youth unemployment are high and show no signs of budging.

    So Bowen’s commitment for his party to work on innovation, education and industry policies that help suburban and regional Australia – not just the leafy bits of upper middle class Sydney and Melbourne – is welcome and essential for the nation.

    Refreshingly Bowen also acknowledged many of the jobs that currently exist in suburban and regional Australia are very likely to be automated and that education, reskilling and investment are all critical factors in dealing with employment shifts.

    A familiar tale

    However we have heard this before, the Rudd Labor government came in with high hopes when it was elected in 2007 which it quickly dispelled and then compounded its errors with cancelling the COMET commercialisation program and making a mess of employee option schemes.

    Given this history of poorly conceived thought bubbles posing as policy, this writer asked (or rather begged) Bowen to consult with industry and the community before announcing major policy changes – something both parties have become notorious for.

    In answer to the comment about consulting with the electorate before substantive policy changes, Bowen suggested a Shorten ALP government will be requiring senior public servants to be more engaged with industry.

    Suggesting that senior public servants should engage with the community and industry is a good idea. That the idea is seen as revolutionary illustrates the problem found by former Digital Transformation Office boss Paul Shetler when he arrived in Australia with the country’s top bureaucrats being isolated and aloof from the citizens they deign to rule. This isolation is in itself a challenge facing Australian governments.

    Memories of earlier oppositions

     

    The Sydney tech community’s lauding Husic and Bowen bought back some memories. Fifteen years ago Australian technologists  were doing the same thing with another Labor shadow spokesperson, Kate Lundy. We ended up with factional warriors Stephen Conroy and Kim Carr when Labor finally won. While both were no doubt wonderful at delivering the numbers to party faction warlords their understanding of the changing economy was marginal at best.

    While the Rudd government at least paid lip service to the Twenty-First Century, unlike the Howard government which was firmly focused on taking Australia back to the 1950s – with some degree of success it should be said, the Labor Party did little apart from getting the National Broadband Network underway.

    In opposition, the Liberal Party too made similar noises however communications spokesperson Paul Fletcher, like Lundy, has been marginalised since winning power and Paul Keating’s description of Malcolm Turnbull as ‘Fizza’ has never seemed more apt since Malcolm became Prime Minister.

    For Australians hoping some of the Lucky Country’s luck would be applied to the nation’s tech sector, government policies from both parties have been a succession of broken dreams.

    Husic and Bowen are promising this time it will be different. Many of us hope it will be, it may be the last chance for Australia to have a fair economy fit for the 21st Century.

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  • Juicing innovation

    Juicing innovation

    Every tech boom has its excesses and it’s hard to go past the Juicero as the most egregious of today’s mania.

    A number of high profile investors, including Google’s venture capital arm, have poured $120 million dollars into the internet connected device that squeezes juice from pre-prepared pouches of pulped fruit and vegetables.

    Bloomberg found the devices don’t a great deal as the juice can be squeezed out of the packs by hand, which is just as well given the microchipped pulp containers can be disabled by the manufacturer.

    While the Juicero aims to be the juicer equivalent of the Keurig coffee capsule, the device’s expense, built in obsolescence and unnecessary waste is emblematic of everything  that’s wrong with the current Silicon Valley culture.

    The fundamental question of any business idea is ‘what problem does this solve?’ It’s hard to think of anything the Juicero fixes.

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  • Innovating American government

    Innovating American government

    On Monday President Trump signed into existence the White House Office of American Innovation, an agency intended to “bring together the best ideas from Government, the private sector, and other thought leaders to ensure that America is ready to solve today’s most intractable problems.”

    While appointing his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to run the office is less than ideal, an agency that brainstorms ideas to transform government isn’t a bad idea.

    There are limitations though, former Obama Administration tech official Tom Cochrane warns government is a very different beast from running a campaign.

    In the government you say ‘I have a problem’ and it’s ‘let’s write out your requirements, here’s your six month procurement process and you can only use these thirty-three vendors who may be substandard or no good and the only reason they are on the list is because they understand how the contracting process works.’

    That is just the tip of the iceberg of the challenges you face when you go into government.

    Cochrane was only talking about managing websites and software while Trump and Kushner’s objectives are clearly more ambitious and, dare one suggest, somewhat driven by the neo-Liberal ideology that the private sector and markets hold all the answers to humanity’s’ problems.

    How radically reforming government will go under the Trump Administration remains to be seen although the early failure with health insurance changes doesn’t bode well.

    While the UK’s Government Digital Service and Australia’s Digital Transformation Office were largely confined to changing the delivery of public sector services, their remit seems somewhat closer to Kushner’s so it’s instructive reading the lessons from Paul Shetler who worked at both agencies.

    His view is in the United States there’s a lot of opportunity on the digital transformation front.

    They do have a lot of potential there. I do think the new administration is more likely to do something big to fix things than perhaps the Obama Administration was, because they are talking about national infrastructure.

    If you to the United States it’s shocking, the physical level infrastructure is falling apart and on a digital level things are pretty much the same, if you look at the government websites many of them look like they are from the 1990s and they all look and act differently.

    The US though has its own complexities with government being far more devolved and ‘hands off’ than the UK or Australian Federal governments, not to mention the tricky political environment the Trump Administration is faced with.

    Possibly the biggest challenge Kushner’s office will face is the question of leadership. Shetler points out pushing change through government agencies requires decisive action.

    In the UK, we didn’t focus on consensus we focused on getting things done. When I first met with Francis Maude he said ‘this is not a change management process – this is transformation.”

    One of the major reasons why the UK was a successful as they were was because Francis Maude was the minister for five years. It became clear he was going to see this through and if you were going to fight, you were going to lose. People got into line.

    So for the Trump Administration and Jared Kushner, the success of the Office of American Innovation is going to lie on how well they can lead and drive the process.

    Given Donald Trump’s temperament and way of doing things, there’s no doubt he’ll take decisive action however bringing along disparate stakeholders and sectors of the community – not to mention deeply embedded interest groups – is going to take more than quickly Executive Orders or 3am tweets.

    As Tom Cochrane and Paul Shetler observe, changing the direction of governments is not an easy task and it takes persistence, determination and vision.

    History will be watching how well Trump and Kushner succeed.

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