Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: innovation

  • How the Internet of Things could overtake the law

    How the Internet of Things could overtake the law

    Last March the Australian internet industry celebrated twenty years of commercial operations with the Rewind/Fast Forward conference that looked at the evolution of the online economy down under and its future.

    Naturally the Internet of Things was an important part of the discussion looking at the internet’s future and one of the panels examined the effects of the IoT on industry and society.

    During the session chairman of the Communications Alliance industry association, John Stanton, raised an important point about how the IoT creates problems for existing laws and the regulators as a wave of connected devices are released onto the market place.

    The risks are varied, and Stanton’s list isn’t exhaustive with a few other aspects such as liability not explored while some of the issues he raises are a problem for other internet based services like cloud computing and social media.

    Roaming rules

    Having fought many regulatory battles over roaming charges and access between networks, it’s not surprising Stanton and the Communications Alliance would raise this as an issue.

    Dealing with roaming devices will probably be a big challenge for mobile Machine to Machine (M2M) technologies, particularly in the logistics, airline and travel industries. We can expect some bitter billing battles between clients and their providers before regulators start to step in.

    Number schemes

    Again this is more an issue for mobile M2M consumers. Currently every SIM card has its own phone number once the service is activated.  It may be that regulators have to revise their numbering schemes or allow providers to use alternative addressing methods to contact devices.

    Data sovereignty

    Where data lives is going to continue to be a vexed issue for cloud computing consumers, particularly given the varied laws between nations.

    Short of an international treaty, it’s difficult to see how this problem is going to be resolved beyond companies learning to manage the risks.

    Identity management

    Data integrity is essential for the IoT and accurately determining the identity of individuals and devices is going to be a challenge for those designing systems.

    Over time we can expect to see some elegant and clever solutions to identity management in the IoT however masquerading as a legitimate device will always be a way malicious actors will try to hack systems.

    Privacy

    For domestic users, the privacy of what remains in data stores is going to be a major concern as domestic devices and wearables gather greater amounts of personal information. We can expect laws to be tightened on the duties and obligations of those collecting the data.

    Access Security

    Who can do what with a networked device is another problem, should a malicious player or a defective component get onto the system, the damage they can do needs to be minimised. What constitutes unlawful access to a computer network and the penalties needs to be carefully thought out.

    Spectrum allocation and cost

    Governments around the world have been reaping the rewards of selling licenses to network operators. As the need for reliable but low data usage IoT networks grows, the economics of many of the existing licenses changes which could present challenges for both the operators and governments.

    Access to low cost and low data access networks

    Following on from the economics of M2M networks, the question of mandating slicing of scarce spectrum for IoT applications or reserving some frequencies becomes a question. How such licenses are granted will cause much friction and many headaches between regulators and operators.

    Commercial value of information

    How much data is worth will always be a problem in an economy where information is power and money. This though may turn out to be more subtle as information is only valuable in the eyes of the beholder.

    Where information becomes particularly valuable is in financial markets and highly competitive sectors so we can see the IoT becoming part of insider trading and unfair competition actions. These will, by definition, be complex.

    Like any new set of technologies the internet of things raises a whole new range of legal issues as society adapts to new ways of doing business and communicating. What we’re going to see is a period of experimentation with laws as we try to figure out how the IoT fits into society.

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  • Beating Facebook envy

    Beating Facebook envy

    Do economies and businesses need to be at the cutting edge of tech or is staying behind the early adopters the key to get the most out of technology?

    “Everybody has Facebook envy,” says Oracle’s Neil Mendelson, the company’s Vice President for Big Data, about business life in Silicon Valley.

    Mendelson was talking about how the Silicon Valley business environment is a high pressure bubble where the focus on shipping products is different from the needs of users outside the tech sector.

    “The farther out you go from Silicon Valley the more people fundamentally understand the value is in getting something out of it,” says Mendelson who was speaking at an executive lunch in Sydney earlier today.

    “Being a late follower has an advantage because companies aren’t going to get fired up about this Facebook envy trying to assemble a solution but rather they can get something out of the cloud that will deliver value.”

    The Minitel problem

    An example of being too far ahead could be Minitel, a text based network operating across France between 1982 and 2012.

    Minitel was a visionary project intended to deliver services similar to the Internet through a dedicated terminal, however the open nature of the net made the French service less than attractive and eventually France Telecom wound the service up in 2012 as user interest evaporated.

    How much the French bet on Minitel held the nation’s digital economy back is open to question, the World Economic Forum lists France as 25th in the world in its 2014 Networked Readiness Index however the gap between most of the top nations is quite close.

    Falling off the bleeding edge

    The idea that the best return on a tech investment is by being behind the ‘bleeding edge’ isn’t new, for years the advice from serious computer experts was to never buy a Microsoft product until version three came out however there is a risk that the early adopters might get an early advantage over the slow movers.

    Another risk is missing out altogether; as Oracle’s Australian manager Tim Endrick told the room, “our experience is organisations are doing two things; they are either managing disruption and/or they are leveraging their structures to innovate. Those who are sitting on the back step doing nothing are in serious trouble.”

    So while there are risks with being too an early an adopter of new technology, it’s important to be aware of the trends and tools that are changing business.

    With the pace of change in both technology and industry accelerating, it may be that staying too far behind the cutting edge risk falling off altogether. Maybe it’s worth being envious of Facebook.

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  • Data driven lending

    Data driven lending

    Banking has always been a data driven business, understanding borrowers and the risks they present is one of the essential skills in making money from lending.

    The new wave of payment startups present a new way for lenders to analyse risks; with real time data aggregated across businesses and regions, lenders can quickly decide wether a borrower is likely to able to pay the money back with the conditions asked for.

    Payments company Square in its latest pivot has partnered with Victory Park Capital and claims to have extended more than $100 million in capital to more than 20,000 merchants writes the New York Times.

    Like other payment companies that have entered this market, Square uses their own deep understanding of their customers’ incomes to be able to make a data based decision on the creditworthiness of applicants.

    Square also offers ancillary data-driven products created for small businesses. The new instant deposit product, which is still in testing and will be fully available in the spring, will give businesses faster access to money they put into a debit account. And the company’s new charge-back protection service will cover some disputes between consumers and merchants.

    Those products also rely on data that Square has collected. They will be available only to small businesses that have a solid financial track record, based on a history of accepting payments with Square.

    Square is by no means the first business to do this, last year we wrote of PayPal’s move into small business lending and Point of Sale hardware manufacturer Verifone retreated from the market two years ago calling it ‘fundamentally unprofitable.’

    The competition in the space and the fact assessing financial risks isn’t exactly a core competence of Silicon Valley start ups indicate Square’s and other companies may find small business lending a tough business as well.

    Despite that, small business lending is a field that is overdue for disruption. With companies like Apple, Google and Amazon all offering payment services, the logical expansion is into evaluating risk and profit.

    It may not be Square, Verifone or PayPal who ultimately redefines the sector, but it will be one of today’s tech businesses that does.

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  • Will the tech industry beat the car makers?

    Will the tech industry beat the car makers?

    Despite the current hype over wearables and smartphones at Mobile World Congress, the real battle in tech is increasingly in the automobile industry; it’s no accident that smartcars were the start turn at the Consumer Electronics Show at the beginning of the year.

    It may be however that the tech companies might take over the automobile industry as Timothy B. Lee in Vox suggests.

    Lee’s argument rests mainly on the tech industry’s superior supply chain management – this is questionable as automotive manufacturing is several orders of magnitude in its complexity than PCs or smartphones – and the changing role of the motor car in modern society.

    That latter aspect is probably the more crucial aspect, as car ownership falls and sharing vehicles becomes commonplace, design and manufacturing imperatives change along with the economics.

    While it’s stating the obvious to say the incumbent automobile manufacturers currently have the advantage due to scale and experience, the same was said when Apple introduced their smartphone to compete against long established incumbents such as Nokia and Motorola.

    Re-inventing the global automotive sector is a far bigger task than changing the smartphone or personal computer industry, although it certainly is going to happen. It may be though that Chinese or Indian groups end up dominating rather than Silicon Valley.

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  • Reading the golden records – can we avoid a digital dark age?

    Reading the golden records – can we avoid a digital dark age?

    In 1977 NASA’s Voyager mission launched from Cape Canaveral to explore the outer solar system, included on the vessel in case it encountered other civilisations were a plaque and a golden record describing life on Earth.

    The record was, is, “a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.” It containing images,  a variety of natural sounds, musical selections from different cultures and spoken greetings in fifty-five languages.

    Most American households in 1977 could have listened to the sounds on Voyager’s golden disk but were the spaceship to return today it would be difficult to find the technology to read the record.

    This is the concern of Google Fellow and internet pioneer Vint Cerf who told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Jose this week we are “facing a forgotten century” as today’s technologies are superseded rendering documents unreadable.

    A good example of ‘bit rot’ is the floppy disk – the icon used by most programs to illustrate saving files is long redundant and few organisations, let alone households, have the ability to read a floppy disk.

    For corporations the problem of dealing with data stored on tape is an even greater problem as proprietary hardware and software from long vanished corporations becomes harder to find or engineer.

    As the Internet of Things rolls out and data becomes more critical to business operations, the need for compatible and readable formats will become even more important for companies and historical information may well become a valuable asset.

    With libraries, museums and government archives having digitised historic information, this issue of accessing data in superseded formats becomes even more pressing.

    It may be that important documents need to be kept on paper – although there’s still the problem of paper deteriorating  – to make sure the 21st Century doesn’t become the digital dark ages and our golden records remain unread.

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