Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: internet

  • Building a protocol for smart cities

    Building a protocol for smart cities

    One of the challenges for governments with smart city technologies is that most administrations don’t know the questions to ask about them, the City Protocol initiative aims to address this problem.

    During the recent Internet of Things conference in Barcelona, Barcelona Deputy Mayor Antoni Vives discussed the objectives of the City Protocol Initiative.

    “The solutions for our problems are more or less the same,” Vives says. “The problems cities have is they are too weak to talk to big corporations to ask for the solutions we need.”

    “So the idea is to set up standard solutions in the way the internet protocol did through agreements between cities around the world and then through these agreements we set up standards that can be developed anywhere around the world in a very cheap way in a physical way that can improve people’s lives.”

    The cities protocol already has fifty cities signed up to the protocol and partnerships with corporations ranging from Cisco to Schneider and Microsoft along with universities such as the MIT, the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago

    Barcelona’s city government was instrumental in setting up the protocol following a visit to Cisco’s head office in 2012.

    “We went to San Francisco and we explained to these guys, ‘we have a plan for our city, why don’t you join us?’ Provided that we convert this plan for Barcelona into something applicable and scalable for any city in the world.”

    “What you have in Barcelona is something we want to scale and replicate anywhere in the world,” Vires proudly states. “The technology you see in Barcelona is something you’re going to see in ten years time in Addis Ababa, Quito, Johannesburg or Moscow. That’s the real revolution.”

    Vires sees the smart city technologies changing the way councils and governments work with citizens, “we have discovered that rather than going from the administration to the citizens, going from the citizens to the people improves our own models. We never forget these guys are the people who pay our wages.”

    “If you put a device in the city that can talk to them, then people are going to interact with the city in a way they have never done.”

    As well as seeing it changing the way governments communicate with people, Vires is enthusiastic about what technology can do for his council delivering services to residents

    “I have to have the best tools in my hands to deliver a better quality of life for my people.”

    There are some risks though with the smart city technologies, particularly that of inclusion with less advantaged, immigrant or older age groups. Vires tells a story to illustrate how this is a priority for the city.

    “We installed the smart bus stop,” says Vires. “There was an old woman and this bus stop has slots to charge mobiles and that old woman went to the slot, took a penny from her pocket and tried to put the penny into the slot as she thought she had to put a coin into the slot to make it work.”

    “We have to make sure that that old woman understands that device is there to serve her, not to put coins into but to give her a better service.”

    The old lady’s story illustrates the challenge facing all governments in implementing new technologies in making sure that everyone has access to the new services. Addressing the problem of equal access will probably be one of the greatest tasks facing the Cities Protocol team.

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  • What if you built a broadband network and nobody used it?

    What if you built a broadband network and nobody used it?

    The assertion that internet connectivity drives economic growth is largely taken for granted although getting the maximum benefit from a broadband network investment may require more than stringing fibre cables or building wireless base stations.

    A key document that supports the link between economic growth and broadband penetration is the International Telecommunication Union’s 2012 Impact of Broadband on the Economy report.

    While the reports authors aren’t wholly convinced of the direct links between economic growth and broadband penetration, they do see a clear correlation between the two factors.

    ITU Impact of broadband on the economy report 2012
    ITU Impact of broadband on the economy report 2012

    One of the areas that disturbed the ITU report editors were the business, government and cultural attitudes towards innovation.

    The economic impact of broadband is higher when promotion of the technology is combined with stimulus of innovative businesses that are tied to new applications. In other words, the impact of broadband is neither automatic nor homogeneous across the economic system.

    For South Korea, internet innovation is a problem as the New York Times reports. Restrictions on mapping technologies, curfews on school age children and the requirement for all South Koreans to use their real names on the net are all cited as factors in stifling local innovation.

    In reading the New York Times article, it’s hard not to suspect the South Korean government is engaging in some digital protectionism, which is ironic seeing the benefits the country has reaped from globalised manufacturing over the last thirty years.

    The problem for South Korea is that rolling out high speed broadband networks are of little use if local laws, culture or business practices impede adoption of the services. It’s as if the US or Germany built their high speed roads but insisted that cars have a flag waver walking in front of them.

    Indeed it may well be that South Korea’s broadband networks are as useful to economic growth as Pyongyang’s broad boulevards just over the border.

    Similar problems face other countries with Google’s high speed broadband network in the US so far not attracting the expected business take up and innovation, although it is early days yet and there are some encouraging signs among the Kansas City startup community.

    In Australia, the troubled National Broadband Network has struggled to articulate the business uses for the service beyond 1990s mantras about remote workplaces and telehealth – much of the reason for that has been the failure of Australian businesses to think about how broadband can change their industries.

    Like Japan’s bridges to nowhere, big infrastructure projects look good but the poorly planned ones – particularly those no-one knows how to use – are a spectacular waste of money.

    Hopefully the fibre networks being rolled out won’t be a waste of money, but unless industries start using the web properly then much of the investment will be wasted.

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  • Crumbling cookies

    Crumbling cookies

    On the last ABC radio spot we looked at how our data is being tracked, in the following 702 Sydney program with Linda Mottram we looked at the role of Internet cookies and online privacy.

    Cookies – tiny text files that store visitors’ details on websites – have long been the mainstay of online commerce as they track the behaviour of web surfers.

    For media companies, Cookies have become a key way of identifying and understanding their readers making these web tracking tools an essential part of an already revenue challenged online news model.

    Cookies also present security and privacy risks as, like all Big Data, the information held within them can be cross-referenced with other sources to create a picture of and often identify an internet users.

    These online data crumbs often follow us around the web as advertising platforms and other services, particularly social media sites, monitor our behaviour and the European Union’s Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications is the first step by regulators to crack down on the use of cookies.

    Similar moves are afoot in the US as regulators start to formulate rules around the use of Cookies, in an Australian context, the National Privacy Principles apply however they are of limited protection as most cookies are not considered to be ‘identifiable data’, the same get out used by US government agencies to monitor citizens’ communications.

    Generally these rules promise to be so cumbersome for online services Google is looking at getting rid of cookies altogether .

    Ditching cookies gives Google a great deal of power with its existing ways of tracking users and ties into Eric Scmidt’s stated aim of making the company’s Google Plus service an identity service that verifies we are who we say we are online.

    Whether Google does succeed in becoming the web’s definitive identity service remains to be seen, we are though in a time where the questions of what is acceptable in tracking our online behaviour are being examined.

    For the media companies and advertising, putting the control of online analytics in the hands of one or two companies may also add another level of middle man in a market where margins are already thin if not non-existent.

    It may well be that we look back on the time when we were worried about  internet cookies tracking us as being a more innocent time.

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  • Farewell to the knowledge economy

    Farewell to the knowledge economy

    One of the mantras of the 1980s was the future of western nations lay in becoming ‘knowledge economies’, unfortunately things don’t look like they are turning out that way.

    As the developed economies moved their manufacturing offshore – first to Japan and Korea, then Mexico and finally China – the promise to displaced Western factory workers was the replacement jobs would be in vaguely knowledge based industries like call centres and backoffice computer work.

    From the 1990s on, those jobs also started to go overseas  to lower cost centres in India, the Phillipines and other countries.

    When the internet became ubiquitous in the developed world in the late 1990s, the creative industries – musicians, artists and writers – found income dried up as their work became commoditised by digital distribution channels.

    Now the professions are being affected by combination of offshoring, artificial intelligence and automated processes. Many of the jobs that were done by highly paid accountants and lawyers can now be done by computers or in places not dissimilar to those that took away the call centre jobs twenty years ago.

    So it turns out the knowledge economy isn’t the key to riches after all and the future turns out to be more complex than what we thought in the 1990s.

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  • Collecting tolls on the information superhighway

    Collecting tolls on the information superhighway

    The news that internet services company Melbourne IT is looking at cutting management costs and returning cash to shareholders in the face of declining revenues doesn’t come as any surprise to observers of the firm.

    In many ways Melbourne IT is a historic relic, one of the last examples of the late 1990s dot com boom where management from those heady days survived unscathed by the realities of the 21st Century.

    Melbourne IT story illustrates the poor management and flaw investment strategies of the big dot com float and also illustrates the risk of under-investing in key areas, as anyone using the site or the services of its Web Central subsidiary will understand.

    Both companies feature clunky sites and extremely poor customer service. For resellers and customers using the Web Central command center, the experience and technology is straight out of the late 1990s.

    While overseas businesses like Rackspace, GoDaddy and Bluehost innovated and invested in their platforms, Web Central and Melbourne IT sat back and how expected their dominant position would guarantee them profits.

    Much of that management complacency was born out the founding of Melbourne IT when it was spun off from the University of Melbourne to exploit the then monopoly the university’s computer faculty had on granting Australia commercial domains.

    In 1998, as the dot com boom was entering its most heated phase, Melbourne IT was floated and immediately attracted anger and allegations of wrong doing – none of which was proved – as the stock debuted on the stock market at four times its listing prices which generated huge profits for the insiders who were fortunate to get shares allocated before the sale.

    Melbourne IT’s huge stock valuation was based on the belief the company would exploit its dominance of the critical domain market – it was similar to other technology floats of dominant players at the time such as accounting giant MYOB in 1999 and Telstra’s spin off of its small business Commander operation the following year.

    All of these stock market floats proved to be disastrous as each company’s management showed they were incapable of exploiting their privileged market positions.

    Of the three, Melbourne IT’s management survived longest partly because of the riches expected to flow into the company’s coffers through Top Level Domain sales as gullible government agencies and corporates being driven by a Fear Of Missing Out overpay for new online addresses.

    Now it appears ICANN’s top level domain river of gold isn’t going to flow, partly due to arrogance and management incompetence in that organisation, so Melbourne IT is now going to have to cull its executive ranks.

    Steadily, both Melbourne IT and Web Central have gone from being dominant to irrelevant and provide a good case study of how poor management and complacency can squander a dominant market position.

    The failure of Melbourne IT’s management proves that clipping tickets on the internet is not always the path to riches, particularly when you don’t invest or innovate.

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