Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: internet

  • Fighting in the sandbox

    Fighting in the sandbox

    The current spat between Microsoft and Google over the Windows Phone YouTube app illustrates the value, and hindrance, of the internet’s walled gardens.

    Google’s locking Microsoft Phone users out of YouTube shows the strength of these online empires and when coupled with control of the mobile phone platforms, as Google has with Android, it makes it hard for outsiders to compete.

    In one respect, this is corporate karma coming back to bite Microsoft who ruthessly exploited their market position with Windows, MS-DOS and Office through the 1990s and early 2000s.

    That doesn’t change the problems facing Microsoft Windows Phone users who want the same access to internet services enjoyed by Android and iPhone owners.

    Being locked out of a service because of the product you choose to use is in many ways the antithesis of the internet and challenges the underpinnings of the online economy.

    All internet and mobile phone users need to watch how this spat between Microsoft and Google develops, captive markets aren’t good for anyone.

    Similar posts:

  • Dicing up the mobile web

    Dicing up the mobile web

    Last week we had a series of reports on the changing web from Cisco, IBM and Ericsson along with Mary Meeker’s annual State Of The Internet presentation.

    One thing all the reports agreed on was there is going to be a lot more data pushed around the net and the composition is changing as business and home users adapt to smartphones and tablet computers.

    Cisco’s Visual Networking Index forecast online traffic would triple by 2017 while Ericsson’s Mobility Report predicts mobile internet traffic will grow twelve times by 2018.

    What’s notable in those predictions is the amounts and types of data the different devices use. Cisco breaks down monthly traffic by device;

    • Smartphones 0.6 GB
    • Tablet computers 2.7 GB
    • Laptops and PCs 18.6 GB

    In one way this isn’t surprising as the devices have differing uses and their form factors make it harder to consume more data. Cisco also points out that data consumption also varies with processor power. As PCs are the most powerful devices, it makes sense they would chew through more information.

    Ericsson breaks down data use by application as well as device and that clearly shows the different ways we’re using these devices.

    internet data traffic by mobile device

    Notable in the graph is how file sharing is big on PCs but not on tablets or smartphones while email and social networking take up a bigger chunk of cellphone usage.

    What’s also interesting in Ericsson’s predictions is how data traffic evolves. It’s notable that video is forecast to be the biggest driver of growth.

    ericsson-by-data-traffic

    Both Ericsson’s and Cisco’s predictions tie into Mary Meeker’s State Of The Internet presentation at the D11 Conference last week.

    It’s worth watching Meeker’s presentation just for the way she packs over eighty slides into twenty minutes with a lot of information on how the economy is changing as the internet matures.

    What all of these reports are telling us is that our society and economy are changing as these technologies mature. The business opportunities – and risks – are huge and there isn’t any industry that’s immune to these changes.

    Similar posts:

  • Take ten engineers and the internet of everything

    Take ten engineers and the internet of everything

    It seems a far jump from running a gaming platform to a remote access software company with a focus on the internet of machines, but that’s the journey remote access company LogMeIn and its CEO Michael Simon has travelled.

    “Anything that could be connected will be connected in the next decade.” Micheal told me in Sydney last week and it’s where he sees the next step for the company he has led since its founding in 2003.

    LogMeIn grew out of a team that formerly worked for uproar.com, an online gaming company sold to a division of Vivendi Universal for $140 million in 2001.

    Two years after the sale Michael, who had been CEO of Uproar, and a team of ten engineers who formerly worked for the company thought they could solve the complexities of accessing computers remotely.

    For geeks and big business, accessing your computer across the internet in 2003 wasn’t much a problem however it involved configuring software, punching holes in firewalls and configuring routers.

    The LogMeIn team wanted to find a way to make this technology cheap and easy for small businesses and homes to use.

    A decade later they employ 650 staff, half of whom are engineers, and have twenty million users of their product.

    Building the freemium model

    The vast majority of those users are using LogMeIn’s free services – Simon estimates that over 95% of users are using the free version.

    In this, LogMeIn is one of the leading examples of the freemium business model – offering a free version of a software product and premium paid for edition with more advanced features.

    One leader of the freemium movement was the Zone Alarm firewall, a product which earned its stripes in the early 2000s at the peak of the Windows malware epidemic.

    Today one of Zone Alarm’s veterans, Irfan Salim, sits on the LogMeIn board along with two former executives of Symantec, the company whose PC Anywhere and Norton Internet Security products competed with both Zone Alarm and LogMeIn.

    While LogMeIn has done well over the last ten years, the market today is very different to that of a decade ago with cloud computing technologies taking much of the need for remote access software

    Mike Simon sees these changes as an opportunity with the computer industry having gone through three phases – the PC centric era, the mobile wave and now we’re entering the internet of things.

    To cater for the mobile wave LogMeIn has released Cubby, a cloud based storage system that competes with Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft’s Skydrive, but Simon has his eye on the next major shift.

    Controlling the internet of machines

    The internet of things is a crowded market, but Simon believes companies like LogMeIn have an advantage over the telco and networking vendors as businesses with freemium and startup cultures look for ‘pennies per year’ rather than the ‘dollars per device’ larger corporation hope to make.

    It’s a big brave call, but with the market promises to be huge – General Electric claimed last year nearly half the global economy or $32.3 trillion in global output can benefit from the Industrial Internet.

    That’s a pretty big ticket to clip.

    Whether Michael Simon and LogMeIn can achieve their vision of being integral part of the Internet of things remains to be seen, but so far they do have success on their side.

    Similar posts:

  • ABC Nightlife technology – April 2013

    ABC Nightlife technology – April 2013

    For the April 2013 Nighlife spot Tony Delroy and I looked at the mobile phone turning 40, Windows 8 coming to an end, Blackberry’s chances of succeeding and what happens when the internet goes dark.

    Danny Hillis gives a great discussion of what could happen if the internet was turned off along with the history of the net in this TED talk.

    If you missed the show, you can download it from the Nightlife website.The next show will be on May 16 and we hope you can join us then.

    Similar posts:

  • Dodging an internet apocalypse

    Dodging an internet apocalypse

    There’s nothing a like a little hiccup to the internet to bring the tech charlatans and other coackroaches out of the woodwork, although wiser heads are now starting to prevail.

    Sam Biddle’s article in Gizmodo, the last link in the above paragraph, is a good overview of how the internet wasn’t “shaken to the core” by a childish spat between two groups of self-righteous geeks.

    It’s worthwhile keeping non-events like this in mind the next time you read a breathless article about an evil hacker, cyber terrorist or rogue regime threatening to bring the online world down.

    What’s really disappointing with hysterical stories like this is there are real risks to the internet, ranging from telephone exchanges burning down, divers cutting subsea cables to solar flares toasting the planet’s electronics.

    Interestingly, 2013 is predicted to be a year of intense solar activity. So we might get to test some of the doomsday scenarios.

    Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) is the main marketing tool of the technology scoundrel, events like the online squabble of the last few days bring out those scoundrels.

    The irritating thing with these people is their snake oil rarely addresses the real risks we have to deal with.

    Watch out for them, they want to scare you into buying something.

    Similar posts: