Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: mobile

  • Samsung pins its hopes on the Internet of Things

    Samsung pins its hopes on the Internet of Things

    South Korean industrial giant Samsung is struggling, in the last year its smartphone division reported a 75% drop in revenues while their handsets, while still the world’s most popular, lost ten percentage points of market share.

    The company’s smartphone division is stuck because mobile carriers in the western world are abandoning subsidies for handsets, with most developed markets now at saturation point for cellphone adoption there’s little point in chasing market growth for all but the most desperate telco.

    For Samsung that’s been a problem as their premium model strategy has been based upon western consumers ordering a new phone every 18 to 24 months as their mobile contracts were renewed, now those deals are not so common a key sales channel for the Korean conglomerate has been lost.

    This leaves Samsung looking for the next market and at this week’s IFA consumer technology event in Berlin, the company unveiled its Smart Things hub, a cylindrical device that connects with your TV, air conditioning, music system, and other home appliances.

    Smart Things was an acquisition Samsung made last year to improve its IoT product line and the company has an open platform for connecting household devices with over 200 already certified.

    For Samsung with its range of domestic equipment this may well mark the future for the business. The interesting thing though is the smartphone is still integral in today’s vision of the connected home, so we won’t see Samsung leaving the handset market soon.

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  • Business and the workforce in an app driven world

    Business and the workforce in an app driven world

    One of the things we know about the future is the workplace will be very different. Just as the Personal Computer changed offices in the 1990s, the smartphone and tablet computer are changing today’s.

    Part of that change though is being driven by the change in generations. While this blog tries to avoid falling into the trap of generalising about different age cohorts – and contends the entire concept of baby boomers as an economic group is flawed – there are undoubtedly differences between the world of the PC generation of workers and that of the new mobile breed.

    The key difference is the idea that work devices are different to those at home. Those of us bought up with the idea that the office computers would be tightly locked workstations – in the 1990s we also had the quaint idea corporate desktops were generally more powerful than what we had at home – are now seeing that way of working being abandoned.

    For the next generation of office workers, accessing corporate resources through an app connected to a cloud service will be as normal as opening Windows NT to access the shared corporate drive was 15 years ago.

    Along with the technology and generational change driving businesses into the cloud-app computing world there’s also the needs of a much more fluid and mobile workforce. The shift to casualisation began well before PCs arrived on desktops but the process is accelerating as we see crowdsourcing and the ‘uberization’ of industries.

    Older workers will adapt as well, many came through the evolution of business computing from ‘green screen’ displays – if their businesses had any at all – through to the server based systems of recent years. For them the shift to smartphones might be troublesome for those with fading eyesight, but it won’t be the first change.

    For businesses this shift means they have to start planning for the mobile services that will change workforces and industries. The shift is already well underway – accounting software company Intuit estimates small businesses already use an average of 18 apps to run their business.

    We all have to start thinking about how these apps can be used to manage our staff and workforces.

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  • Putting machine learning into wine

    Putting machine learning into wine

    As we gather more data, the opportunities to apply it become wider. A good example of this is Seer Insights, a South Australian company started by pair of university students that calculates the likely grape yields for vineyards.

    Seer Insights’ product Grapebrain is made up of two components, a mobile app that the farmer uses to count the grape clusters on the vines and then a cloud service that analyses the data and produces web based reports for the farmers.

    The current methods are notoriously unreliable with Seer Insights estimating mistakes cost the Australian viticulture industry $200 million a year as harvests are miscalculated resulting in either rotting fruit or wasted contractor fees.

    Born in an elevator

    Seer’s founders, Harry Lucas and Liam Ellul, started the business after a chance meeting on their university campus. “We started off doing this after being stuck in a lift together,” remembers Liam. “Originally we were looking at the hyper-spectrum imaging for broadacre farming but when we started looking at the problems we ended up talking to wine organisations about this.”

    “The technology predicts how many grapes will be coming off the vineyards at the end of the season to enable people to sort out their finances,” Harry says. “The growth process grapes go through is difficult to model so we use machine learning to do that.”

    For both the founders having an off the shelf product, in this case Microsoft’s machine learning tools, to run the data analysis made it relatively easy to launch the product.

    As a winner of Microsoft’s Tech eChallenge, the startup has won a trip to the United States as well as being profiled by the company as a machine learning case study.

    Over time as these tools become more accessible to small companies we’ll see more businesses accessing machine learning services to enhance their operations.

    As companies face the waves of data flowing into their businesses over the next decade, it will be those who manage it well and gather valuable insights from their information that will be the winners.

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  • Delivering on the promise of the connected stadium

    Delivering on the promise of the connected stadium

    Once a year I come out of the closet in Sydney and admit I support Carlton in the Australian Football League. This usually ends in humiliation as Carlton hasn’t beaten Sydney in the last twenty years.

    This year’s ritual humiliation coincided with an offer by Telstra to review their smart stadium rollout at the Sydney Cricket Ground’s rebuilt MA Noble stand following a tour of Etihad’s stadium earlier this year.

    Late last month I interviewed Mike Caponigro, Cisco’s head of Global Solutions Marketing for Sports and Entertainment, around how smart stadiums are being rolled out around the world, including the Sydney Cricket Ground.

    Caponigro sees the smart stadium as complementing the ground experience and Cisco are working with over three hundred venues in thirty countries around the world.

    “Live is always going to be best,” states Caponigro. “You can’t replace that tribal passion of the crowd. No matter how excited I get in my living room or with some friends in a pub you’re never going recreate that enthusiasm.”

    However the expectations of sports fans are changing Caponigro points out citing how HD television and the internet is changing the experience for spectators outside the stadium, “fans don’t want to be removed from that action.”

    So how does the connected stadium experience stack up for a punter who’s used to being in the cheap seats and often wonders if buying that ticket along with putting up with the hassles of getting to the ground, being overcharged for bad food and water down beer is worthwhile compared to staying at home and enjoying it on TV?

    A limited App

    Like all the smart stadium rollouts, the SCG’s revolves around the onscreen displays and the spectators’ smartphones. Once downloaded the 35Mb app isn’t spectacular. The sports news focuses on cricket – somewhat irrelevant in a Sydney winter – while the transport map front ends into Google Maps.

    Probably the biggest disappointment with the app is the venue map which is a detailed PDF lacking any interactive capabilities which successfully manages to pack a lot of information, like the location of light towers, without actually telling you anything useful.

    In seat ordering is one of the attractions of the app. Unfortunately we were unable to test it as the collection points are within the members section of the Noble stand which we didn’t have access to.

    The lack of real time information about seating, transport and ground information makes the app at best ornamental, indeed there are opportunities missed in upselling such as offering spectators seat upgrades or merchandising offers.

    In stadium connectivity

    Where the SCG smart stadium shines is in the Wi-Fi connectivity. Mobile connections over 3 and 4G services have always been problematic during match breaks. During the game, the connection was flawless, the only gripe being that the login screen reappeared for a moment everytime the phone was bought out of sleep.

    Again though it’s hard not to think the ground management are missing opportunities with the Wi-Fi as the login screen asked for an email address but didn’t give the option of providing an SCG or Swans membership number rather than just an email address.

    Not so smart screens

    The biggest boast of smart stadiums are the connected screens, the previous tour of Melbourne’s Etihad Stadium showed what could be done but the SCG game was an opportunity to see the videos in action.

    Smart-stadium-action-shot

    Unfortunately the screens actually detracted from the experience. While the main scoreboards were showing game details and replays the smaller screens were showing the SCG members in ground advertising which added nothing for spectators.

    Even during the match play, the screens carried the Channel Seven television feed with food outlet advertising wrapped around it. Disappointingly the screens didn’t give any updates on the match play, the goal kicked by Swans’ debutante Dan Robinson (who played for my local junior club) didn’t receive a mention at all.

    Overall the spectator experience from the SCG’s smart stadium rollout is underwhelming. This isn’t a result of Telstra and Cisco’s technology but of its implementation with a focus on low value advertising rather than adding value for spectators.

    Leaving money on the table

    The smart screens need to be delivering more relevant information to fans in the stadium while the smartphone app has to be giving dynamic and useful data to help spectators before during and after the game.

    At the moment, it seems there’s a lot of money being left on the table as opportunities beyond pushing advertising onto spectators aren’t being explored.

    smartscreen-connected-stadium

    It’s hard not to think that right now the smart stadium is a solution in search of a problem. Certainly for fans to take anything except the improved Wi-Fi service seriously there ground managements have to offer more than continuous ads for chicken outlets and expensive private schools.

    Then again, maybe I’m just bitter as once again us Carlton fans were humiliated by another hundred point loss. For Blues supporters it was another dismal night at the footy ground.

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  • Facebook’s and Google’s enlightened self interest

    Facebook’s and Google’s enlightened self interest

    Over the last few weeks much has been written about Google’s mobile search update that went live on Wednesday, some said it would be the death of small business on the internet while others claimed it would be the end of corporates online.

    While all the focus has been on Google’s search changes Facebook quietly made a change that will probably be more vexing for many businesses.

    Both Facebook and Google are struggling with making their services more useful for users, with the Google changes the intention is to make search on mobile devices more useful in giving preference to websites that work on smaller screens.

    In a post on Google’s webmaster blog, Developer Programs Tech Lead Maile Ohye answered the basic questions about the search engine changes which dispelled much of the hysteria and myths about the update. The main point of Ohye’s post is that Google want to show users useful information.

    Facebook have a similar problem, they have to balance the often competing interests of their users and advertisers with the main aim being keeping visitors on their site for as long as possible.

    The objective of keeping users engaged is the reason for a series of tweaks Facebook announced this week that change the newsfeed visitors see.

    The goal of News Feed is to show you the content that matters to you. This means we need to give you the right mix of updates from friends and public figures, publishers, businesses and community organizations you are connected to. This balance is different for everyone depending on what people are most interested in learning about every day. As more people and pages are sharing more content, we need to keep improving News Feed to get this balance right.

    Facebook are putting their users priorities first in making sure the news feed is interesting and relevant, which the company believes will entice visitors to spend longer on the site and make advertising more attractive.

    If it works then it’s a win for Facebook, their users and those who pay to advertise on the site. Again though, the losers are the companies and brands not advertising who thought they could get views by the quality of their content.

    Unless the content is very good, those companies not paying Facebook are in for more disappointment as their reach collapses even further than its current pathetic rates.

    Google’s change too is something that puts users first; rather than dumping mobile web surfers onto an unreadable page, they are making sure people get to sites that are useful.

    In many ways Google is only encouraging what has been best practice for at least five years, that every site should work equally well on mobile devices as they do on desktop computers.

    What Facebook and Google are showing us is the value of putting users’ needs first. If your guests are happy then your business model has a much better chance of succeeding, regardless of who the eventual customer is.

    Making business more user friendly should be a priority for all companies in a competitive world.

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