Society and business in the 21st Century
What are the basic online tools for business? Here’s a quick list on what small and startup businesses can use to get online quickly and cheaply.
What are the basic online tools for business? Here’s a quick list on what small and startup businesses can use to get online quickly and cheaply. This list will be updated regularly and please let us know if there’s anything we should add.
Google Hangouts (being depreciated)
One of the notable things about the 2008 financial crisis was how people stopped setting up businesses. Faced with economic uncertainty, it seemed most folk decided starting new ventures was just too risky.
The OECD’s Entrepreneurship at a Glance report shows just how dramatic that fall in small business creation since the financial crisis has been with United States’ current new business formation rates at 15% below 2008 levels, Italy’s at 35% and Germany’s at 23%.
Even in Australia, which largely escaped the 2008 crisis, business formations are twenty percent lower. This is despite interest rates being close to zero for the last five years.
Those statistics are telling – despite the talk about tech startups, people are not starting new ventures at the rates they were ten years ago. That’s a worrying aspect for economies and future growth prospects.
This week’s The Future is now – Trends in the Modern Workplace webinar was an opportunity to look at the trends affecting small and micro businesses.
What’s notable is almost all the topics affecting small business are being felt by their corporate cousins. It shouldn’t be surprising the technology and social trends affecting society are equally being felt
Now the webinar is over, I’ve posted the presentation to Slideshare with the commentary below, we cover established trends like the shift to mobile then ponder the future of business with artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
The presentation ties up with the post I published a few days ago that provides the commentary to the slides.
Flying Solo’s future is now presentation looks at the technology and industry trends affecting small business
What is changing the modern business? In Flying Solo’s upcoming free webinar, The Future is now – Trends in the Modern Workplace, I’ll be exploring some of the technology trends changing the way we work.
A few of these trends are already here, like the mobile workplace but others such as artificial intelligence, the internet of thing and augmented reality are on the five year horizon and we can expect those technologies to have a major impact on the business in the medium term.
One of the industries we’ll be looking at is the automobile industry that’s facing massive changes as electric vehicles, driverless cars and smartcities change the way we use cars and get goods delivered. This sector is looking at both the immediate effects and the longer term effects of the technological change on their industry.
In preparing the presentation it’s striking how similar todays discussions about AI and and AR are with how we talked about the World Wide Web twenty years ago. At the time we didn’t see how companies like Google and Amazon were going to change they way we work and the way our customers buy from us.
Equally ten years ago we didn’t see how the mobile internet or social media was going to change the ways we did business or how our customers would buy. Today they are important factors.
The recent announcement of the iPhone 7 underscores just how the smartphone has become part of lives. No device has been adopted quicker by the marketplace and its effects on business have been profound and continue to be felt.
In the nine years since the iPhone was released, the mobile internet has boomed. Now almost all our customers are looking for our services through mobile devices – be they smartphones or table computers.
One of the things that ‘s worrying however is how few small operators have mobile friendly websites. This year’s Sensis e-business report found sixty percent of small businesses have websites but only forty percent of those were mobile friendly meaning less than a quarter were suitable for smartphones and tablets.
But it’s not just marketing – the mobile internet, smartphones and cloud computing is changing how workplaces operate. It’s becoming easier for employees to work remotely and for companies to be genuinely distributed and we’re seeing more businesses made up of workers scattered around the world, a good example being the company that created WordPress, Automattic, who are showing how a modern workplace can operate.
Automattic’s experience shows how companies can use the mobile and web based tools to manage a modern workforce. For solo businesses, being able to harness outside skills and participate in larger projects, is one of the great opportunities presented by the mobile world.
Key to business automation is how things are being networked. Increasingly things are being connected to the internet, whether it’s bees, kettles or tractors. If we can put a chip in something and connect it to the net, then we will.
Also, as anyone who deals with the supermarkets knows, large customers increasingly want suppliers to be connected into their data exchange platforms. That integration into supply chains is only going to increase.
This has a number of issues for organisations, first we need the technology to allow us to connect and the systems to efficiently exchange data with our business partners. We also need to know what is being collected by our devices.
‘Data is the new oil’ is one of the mantras we hear, however that overlooks that dealing with oil is a complex, often dirty and frequently dangerous business.
While having lots of data is an opportunity to get more understanding of our businesses and the markets they operate in, all of this information also has a number of hazards. Not least in securing it and making sure company’s, its employees and its clients’ data is safe.
The big challenge for businesses, big or small, is managing the data that threatens to overwhelm everyone. Being able to get value from the information flowing into the organisation while protecting the underlying data is going to be one of the big issues facing businesses of all sizes.
Much of the work in managing all this data will be done by computers – artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation are all going to be standard features in business.
For service providers, increasingly ‘bread and butter’ tasks are going to be taken over by robots that deprive them of business and cash flow. Other businesses however will see this shift as an opportunity to reduce costs and improve productivity.
Accounting service Xero is a good example where founder and CEO Rod Drury sees these technologies as changing the way we work, “Automation and machine learning are improving traditional services by streamlining compliance processes and creating new business opportunities, many of which are either no-touch or limited-touch.”
Increasingly we’re going to see these technologies built into the software programs we use, not just in accounting packages but also in areas like CRM platforms, email and even word processing,
One of the most exciting technologies of the moment are Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and, a combination of the both, Mixed Reality. While games like Pokemon Go! are leading the way it’s actually in industries like logistics, resources and public safety that are leading the applications of these technologies.
For smaller businesses technologies like AR and VR promise to help us visualise the data we have to deal with along with opening up a range of applications ranging from virtual meetings to prototyping. Coupled with technologies like 3D printing, VR and AR may open up a whole range of new industries.
This range of new industries means we’re going to need a whole new set of attitudes and business faces a cultural change as technology changes the workplace. Coupled with major skill shortages in most areas, corporations are going to need to find a new pool of diverse, qualified labour. This is great news for solo businesses.
Like everything there is also a catch, and small businesses are also going to have to embrace that diversity in looking for commercial partners, suppliers and customers. Increasingly, thinking outside the box to find people who can effectively use new technology is going to be important.
The good news is that mobile and cloud services coupled with most of the world becoming connected makes it easier for solo operators to find the skills they need. The real barrier lies in ourselves ditching old prejudices and assumptions
In conclusion, we’re about to enter the next phase of the computer revolution. We’ve been through the PC period, we’re now in the middle of the smartphone era and the artificial intelligence age is about to begin.
The ultimate trend though is that business is going to get faster and solo business proprietors are going to face the same challenges as managers and executives in large corporations as a wave of data floods over us all.
One of the advantages for small businesses is we’re not saddled with legacy systems in the way large organisations and with the tools of the new era being affordable, means solo entrepreneurs can grasp opportunities far quicker than their bigger competitors.
The opportunities are there for us to take, we just have to seize them when when they appear.
Australia’s National Australia Bank and Telstra launch a service for small businesses wanting to go online
How does a small business get online quickly and cheaply? This was a topic I explored in my last book, the e-Business guide, so it was good to revisit the topic after being invited to contribute a post to the new Proquo small business exchange website.
Proquo, a joint venture between NAB and Telstra, was launched earlier this month and offers more than two million Australian small businesses an online platform to network, trade or swap services with each other.
The service’s name is a take on the phrase ‘quid pro quo’ – meaning ‘this for that’ – and it offers users the opportunity to swap or exchange their skills or services in addition to traditional monetary payments.
Developed by NAB’s innovation hub, NAB Labs and Telstra’s Gurrowa Innovation Lab, the joint venture operates independently of its parents although the service will tap into both companies’ huge small business customer base and complement their existing service offerings.
For the blog post, I give a quick overview of the basics a small business proprietor needs to keep in mind when setting up an online presence, something every organisation should have. Hopefully we’ll have the chance to expand upon this important business topic.
This is a paid post on behalf of Nuffnang
Are we seeing a new digital divide develop between big and small businesses, particularly in areas like retail and hospitality?
This thought occurred to me during a radio spot earlier today where we were talking about Apple Pay’s Australian launch. Many small businesses don’t have the capital or expertise to implement many of these new technologies.
A number of factors contribute to this including the legacy systems installed in small businesses, the proprietors having a poor understanding of technology and, most importantly, the lack of either capital for reinvestment or cashflow to fund the monthly charges that are standard for cloud computing services.
One unstated factor with cloud computing services is how the cost of services add up. For example a Premium 10 Xero customer with Receiptbank attached is looking at a $100 a month in charges. It’s not hard to see how adding cloud based Point of Sale, rostering and customer service software could see a small business incurring $400 a month in fees, throw in Salesforce and you could be looking at a very expensive exercise.
No doubt for those companies that can afford these services this is money well spent but for many margin or low turnover businesses, the charges could be a deal breaker.
Another aspect to the cloud services is the myriad of different platforms that need to be stitched together in most businesses, one cloud service founder calls it “digital spaghetti.”
Managing this bowl of complexity isn’t easy and raises a number of business risks as different services apply varying policies and practices to the data they collect and store. A breach or service failure at one could cause a ripple effect through all business operations.
For many small business owners, particularly older proprietors, managing this complexity is intimidating if not downright scary.
It may well be there’s a number of opportunities for a canny service provider to offer an out of the box small business solution, but for many older small operators with limited capital and restricted cashflow affording such a product might also be difficult.
The risk though for those businesses is they will find themselves falling further behind as markets, consumer demands and the workforce’s expectations evolve. A business digital divide could be fatal for those caught on the wrong side of it.
Intuit’s plan to sell Quickbook is part of the shift to cloud computing that’s leaving old business models dead.
“No-one is making money from cloud software, in the early days everyone made money from software,” bemoaned one of the panellists at last week’s CPA Technology, Accounting and Finance Forum.
A good example of this is the US accounting software giant Intuit putting the 32 year old Quickbooks on to the market.
Intuit was built on the back of Quickbooks but today the product today makes less than 6% of the company’s revenues and under 2% of the profits. Making matters worse is the old code base is clunky, proprietary and expensive to maintain.
Apart from getting a captive – and almost certainly dwindling – client base, there doesn’t seem to be a lot to attract buyers for Quickbooks as a desktop based product in a market shifting to the cloud.
The shifting business model hurts more than Intuit; the accountants, resellers and other service providers who were making a decent income from selling or supporting the box products have seen their margins evaporate.
For users, both Intuit and the services providers moving away from the product risks leaving them and their data stranded, something every business should understand about the risks of proprietary formats.
The shift though by Intuit should be a warning to small businesses that the days of box and inhouse software are numbered and running packages on servers and desktops will soon be for large organisations or niche applications.
Almost every business is going to have to plan its move to the cloud, those who don’t are increasingly going to be left behind in a shifting market.
