Tag: technology

15 years of radio and technology

Some reflections on 15 years of talking technology on ABC Radio

I used to be a cranky radio listener.

One morning in early 1998 I was listening to my local ABC station, then 2BL, when stand in breakfast host Bob Hughes was interviewing a “Y2K expert” who had the standard spiel designed to scare people into buying expensive consulting services.

Irritated by the expert’s shoddy advice, I dashed off a quick “with respect” fax to the radio station – the ABC didn’t have publicly facing email addresses at that time – and expected it would be ignored.

A few weeks later Bob Hughes invited me on his regular Sunday spot to talk about Y2K and computers in general. He didn’t mention we’d spend most of the time taking listeners’ calls.

After a few minutes of ‘umming’ and ‘aaahing’ with lots of bluffing, Bob finished with “we’ll see you next month Paul.”

So it began.

Over time the segments moved from 702 Weekend on Sunday mornings to regional spots and the national Tony Delroy nightlife segment

Looking at the sadly neglected PC Rescue website, the programs have ranged from the mundane to the mad, bad and ugly.

At the ugly side, the Windows virus epidemic of the early 2000s looms large. At one stage almost every caller had a virus problem, the only ones that were didn’t were Mac users calling in to crow about their not having this problem.

We enjoyed the various platform wars as Microsoft consolidated its strength and then saw it ebb away as first Firefox started chipping away at its browser dominance, Google at its Internet strategy and then Apple came roaring back into relevance.

The radio shows track the rise of the web as we started talking about the various online services that were changing computing.

One of the critical things, which still hasn’t changed, was billing problems.

Through the early 2000s Australian telcos had shocking charges for data and mobile services. Calls from listeners distressed at big bills was common and the TIOs contact details would be among our most frequent answer.

It was Telstra’s decision to stop stunting Australian internet growth and offer reasonably priced plans, albeit with criminally tiny data allowances, that kick started consumer adoption of broadband plans.

Today the questions revolve around social media, online security and the merits of Android versus Apple smartphones and tablets, it’s quite notable at how Microsoft has moved from dominating the program to being almost irrelevant.

How the next 15 years will pan out are anyone’s  guess, although one suspects pervasive computing, the cloud and the internet of machines will be among the trends we’ll see.

Last week Tim Berners-Lee said that innovation is only just beginning, it’s going to be an interesting, wild ride.

I’m still a cranky radio listener, but these days I have a lot more sympathy for producers and announcers.

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2UE Weekend Computers, 5 January 2013

Paul Wallbank stands in for Trevor Long to talk technology, computers and the internet on Radio 2UE Weekends from 3pm this Saturday

This Saturday from 3.10 pm I’ll be discussing tech with John Cadogan on Radio 2UE as the stand in for regular guest Trevor Long who’s in the US for the Consumer Electronics Show.

We’ll be taking calls on the Open Line, 13 13 32 or tweet to @paulwallbank while we’re on air. 2UE can be heard online or on 954 AM in the Sydney region.

Some of the things we’ll be covering include the following which we’ll be covering after John speaks to Trevor Long in Las Vegas.

R18 + video games

An adult’s only rating category for computer games has come into effect across Australia. The new R18+ will make it illegal for people under 18 to hire, buy or view any games given the rating, while it will be illegal for retailers to sell R18+ games without the new markings.

The new laws bring computer games into line with the classification system for films and other material and make Australia more consistent with international standards.

Google is working on an X phone

Google is working with Motorola on a handset code-named ‘X Phone’ that’s aimed at grabbing market share from Apple and Samsung.

Google acquired Motorola in May 2012 for $US 12.5 billion to bolster its portfolio as its Android operating system competes with Apple and Samsung.

It’s believed that the handset will feature an imaging and gesture-recognition software developer. The new handset is due out next year.

The first civil lawsuit against Instagram

A Californian Instagram user has levelled breach of contract and other claims against the company.

The lawsuit, filed by Finkelstein and Krinsk, says that customers who do not agree with Instagrams terms can cancel their profile, but they then forfeit their rights to photos they had previously shared on the service.

Instagram, which allows people to add filters and effects to photos and share them easily on the Internet, was acquired by Facebook earlier this year for $US 715 million.

It announced its revised terms of service last week and also announced its mandatory arbitration clause that forces users to waive their rights to participate in a class action lawsuit except under very limited circumstances.

Easing of restriction on Internet use on flights

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved an application process for airlines to obtain broadband Internet licenses aboard their planes. Previously airlines have been granted permission on an ad-hoc basis.

Airlines need the FCC’s permission to tap into satellite airwaves while in flight so that passengers can connect to the Internet.

They also need permission from the Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees the safety of inflight Internet systems.

The death of Netbooks

Netbooks have been overtaken by tablet computers and vendors are seeking to push more expensive items to their customers.

The Internet’s TCP/IP language celebrates its 30th birthday

Known as ‘flag day’ January 1, 1983 was the first time that the Us Department of Defence-commissioned ‘Arpanet network’ fully switched to use the Internet protocol suite communications system.

It began as a military project in the U.S in the late 1960’s and it paved the way for the arrival of the World Wide Web.

Summer sales of mobile phones are creating e-waste stockpiles

Over a third of Australians have bought or will consider buying a new mobile phone over Christmas and the summer sales.

This is contributing to the 22 million old mobile phones in Australia.

If these 22 million phones were recycled, they would divert nearly 120 tonnes of plastic from landfill.

Four out of 10 Australians have two or more old mobile phones lying around the home father dust.

Mobile Muster is the official recycling scheme of mobile phones.

You can drop your mobile phone off at a Mobile Muster Collection Point or pick up a reply-paid environment at any Australia Post store and post it in.

Your views, comments or questions are welcome so don’t be shy about calling in on 13 13 32 and Trevor Long will be back next week.

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Twenty years of text messages

A BBC interview with the inventor of the SMS service illustrates how fast technology changes.

When the mobile phone arrived we thought that text, particularly those clumsy pagers people used, would be dead.

Little did we know that an overlooked part of the newer digital cellphone technology would see short messaging become a key part of the phone system and a major income generator for telephone companies.

Short Messaging Services – or SMS – was an add on to the digital Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) standard which became the second generation (2G) of mobile phones.

While intended as a control feature on the phone networks, SMS took off as a popular medium in the mid 1990s and soon became a major profit centre for mobile carriers.

The Twentieth anniversary of the first SMS being sent passed last week and the BBC has a great interview, conducted by text message, with Matti Makkonen who came up with idea.

One of the notable things in the interview is Matti’s humility – he doesn’t like being called the inventor or founder of text messaging as he explains,

I did not consider SMS as personal achievement but as result of joint effort to collect ideas and write the specifications of the services based on them.

We can only imagine what would happen if the idea of SMS messaging was invented today, there’d be an unseemly struggle over patents while hot young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs would pitch venture capital firms with plans for niche services that will make a billion dollars when sold to Yahoo! or HP.

As it was, SMS services were insanely profitable for the telcos. In the early days, text messages were being charged at over a dollar each – for a service that cost the carrier almost nothing.

Over time those handsome profits have been eroded as SMS became bundled into all-you-can-eat packages and then the internet introduced new mediums to send short messages.

While SMS isn’t going away while mobile phones are an important part of our business and personal lives; the service isn’t going to be as critical, or as profitable as it was over the last twenty years.

Short Messaging Services are a great example of how individual technologies rise, evolve and fade with time. They are also a good lesson on how quickly a premium, highly profitable service can become commodified.

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Digital maturity and the profitable business

How digitally mature is your business?

“The advantages of Digital Maturity”‘ a paper recently released by researchers at the MIT Sloan school of management looked at how different businesses adopted technology and the effect this had on the companies’ profits.

The authors of the paper, George Westerman, Didier Bonnet and Andrew McAfee, defined ‘digital maturity as a combination of a company’s level of technology investment and the management skills to implement that technology. From this they classify businesses into four categories – the beginners, conservatives, fashionistas and digirati.

Wallowing in the bottom right are the beginners, who have little idea of how to use technology and as a consequence don’t apply tech to their business. While they’ll use computers and will almost certainly use tools like ERPs and accounting software, they won’t implement them beyond their immediate needs.

This could describe thousands of big and small businesses who have learned just enough to do what they need but don’t really understand, or care, about what their IT systems can do for the way they work.

Above the beginners sit the fashionistas, the businesses who like shiny tech things but don’t really have a strategic understanding of technology or how to apply it effectively. As a consequence the digital tools are underused and fashionistas don’t use them much more effectively than the beginners.

More effective users of technology are the conservatives and digerati, the latter are like the fashionistas except their managements understand how to integrate technology into their business.

The conservatives are probably the most typical business, slow to adopt new technology but when they do, the management ensures it is used effectively.

Of the four groups, MIT’s researchers found that the digerati and conservative categories earned between 9 and 26% more profit than their peers.

The use of technology makes a difference as well with the fashionistas getting a 16% better return on assets than the conservatives which is something worth noting about the adoption of tech in a business.

What the researchers concluded was that businesses who aren’t adopting technology are falling further behind in skills as well as profit noting that attaining ‘digital maturity’ takes several years.

It’s worthwhile reflecting on how digitally mature your business is and reviewing exactly how you’re using technology in your organisation. With the tools available for today’s business, there’s no reason to be playing with the beginners.

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Reinventing the connected bank

Financial institutions are evolving as technology changes their business

Yesterday the National Australia Bank had a media briefing to show how they, like their competitors, are revamping their entire business around new technologies.

The investments are substantial and the re-organisation of the business is too as the old model of branch based banking only available from 9am to 4.30pm is superseded by the always on model of Internet banking delivered through tablets and smartphones.

One of the notable points the NAB executives made was their move to authenticating customers through voice recognition. A trial had found the system reduced fraud and social engineering attempts dramatically.

The use of voice recognition makes sense as it reduces the reliance on users remembering passwords or having to give over personal information that can often be gleaned off social media sites.

Again we’re seeing data security evolving away from passwords.

On the social media front, NAB are also offering their small business customers Facebook selling tools in collaboration with social media sales platform Tiger Pistol.

While it’s questionable that businesses will get that much from a Facebook store, it’s a good attempt from the bank to add some value and encourage their commercial customers to move online.

The move online is essential as the bank noted that online sales through their merchant platforms are up 23% as opposed to an anaemic 2.5% in general sales.

Along with passwords dying, the NAB also found that the cash register is dying and being replaced with smartphone and tablet apps. The bank itself is moving its online platforms to being ‘device agnostic’ so as not to be locked into any one technology.

What the NAB, and its competitor the Commonwealth Bank, are showing is the importance of having modern systems which are flexible enough to evolve with changes in the marketplace.

Smaller businesses could learn from the banks on just how important this investment is. The organisations who aren’t making these changes are steadily being left behind.

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Building new technological Jerusalems

Britain’s hopes of building a new technology hub are similar to those of Harold Wilson – how much do they owe the ideology of our times?

A Telegraph profile of Joanna Shields, the incoming Chief Executive of London’s Tech City Investment Organisation, is an interesting view of how we see economic development and the route to building the industrial centres of the future. Much of that view is distorted by the ideologies of our times.

London’s Tech City is a brave project and somewhat reminiscent of future British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s 1963 proclamation about the UK’s future lying in harnessing the “white heat of technology.” From Dictionary.com;

“We are redefining and we are restating our socialism in terms of the scientific revolution…. The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or outdated methods on either side of industry.”

Fifty years later a notable part of Wilson’s speech is the use of the word “socialism” – the very thought of a mainstream politician using the “s-word” today and being elected shortly afterwards is unthinkable.

Today the ideology is somewhat different – much of Tech City’s objectives are around aping the models of Ireland and Silicon Valley – which in itself is accepting the failed beliefs of our times.

Based around London’s “Silicon Roundabout” – a term reminding those of us of a certain age of a childhood TV series – the heart of the Tech City strategy lies the tax incentives used by the Irish to build the “Celtic Tiger” of the 1990s and government investment funds to create an entrepreneurial hub similar to Silicon Valley, something also done in Dublin with the Digital Hub.

It’s hard not to think that copying these models is a flawed strategy – Silicon Valley is the result of four generations of technology investment by the United States military which is beyond the resources of the British government, and probably beyond today’s cash strapped US government, while the Celtic Tiger today lies wounded in the rubble of Ireland’s over leveraged economy.

At the core of both Silicon Valley’s startup culture and Ireland’s corporate incentives are the ideologies of the 1980s which celebrates a hairy-chested Ayn Rand type individualism while at the same time perversely relying upon government spending. Ultimately failure is not an option as governments will step in to guarantee investment returns and management bonuses.

Just up the M1 and M6 from London’s Silicon Roundabout are the remains of what were the Silicon Valleys of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The manufacturing industries of the English Midlands or the woollen mills of Yorkshire revolutionised the global societies of their times. These were built by individuals and investors who knew they could be ruined by a poor investment and managers who retired to the parlour with a pistol if the enterprise they were trusted to run failed.

Today’s investment attraction ideologies – tax discounts to big corporations and grants to entrepreneurs – are in a touching way not dissimilar to Harold Wilson’s 1960s belief in socialism.

At the time of Wilson’s 1963 speech China and much of the communist world were showing that socialism, with its failed Five Year Plans and Great Leaps Forward of the 1950s, was not the answer for countries wanting to harness the “white heat of technology.”

Similarly today’s Corporatist model of massive government support of ‘too big to fail’ corporations is just as much a failed ideology, like the socialists of the mid 1960s had their world views had been framed in the depression of the 193os, today’s leaders are blinded by their beliefs that were shaped by the freewheeling 1980s.

Whether the next Silicon Valley will be in London, or somewhere like Nairobi or Tashkent, it probably won’t be born out of a centrally planned government initiative born out of the certainties of Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan anymore than the 1960s technological revolution was born out of Karl Marx or Josef Engels.

Silicon Valley itself was the happy unintended consequence of the Cold War and the Space Race, which we reap the benefits of today.

Every ideology creates its own set of unintended consequences, those created by today’s beliefs will be just as surprising to us as punk rockers were to the aging Harold Wilson.

Maybe Tech City will help Britain will do better at this attempt to regain its position as global economic powerhouse, but you can’t help thinking that economic salvation might come from some West Indian or Sikh kid working out of a storage unit in Warrington than a bunch of white middle class guys celebrating a government grant over a glass of Bolly in Shoreditch.

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Legacy people

Virgin America shows how quickly legacy operations are falling behind their younger competitors

“The problem with legacy businesses is legacy people” said David Cush, the CEO of Virgin America at the Dreamforce conference.

For many organisations this is indeed the problem; that managements, workforces and shareholders are locked into a way of doing business that has worked for them in the past, so when change arrives they are ill-equipped to deal with it.

One of the key take aways from the Dreamforce conference is that the rate of business change is accelerating as technologies like cloud computing and the Internet mature.

For the legacy businesses locked into old ways this means they are going backwards faster than they could imagine.

A good example of this is when Virgin America showed their vision of how customer service works in a connected, social world.

The problem for companies like United and the other legacy carriers with their older aircraft and lumbering IT systems is they simply don’t have the infrastructure to provide these services if they wanted to.

One of the characteristics of 1980s management thinking is under-investing in equipment. ‘working your assets’ by flogging them way past their replacement dates is a handy way to increase profits and management bonuses, but it leaves a business exposed when newer technologies come along.

That’s the problem the legacy businesses, whether they are airlines, banks, telcos or in any other sector. Those who are nimble and those who have invested in new systems can take advantage of the change.

For some of these businesses even if they had the wits, and cash, to make those investments it’s dubious whether they could make the tools work properly.

‘Getting it’ is more than just understanding how to turn on an iPhone or send a tweet, it’s about how these tools can be used in a business.

If you don’t know how to use these tools, or understand the consequences of using them, then the investment is wasted.

For those organisations who are falling behind, they have to start moving quickly or their legacy is the only trace there will be of their existence.

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