Author: Paul Wallbank

Paul Wallbank is a speaker and writer charting how technology is changing society and business. Paul has four regular technology advice radio programs on ABC, a weekly column on the smartcompany.com.au website and has published seven books.

Making e-Business work for you masterclass

A three hour masterclass to help your business get online

A website is a business essential. You need to be where your customers can find you

The Internet is the new shopfront – our customers, suppliers, staff and anybody who wants to deal with us is checking us out on the web before they contact us.

Making e-Business work for you will show you how you can use various Internet tools to promote your business and products online to the world. The three hour masterclass will show you how to setup the web tools you need for an effective online presence.

Business owner, broadcaster, writer and specialist on the digital economy, Paul Wallbank, will guide you through the online tools and techniques which businesses owners and managers can use to improve their Internet performance and effectively extend their web reach to their key customers.

I already have a website

Even if you have website, an effective entry on these directories is essential – the local plumber, baker, lawn mowing service or hairdresser is finding their local search listings is vital to capturing customers in their neighbourhoods while larger business have to compete in crowded markets. Local listings improve the performance of your web site and can help it perform better when customers are searching online.

What will I learn?

During the workshop participants will develop a cost effective online local search presence along with gaining insights on some strategies to be the most popular search result for their neighbourhood.

At the end of the Web for Free workshop you’ll have full, effective listings in the key places your customers are looking online, we’ll have also reviewed how you can choose the keywords to make your site more relevant to those searching for your services.

Participants cover;

  • how the local services work with the web
  • the relevant local directories for Australian online markets
  • maximising local internet coverage
  • using online basic search optimisation strategies
  • optimising website product descriptions with keywords
  • adapting social media to local search and the web

All of this is explained in non-geek terms and at the end of the workshop, you have a fully functioning website and local listings. A full set of reference notes will be provided to workshop participants.

If you’re a tradesman, local shop, restaurant, cafe or any other business catering to a neighbourhood, suburb or district this is a workshop you cannot afford to miss.

Location

Mosman Professional Centre, 3 Brady Street Mosman Map

Date and Time

Thursday, 2 June 2011 from 10.00am to 1.00pm

Price

$300 per participant. The session is limited to 15 people and you’ll need to bring a wireless capable laptop computer. Book now as spots are limited.

Order now


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ABC Nightlife computers: What is cloud computing?

Is cloud computing really just vapour and wind?

Our regular ABC Nightlife radio spot explained cloud computing and had a look at the Sony PlayStation Network security problems.

The tech industry loves nothing more that to baffle us with new terms and one of the biggest terms we’re hearing is cloud computing. Paul and Tony discussed what cloud computing is and what people are using it for.

Aspects covered included;

  • What exactly is cloud computing?
  • Isn’t this just another name for the old mainframe computing systems?
  • What are the benefits of cloud computing?
  • Can you really save huge amounts of money?
  • What are the applications you can use?

A lot of what we discussed is covered in The Connected Business post and we’ve listed some useful cloud computing tools which can be used in the home or office at Ten Business Uses for Cloud Computing.

You can listen to the program’s podcast via the Nightlife website. We promised some of the listeners that we’d get back to them on the following topics;

What is my computer downloading?

Margaret called about her prepaid broadband usage being inconsistent, some days her system downloads more than on other days.

This is probably caused by email downloads and security updates. You shouldn’t avoid the program patches, but you can overcome the email downloading problem by using a webmail service like Hotmail or Gmail.

How do I check my computer is secure?

Two callers, Peter and Katherine, were unsure about how secure their computers are and asked how can they can be sure their systems are safe to use. We’d suggest downloading MalwareBytes and follow our Removing A Trojan instructions however if that’s too complex, it might be worthwhile calling a computer technician.

Viewing new PDF files on an old system

One of the problems with having an older computer is that newer files sometimes can’t be read by them. Rob called in to ask how he can read Adobe PDF files on his older Power PC Apple Mac.

The answer is to use Google Docs and upload the PDF into it as the service can read newer documents. If you’re using Gmail as we discuss above, then files sent with newer attachments will automatically open in the Google reader service.

The next Nightlife program will be on June 16. If you’d like to suggest topics contact us or join the conversation on the night with your on-air questions or comments by phoning 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

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The benefits of mentoring

Challenging your assumptions and leaving your comfort zone helps your business

When I was asked at the beginning of the year if I’d be a mentor on a Young Entrepreneur Program it was a tough decision, I was writing a book and launching a new business myself. As it turned out, it was a good decision as it challenged my assumptions about the economy and industry.

A striking thing about the mentoring program was the diversity of the participants, everything from olive merchants and flower shops to chiropractors and shirtmakers with a fair few web and IT people thrown in.

Notable were that half those being mentored were in the manufacturing and clothing industries, two sectors that I assumed were well and truly dead and buried in an Australian economy focused on seeking easy capital gains underpinned by mining royalties.

My assumption was wrong; many people want to make and sell things despite the odds working against Australian manufacturers. As well as a shirtmaker, the course also included fashion designers and a manufacturer of rope sandals.

The rope sandal man personified one of the most valuable business skills of an entrepreneur; don’t get stuck with assumptions. Business life is a continuing journey and if you get stuck working within the stricture of one set of assumptions, your business will at best stagnate or be hit by the forces of change that are destroying many industries built on what seemed to be rock solid assumptions.

Of course many assumptions are flawed; we can call that “The Unknown Unknown Problem”. When we start a business there are a whole set of unknown factors, some of which we know about and others which are totally unexpected.

Identifying “unknown unknowns” is probably the best benefit an adviser can bring to the mentoring relationship. The more inexperienced we are, the more likely it is that we don’t know what we don’t know. As one of the experienced mentors put it, “the longer I’m in business, the more I realise how much I don’t know.”

Another of my assumptions that was shot down during the program was the internet-savviness of younger entrepreneurs. Many of their assumptions were that net wouldn’t do much for them.

For instance the custom car parts seller believed, incorrectly, that most of his customers aren’t on the web or interested in tools like Facebook when the reality is that niche products are exactly what the web does well.

A similar belief was with the shop fitting design business, that the web is a threat to her business. The reality is the opposite, as innovating retailers need to improve their store designs to improve the physical shopping experience that presents wonderful opportunities for clever designers.

One assumption I’ve never bought into is about the work ethics of the much maligned Generation Y, believing those whining about lazy twenty somethings are just intellectually lazy and grumpy old baby boomers and Gen Xers. This was bourn out by the course as the younger entrepreneurs showed they weren’t shy of putting in the hard work required to succeed in your own business.

Demolishing assumptions about things – like the Internet’s effect on business, the work ethics of Generation-Y and the refusal of Australia’s manufacturing and clothing sectors to die – was the most valuable thing this course delivered for everyone involved.

Assumptions kill our creative thinking, the very asset we need in society like ours that’s going through massive technological change, not to mention an economy that still has many “unknown unknowns”.

Challenge your own assumptions, you might be surprised at the results.

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Glittering distractions

Google and Facebook have joined the online deals battle. Will they dominate this market?

Into an already crowded group buying market, Google Offers and Facebook Deals have launched. It’s tempting to think the power of both will swamp existing players like Groupon and Living Social, but will the search engine and social media giants eventually dominate the group buying market.

There’s a number of barriers to success in the group buying industry; securing a steady supply of compelling offers, generating a community of followers, building a sales team and dealing with customer service issues are just a few. For both Facebook and Google these obstacles are not just a matter of money or scale.

The power of Google

Google’s clear strength lies with its local search functions. Google Places is an excellent fit for group buying services, a point not lost on many of the existing players who use Google Maps and the local business service to support their offers. Merchants can already use the free vouchers feature in Google Places and proactive businesses are already doing this.

Leveraging their existing voucher features into paid group buying services should be one of the easier tasks for Google Offers’ management. Search itself is a powerful tool for merchants offering group buying services, I might not be interested in dog washing or personal training services in my neighborhood, but if I’m online searching for a holiday a group buying offer for discount meals or car hire in Miami may well attract me.

Facebook’s power

Adding social media to group buying is a pretty powerful combination and one that many of the early services leveraged extremely well, so Facebook’s entry into group buying should worry the existing platforms. Being able to segregate deals by geography, demographics, friends and likes is another example of how powerfully Facebook’s advertising can be targeted.

Merchants who use the Facebook service can be pretty confident their ads will hit the right audience rather than being blasted across a mailing list of indifferent subscribers. Coupled with this is the use of Facebook credits. While Facebook aren’t going to make them directly redeemable for gift vouchers or cash at this stage, they still add to a compelling package Facebook can offer both advertisers and customers.

The customer service dilemma

One thing that makes a group buying service successful is the delivery of well timed, compelling deals. This means a hands-on sales and support team. Like most web2.0 businesses, both Facebook and Google aren’t particularly good at face-to-face, or phone-to-phone interactions with customers.

A challenge for both companies will be to attract management talent that can run the sales teams necessary to provide attractive daily deals while dealing with the inevitable consumer service tasks that come with selling direct to the public.

Channel conflict

Facebook and Adwords advertising have been big lead generators for the existing social media platforms and it’s going to be a challenge for both companies in managing the conflicts which will appear between their advertising and group buying platforms.

Those advertising channels are both organisations’ primary source of revenue, so these are going to take priority over other initiatives. Both services’ group buying operations may interfere with their advertising revenue by discouraging or competing with paying advertisers and this will be a major challenge for both Facebook and Google to manage.

Are we over group buying?

That effort to find compelling deals is a problem for all group buying services and we’re seeing the saturation problem with many of the providers as they struggle to find compelling daily deals in all of their markets.

Being late to the markets means both Google and Facebook are going to face exhausted buyers and merchants who been saturated by the dozens of services that have appeared in the last twelve months.How many consumers and businesses are prepared to sign up to YAGS (Yet Another Group buying Service)?

There’s also the issue that group buying might be a passing fad; many of the merchants advertising on these services are service businesses grimly hanging onto failing business models built on the late 20th Century idea of unlimited credit driven consumer demand.

Many of their customers too are cash strapped consumers shopping around for cheaper deals – a discount haircut here, a cut-price meal there – as a way to maintain the lifestyles that are becoming unaffordable in an economy where jobs aren’t as secure, credit isn’t as easy and retirement savings looking uncertain.

As it becomes apparent to both consumers and merchants that most of the group buying services aren’t meeting their needs then the demand for these service is going to drop away.

That’s not to say group buying is a dead model, but it appears the market is overheated with way too many suppliers.

Having deep pockets may well turn out to be why Google and Facebook end up being the sole survivors from the inevitable group buying shakeout, but it doesn’t mean they’ll actually be the best players, or they’ll make any money from it.

Given how late both Facebook and Google are to this market it’s hard not to think they are repeating the mistakes of previous market incumbents in other sectors of ignoring a market until becomes a shiny trinket which every dynamic corporation should have a presence in.

In that respect it’s a bit sad that relatively young corporations like Facebook and Google are overlooking genuine innovation and using their skilled teams to build me-too products rather than finding and building new markets. Hopefully the time taken to build their group buying services won’t distract these companies from their core businesses.

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Trust is the currency of the web

To succeed online, we have to be a trustworthy voice in the noise of the Internet

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” says Peter Steiner’s famous cartoon. All of us who want to be taken seriously on the web have to prove we’re not dogs – or trolls, shills or just those who regurgitate cheap, nasty and unreliable content.

This is particularly true when you want to be a trusted news source; your audience has to be assured an article’s facts are true and the conclusions can be relied upon. That assurance is found in references to source material, the writer’s identity and the basic facts for the reader to decide how accurate the story is.

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald on Voice over IP security illustrates just how even mainstream, established media can get things wrong. This article tells us nothing; we don’t know who the writer is, it doesn’t link to source material and, unforgivably, the story leaves it to the reader to guess what the security problem was.

Because of Fairfax’s silly and inconsistent rules on external links I normally don’t link to Fairfax news articles. A good example of this silliness is illustrated in the above article where the reader has to copy and paste into a web browser the bit.ly reference to MyNetFone’s security advice which the writer has managed to sneak into the copy.

It would be nice to congratulate the writer on this little bit of subterfuge but the article doesn’t have a byline, the credit at the bottom simply says “Livewire” which probably refers to the long defunct IT section of The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald’s sister publication.

That the article also refers to Bleeding Edge, a long running Age technology column by Charles Wright which was discontinued some time in early 2006 and which Charles later tried to morph Bleeding Edge into an independent blog. It’s not good enough that we have to guess who the writer is.

Having a semi-anonymous writer, no byline and no links to supporting information might be all forgivable if the article actually told us what the problem had been with the phone account; did the evil Hong Based criminal mastermind hack the providers’ network, was it a security lapse on the writer’s network or had the user’s password been weak and compromised?

I suspect it’s the latter, but like most things about this article the reader is forced to guess. If the reader doesn’t have some level of computer expertise they’d be totally lost.

For organisations like Fairfax, the publishers of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, the challenge in a society where the traditional newspaper model is rapidly dying is to build their online brand so they can bring advertisers across to it.

The only way they will succeed in this difficult task is to be trusted as a source of reliable information, and right now poor editing coupled with silly policies such as the one on linking out to other trusted sites are damaging readers’ trust in their brand.

Rather than sacking editors, publishers should be preserving them and making their online content more trustworthy than the bulk of the web with its dozens of content farms and millions of inconsistent blogs (like this one).

It’s only by having high standards that today’s media empires will survive the changes the Internet has bought, going cheap and losing the trust and respect of the audience is not an option.

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How safe is your net connection?

It pays to be careful on the web when travelling.

Reports last week that foreign “hackers” had intercepted emails between Australian government officials and miners raised the issue of email security, just how private are our online messages?

When the media uses the word “hacking” it’s always worth taking a step back and finding out the facts. Often a security breach is the result of a simple setup mistake or the information and passwords have walked out the building with a disaffected, lovestruck or just plain dumb employee.

That’s not to say hackers aren’t a risk organisations should to be conscious of, it’s just that often the security risks are more mundane than we would expect. A good example is the simple matter of logging onto a wireless or hotel network.

We assume when we log into our networks that the data is secure though often the user names and passwords are exchanged in “clear text”, which anyone with access to the network can view your passwords with the use of a “packet sniffer” that reads each bundle of information sent across the internet.

Poor security isn’t just a feature of unprepared computer users, every year the world’s leading hackers and security experts gather at that Las Vegas DEFCON conference which since 2001 has featured the Wall of Sheep, an embarrassing display of user information captured off the convention’s network.

This is a surprisingly common security problem made more frequent with the rise of unencrypted wireless networks which can be sniffed by anyone who can be bothered logging on, this is a common problem when you’re connecting onto free wireless networks at the local coffee shop or fast food restaurant.

The answer to all of this is to use Secure Socket Layer encryption, which creates a secure link between your computer, mobile phone or iPad and the servers. For email use, your system administrator can set this up or if you use the popular web mail services it’s a matter of ticking the box.

A similar service works when you’re browsing the web, on visiting a secure site the address should start with https instead of the usual http, the “s” on the former stands for “secure”. A padlock symbol will also appear – in the bottom left hand corner of Firefox or beside the site address at the top of both Chrome and later versions of Internet Explorer.

Before logging onto any secure service, including social media platforms, both the https address and the padlock symbol should appear before you enter passwords or sensitive information like credit card or banking details.

Sadly, the secure websites are not always foolproof as sometimes the site will use a secure connection for your password details then once you’ve logged in, return to an unsecured version. This is how the Filesheep program that was released last year works by sniffing cookies and other stored information from unsecured websites.

It’s surprising how many tourists and backpackers get caught out while doing online banking, checking their email or using social media while on the road.

Without logging into a network securely, then logging out when finished and making sure their details haven’t been saved, it’s quite common to see travellers getting their details stolen.

Assuming you’re safe because the network belongs to a high priced hotel or resort doesn’t always work either; a few years ago passengers on a major cruise liner had their bank accounts compromised when one of the crew was stealing data passing through the ship’s Internet cafe.

You don’t need to be a mining executive in China or Julian Assange to fall prey to the Internet snoops, whole industries and criminal organisations are built around using your data so it’s a good idea to be making sure your information is secure while taking a little bit of caution and using some judgement before logging onto a network.

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Happy birthday, iPad

Last week’s anniversary of the iPad has some useful lessons all disruptive businesses

Last week the iPad’s first birthday quietly passed, lost among the hoopla of the release of the tablet computing leader’s second version. It’s a difficult to think of another product that’s changed an industry so radically and so quickly.

All of Apple’s successes in the last decade have been in areas with many already established players; the iMac entered a crowded PC market, the iPod was just another MP3 player and the iPhone plunged into a sector sated with hundreds of mobile devices.

With each product Apple redefined their segment of the market place and established a secure, and profitable, niche.

The iPad was somewhat different to the other products; with it Apple redefined the entire market and now leads the tablet computing sector. Yesterday industry analysts Gartner put out figures claiming Apple has over two-thirds of today’s market and will still hold half in 2015 despite the rise of the cheaper Google Android devices.

Notable in Gartner’s predictions is the absence of Microsoft Windows based systems and that’s the clue for the iPad’s success as industries like healthcare, retail and logistics had been begging for affordable and usable tablet computers for a decade which the clunky Windows based systems had consistently failed to deliver.

Another factor in Apple’s favour has been the rise of cloud computing, which has freed devices from relying on heavy and power hungry internal hard drives and made them more flexible. One of the most popular business iPad applications has been Evernote, a note taking program which has proved indispensable for business executives.

Most of those executives work for corporations where the IT departments had blocked the introduction of cloud services and Apple products on compatibility and security grounds.

Senior management’s adoption of Apple products and cloud services has broken down that enterprise barrier, which is one of the reasons why competing companies that made their fortunes selling desktop and server products are now desperately trying to find other selling points.

In many ways, the adoption of Apple and the cloud is similar to how personal computers entered business. In the 1980’s computing departments resisted the introduction of PCs for almost the same reasons as IT managers today object to social media, cloud computing and Mac desktops in the office.

The difference is the PC revolution was initially driven by the office accountants, sales teams and secretaries who found desktop applications like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect made their jobs more effective. This time, being different, it’s their managers driving the change.

For smaller businesses and entrepreneurs Apple’s successes open a whole range of opportunities in the applications and services markets to support these devices.

Those applications also help upstarts disrupt existing industries; the lower cost of entry is reducing barriers and speeding up lead times making slower incumbents more vulnerable to change.

Disruption is probably the greatest lesson that Apple and Steve Jobs have taught us with the iPad, you can enter an already crowded market with a product different from the existing players and own a substantial part of it.

All businesses, regardless of the sectors we work in, can learn from the iPad whether it’s how we can use tablets and the cloud in our operations or how we can apply Apple’s disruptive business model to secure a profitable industry niche. It’s a good time to be being open to new ideas.

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