Category: cloud computing

Is the Paperless Office promise about to come true?

For twenty years abolishing paper has been promised. Is the promise about to be delivered?

For as long as personal computers have been around the paperless office one of the holy grails of the IT industry.

Paper is messy, difficult to file or store and cruel to the environment. So being able to move and save information electronically made sense.

Despite the promises of the last twenty years, the quest for the paperless office seemed lost.

While the networked PC gave us the ability to get rid of paper, its advanced word processing functions and graphic capabilities along with the data explosion of email tempted us into generating more paper.

To compound the problem, over the last thirty years paper manufacturers found cheaper ways to make their product which meant the price of paper dropped dramatically just as we found more ways to use it.

So rather than delivering on the promise of eliminating paper, computers generated more than ever before.

Just as it seemed all was lost in IT’s War On Paper, the tablet computer came along. Coupled with cloud computing services and accessible fast wireless Internet, suddenly it appears we might just be on the verge on delivering on those promises of the last twenty years.

At a suburban football game I saw this first hand as I watched the ground officials electronically filing match information with their league.

“This used to be a pile of paperwork that used to take until Tuesday to be filed and collated” the ground manager told me, “today it’s done within half an hour of the game ending with almost no paper involved.”

For amateur sports clubs, money isn’t so much the problem as time. There simply are never enough volunteers to meet the workload of getting a team on field.

This is true with almost any community based organisation – from volunteer firefighters to community kindergartens organisers struggle with rosters and finding helpers.

In business the same resource constraints exist except we know we can fix these problems by paying a worker to do it. The problem there is few businesses have unlimited funds to employ filing clerks and form fillers to handle the paperwork.

By killing paper in the office, we’re making business and the economy more efficient. We’re about to deliver on that promise.

Bill Gates once wrote that in the short term we overpromise what technology can deliver while in the long term we underestimate its effects.

This is true of the paperless office – now that promise is being delivered the effects on business and government will be profound.

Is your business prepared for these changes?

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Undermining the cloud

Google’s broad claim on users’ data risks the viability of their services

Whenever I do a presentation on cloud computing and social media for business, I focus on one important area – The Terms Of Service.

Google’s relaunch of their Cloud Drive product has reminded us of the risks that hide in these terms, particularly with the one clause;

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.

This is an almost identical clause to that introduced – and quickly dropped by file sharing Dropbox – last year. It’s also pretty well standard in the social media services including Facebook.

Basically it means that while you retain ownership of anything you post to Google Drive, or most of other Google’s services including Google Docs you’re giving the corporation the rights to use the data in any way they choose.

While the offending clause does go onto say this term is “for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones” there is no definition of what operating, promoting or improving their services actually means.

Not that it matters anyway, as one of the later terms says they reserve the right to change any clause at any time they choose. So if Google decided that selling your client spreadsheets to the highest bidder will improve the service for their shareholders, then so be it.

If you’re a photographer then the pictures you upload to Facebook or Google+ now are licensed to these organisations as are all the documents stored on Cloud Drive.

To be fair this is not just a Google issue, Facebook has similar terms as do many others. Surprisingly just as many premium, paid for services have these conditions as free ones.

Because these Terms Of Service are about establishing a power relationship, there’s usually an over-reach by large companies with these terms.

While an over-reach is understandable, its not healthy where the customer has to trust that the big corporation will do the right thing.

Right now, if you’re using a cloud or social media service for important business information you may want to check that service doesn’t have terms that grant them a license to your intellectual property.

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Locking in the mobile market

Where are the next challenges for a phone industry that’s re-invented itself?

Mobile phone carrier Vodafone yesterday announced its purchase of Cable and Wireless, the company that rolled out the telegraph and phone networks that connected Britain’s empire.

Vodafone’s purchase is one of the final phases of the telco industry’s long term restructure where customers – both home and business users – have switched from land lines to mobile devices.

It’s long been acknowledged the profit in this market lies in devices and data usage which is why Cable and Wireless steadily declined over the past quarter century.

While there’s good money to be made in running undersea cables, which is what C & W did, the big profit is in delivering the data over the “last mile” to the customer.

For most customers, that last mile is the radius around a cellphone base station.

In Australia, this is best illustrated by Telstra’s undisguised glee at being able to offload their legacy copper network and backbone services to the government owned National Broadband Network allowing the former land line monopoly to focus on the mobile, data customer.

That data aspect is important too, one of the big changes in telecommunications over the last 25 years has been the rise of data.

A quarter century ago, voice communications were the main traffic of these networks. For companies like Cable and Wireless, data was a profitable sideline with services like Telex and ISDN being lucrative business niches.

Those rivers of gold distracted incumbent telcos in the early years of the public Internet as they tried to protect those expensive data plans and discouraged customers from using the net.

Over time, a new breed of Internet Service Providers rose who could supply those data services customers wanted.

Ironically, the same thing has happened with mobile phone manufacturers and the rise of the smartphone. Unlike the incumbent telcos, they haven’t adapted.

The incumbents phone manufacturers like Nokia and Motorola missed the rise of data communications and the mobile web as the iPhone and Android devices delivered the portable utility that “dumb phones” couldn’t deliver.

For Nokia, that miss appears fatal with the company rapidly running out of cash as their smartphone devices fail in the marketplace and margins collapse in the sectors they still dominate.

Research In Motion – the manufacturers of the Blackberry phone – are in the same trap. While their devices were data orientated they were more akin to corporate “feature phones” where they did one or two things well but couldn’t deliver the full features mobile phone users increasingly wanted.

The rise of the iPhone threatened Blackberry’s market and the arrival of the iPad with applications like Evernote killed most of the product’s demand.

Blackberry and Nokia’s decline while companies like Telstra and Vodafone survive – not to mention massive profits of companies like Mexico’s Telefonica – illustrate the value of government licenses to telcos and the breathing space it gives the management of these licensees.

We shouldn’t underestimate though the risks to all these businesses if they don’t adapt.

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Risks and opportunities in crowdsourcing

There are real benefits and dangers for business in the globally connected marketplace

Crowdsourcing and offshoring are changing bringing to small business the same changes we’ve seen in manufacturing and low level office jobs over the last forty years.

Those trends are going to affect local businesses – particularly the home based service providers – in a serious way as the local web designer and bookkeeper find themselves undercut by freelancers in countries where an Australian day rate is a month’s pay.

With those thoughts in mind I went along to a round table discussion with crowdsourcing advocate Ross Dawson, Freelancer CEO Matt Barrie and Design Crowd founder Alec Lynch to hear them discuss some of the issues around the concept ahead of their half day workshops in Sydney later this months.

Having read Ross’ recent book, Getting Results From Crowds, many of the concepts and arguments are familiar but its worthwhile considering how the trend of a globalised workforce is changing.

The benefits of crowdsourcing services

Crowdsourcing services like Design Crowd and Freelancer have benefits traditional outsourcing services don’t have.

Alec Lynch describes these as reduced expense, speed and risk. A broad range of cheap, accessible suppliers mean businesses aren’t locked into costly contracts with the attendant risks while they can bring projects to fruition in days.

Until recently, globalisation only bought benefits for major corporations with manufacturers contracting work out to China, back office functions to India and software development to Eastern Europe.

The rise of web based services where smaller, one off projects could be paid for by credit card has bought global outsourcing into the small and medium sized business markets.

Now local businesses are affected by business practices that, until recently, were the concern of those working for large organisations.

This is bad news for local service businesses; the suburban web designer or bookkeeper is now finding themselves competing with individuals who, as Matt Barrie points out, have a very good weeks’ income for the equivalent of a day’s pay in Australia.

Basically the same forces that drove most low value manufacturing offshore are now driving services and white collar jobs the same way.

Responding to the threat

There are major downsides for clients using these project based outsourcing services; for instance designing a logo is only part of a much bigger branding exercise which in turn has to be considered against the orgainisation’s longer term objectives.

Often, most of us don’t know what we don’t know and that’s the real reason why we hire an expert to explain why a logo should look a certain way, an expense should be allocated to one specific cost centre and not another or why we should one software package over another.

When we outsource our services, particularly to a low cost provider, we lose that expert insight and end up with someone just carrying out a task; it is up to us to supervise something we probably don’t understand ourselves.

Part of that supervisory role is project management, in the design field managing creatives can be like herding cats. This is why experienced project managers are worth their weight in gold.

Like many essential skills, project management is one of those which most of us don’t have and is chronically undervalued but when a business is outsourcing to a freelancer in Estonia or Eritrea then this service is essential.

Providing those skilled supervisor and management roles is where the opportunities lie in a crowdsourced market place.

In many ways, we’re seeing the end result of the post-industrial society. Just as we offshored the manufacturing industries through the 1970s and 80s then the low skilled office work in the 1990s and 2000s, we’re now outsourcing local services to low cost countries.

Whether ultimately this is a good thing or not is a big question but for local businesses, the trend is clear and much of the basic work is going offshore. Those who choose to whinge rather than adapt will be left behind.

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Why VCs hate Amazon

How cloud computing is changing investment and entire industries

“Venture capital investors hate us” said Dr Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com at the April Sydney FED, “once you needed five million dollars to launch a new technology business, today you need $50,000 and a big box of ramen.”

Dr Vogels was talking about the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform that underpins many of the cloud computing and social media sites which are redefining how we use computers and the web.

What’s really interesting with the doctor’s comment is it’s only part of the story; for businesses outside the tech sectors –say retailers or service companies – they get cheap or even free access to the cloud computing services running on AWS or its cloud competitors like Windows Azure.

For those businesses, it’s possible to start an idea for nothing but the founder’s time; rather than putting fliers up at the local bus stop or shopping mall an entrepreneur starting an online store or neighbourhood computer repair business now can create a website and all the local search profiles without spending a cent.

Being able to start up a business with little, if any, capital means we’re seeing a new breed of innovators and entrepreneurs entering markets.

At the corporate level, or in the $50 million dollar VC investment field, the opportunities for exploring Big Data without buying big supercomputers is another benefit of the cloud computing services.

Services like ClimateCorp which insures farmers against extreme weather couldn’t have existed a few years ago as the processing power to analyse historical rain and drought data was only available to those with insanely expensive super computers.

Today, the combined power of millions of low powered cheap computers – the definition of cloud computing – delivers the processing grunt of a supercomputer at a fraction of the cost.

Access to cheap computing power means innovations can be bought to market quickly and at a fraction of the cost that was normal a decade ago.

We’re in early days with what the effects of super cheap computing means to most industries, but it is changing industries as diverse as agriculture, banking, logistics and retail quickly.

Cloud computing is giving big business the tools to understand their markets better and small business the ability to grab customers from bigger competitors who are too slow or don’t want to face what their clients really think.

These are the forces that are changing the way business is being done; if you’re in business it’s time to start paying attention.

In reality, Dr Vogels is pulling our legs – the smart VCs aren’t hating Amazon, they are rubbing their hands at the profits that are going to be made in disrupting cosy industries.

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Who will be the future Betamaxes?

A modern version of the video tape standard wars is being fought on our phones

This morning Paypal announced its PayPal Here service, a gizmo that turns a smartphone into a credit card reader.

On reading PayPal’s media release in the pre-dawn, pre-coffee light I found myself grumpily muttering “which platforms?” as the announcement kept mentioning “smartphones” without saying whether it was for iPhone, Android or other devices.

It turns out to be both Google Android and Apple iOS. It adds an interesting twist to the Point Of Sale market we’ve looked at recently.

The omission of platforms like Windows Phone raises the question of which platforms are going to go the way of Betamax?

Sony’s Betamax and JVC’s VHS systems were the dominant competitors in the video tape market in the early 1980s. They were totally incompatible with each other and users had to make a choice if they wanted to join one camp or the other when they went to buy a video recorder.

On many measures Betamax was the better product but ultimately failed because VHS offered longer program times and Panasonic’s licensing out of their technology meant there were more cheaper models on the market.

A few days ago Bloomberg Businessweek listed the Betamax device as one of the “technology’s failed promises”

With a superficial comparison, Apple would seem to the Betamax while Google and possibly Microsoft are the VHS’s given their diverse range of manufacturers their systems run on and Apple’s refusal to license out iOS, which was one of the reasons for Sony’s failure.

But it isn’t that simple.

In the smartphone wars, it’s difficult to compare them to VCRs as the video tape companies never controlled content and advertising the way smartphone systems do – although Sony did buy Columbia Studios at the peak of the Japanese economic miracle in 1987.

This control of content is what makes the stakes so high in the smartphone and tablet operating systems war. A developer or business that dedicates their resources to one platform could find themselves stranded if that platform fails or changes their terms of services to the developer’s detriment.

Another assumption is there is only room for one or two smartphone systems; it could turn out the market is quite happy with two, three or a dozen different systems and incompatibilities can be overcome with standards like HTML5.

In a funny way, it could turn out to be Android becomes the Smartphone Betamax due to having too diverse a range of manufacturers.

One of the first questions that jumps out when someone announces a new Android app is “which version?” The range of Android versions on the market is confusing customers and not every app will run on each version.

More importantly for financial apps like PayPal Here and Google Wallet, smartphone updates include critical security patches so many of the older phones that miss out on updates pose a risk to the users.

In the financial world confidence is everything and if customers aren’t confident their money is safe or will be promptly refunded in the event of fraud they won’t use the service.

Whether this uncertainty will eventually deal Google out of the game or present an opportunity for Microsoft and other companies is going to be one of the big questions of the mobile payments market.

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Reinventing point of sale

Cloud and mobile devices are changing retail systems.

One of the banes of running a business computer support organisation were cash registers.

Retail Point Of Sale (POS) systems were almost always arcane, clunky and difficult to maintain, at PC Rescue we dreaded a call from a shop, pub or hairdresser having problems with their registers.

Frequently this was by design, the POS system supplier would try to lock in their business customers into expensive support contracts.

By making it difficult for anybody without intimate knowledge of the product to actually do anything with it, the retailer was stuck having to hire overpriced custom support.

To make things worse, many of the POS systems ran on outdated hardware which offered the suppliers another opportunity to hit their customers (victims?) with high support costs.

Since the iPad was released, I’ve been waiting for an application using cloud services for a back end that challenges the existing Point of Sale systems and today US online payments system Square has announced their Square Register app.

While only available in the US, Square has been setting the pace for physical payment systems like taxi fares and coffees using online technologies so it’s hardly surprising they are leading this push.

The iPad as a cash register is a logical step for the device and tied in with a robust Point Of Sales platform behind a simple to use app, it will probably make a huge dent in the point of sale market.

It may be the Square service won’t be the point of sale leader – Square is more a payments service than retail platform – which means this field is way open for some savvy operators.

One of the concerns with the Square service, and any iPad based application, is the spectre of vendor lock-in. Being fixed on the iOS platform means there is a risk of being held hostage to Apple’s business plans, also being locked into Square’s payment systems may not be the best choice for many merchants.

The payments and point of sale industry is another that’s being radically changed by mobile devices coupled with cloud computing. It’s not a time for incumbents to rest on their laurels.

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