Paul Wallbank, talking about media and comms

Uber and the management dilemma

Is Uber profoundly changing the economy or are even bigger forces at work that will challenge managers?

“Uber-mania reflects a profound turn in the way the global economy is organized,” writes Fortune Magazine’s editor Alan Murray.

That’s a bit of stretch as Uber’s simply an application of the technologies that are changing business and the economy; those technologies are having a more profound effect on the role of managers in the modern workplace.

Along with services like AirBnB and Task Rabbit, are the result of the new breed of cloud, mobile and big data tools that make it easier to deploy new business models which in themselves threaten traditional industries and their executives.

Uber’s success is in finding an industry that in much of the world has been ripe for disruption for decades; in most Western cities cab services have been regulated to protect plate holders’ incomes and often to protect corrupt local cartels.

What Uber’s disruption shows is how those tools can be deployed against cosy incumbents.

Probably the cosiest group of incumbents of all have been corporate managers; over the last thirty years businesses have been downsized, workers have become more productive and many functions have been outsourced or offshored.

Management however has largely remained untouched as the need to supervise business functions has remained.

Now those tools – particularly the smart algorithms that run companies like Google, Facebook and Uber – are coming for managers in many industries. Added to the manager’s dilemma are improved collaboration tools that allow workers and machines to communicate and make decision autonomously without the need for supervision.

Possibly the greatest change in business over the next decade will be the disappearance of the manager as software takes over.

Trapped in our own expertise

We need to think outside the boundaries of our expertise warns investor and entrepreneur Paul Graham

It’s becoming harder to be an expert warns Entrepreneur and investor Paul Graham.

What’s worse, Graham suggests being locked in the way things currently are is the biggest risk for today’s experts as change accelerates across society.

This climate of change makes it tough for investors like Graham to identify the next big things for them to stake money on; when the experts are often wrong it’s hard to figure out whose right in picking what business or technology will be successful in a few years time.

Graham suggests betting on people, particularly the “earnest, energetic, and independent-minded” is a better way of finding the next wave of successful businesses and his views are a useful reminder that ultimately its people who find ways to implement and profit from technology.

The paradox with the changes we’re facing is that the technology is the easy part, it’s the human and social consequences which will surprise us.

Which is why Paul Graham is right about our having to think outside the boundaries of our own expertise.

Yahoo! Directory comes to an early end

Yahoo! closes down its directory service five days early with a warning for today’s internet giants

After twenty years the Yahoo! Directory closed down five days early reports Search Engine Land.

The rise and and fall of Yahoo!’s core product illustrates both the volatility of the web and how the underlying dynamics of the internet has changed; at the time Yahoo! Directory was launched, we were struggling the task of keeping track of all the information being posted online.

Even in those early days it was clear that task was becoming unmanageable and this was the problem Google set out to solve and its success destroyed the directory business along with a whole range of other industries.

Yahoo! Directories’ demise needs to be noted by today’s web and social media giants; just as these technologies are disrupting old industries, new businesses aren’t immune to those changes.

Kodak and the smartphone

The Kodak brand makes a comeback on a smartphone

On reading the Verge’s story that UK tough smartphone company Bullitt would realease a Kodak branded phone in the new year my first though was “Aren’t Kodak out of business?”

As it turns out Kodak are still in business having come out of Chapter 11 administration last year with the company focusing on commercial printing, cinematography and the odd bit of revenue from licensing out their name.

Bullitt on the other hand does that licensing with their main product being a range of tough smartphones marketed under the Caterpillar name which doesn’t seem to be a bad niche given the importance of connectivity to farmers, miners and construction workers.

It’s difficult though to see exactly what the Kodak name is going to bring to smartphones; the brand has long fallen out of favour and is irrelevant to today’s digital photographers, the only way conceivable way the Kodak name could be a selling point is if the devices offer something additional in the way of processing digital photographs or offers some advanced camera features.

From the media release that doesn’t seem to the be the case, however in a marketplace increasingly dominated by cheap Android phones having an additional selling point is useful in locking in higher margins.

Both Bullitt and Kodak though will both be happy for the publicity, in one way it’s good to know the brand is still around.

The tension between creative and business

One of the ongoing tensions in the new media landscape is that between the demands of advertisers and content creators.

This isn’t a new thing as a 1959 interview between Mike Wallace and TV pioneer Rod Stering shows.

Sterling describes how pressures from networks and advertisers created often weird compromises along with a fair degree of self censorship among TV writers and producers.

Little that Sterling describes would surprise today’s online journalists, bloggers and social media influencers who find themselves subject to identical pressures today.

Terry Gilliam’s Christmas Cards from before the Monty Python days

Terry Gilliam’s 1968 Christmas animations are a great piece of pre-Monty Python comedy.

In 1968 Terry Gilliam was some years off his Monty Python fame and eking out a living as a struggling American artist in London.

Midway through the year he was commissioned by the producers of Do Not Adjust Your Set, the British TV comedy show that led to Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to contribute to their 1968 Christmas special.

The results are marvellous as the Open Culture website describes.

We ordinary people should be thankful we don’t have Terry Gilliam in our family.

Building safer roads and cars

While driverless cars are a way off, technology is making the roads safer

Yesterday’s blog post considered how we might design a driverless car without the legacies of today’s vehicles.

In the meantime we have to deal with our own human failings on the road and already tomorrow’s technologies are helping us drive better today.

The day when driverless cars are the norm on our roads may be a generation, possibly further, away but many of the technologies that make autonomous vehicles possible are available today and are appearing in many new models.

Last year the MIT Technology Review looked at BMW’s driverless car project and made the point that the technologies are still some years away from being adopted, the features being incorporated in today’s vehicles are already reducing accidents.

Thanks to autonomous driving, the road ahead seems likely to have fewer traffic accidents and less congestion and pollution. Data published last year by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a U.S. nonprofit funded by the auto industry, suggests that partly autonomous features are already helping to reduce crashes. Its figures, collected from U.S. auto insurers, show that cars with forward collision warning systems, which either warn the driver about an impending crash or apply the brakes automatically, are involved in far fewer crashes than cars without them.

This fits in with the vision described last year by Transport For New South Wales engineer John Wall who described how Australian roads can be made safer through the use of smarter cars, roadside sensors and machine to machine technology.

As the MIT story illustrated, many of the technologies Wall discussed are being incorporated into modern cars with most of the features needed for largely autonomous driving being common by 2020.

Like many of the things we take for granted in low end cars today most of the advanced features will be appearing in top of the line vehicles initially, we can also expect the trucking and logistic industries to be early adopters where there’s quantifiable workplace safety improvements or efficiency gains. Eventually many of these features will be standard in even the cheapest car.

One thing is certain, while the driverless car is some way off we’re going to see the roads become safer as new technologies are incorporated into cars.

Designing the self driving car

Does a driverless car need to look like the vehicles we’re used to?

“It certainly looks like an engineer designed it,” was one of the first reactions to Google’s announcement of its first full prototype self driving car.

Certainly Google’s driverless vehicle looks odd, sort of like an overgrown carnival dodgem or an cartoon character police car.

One of the interesting aspects of the driverless car is that many features into today’s automobiles aren’t necessary if you don’t have a driver – the obvious aspects being that a steering wheel, handbrakes and dashboard displays become unnecessary.

Google have a video from earlier in the year showing the design and unveiling of the prototype. One of the fascinating aspects of the new device is how Google propose it can empower the sight impaired and disabled.

The prototypes are stripped down vehicles with only a top speed of 25mph, with only two seats and little, if any luggage space. As the Oatmeal reports, riding in them is a little boring after the first few minutes.

Looking at the Google vehicles it’s difficult not to think we could design something radically different if we moved away from our own prejudices of what a car should look like.

At the beginning of last century, motor cars looked similar to the horse carts that were the standard transportation of the day; it was only in the 1930s the automobile fully took the form we recognise today.

So it’s worth considering how we can optimise these vehicles to meet our needs and comfort rather than build them around the requirements of Twentieth Century technologies and usage.

Tomorrow’s driverless cars will probably look very different to today’s vehicles and similarly our communities will adapt to a very different way of travelling. We will almost certainly find our cities will be very different when the driverless car becomes the norm.

We need to think how to design them for that future, however far away it may be.

Work in an age of abundance

Our society is changing as we enter an age of abundant information and automation

We aren’t prepared for the changes technology is bringing our society warns Vivek Wadhwa in Our future of abundance—and joblessness.

Vivek makes the important point that in the near future many of the jobs we take for granted today will be replaced by machines, this is similar to the warning from Andrew McAfee that a wave of innovation is going to overrun businesses over the next two years.

That innovation is going to cause massive disruption; as Vivek notes we’re going to see the loss of jobs in occupations as diverse as taxi drivers, farmers and – probably the most underestimated of all affected occupations – managers.

Of course this is not first time we’ve seen massive changes to our economy and over the last century farming has gone from one of the most labour intensive industries to one of the most automated.

The automation that changed farming though created millions of new jobs; today’s retail and food industries employ far more people than agriculture did a century ago and most of those jobs were made possible by the same technologies that reduces the need for farm workers.

Vivek acknowledges this in quoting Ray Kurzweil in that jobs are lost only if we look narrowly at the industries and communities affected.

Automation always eliminates more jobs than it creates if you only look at the circumstances narrowly surrounding the automation. That’s what the Luddites saw in the early nineteenth century in the textile industry in England. The new jobs came from increased prosperity and new industries that were not seen.

What we have to acknowledge though is the transition to a new economy won’t be painless and that millions of people will be dislocated and some communities will cease to exist – just as the bulk of the developed world’s populations moved from rural villages to industrial cities during the Twentieth Century.

The truth is we don’t know how that process is going to evolve; then again, neither did our forebears a hundred years ago.

A hundred years ago we were at the beginning of an age of abundant energy and that changed society beyond recognition in the course of the century, at the end of this century of abundance our society will be very different again.

Apple looks dangerous in the payment wars

Apple Pay is making big gains in the online space, however the battle is far from over.

Apple are making great gains in the online payment space but the battle with Google Android, PayPal and the banks to control the market is far from over.

One of the biggest business struggles this blog has been watching for the last five years is the battle over payment systems as banks, credit card companies, telcos and technologies vendors have jostled for control of what will probably the world’s most lucrative market by the end of the decade.

Apple were late to that fight with their Pay service only being released a few months ago however according to a report by ITG Investment Apple’s service is already ahead of PayPal in terms of usage among new adopters.

While PayPal have an impressive range of technologies, it’s clear they have found themselves wrong footed by Apple and have new companies like Stripe also challenging their market position.

Apple Pay may be getting the headlines, but at present Google Android still dominates the mobile commerce industry according to another research company Criteo.

In their State of Mobile Commerce report, Criteo claims that globally Android is well ahead in smartphone transactions. An interesting aspect of Criteo’s report is how far behind many nations such as Japan, South Korea and Germany the United States is in the take up of mobile commerce.

Criteo’s report shows the battle to control the e-commerce space is far from over, however if Apple Pay can grab a large chunk of the payments market then the company will have a strong hold on key part of global industry. It remains a high stakes and uncertain battle.

BlackBerry’s classic struggle

BlackBerry’s classic struggle – is the new device enough to attract existing users

Earlier this week BlackBerry released its Classic handset – the device the company hopes will rekindle its fortunes in the smartphone market in appealing to the thousands of loyal corporate users still wedded to their old devices.

For BlackBerry the stakes are high with the handset business still being worth over half the company’s earnings last financial year, although hardware revenue dropped 43% to $3.8 billion over that period.

“Handsets are still an important part of our business in terms of revenues,” BlackBerry’s President of Global Enterprise Services, John Sims told Decoding the New Economy in an interview last month.

The main market for the Classic are the corporate users still sitting on their old handsets, “there are tens of millions of BlackBerry users who are still sitting on their old handsets.” Sims said. “The classic, when it comes along is targeted at that market. We know people are waiting.”

“When you get on a plane people start taking out their devices I can guarantee you’ll see BlackBerry Bolds with almost every person in business and first class. They may have another device too – a Samsung or something as well.”

Sims’ belief was that bringing back the shortcuts and keyboard of the older devices would encourage users wedded to their old devices to buy the new smartphone.

The first response to the new BlackBerry Classic hasn’t been enthusiastic with Larry Dignan in the Canadian Globe and Mail describing it as “a curmudgeonly phone” – a worrying description coming from the home team. Dignan goes further in questioning BlackBerry’s hope the Classic will attract the users it needs.

BlackBerry remains convinced that its hardcore enterprise users are crying out for the unique set of features only it can offer. But after using it for several days I don’t think the Classic is old fashioned enough to please traditionalists, and its callbacks to a dead era of smartphone mobility are more than enough to cripple the device for new users.

For BlackBerry, the success or otherwise of its handsets is going to be critical in the company’s transition to a security, software and internet of things business. The early indications are that the company has a struggle ahead.