Spreading the good news – Canva’s Guy Kawasaki

The tools for building new businesses have never been more accessible says Canva’s Chief Evangelist Guy Kawasaki

“My job is to spread good news,” says Guy Kawasaki of his role as Canva’s Chief Evangelist.

Kawasaki was speaking to Decoding the New Economy about his role in popularising the online design tool which he sees as democratising force in the same way that Apple was to computers and Google to search.

Democratisation is a theme consistently raised by startups and businesses disrupting existing industries and Kawasaki continues this theme.

“The world is becoming a meritocracy; it’s not about your pedigree, it’s about your competence,” states Kawasaki.

Falling barriers to entry

What excites Kawasaki about the present business climate are the falling barriers to starting a venture. “Things are getting cheaper and cheaper, in technology you had to buy a room full of servers, have IT staff in multiple cities. Today you call Amazon or Rackspace and host it in the sky.”

“Before you had to buy advertising for a concert, now if you’re adept at using social media – with Google Plus, Facebook,Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram – you have a marketing platform that fast, ubiquitous and cheap.”

“What excites me is there are going to be more technologies, more products and more services because the barriers are so low.”

Creating a valued and viable product

For those businesses starting into this new environment, Kawasaki believes the most important thing a startup should focus on is getting a prototype to market; “at that point you will know you’re truly onto something.”

“If you build a prototype that works you may never have to write a business plan,” says Kawasaki. “You’d never have to make a Powerpoint, you may never have to raise money as you could probably bootstrap.”

Kawasaki view is the MVP – Minimum Viable Product – model of lean product development should have another two ‘V’s added for ‘Valuable’ and “Validated’.

“You can create a product that’s viable, ie you could make money, but is it valuable in that it changes the world?”

“Is your first product going to validate your vision? If it’s not then why are doing it?”

The story Kawasaki tells is the tools to deliver valued and viable products are more accessible than ever before; that’s good news for entrepreneurs and consumers but bad for stodgy incumbents.

Privacy and mutual respect

Privacy and mutual respect – the assumption underlying the Respect Network and online trust

Tonight was the Australian launch of the Respect Network in Sydney which followed similar events in London and San Francisco. I’ll be writing more on this over the next few days.

One of the key questions when considering the Respect Network is how much the average internet user values privacy; the business model of the service relies upon people being prepared to pay to preserve their privacy.

Another question is how many lies people will tell to get free or cheap stuff – respect is a two way thing.

Startups as a dream job

Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins describes the design service’s journey

“It’s my absolute dream job” says Melanie Perkins of her role as CEO and co-founder of online design app Canva in the latest Decoding the New Economy video.

Since being set up ten months ago, Canva has grown to over a half a million people using the tool to create graphics for applications such as books, marketing banners and website logos.

The idea for Canva came out of the difficulties Melanie found in using design software while lecturing at university and it’s growth has been as a result of the idea catching the imagination of investors like Lars Rasmussen, one of the driving forces behind Google Maps, and Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s original Mac evangelist.

“We’ve got some great things coming in the next few months,” says Perkins. “So stay tuned.

Staying healthy with Big Data

Doctors are starting to match shopping patterns to health problems

US medical centre chain Carolinas HealthCare has started mining patients’ credit card data to predict health outcomes reports Bloomberg Businessweek.

The idea is that by looking at credit information and purchasing records, doctors can anticipate what ailments their patients will present with.

Carolinas Healthcare’s matching of spending patterns to healthy is an obvious application of Big Data which illustrates some of the benefits that mining information can deliver for individuals and the community.

Should the project overcome patients’ valid privacy concerns, this is the sort of application that is going to be increasingly common as organisations figure out how to apply software to their mountains of information.

Jumping the queue

Reservation Hop illustrates all that is wrong with the current startup culture

Reservation Hop is a good example of many of the current breed of parasitic startups that want to create a new class of middleman.

The hospitality industry is tough work and something guaranteed to irritate restauranteurs are reservations that don’t show up.

One startup that seems almost certain to attract the ire of the restaurant industry is Reservation Hop – “We make reservations at the hottest restaurants in advance so you don’t have to.”

Reservation Hop makes table reservations at popular restaurants and then sells them through their website.

We book up restaurant reservations in advance. We only book prime-time restaurant reservations at the hottest local establishments, and we mostly list high-demand restaurants that are booked up on other platforms.

This is probably one of the worst examples of the middleman culture that dominates much of the current startup thinking.

Almost certainly there’s a market need for proxy queue jumpers – although one wonders how profitable it is when the transaction fees are under $10 – but this service will deeply irritate restaurant owners and diners who are crowded out by these ‘parasite’ services.

In many ways, Reservation Hop illustrates the problems with this phase of our current startup mania; the rise opportunistic businesses that are more akin to parasites than services that add value.

The Reservation Hop website assures patrons that there’s a 99% chance their booking will be honored by the restaurant on the night, we can expect establishments to start messing with that statistic as they wise up to the business.

Many in the startup sector speak about how new technology improves the world, services like Reservation hop illustrate that not every idea is a step forward.

Fighting a loss making business

Uber follows the Amazon tactic of hurting the market with its deep pockets

Having deep pockets is a great help in business as the online cab war in San Francisco shows.

As competition heats up on the streets of San Francisco, Uber is trying to put Lyft out of business by offering fares below what they pay drivers.

This has been the long term tactic of Amazon; raise a lot of money and then run your main line of business at a loss.

Amazon have shown you can do this for a long time if investors stay patient. Fighting it is difficult if you don’t have deep pockets yourself.

In the long term though you can’t see this being good for customers, although in the meantime San Franciscans can enjoy cheap taxis.

Self publishing and the cloud

The book publishing industry is being disrupted by cloud services

Today design site Canva hosted a media breakfast with their founders and chief evangelist, Guy Kawasaki.

One of industries Canva cite in their case studies is designing book covers as part of the publishing industry which Kawasaki points is an area where incumbent giants are falling down badly.

In Kawasaki’s view services like Canva, Amazon and the various publishing tools have made the major publishing houses redundant.

Publishers were once necessary to get a book to market; today there’s little a moderately well funded individual can’t do.

For publishers, it means they have to lift their game – automate their processes, harness their corporate knowledge and help good products get to market.

Instead most are riding a dying business model as cloud based services make it easy and simple to get a project to market.

Times get tougher for journalists and the middle class

Business and sports reporting is increasingly being done by computers, many other middle class jobs are going the same way.

Journalists have had a tough time over the last twenty years and it’s about to get tougher.

Last July The Associated Press announced they will automate most of their business reporting. AP’s Business News Managing Editor, Lou Ferrara explained in a company blog how the service will pull information out of company announcements and format them into standard news reports.

instead of providing 300 stories manually, we can provide up to 4,400 automatically for companies throughout the United States each quarter

This isn’t the first time robots have replaced journalists, three years ago National Public Radio reported how algorighms were replacing sports reporters.

Ferrara admits AP has already automated much of its sports reporting;

Interestingly, we already have been automating a good chunk of AP’s sports agate report for several years. Data comes from STATS, the sports statistics company, and is automated and formatted into our systems for distribution. A majority of our agate is produced this way.

Reporting sports or financial results makes sense for computer programs; the reciting of facts within a flowing narrative is something basic – Manchester United led Arsenal 2-0  at half time, Exxon Mobil stock was up twenty cents in morning trading and the Japanese Yen was down three points at this afternoon’s close don’t take a super computer to write.

Cynics would say rewriting press releases, something many journalists are accused of doing, could be better done by a machine and increasingly this is exactly what happens.

The automation of commodity reporting isn’t just a threat to journeyman journalists though; any job, trade or profession that is based on regurgitating information already stored on a database can be processed the same way.

For lawyers, accountants and armies of form processing public servants the computers are already threatening jobs – like journalists things are about to get much worse in those fields.

It could well be that it’s managers who are the most vulnerable of all; when computers can monitor the workplace and prepare executive reports then there’s little reason for many middle management positions.

This is part of the reason why the middle classes are in trouble and the political forces this unleashes shouldn’t be underestimated.

Apple builds the iHome

Apple makes its stake for the smarthome while Canada builds the smart fridge

On the seventh anniversary the release of the iPhone, Apple makes it clear they see smarthome as the next opportunity.

The latest Apple ad showcases the iPhone at the centre of the connected home controlling baby monitors, GPS enabled pet collars and smart lights. The massage is Apple’s iHome brings families together.

While Apple is showing its cuddly side, those vendors who think an iHome is going to a great opportunity may well find they’re working with a ruthless competitor as reports claim Apple is about to launch its own range of smart home devices.

Meanwhile in Canada, they have better things to do with smart kitchen appliances…..

Facebook’s experiment with the limits of public trust

We may soon find out the limits of trust in social media

The revelation that a Facebook research team lead by Alan Kramer experimented with users’ emotional states is a disturbing story on many levels, the immediate consequence is a further erosion in the public trust of social media services.

Facebook, like many social media services, has received a lot of criticism in recent times as the company tries to make enough money to justify its $160 billion valuation.

Most of that criticism has been around the re-arranging of users’ feeds with Facebook’s algorithm deciding what information should be displayed based upon a user’s history with a liberal sprinkling of advertising thrown in.

The Kramer research though takes Facebook’s manipulation of users’ information to another level, along with raising a range of ethical issues.

One of the most concerning issues is the claim that the experiment’s subjects had given informed consent by agreeing to Facebook’s Terms of Service. This is dangerous ground.

The dangerous ground, apart from the gross overreach of customer terms of service this behaviour risks losing the market’s trust; once Facebook or other social media and cloud computing services are viewed as untrustworthy, they are doomed.

For Facebook it might be that the abuse of user trust is the biggest social experiment of all: How far can the company push the public?

We may soon find out.

Demoting the newspaper

Newsagents are adapting to a digital world which is seeing every industry being disrupted

You know a product has problems when retailers start start moving it out of key retail positions. When the product was the retailers’ core business, you know the entire industry is in serious trouble.

Mark Fletcher describes in the Newsagency Blog how he’s moved his city’s number two selling paper off the main level of his newspaper display.

“Sales are not paying for the space,” Mark says bluntly.

Newsagents relegating newspaper fits nicely into Ross Dawson’s Newspaper Extinction Timeline, in the case of Mark Fletcher’s newsagency Dawson sees the Australian newspaper industry vanishing by 2022.

For newsagents the signals have been clear for some time that they have to adapt to a society where paper based products – newspapers, stationery and greeting cards – aren’t in demand.

The process of adapting isn’t easy or smooth – many experiments will fail and even the smartest business people will make expensive mistakes. That’s the nature of evolution.

Newsagents though are just one example of changing marketplaces, there’s few industries that aren’t being disrupted by the technology and economic changes of our times. All of us are going to have to adapt to a rapidly changing world.