cities | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

You’re going to need a bigger app

Focusing on digital disruption while ignoring bigger social, economic and climatic changes is a folly for business and government leaders

“It has to be disruptive technology,” bleated the consulting firm facilitator at the Future Transport Summit in Sydney earlier this week.

The hapless, but well paid, consultant — a depressingly frequent feature of Australia’s current ‘ideas boom’ — was protesting when one of the participants at his ‘ideation session’ had raised topics such as integrated timetables and changing commuting habits.

Mr Consultant’s running orders for his ‘ideation session’ were to focus on ‘digital disruption’ and his employer;s cluelessness illustrates a danger for business leaders and policy makers.

Selling the snake oil

Digital disruption is real however it’s not just the only factor facing governments and industries. Demographics, economics, politics and climate change will have greater influences on business and society.

Uber, the favourite lovechild of those spruiking digital disruption snake oil, is a very good case in point. While the service certainly has disrupted the taxi and motor vehicle industries, these sectors were facing major challenges as governments enacted policies to reduce carbon emissions, voters became tired of cartel like taxi companies and the Western world’s young and wealthy moved back to the cities and away from owning motor vehicles.

If anything, Uber was the result of GenY entrepreneurs like Travis Kalanick finding existing services didn’t meet their needs rather than the result of technology desperately looking for a problem to solve finding a niche.

Complex changes

While the smartphone was critical in Uber’s success in disrupting the global taxi industry, technology was only one facet of a much more complex set of changes.

The motor industry is a good example of the complexity of change. A hundred years ago it was clear the transport industry was about to be disrupted by the automobile, it was by no means obvious access to affordable personal transport would allow urban sprawl and the suburbanisation of western society.

Coupled with the motor car and truck, the availabilty of mains electricity meant refrigeration also became accessible which lead to the rise of supermarkets after World War II. This disrupted the local corner store in ways shopkeepers could never have foreseen in the interwar years.

Shifting demographics

Now, the opposite is happening as the young and affluent reject long commuting times from distant suburbs and city densities start increasing.

The social and economic factors that drove Uber are affecting public transport usage patterns and it’s no coincidence that the cities where ride sharing services have most successful, such as Sydney, also have underfunded public transport systems that are struggling to meet their population’s demands.

Which brings us back to the foolishness of discussing the future of transport only in relation to technology. Smartphones, apps, big data and the internet of things will all be critical parts of future transportation but the social and economic factors will shape how people use the networks.

Focusing on technology while ignoring the other big influences is a folly that will cost businesses and government dearly. Although one suspects the management consultancies will do well regardless of how well change is managed.

Breaking the ennui – thoughts on new projects

Five projects to get minds working again.

To snap myself out of the current ennui that has swamped me, I’ve a few ideas for a crowdfunded project. I’m interested in what people think of them, the first two are Australian focused while the others are more international.

All five of them revolve around the changing global economy and its effects upon societies, communities and individuals.

These are the ideas and I’d be delighted to hear some thoughts on them.

True Australian stories

Australia is in a time of transition. The upcoming Federal election may well determine the nation’s development over the next half century.

The idea of this project is to get out into the regions and suburbs which aren’t being covered – if not outright ignored – by the mainstream media and talk to the communities, people and businesses about how their worlds are changing and what they are doing to deal with it.

Re-inventing Australia

After a quarter century of continuous growth Australia has to make decisions on where its economy goes next. Successive governments have identified resources, agriculture, tourism, finance and education as the ‘five pillars’ of the economy.

This project talks to the people trying to make Australia’s five pillars work along with looking at those trying to build alternatives.

The future workforce

How does the global future workforce look? Will we be all contractors for Uber or Upwork or are there other models developing around the world.

What does the next phase of the industrial revolution look like for workers in both the developed and emerging economies? This idea is inspired Sebastião Salgado’s work.

The Second City project

Every major city has a less prosperous neighbour – Sydney and Newcastle, Melbourne and Geelong, London and Birmingham, Beijing and Qingdao, San Francisco and Oakland are examples.

How are those second cities faring in a global economy that’s increasing the wealth of the rich? What are the leaders of those communities doing to reposition themselves.

The next Silicon Valleys

While we’re focused on today’s global centres like California’s Bay Area, London and Shanghai there are other emerging industrial centres that will be the next generation’s Silicon Valleys. Who are they and what do they look like?

I’d be delighted to hear readers’ thoughts on these projects and any other ideas for similar ventures.

Barcelona fears becoming Venice

Barcelona’s new mayor fears the city risks becoming like Venice. Is she right?

“We don’t want to become like Venice,” is the cry from Barcelona’s new government.

Comparing Venice to Barcelona is problematic given the Spanish city has a population of 1.6 million compared to the Italian tourist centre’s 60,000. The tourist industry has long overwhelmed Venice.

A more relevant discussion is how does a city like Barcelona avoid a decline like Venice, in my interview with the deputy mayor Antoni Vives in 2013 he described his aim to see the city develop new industries and build on its existing strengths.

The new mayor’s concerns about soaring property costs displacing residents are valid –and shared with every major city in the world.

For Barcelona though the real challenge is to stay relevant in a changing global economy. For the moment the Spanish city has a long way to go, and five hundred years, before its leaders can worry about becoming the new Venice.

Do successful cities need to be walkable?

Do smaller cities have the advantage with the new economy?

can Wellington become a global tech hub? raised an interesting question, how big does a city need to be in order to be successful in the new economy?

Does a compact city with a few hundred thousand people have an advantage over several million inhabitants sprawling across a huge metropolis?

The romantic view is the smaller cities should prevail but history, particularly given the wide sprawl of Silicon Valley, indicates the opposite.

While Silicon Valley, and most of the other Twentieth Century industrial hubs like Detroit, were sprawling conurbations it may be this era’s centres are more compact with towns being walkable.

Certainly this is what we’re seeing with the tech industry’s shift into San Francisco as workers find they’d rather walk or cycle to work than spend hours on freeways each day.

So it may be the newer breed of businesses and industries that don’t need massive infrastructure also don’t need to sprawl.

If that turns out to be true then cities like Wellington could do well.

Seizing the agricultural technology opportunity

Can a regional city like Fresno become a centre of agricultural technology?

Does the real opportunity for tech entrepreneurs lie in the agriculture sector? An article by James Fallows looking at Fresno’s startup community for the Atlantic Magazine suggests that might be the case.

Fresno, in California’s agricultural Central Valley, doesn’t have the glamor of the global startup centres but offers a focus on neglected sectors as Fallows quotes Jake Soberal of Bitwise Industries.

“My guess is that 5 to 10 percent of the tech need of the farming industry is now being met,” Fallows quotes Soberal as saying. “You could build a technology industry in Fresno based on that alone, not to mention the worldwide need in agriculture.”

While there isn’t a great need for another coffee app, pizza delivery service or online store, there are far more opportunities in other sectors to address unmet needs.

This is probably where the opportunity lies for cities like Fresno that are trying to create their own mini Silicon Valley – build a technology sector to address the needs of your existing industrial base.

In agriculture there’s a plethora of Internet of Things, Big Data, analytics and other technological applications that addresses issues in the industry. Farming is not the only sector which presents these opportunities.

Fresno’s ambitions aren’t unique but as Fallows points out this is not a zero sum game and there’s no reason why dozens of cities shouldn’t be able to build their own niches with new technologies.

Picture of Fresno from David Jordan via WikiPedia

Adapting to a new economy

A San Francisco taxi company reinvents itself for the app economy.

Taxis have gotten their ass kicked” says Hansu Kim, owner of San Francisco’s oldest taxi company.

Kim’s company, DeSoto, is changing the name it has held since the 1930s to Flywheel in an agreement with the taxi hailing app of the same name. The San Francisco Chronical describes how DeSoto and the city’s other taxi companies are finding times tough now Uber and other services have moved into what was a safe, regulated business.

DeSoto’s move is a sign of the times as older business models evolve; moving to an app based hailing service improves the experience for everybody in the cab industry and radically changes the economics of getting a ride across town.

The main reason for Uber’s success is being able to identify both drivers and passengers which improved confidence in the system. In turn, this changes riders expectations and taxi’s fare structures.

For companies competing with Flywheel the question will be do they participate in this service or do they create their own app. For the industry in general it makes sense to share the infrastructure but for uses it may well be in their interest to have competing apps with different levels of service.

As the levels of car ownership continue to fall, how taxi hailing and car hire apps evolve will drive the development of our cities through this century. DeSoto and Flywheel’s experiment is the start of many as older businesses adapt to a changing economy.

Links of the day – Terrorism, deflation and London’s rebirth

The terrorist murders in Paris lead today’s links of the day.

Today’s links kick off with the worldwide reaction to the terrorist atrocity in Paris. The other links, which pale in contrast, include why we should really fear deflation, the decline and rise of China and how to understand a food critic.

Cartoonists unite over French terrorist murders

After the terrorist atrocity that saw twelve people murdered in an attack on a magazine office in Paris, cartoonists around the world have shown their reaction.

Why Europeans should fear deflation

Yesterday the main economic news was the Eurozone had re-entered a deflationary period. Irish economist David McWilliams explains why deflation scares governments and banks with some lessons from the Great Depression.

The decline and rise of London

In 1939 London reached its peak population of 8.3 million then saw declines for the next fifty years as war, government policies and economic restructuring saw the city’s attractions wane.

Sometime this week London will pass its 1939 peak and Citymetric magazine looks at the reasons for the decline and why the recovery began.

China’s incredible disappearing former leader

In November 2012 Chinese leader Hu Jintao stepped down from his post. Since then he’s effectively disappeared from public view Foreign Policy magazine reports.

At the same time many of his allies and supporters have been purged from their party positions as part of a major change in direction for the Chinese government. What this means for the parties’ cronies who’ve been propping up property prices across the Pacific and Macau’s lucrative casino business remains to be seen.

What restaurants should know about food critics

First impressions matter warns former restaurant critic for the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, Ruth Reichl, in a terrific interview with Open For Business.

Reichl’s advice is good for pretty well any business; make sure your first impressions are good, don’t rip off your customers or be too pushy with upselling and train your staff. It’s an entertaining insight into a field dominated by egos that’s largely becoming extinct.

Tony Hsieh’s field of dreams

Can Tony Hsieh build Las Vegas into a tech hub?

Stepping off the bus at Las Vegas’ Fairmont Street in the early morning is a reminder of how seedy nightlife areas look in the harsh daylight.

The reason for being in Downtown Las Vegas on a warm Monday morning was to tour Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project, a scheme to revitalise the rundown and neglected town centre of the gambling and convention mecca.

One of the striking things about Las Vegas is how much of it pretends to be somewhere else; The Luxor, New York, New York, The Ballagio. It’s almost as if the fantasy land of the American Dream is a little embarrassed about where it is.

Not that the tourists are embarrassed with millions pouring in every year to enjoy the gambling, entertainment and the pasteurized sin on offer along Las Vegas’ glitzy strip of mega casinos.

Five miles north the mega casinos and bright lights, the luck runs out. The best thing locals have to say about Las Vegas’ downtown district is “it is better than it was.”

One of the reasons it’s better is because of one man — Tony Hsieh, the founder of online shoe retailer Zappos. Hsieh moved his business to Las Vegas because, in the entrepreneur’s view, San Francisco was ‘hostile towards company service.’

The Downtown Project is the result of a promised $350 million investment by Hsieh to invigorate the city centre of Las Vegas.

However the project has hit problems with Hseih recently stepping down from his position, layoffs being announced and community programs being cut back, leading critics to claim the project is in jeopardy.

So a tour of the project during a recent visit to Las Vegas was well timed to judge how things are going.

The tour starts with the small group meeting at The Window, an arts and meeting space on the ground floor of the Ogden residential tower which closed down in September as part of the scheme’s recent cutbacks.

Gathering in the room with our tour leader Maggie is a somewhat spooky experience with all The Window’s furniture, books and exhibits intact as on the day they were left at the end of the space’s six month lifespan.

Leaving the room’s contents intact and unpacked doesn’t engender confidence that The Window will find a new home. In all, starting the tour in the abandoned workspace is an unsettling start.

After a quick explanation of The Downtown Project, Maggie leads takes us around the corner to the Ogden’s residential entrance where we ride the elevator to Tony Hsieh’s upper level apartment.

The building doesn’t have a fourth or fourteenth floor; something familiar to anybody who’s lived in a city where property developers are courting Chinese investors — the sound of the word ‘four’ in Mandarin and Cantonese has unlucky overtones.

On the way up to the Twenty-Third floor apartment it’s also an opportunity to gauge the dynamic between the residents of the building; in reviews of the complex, many residents not associated with Hsieh’s projects have complained they have been marginalised.

Once in Hsieh’s apartment, it’s an impressive look into the domestic life of a modern successful internet tycoon with common workrooms, open plan living and a jungle themed party room featuring a hanging garden.

The most important thing about Hsieh’s apartment is it gives a sense of perspective of the project with views across the downtown district, a panorama of the Las Vegas strip with the huge casinos rearing out the suburbia and the refurbished Goldspike Casino that is becoming a community hub of sorts.

Hsieh’s apartment also gives some ideas of the plans the tycoon has, particularly the Life Is Beautiful festival that Maggie promises will be a “combination of Burning Man and South by South West.”

Returning to street level from Hsieh’s apartment does give the impression there are two breeds of residents in The Ogden; the Zappos and Downtown project crowd who treat the other residents with polite disdain.

The dismissive attitude towards non-tech outsiders is common among the technology startup communities around the world but that doesn’t make it any less jarring for those living with it in their building.

Stepping out into the mid morning heat of Las Vegas, we go around the corner to the Beat Coffeehouse, part of the Emergency Arts Collective that’s based in a disused medical centre and which, interestingly, isn’t part of Hsieh’s downtown project.

A block further along is The Container Park, the retail and entertainment hub of the Downtown Project that welcomes visitors with a giant preying mantis, shown at the beginning of this post.

The container park is an interesting rag tag collection of independently owned food and retail outlets, a test laboratory for hospitality and bricks-and-mortar shopping outlets. In the mid morning heat it’s somewhat deserted.

Unfortunately that’s where our official tour concluded and it was time to explore the dubious delights of downtown Las Vegas on our own. The locals are right, there isn’t much.

Later that evening I returned to see how The Downtown Project and downtown Las Vegas itself do at night. The difference with daytime is spectacular.

Getting off the bus at the Fremont Street Experience with its roofed in mall the boasts the world’s biggest video screen is a great difference from its dowdy daytime appearance.

Fremont Street jumps with the tame bacchanalia that’s the hallmark of Las Vegas; all the false unfulfillable promise of sexual and economic success that defines modern America.

The three block walk from West Fremont street to the Container Park is stark; while the Beat Coffeehouse is packed with drinkers enjoying the live band, the street is dark and quiet; it’s quite easy to feel uncomfortable on the short walk.

At the Container Park itself, things aren’t exactly busy. A few families play on the central green while a band plays. Few of the food stalls are selling anything and most of the shops are closing at 8pm. While it’s a Monday night, it’s not encouraging.

Leaving Downtown Las Vegas on the WAX express bus — fifteen minutes to the MGM Grand down the interstate rather than the hour plus trudge down the strip on the Deuce — it’s a good opportunity to reflect on a superficial tour of the Downtown Project.

For young families wanting to move from the wallet crushing costs of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Las Vegas could be an option but it’s going to require more business than Zappos and a small cluster of startups.

The city is going to need more drop in spaces like The Windows — something like Google Campus is going to be needed to encourage smart young entrepreneurs to make the journey and try their luck.

Another aspect is more accommodation is needed as right now the housing stock around the downtown district is either run down or overpriced — while cheap by San Francisco or New York standards prices don’t reflect the fact Las Vegas is not an economic powerhouse like the two cities.

The Ogden building is an example of everything that is wrong in the current global property mania with high priced, high maintenance apartments aimed at rich investors rather than ordinary people and their families.

For residents transport also remains a problem although Las Vegas’ public bus system is surprisingly good, one suspects the service is subsidised by the immensely popular Deuce double decker buses carrying crowds of tourists up and down the strip.

To get a San Francisco or Brooklyn type critical mass into the city requires a high density population and a deeper local tax base which is something beyond Hsieh’s power.

Las Vegas also has the problem that it is in a competitive field with towns like Kansas City and Des Moines among others all vying to attract young entrepreneurs to their low cost communities. Just being cheaper than Mountain View or South of Market is not enough on it’s own.

Overall, it’s not hard to leave Las Vegas with a feeling that the Downtown Project is floundering. To build a community like that envisioned by Tony Hsieh takes more that $350 million and a few years work; it’s a lifetime commitment and it needs several generations of funding.

That the Fremont Street Experience and The Beat Coffeehouse are both jumping while the Container Park is quiet also tells us that building a community requires diverse groups and that no one guiding agency, private or public can build a thriving industrial centre.

It is possible that Zappos and Hsieh may plant the seed for Las Vegas to become a technology and business hub, but there’s a long way to go and it will need more than one man to drive it.

“Build it and they will come,” was something I heard constantly about the plans to invigorate the city’s centre from its supporters and Las Vegas residents. Whether the Downtown Project is Tony Hsieh’s field of dreams is for history to judge.

Rent doesn’t matter to startups

Rent doesn’t seem to matter for startups — for the moment

Following yesterday’s post about the factors behind cities like New York, London and San Francisco becoming startup hubs, a friend asked “let me gues — cheap rents?”

In truth it’s the opposite; none of the cities cited as startup centres are cheap places to live or work and London is usually towards the top of the most expensive places on the planet.

That rents aren’t a huge factor is possibly because the typical tech startup is a lean operation with a small team crammed into a crowded location.

One suspects though there are limits to how much a business conserving its cash will pay — you don’t see many startups based in A-grade locations alongside big law firms and banks — and this may be the weaknesses of these big cities.

Certainly in London’s Silicon Alley the complaint is the days of cheap rent are long gone and newer startups have to base themselves in other locations across the city.

Overall, rents are important but they aren’t the critical factor in developing a tech sector hub. Whether that remains the case depends upon how the industry develops.

Why have cities like New York, London and San Francisco become tech hubs?

What are the ingredients that have driven today’s tech startup centres to prominence?

One of the recurring topics this site keeps returning to is how cities like San Francisco and London have seen an explosion of tech startups in recent years.

Probably the spectacular of all the cities that have shot to prominence is New York; a decade ago tech startups in the city were a rare thing, today there are thousands.

Today I had the opportunity to visit AlleyNYC, one of New York’s biggest tech accelerators. It’s impressive how a venture two years old can be so successful.

A question I asked was ‘what has driven the change in New York?’ The consensus was the combination of the Great Depression and the success of high profile companies like Facebook.

The success of high profile startups has validated the business model in the eyes of both investors and founders, people who would have been reluctant to leave their jobs and start a business now see the opportunities while investors can see there are returns to be made.

What’s notable about cities like New York, London and San Francisco is the depth of industry expertise, capital, networks, education institutions and diversity. These are key factors in attracting tech startups.

For other cities aspiring to be ‘the next Silicon Valley’, it would be worthwhile considering where their strengths lie compared to these giants.

It’s not a given that any of today’s global leaders will be the future centres of industry, but other cities and regions will need to have a very strong reason for businesses to choose them over the incumbents.

Measuring an industrial hub’s success

What should measure the success of technology incubators and hubs? London’s Google Campus gives us some clues.What should measure the success of technology incubators and hubs?

A short article appeared on London’s City AM website yesterday discussing the successes of Google’s Campus and the government’s Tech City initiative.

What jumped out of that story is the quote from Benjamin Southworth, the former deputy chief of the Tech City Investment Organistion, that London’s first tech IPO is “probably 18 to 24 months away”

Southworth’s comments raise the question of how do you measure the success of initiatives like Tech City, does a stockmarket float indicate success of business or tech cluster?

The debacle of Australia’s Freelancer float which saw the shares soar over 400% on the first day of trading certainly doesn’t indicate anything promising about the startup scene down under apart from the opportunities for those well connected with insiders on Australian Security Exchange traded stocks.

In London’s case, Google’s Campus gives a far better indicator of what tech hubs and industrial clusters can add to an economy – £34m raised from investors in the 12 months to October 2013, 576 jobs created and 22,000 members of its coworking space.

Google’s statistics raise an interesting point about the different objectives for the stakeholders in incubators and hubs; entrepreneurs want money or glory, investors want returns, corporate backers want intellectual property or marketing kudos, governments want jobs and politicians want photo opportunities with happy constituents.

These different objectives means there are different measures for success and one group’s success might mean bitter disappointment for some of the others.

What the various partners define as success is something anyone involved in an incubator or hub should consider before becoming involved, in that respect it’s like a business or a marriage.