Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: data

  • Reading the golden records – can we avoid a digital dark age?

    Reading the golden records – can we avoid a digital dark age?

    In 1977 NASA’s Voyager mission launched from Cape Canaveral to explore the outer solar system, included on the vessel in case it encountered other civilisations were a plaque and a golden record describing life on Earth.

    The record was, is, “a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.” It containing images,  a variety of natural sounds, musical selections from different cultures and spoken greetings in fifty-five languages.

    Most American households in 1977 could have listened to the sounds on Voyager’s golden disk but were the spaceship to return today it would be difficult to find the technology to read the record.

    This is the concern of Google Fellow and internet pioneer Vint Cerf who told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Jose this week we are “facing a forgotten century” as today’s technologies are superseded rendering documents unreadable.

    A good example of ‘bit rot’ is the floppy disk – the icon used by most programs to illustrate saving files is long redundant and few organisations, let alone households, have the ability to read a floppy disk.

    For corporations the problem of dealing with data stored on tape is an even greater problem as proprietary hardware and software from long vanished corporations becomes harder to find or engineer.

    As the Internet of Things rolls out and data becomes more critical to business operations, the need for compatible and readable formats will become even more important for companies and historical information may well become a valuable asset.

    With libraries, museums and government archives having digitised historic information, this issue of accessing data in superseded formats becomes even more pressing.

    It may be that important documents need to be kept on paper – although there’s still the problem of paper deteriorating  – to make sure the 21st Century doesn’t become the digital dark ages and our golden records remain unread.

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  • The what and the why

    The what and the why

    “People are drowning in big data,” SurveyMonkey’s CEO Dave Goldberg says in the latest Decoding The New Economy video.

    Goldberg sees SurveyMonkey as bringing order to the world of big data in allowing organisations to put their information in context, “We want people to ask the right questions so we can get better data.”

    “Here’s a question I need to answer – how happy are my employees? what do customers think of my new product? What are my students doing at school this year?”

    Growing the survey industry

    One group that’s uncomfortable with the rise of SurveyMonkey, a privately listed company that’s worth $1.3 billion after a capital raising last year, are traditional market research firms who see the service as putting a powerful tool in experienced hands. Goldberg sees it as an opportunity for the market research industry.

    “We’re not replacing market researchers,” says Goldberg, “most people who come to SurveyMonkey haven’t used a market researcher before. It actually probably creates more demand for more sophisticated research down the line.”

    Goldberg himself isn’t from a market research background, instead he hails from the tech sector having set up LAUNCH in 1994, one of the early music streaming companies which he sold to Yahoo! in 2001 and became the company’s Director of Music.

    He left Yahoo1 in 2007 and spent two years in the venture capital industry before joining SurveyMonkey as CEO in 2009.

    Understanding the data

    From his experience, Goldberg sees understanding data the key business skill for today’s workers, firmly believing that kids should be taught statistic rather than coding.

    “Everyone is going to have to learn how to use data.” Says Goldberg, “someone was asking me the other day about sort of skills should we teach our kids to prepare them for the future and I think the thing we’re not doing enough of is teaching them how to use and analyze data.”

    To Goldberg we’re still in the early days of understanding how mobile and social media are going to change business with understanding data being one of the great opportunities.

    “Implicit data is really interesting but it tells you ‘what’, it doesn’t tell you the ‘why’, believes Goldberg. “We think what we do is the explicit side, we gotta ask people to get the ‘why.”

     

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  • Using data laws to create an economic advantage

    Using data laws to create an economic advantage

    Yesterday I posted piece on Business Spectator about Australia’s new privacy regulations, little did I know that the European Union Parliament was about to release its own.

    The EU regulations look interesting and certainly seem on  first look to be far more comprehensive than Australia’s effort that I describe as a toothless, box ticking exercise.

    A notable aspect of the EU’s announcement of the new rules is its claim that the updated regulations are expected to generate €2.3 billion in economic benefits each year.

    Whether the EU’s rules prove to be an economic cost – as Australia’s effort will almost certainly turn out to be – or a competitive advantage remains to be seen, however the European Parliament is certainly making a case for data security and privacy protection as being an important selling point in a highly competitive digital world.

    The competitive advantages between countries and continents in the 21st Century will be vary different to those that determined the economic winners of the previous two centuries.

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  • 2013 – the year of the incumbents

    2013 – the year of the incumbents

    Bigger, quicker and more congested are the predictions from consulting firm Deloitte’s 2013 Technology, Media and Telecommunications survey.

    In Sydney last Friday, the Australian aspects of the report were discussed by Clare Harding and Stuart Johnston, both partners in Deloitte’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications practice.

    Most of the predictions tie into global trends, with the main exception being the National Broadband network which Stuart sees as addressing some of the bandwidth problems that telecommunication companies are going to struggle with in 2013.

    Technology predictions

    For the technology industry, Deloitte sees 2013 as being a consolidation of existing trends with the trend away from passwords continuing, crowdfunding  growing, conflict over BYOD policies and enterprise social networks finding their niches.

    Some technologies are not dead; Deloitte sees the the PC retaining its place in the home and office, with over 80% of internet traffic and 70% of time still being consumed on desktop and laptop computers.

    Deloitte also sees gesture based interfaces struggling as users stick with the mouse, keyboard and touchscreen.

    Media predictions

    Like 3D TV two years ago, the push from vendors is now onto smart TVs and high definition 4K televisions. As with 3DTV, much of the market share of smart and hard definition TVs is going to be because television manufacturers will include these features in base models.

    Deloitte’s consultants see 2013 as one where “over the top” services (OTT) like Fetch TV and those provided by incumbents delivered start to get traction on smart TVs with 2% of industry revenues coming from these platforms.

    Catch up TV is the main driver of the over the top services with 75% of traffic being around viewers watching previously broadcast content. This will see OTT services firmly become part of the incumbent broadcasters’ suite of services.

    The bad news for some incumbents is the increase in ‘cord cutters’ as consumers move from pay-TV services to internet based content.

    Smartphone and tablet computer adoption which is expected to treble will be a driver of OTT adoption as viewers move to ‘dual screen’ consumption, the connections required to deliver these services will put further load on already strained telco infrastructure which is going to see prices rise as providers respond to shortages.

    Telecommunications predictions

    The telecommunications industry is probably seeing the greatest disruption in 2013. With smartphones dominating the market world wide as price points collapse.

    One of the big product lines pushed at this year’s CES was the “phablet” – while the Deloitte consultants find it interesting hey don’t seem convinced that the bigger form factors will displace the standard 5″ screen size during 2013.

    As a consequence of the smartphone explosion is that apps will become more pervasive and telcos will try and build in their own walled gardens with All You Can App to lock customers onto their services.

    With smartphones moving down market, largely because of the cost benefits for manufacturers, Deloitte also predicts many new users won’t access data plans given they’ll use the devices as sophisticated ‘feature phones’.

    Data usage will continue to grow, particularly with the adoption of LTE/4G networks, although much of the growth will still be on the older 2 and 3G networks as lower income users choose plans which don’t require high speed data.

    The looming data crunch

    There is a cost to booming data usage and that’s the looming shortage of bandwidth, Deloitte sees this as getting far worse before it gets better.

    With bandwidth becoming crowded, prices are expected to rise. In the United States, the “all you can eat” nature of internet plans is being replaced with “pay as you go” while in Australia data plans are becoming stingier and per unit costs are rising.

    The London Olympics were cited as an example of how the shortages are appearing – while the Olympic site itself was fine, outside events like the long distance cycle races strained infrastructure along the route. We can expect this to become common as smartphones push base station capacity.

    Where to in 2013

    Deloitte’s view of where the telecom, technology and media industries are heading in 2013 is that incumbents will take advantage of their market positions as technology runs ahead of available bandwidth.

    In Australia, governments might be disappointed as telcos internationally aren’t interested in bidding huge amounts for bandwidth. As Stuart Johnston says “globally what we’re seeing is that carriers are not as willing to spend. It’s not the cash cow that governments are expecting.”

    For government and consumers, we’re going to get squeezed a little bit harder.

    While things do look slightly better for telcos, broadcasters and other incumbents there’s always the unexpected which eludes all but the most outrageous pundits, it’s hard to see what the disruptive technologies of 2013 will be but we can be sure they are there.

    The main takeaway from the 2013 Deloitte report is that smart TVs, 4K broadcasting, tablet computers and smartphones are going to be the biggest drivers for the technology, media and telecommunications industry for this year. There’s some opportunities for some canny entrepreneurs.

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  • Finding the perfect customer

    Finding the perfect customer

    With the rise of social media we’ve spoken a lot about customers’ ability to rate businesses and overlooked that companies have been rating their clients for a lot longer. The same technologies that are helping consumers are also assisting companies to find their best prospects.

    A business truism is that Pareto’s Rule applies in all organisations – 20% of customers will generate 80% of a company’s profits. Equally a different 20% of clients will create 80% of the hassles. The Holy Grail in customer service is to identify both groups as early as possible in the sales cycle.

    Earlier this week The New York Times profiled the new breed of ratings tools known as consumer valuation or buying-power scores. These promise to help businesses find the good customers early.

    While rating customers according to their credit worthiness has been common for decades, measuring a client’s likely value to a business hasn’t been so widespread and most companies have relied on the gut feeling of their salespeople or managers. The customer valuation tools change this.

    One of the companies the NYT looked at was eBureau, a Minnesota-based company that analyses customers’ likely behaviour. eBureau’s founder Gordy Meyer tells how 30 years ago he worked for Fingerhut, a mailorder catalogue company that used some basic ways of figuring out who would be a good customer.

    Some of the indicators Fingerhut used to figure if a client was worthwhile included whether an application form was filled in by pen, if the customer had a working telephone number or if the buyer used their middle initial – apparently the latter indicates someone is a good credit risk.

    Many businesses are still using measures like that to decide whether a customer will be a pain or a gain. One reliable signal is those that complain about previous companies they’ve dealt with; it’s a sure-fire indicator they’ll complain about you as well.

    What we’re seeing with services like eBureau is the bringing together of Big Data and cloud computing. A generation ago even if we could have collected the data these services collate, there was no way we could process the information to make any sense to our business.

    Today we have these services at our fingertips and coupled with lead generators and the insights social media gives us into the likes and dislikes of our customers these tools suddenly become very powerful.

    While we’ll never get rid of bad customers – credit rating services didn’t mean the end of bad debts – customer valuation tools are another example of how canny users of technology can get an advantage over their competitors along with saving time in chasing the wrong clients.

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