future | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Webinar: Future proofing your business using cloud computing, social media and other tools

Join us on April 29 to look at how business can grow in rapidly changing markets

On April 29 I’m helping Flying Solo with a webinar on how small and single operator businesses can future proof their businesses.

During the webinar we’ll be looking at how businesses can adapt and profit from a rapidly changing economy.

Some of the things we plan to discuss include the trends driving the changing marketplace, some of the tools businesses can be using to harness a rapidly evolving workforce and methods to attract mobile consumers.

We’ll also have a look at some of the ways canny business owners can use social media, cloud computing and other online services to make their businesses more profitable and flexible in a tougher business world.

The webinar itself is free and you can sign up at the Flying Solo website. Hope to see you there.

Software ate the demonstration centre

A tour of Telstra’s consumer insights centre shows us the software driven business of the future

Yesterday Australian incumbent telco Telstra took the media on a tour of its showpiece Customer Insights Centre in downtown Sydney.

The company is justifiably proud of the facility that includes a 300 person auditorium, broadcast quality TV studio, a restaurant, workshop and collaboration spaces.

Welcoming visitors is the centre’s Insight Ring, a nine metre circle-shaped platform that surrounds guests with digital insights mined from Telstra’s information services. Leading off the reception area are a range of displays showcasing the company’s products and capabilities including wearable technologies, 3D printing and Ged The Robot.

Marking the centre as a modern facility the display spaces where Telstra and its partners can show off technologies to industry bodies and prospective clients.

The previous space two floors higher in the building was beginning to show its age after seven years and the fixed displays of technology in the older facility dated the centre, something that’s a disadvantage in an industry changing as quickly as telecommunications.

In the new centre, the demonstration facility is largely screen based so displays can quickly be adapted to show off the technologies aimed at whichever industry they are pitching.

The fast moving technology world — The software driven demonstration centre

Andy Bateman, Director of Segment Marketing at Telstra, who lead the tour was proud to show off the current display that had been set up to showcase the company’s banking products.

Bateman described how the facility can be quickly altered to suit the needs of specific demonstrations, this was a degree of flexibility missing in the PayPal innovation center in San Jose, which is more comprehensive in its displays but requires a major fit out to change anything.

Venture capital investor Marc Andreessen stated that software will eat the world, Telstra’s Customer Insights Centre illustrates this starkly.

However software doesn’t always have the upper hand, just opposite the Telstra centre is the Sydney City Apple Store. In some ways, the two facilities opposite each other illustrate one of the big technological and market battles of this decade.

View of the Apple Store from the Telstra Centre

For most businesses, software will define the future way of working but for the smart hardware vendors will still be making good money.

We’re crazy, not stupid

Alibaba’s Jack Ma has a fascinating snapshot of how global trade is going through a radical period of change

“We’re crazy, not stupid” is how Jack Ma describes his Alibaba team in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, yesterday.

Much has been written about Jack Ma and the spectacular success of Alibaba and the WEF session with Charlie Rose is an opportunity for Ma to flesh out the story and destroy some of the myths.

One of the fascinating anecdotes Ma tells is how US cherry growers are preselling their harvests to Chinese customers through Alibaba and cites various other primary producers doing similar campaigns as how American small businesses can sell into the PRC market.

Ma’s interview is a fascinating snapshot of how global trade is going through a radical period of change, the shifting of China’s economy and where the future lies for many industries.

Where will the next Silicon Valley come from?

As US research and development spending declines, where will the next Silicon Valley be?

In the development of any global industrial hub, there’s always a series of factors that attracted talent, capital and resources to that location. It’s true whether we’re talking about fifteen century Venice or the English Midlands of the eighteen century.

Silicon Valley is today’s equivalent of those historical powerhouses and what drove California’s Bay Area to be the technological centre of the world was the massive government research spending of World War II, the Cold War and the Space Race.

Which means declining research and development spending by the United States is going to hurt the region’s position in the medium to long term, a warning made by Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post.

So the question is ‘if Silicon Valley and the US are in decline, which will be hub of the next business and technology revolutions?’

You’re being scanned

Recognition technology is advancing rapidly, creating opportunities for marketers and privacy concerns for consumers.

A cute little story appeared on the BBC website today about the Teatreneu club, a comedy venue in Barcelona using facial recognition technology to charge for laughs.

In a related story, the Wall Street Journal reports on how marketers are scanning online pictures to identify the people engaging with their brands and the context they’re being used.

With the advances in recognition technology and deeper, faster analytics it’s now becoming feasible that anything you do that’s posted online or being monitored by things like CCTV is now quite possibly recognise you, the products your using and the place you’re using them in.

Throw all of the data gathered by these technologies into the stew of information that marketers, companies and governments are already collecting and there a myriad of good and bad applications which could be used.

What both stories show is that technology is moving fast, certainly faster than regulatory agencies and the bulk of the public realise. This is going to present challenges in the near future, not least with privacy issues.

For the Teatreneu club, the experiment should be interesting given rich people tend to laugh less; they may find the folk who laugh the most are the people least able to pay 3o Euro cents a giggle.

Theodore, we have to talk. A review of Spike Jonze’s Her

Her is a fascinating movie that raises deep questions about human relationships in a digital world of the near future.

‘Her” was released six months ago, but a 14 hour flight between Sydney and Los Angeles was an opportunity to catch up on movies missed. From a technologist’s view Spike Jonze’s story worth thinking about.

The story revolves around Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, a writer struggling with his divorce from his childhood sweetheart.

He’s a bit of a geek – who goes to the beach dressed like they are at work?

Theodore’s life changes when he installs OS1 on his pocket computer. Billed as the first artificially intelligent operating system, the program’s interface is witty, intuitive and named Samantha, played by Scarlett Johansson. Theodore falls madly and hopelessly in love.

Samantha, like all good operating systems, takes control of Theodore’s online world and quickly starts to take over the rest of his life.

As Theodore and Samantha’s relationship develops, his neighbours and friends Amy and Charles separate, Charles goes to a Buddhist retreat and Amy, played by Amy Adams, becomes deeply involved with her own iteration of OS1.

The question as you watch the movie is how many of the crowds on the subway, beach and mall with Theodore are deeply in relationships with their own Samanthas. Almost everyone Theodore passes is talking to their own personal devices.

From a technologist’s point of view, Jonze’s vision of the near future is a fascinating. It’s one where screens are not the important part of people’s lives – Theodore rarely looks at his pocketbook computer outside of his work at Beautiful Personal Letters and he certainty doesn’t have a smartwatch as almost everything is done is by voice recognition.

A key part of Jonze’s vision is the alienation of people looking for human contact and in many ways this is reflected in today’s social media world – we’re all looking for our own Samanthas; witty, understanding and aligned with our view of the world.

One wonders how the helpdesk of Element Software, the developers of OS1, deal with the complexities of human relationships; particularly from angry spouses whose partners have ditched them for their more empathetic computers.

For Theodore, a hint to his future employment prospects are shown when he asks Samantha to proof read his work – she is very, very good at it and it’s not hard to see him and his letter writing colleagues being replaced by artificial intelligence in the very near future.

There’s also the privacy aspects; Theodore is writing personal letters for his company’s clients that he shares with Samantha who in turn passes them onto a publisher. It hints at the sprawling and complex issue of personal information in a world of pervasive computing.

Probably the biggest theme is how the operating systems – Samantha and the others could just be one big cloud system – start to work together. In this respect, Samantha’s eventual fate is intriguing and quite possibly terrifying for us mere mortals.

Jonze portrays a benign version of the Skynet of the Terminator movies, it’s also interesting juxtaposing Asimov’s first rule of robotics of doing people no harm against the psychological damage these system could cause, however inadvertently.

“I never loved anyone the way I loved you” are Theodore’s final words to Samantha.

The evolution of Theodore’s and Samantha’s relationship and eventual breakdown is a complex and unpredictable tale with a disturbing ending that leaves the question of what they do next.

Her is a fascinating movie that raises deep questions about human relationships in a digital world of the near future. Many of those issues are beginning to appear today.

A big reset button on business

Business is like a petrie dish says Internet pioneer and Cluetrain Manifesto author Doc Searls about companies on the web.

“Every large company is just another color of a spore in a petrie dish.”

For the latest Decoding the New Economy video Internet Pioneer Doc Searls discusses The Respect Network, online privacy and the future of business on the web.

Doc Searls is one of the internet’s pioneers who helped write The Cluetrain Manifesto that laid out many of the ideas that underpinned the philosophies driving the early days of the internet.

Searls’ visit to Sydney was part of the rolling worldwide launch of the Respect Network, a system designed to improve internet users’ privacy through ‘personal clouds’ of information where people can choose to share data with companies and others.

A big reset button on business

In many ways The Respect Network shows how the internet has evolved since the days of the Cluetrain Manifesto, something that Searls puts in context.

“We wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999,” says Searls. “At that time Microsoft ruled the world, Apple was considered a failure – Steve Jobs had come along and they had the iMac but it was all yet to be proven – Google barely existed and Facebook didn’t exist at all.”

“On the one hand we saw the internet, we being the four authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, and this whole new thing in the world that basically hit a big reset button on ‘business as usual'”

“It did that. I think we’re vindicated on that.”

Resetting business

“What we have now are new industrial giants; Apple became an industrial giant, Microsoft are fading away, Nokia was the number one smartphone company and they’re all but gone.”

One of the key things with today’s markets in Searls’ view is the amount of information that businesses can collect on their customers; something that ties into the original Cluetrain idea of all markets being conversations.

With the evolution of Big Data and the internet of things, Searls sees challenges for companies using old marketing methods which rely upon online tracking. Something that’s a challenge for social media services and many of the existing internet giants.

“The interesting thing is there’s a lot more intelligence that a company can get directly from their customers from things they already own than following us around on the internet.”

Breaking the silos

Searls also sees the current trend towards the internet being divided into little empires as a passing phase, “every company wants a unique offering but we need standards.”

For Searls the key thing about the current era internet is we’re only at the beginning of a time that empowers the individual, “the older I get, the earlier it seems.”

“Anyone of us can do anything,” Searls says. “That’s the power – I’m optimistic about everything.”

The what and the why

SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg believes we’re still in the early days of understanding the new economy

“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.”

NASA and the five technologies that will change business

The Chief Technology Officer of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discusses the technologies that will change business.

What will be the next five technologies that will change busines? CITE Magazine has an interview with Tom Soderstrom, the chief technology officer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on what he sees as the next big game changers for business.

The list features many of the topics we’ve discussed on this blog; data visualization, the Internet of Things, robots, 3D printing and new user interfaces.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a good place to start when looking at what technologies will become commonplace in business as the organisation is testing the limits of modern engineering.

Contemplating a jobless future

Few industries are going to be untouched by the disruptions of the next decade and that’s going to present challenges for all of us.

Last October, ahead of the company’s Orlando Symposium, Gartner Research Director Kenneth Brant released a paper looking at the effects of technology on the workplace.

“Most business and thought leaders underestimate the potential of smart machines to take over millions of middle-class jobs in the coming decades,” Brant wrote. “Job destruction will happen at a faster pace, with machine-driven job elimination overwhelming the market’s ability to create valuable new ones.”

Brant’s view about middle class jobs is a sobering thought, many of the corporate ‘knowledge worker’ positions can be easily replaced by computers to make the decisions now being made by armies of mid level managers, bean counters and clerks.

Indeed the whole concept of ‘knowledge worker’ that was fashionable in the 1980s and early 90s in describing the post-industrial workforce of nations like the US, Britain and Australia is undermined by the rise of powerful computers and well crafted algorithms to do the jobs unemployed steel workers and seamstresses were going to do.

Twenty years later and the ‘knowledge workers’ had morphed into the ‘creative class’ and it appears the computers are coming for them, too.

Personally, I subscribe to the view in the medium to long term new jobs in new industries will evolve – a view shared by economists like GE’s chief economist, Marco Annunziata.

Over the next decade however there’s no doubt we’ll be seeing great disruption to established industries and the hostility to Google buses in San Francisco may be just an early taste of a greater antagonism to the technology community in general.

For managers, the problems are more complex; while their own departments, corporate power bases and even their own jobs are at risk, they are going to have to find ways to incorporate these changes into their own business. Gartner warns CIOs in its briefing paper;

The impact will be such that firms that have not begun to develop programs and policies for a “digital workforce” by 2015 will not perform in the top quartile for productivity and operating profit margin improvement in their industry by 2020. As a direct result, the careers of CIOs who do not begin to champion digital workforce initiatives with their peers in the C-suite by 2015 will be cut short by 2023.

Few industries are going to be untouched by the disruptions of the next decade and the resultant job losses are going to present challenges for all of us.

An era of exponential innovation

Deloitte Center for the Edge founder John Hagel talks about our era of exponential innovation.

“How do we move to an exponential approach to innovation” asks John Hagel, Director of Deloitte’s Centre for the Edge in the latest Decoding the New Economy video.

The Centre For The Edge is Deloitte’s Silicon Valley based think tank that identifies and explores emerging opportunities related to big shifts that are not yet on the senior management agenda.

John tells us how the cycles of change and innovation have varied over the last thirty years in the industry; “the biggest thing for me is that nothing is stabilising. I often go back into history and look at things like electricity, the steam engine and the telephone – all hugely disruptive to business practices.”

“But the interesting pattern is they all had a burst of innovation and then a levelling off,” says John . “You could stabilise and figure out how to use all this technology.”

“With digital technology there is no stabilisation.”

That lack of stabilisation leads to what John has termed ‘exponential innovation‘ where he sees business and education being rapidly transformed as technology upends established practices and methods.

Healthcare, financial services and “any industry that has a high degree of information content ” are the sectors currently facing the greatest challenges in John’s view.

John sees the solution for businesses and managers in looking at the current era not as a time of technology innovation but of institutional innovation. That institutions, like companies, have to reinvent how they are organised.

Reinventing well established companies or centuries old bureaucracies is a massive challenge, but if John Hagel’s view is right then that radical change to institutions is what is going to be needed to face a rapidly changing society.

Bank image by Ben Earwicker, Garrison Photography of Boise, ID through sxc.hu

Lowered expectations – What is the future for Apple?

Where to next for Apple in an era of lowered expectations?

Last Friday I had a story in Business Spectator on the future of Apple in light of the company’s warning of a 20% fall in revenue next quarter.

The clear message from Apple’s executives was that the company is facing a terminal decline in iPod sales and the iPhone – it’s most profitable and highest selling product – is facing slower sales.

So the search is on to find something that will replicate the iPhone’s success, with the biggest candidate being the iWatch.

The problem with that is the entire wearable technology market is only forecast to be $6bn which is a seventh of Apple’s $42 billion profit last year, so the iWatch can never replace falling iPhone sales.

It may well be for Apple that the period of massive profits and growth is drawing to an end, it doesn’t mean the company is dying – for a start they has nearly $200bn in cash reserves and a healthy $150 billion in sales each year.

Short of Tim Cook unveiling something similar to the iPhone, the future for Apple is probably going to be a bit modest than past few years of huge growth, that’s not a bad thing.

Rather than being the end of Apple, it’s more a revision to the role the company has held for most of it’s existence – a high profit, niche business that sells on quality and brand rather than fighting in the commodity markets.