Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: google

  • ABC Nightlife: The next wave of smartphones

    ABC Nightlife: The next wave of smartphones

    The world of mobile phones is getting busy again as a whole new range of smartphones appear. Paul Wallbank joined Rod Quinn for ABC Nightlife on October 20 to discuss what the new smartphone wars mean for home and business users.

    We’ll be going to air from 10pm, Eastern Australian time across Australia on ABC Local Radio’s Nightlife to look at the following questions;

    • Why were people disappointed with Apple’s iPhone 4S that was released a few weeks ago?
    • The big competition are the Google Android phones, what are they doing?
    • What’s happened to Nokia? They seemed to have lost their domination.
    • Microsoft were the other big player, what are they doing?
    • How are the smartphones changing business?
    • Shopping centres seem to be jumping on board with various social media checkins. What are those?
    • There’s been a push to online payments, how are the smartphones affecting this?
    • Are smartphones going to be the big buy for Christmas?
    • What are the best plans for consumers and business?
    • How do people deal with telco disputes?

    The podcast from the program is available from at Nightlife website, and some of the information we mentioned can be found here;

    Dealing with Telco complaints

    We’ll be adding more resources in the next few days, the next ABC Nightlife spot is on 23 November and our events page will have more details. If you have any suggestions for future programs or comments on the last show, please let us know as we love your feedback.

    Similar posts:

  • Does revenue solve all problems?

    Does revenue solve all problems?

    According to Eric Schmit, Google’s Executive Chairman, “Revenue solves all problems.” Is that really so?

    The truth is it doesn’t. Revenue can solve some problems, while creating others and having plenty of cash coming in may even cover over existing issues that can be ignored while times are good.

    Plenty of governments have found themselves unsuck after rich revenues allowed them to ignore problems in their own society, the Dutch Disease – where a country’s income rises rapidly because one industry booms and crowds the others out – is one example of revenue causing problems. Local Chinese governments are currently dealing with problems bought around by their massive income from selling land.

    In business, owners and managers sometimes find themselves in trouble because they can’t manage the demand that comes with the revenue a growing enterprise attracts.

    Sometimes, the revenue’s fine but there’s no profit. I can earn a lot of money selling bottles of beer for ten cents when everyone else is charging two dollars, but the fact the wholesale price is one dollar means I’m going to grow broke quickly unless I can impress a dumb corporation with my massive customer growth and get them to buy me out.

    The group buying model tends to combine two of the above problems – participating businesses struggle with the demand they generate while the discounts they are giving almost certainly guarantees they are not making a profit on the deal.

    So revenue doesn’t solve all problems, even the most profitable business – legal or not – has its own unique set of problems.

    Life’s easier when your business is profitable, but problems will never go away. Even the good life has problems; deal with it.

    Similar posts:

  • Is the social media business model dying?

    Is the social media business model dying?

    Is the social media business model dead?

    The frenzied rush to release new features such as Facebook’s latest changes, along with Google’s updates to their Plus platform, may be the first indication the big social media business model is broken.

    Driving the adoption of social media services has been the value they add to people’s lives; MySpace was a great place to share interests like bands and music, Facebook’s is to hear what was happening with their families and friends, LinkedIn is for displaying our professional background and Twitter keeps track on what’s happening in the world.

    Now the social media services want to be something else, Facebook wants to become “a platform for human storytelling” where you’ll share your story with friends and friends of friends (not to mention the friends of your mad cousin in Milwaukee) while Google+ wants to become an “identity service”.

    The fundamental problem for social media services is their sky high valuations require them squeezing more information and value out of time poor users by adding the features on other platforms; so Facebook tries to become Twitter while Google+ desperately tries to ape Facebook and Quora.

    Adopting other services’ features is not necessarily what the users want or need; you may be happy to follow a Reuters or New York Times journalist on Twitter for breaking news but you, and them, are probably not particularly keen on being Facebook friends or professionally associated on LinkedIn.

    If it turns out we don’t want to share a timeline of our lives with the entire world but just know how our relatives or old school friends in another city are doing, then the underpinnings of the social media giants value may not be worth the billions of dollars we currently believe.

    This isn’t to say social media services themselves aren’t going away, it could just be that the grandiose dreams of the online tycoons where they become an identity service or a mini-Internet are just a classic case of overreach.

    For Google and Salesforce, whose core businesses aren’t in social media, this could be merely an expensive distraction, but for those businesses like Facebook it could be that Myspace’s failure was the indicator that making money out of people’s friendships isn’t quite the money maker some people think.

    Similar posts:

  • Losing sight of what matters

    Losing sight of what matters

    Last Night Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt testified before a US Senate antitrust committee on the search engine company’s market power.

    In opening his testimony, Schmidt alluded to Microsoft, saying “twenty years ago, a large technology firm was setting the world on fire. Its software was

    on nearly every computer. Its name was synonymous with innovation.

    “But that company lost sight of what mattered. Then Washington stepped in.

    It’s an interesting and probably accurate perspective given how Microsoft has effectively lost its way for the last decade – although given Google’s urge to become an identity service and its buying a mobile phone manufacturer doesn’t auger well for their focus on the core search business.

    Losing of focus of what matters is a problem for all business owners. We’re busy, it’s hard winning orders, getting paid and keeping customers happy so we lose track of the reason we went into business.

    For most of us it was because we had a great business idea or a belief we could have a better life being our own bosses.

    That latter objective is often the first one lost, usually we find ourselves working harder, taking fewer holidays and seeing the family less than if we’d stayed in a comparatively safe job with BigCorp.

    Great ideas can also be our undoing – if you’re constantly having brainwaves, you find you have lots of ideas but no time to execute on any of them.

    Similarly, one great idea that turns out to be dog can be bad news as well. Often, we’re loath to admit we’re wrong and hold onto a failing business idea long after it’s shown not to be viable.

    Probably worst of all is when we violate our own values; many of us went into business because we didn’t like the values of the corporation we worked for.

    Then one day we find we’re screwing subcontractors, that we’re leasing an expensive car the business can’t afford while cutting staff benefits and we’re tying up customers in legalistic contracts in attempt not to deliver the services we promised.

    Just like the big company we swore we’d never become.

    If you’re a big company with a lucrative business niche – like Google or Microsoft – you can get along quite nicely with the rivers of gold flowing subsidising your indulgences and distractions, most of though we don’t have that revenue buffer protecting our assets.

    The cost of losing focus is a killer; even if it doesn’t kill our businesses, it will destroy our souls.

    Are you keeping focus on why you went into business?

    Similar posts:

  • ABC Nightlife Computers: The Internet Name Wars

    ABC Nightlife Computers: The Internet Name Wars

    The online empires want our names and identities, are the real costs of social media now being exposed? Our September ABC Nightlife spot on September 22 from 10pm looked at these issues and more.

    Paul and Tony discussed how Google’s “Name Wars” or “nymwars” came about, why social media sites like Facebook and search engines want you to use to use your real names.

    The podcast from the program is available from at Nightlife website, more details of Tony’s programs can be found there as well.

    Is this a good thing or are there costs we should consider before handing over our intimate details to a social media or free cloud computing service?

    Some of the topics we covered included;

    • What are the “name wars’?
    • Why do companies like Google and Facebook want us to use our ‘real’ identities?
    • How can they use the information they gather?
    • What problems does that cause for Internet users?
    • Can these problems spill into real life?
    • Are all web services doing this?
    • What are the risks to businesses using social media?
    • Is this the real cost of social media?

    Some of the information we mentioned can be found here;

    The cost of lunch: Google and Information Revenue
    Google’s real names policy explained
    Google’s Eric Schmidt on being an “identity service”, not a social network
    Google’s company philosophy (note item two)
    Why Twitter doesn’t care what your real name is

    We’ll be adding more resources in the next few days, the next ABC Nightlife spot is on 20 October and our events page will have more details. If you have any suggestions for future programs or comments on the last show, please let us know as we love your feedback.

    Similar posts: