Paul Wallbank – Communications Professional
Comms, journalism and writing
Collaboration tools are changing business but the progress is slower than some of us expected
Today in Technology Spectator, I have a piece on collaboration based around the Google and Deloitte paper released last week.
At the moment Google are on a marketing campaign promoting Apps for Business, for a previous campaign I prepared The Future of Teamwork which examined the benefits of cloud computing for industry.
It’s interesting how the message hasn’t changed a great deal in the last five year, despite it being valid.
Google has another spectacular financial result but weakness remain.
Google’s quarterly results are in – revenue up 22% on the previous year with a gross profit margin of 300%. Although the adwords river of gold still makes up 90% of the company’s income.
investor.google.com/earnings/2014/Q2_google_earnings.html
While spectacular, such a reliance on one product line is a vulnerablity. It’s not surprising Google’s leadership is experimenting with new businesses.
It’s also notable that payments to network partners fell as a proportion to revenues, which explains some of the pain sites that rely on Google Adsense checks are feeling.
The story of Rene Bertagna and the Serbian Lion illustrates how operators in the hospitality industry need to be on top of their listings and online presence.
A Virginian restaurant, the Serbian Lion, went out of business because its Google Places listing was hacked, reports Wired.
The proprietor of the Serbian Lion, Rene Bertagna, wasn’t aware his online listing showed the restaurant as being closed on weekends and as a result customers stopped showing up, he alleges in a law suit against Google.
As a result of result of the drop in earnings, the restaurant entered a death spiral of falling service standards, declining customers and further cuts until the place closed down.
While it’s difficult to judge how true Bertagna’s claim is – it’s quite possible the listing was a mistake by Google’s data scrapers or an oversight by a customer putting the data into the services – the story does illustrate how important getting the correct information into online services like Google Places, Microsoft Bing and Yelp.
Bertagna himself appears to be a classic case of roadkill on the information superhighway with his claims not to be a computer or internet user.
Bertagna immigrated to the U.S. from northern Italy when he was young. He’s 74 now, and, he says, doesn’t own a computer—he’d heard of the Internet and Google but used neither. Suddenly, a technological revolution of which he was only dimly aware was killing his business. His accountant phoned Google and in an attempt to change the listing, but got nowhere. Bertagna eventually hired an Internet consultant who took control of the Google Places listing and fixed the bad information—a relatively simple process.
The sad tale of Rene Bertagna and the Serbian Lion illustrates just how important it is for operators in the hospitality industry to be on top of their listings and online presence. This is where the customers are.
Sadly, this story isn’t news – that customers are using the web to find local businesses and read reviews of neighbourhood establishments has been the case for a decade, the move to mobile has been obvious for over five years.
For all local businesses, it’s a core responsibility to make sure online listings are correct along with having an up to date website. If you don’t, you only have yourself to blame if the customers don’t show up.
How Google Ventures James Temple wants to reinvent venture capital
James Temple writing in on tech website Re/Code has an excellent profile of Google Ventures founder Bill Maris and his quest to re-invent the venture capital industry.
Certainly the Silicon Valley venture capital industry is ripe for disruption; Maris is not alone in pointing out that most investors in the sector and focused on short term incremental gains like shopping apps and online stores.
Probably the biggest thing that Temple points out in the story is the importance of Big Data to the Google Ventures model, although Maris seems to be acutely conscious of the limitations of relying on algorithms to make decisions;
Because you can 100 percent use data and statistics in exactly the wrong way. That’s a trap some fall into, one that we really try hard to avoid. But I think it’s important to use that as a tool.
The data is a support. It’s just like having your other partners there.
Being skeptical about the infallibility of Big Data and algorithms seems a very un-Google thing, but it may work well for Bill Maris and his team.
Whether Maris and Google Ventures can upend the Silicon Valley investment culture remains to be seen; the real message though is that the venture capital industry is just as vulnerable to disruption as any other.
Will an Amazon phone succeed in tethering customers to the company?
Today Amazon is expected to launch a smartphone which the New York Times suggests will tether consumers to the company.
With 240,0000 apps in its Kindle store, Amazon will be formidable competitor to Google Android devices and Apple. Like iTunes, Amazon also have a strength in already knowing the customer’s credit card details.
The question is can Amazon be trusted? As we see with the Hachette book publishers dispute, Amazon is a company that’s ruthless in bullying suppliers and has a mandate to do so from its shareholders.
With the smartphone becoming the centre of the connected lifestyle, the stakes are high as whoever controls the customer’s pocket controls the customer’s smarthome, smartcar, retail and health applications.
Of course whoever wins this battle, they’ll still have to pay Microsoft for patents.
Despite Google’s new small business service, the space remains a great opportunity for a disruptive entrepreneur.
Google’s small business services have been a constant irritation of this site, with the view that local listings have been a missed opportunity for the service.
Overnight, the search engine giant has launched their new Google My Business site to bring together the disparate services offered to local enterprises.
At first look it’s a fairly slick way to get new businesses signed up, albeit dependent upon Google+ for the initial login. For businesses with existing Google small business accounts, the site directs you to the revamped Google Places administrator screen.
The immediate observation is that Google+ integration is a weakness as it relies on one ‘real person’ account to administer the listing; this will create problems for business as staff leave and founders retire.
Another problem is the black box verification process still remains – it’s hard for businesses to keep their listings fresh and up to date when there’s a risk doing so will see their entries might be suspended for violating some vague rules.
For local businesses it’s essential to have the search engine listing and the Google My Business site makes it easier to get it running, however the problems with Google’s local business strategy remain.
With Google, Facebook and the other online empires neglecting small business, this market is still a great opportunity for a disruptive players.
Mary Meeker’s State of the Internet report reminds us that the online advertising model is yet to be found
At the Code Conference held outside Los Angeles last week, analyst Mary Meeker delivered her annual State of the Internet slideshow covering the trends and opportunities in the online world.
One of the most watched graphs is the time spent on media versus the advertising spend on that channel.
For years Meeker has shown print is receiving a higher share of advertising dollars for the amount of time consumers spend on it compared to online channels.
That implies print revenue is due for collapse and online advertising revenues will surge. Here’s the 2014 chart.
If we track this over the last five years, here’s what we see with the ‘difference’ column being the sum of print’s over-representation and online’s (mobile and web) under-spending.
| Year | Print time | Print share | Online time | Online share | difference |
| 2010 | 12 | 26 | 28 | 13 | 29 |
| 2011 | 7 | 25 | 36 | 23 | 31 |
| 2012 | 6 | 23 | 38 | 25 | 30 |
| 2013 | 5 | 19 | 45 | 26 | 35 |
The collapse in print’s share of consumer time, down 60% in five years, is stunning and the 2012-13 changes may indicate advertising spend may is now collapsing as marketers start to adapt to the changed marketplace.
It could be however that advertising as we know it has to change; one of the key reasons for online – particularly mobile’s – spending being under represented is because no-one is quite sure what works in the newer mediums.
Advertisers may know that consumers are moving from print channels, but at least they know what works in print. Online the experts’ guesses are still not much better than the amateurs’.
In short, we’re still watining for the digital era’s David Sarnoff. As Mary Meeker keeps reminding us, it’s a $20bn a year opportunity.
The future of design and 4D printing are the topics of today’s 702 Sydney segment with Linda Mottram
I’ll be on ABC Sydney this morning discussing 4D printing and the future of design as the Sydney Vivid Festival swings into gear.
Some of the areas we’ll be looking at in the spot that should start around 10.20am is what exactly is 4D printing, how can materials build themselves and how designers are creating more sustainable devices like Google’s Project Ara.
One particularly interesting Vivid session is the Electric Dreams to Reality session that will feature local entrepreneurs and makers explaining how they are using the internet of things and new design.
We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on 1300 222 702 or post a question on ABC702 Sydney’s Facebook page.
If you’re a social media users, you can also follow the show through twitter to @paulwallbank and @702Sydney.
The race to build smart cities is important for communities that care about where they want to be in the 21st Century economy.
For the last decade city administrations have been jostling for the title of being a ‘smartcity’ – a metropolis that brings together technology, creativity and business to grow their local economy. Now the competition is getting fierce.
While the concept has been around since British Prime Minister Harold Wilson coined the phrase the Great White Heat of Technology fifty years ago, the arrival of the Internet of Things, cheap sensors and accessible wireless broadband have made wiring up a city far more easier than a decade ago.
So now we’re seeing a race to set up smartcities with just the last week seeing Kansas City join the Cisco Connected Communities program, a consortium of UK technology groups announced Milton Keynes will be wired up and French machine to machine (M2M) network provider Sigfox launched its plan to add San Francisco to the cities it’s covering.
Kansas City is a particularly interesting location being the first town to recieve Google Fiber and its designated Innovation Precinct along the new street car route the city is building. The Connected Cities scheme will cover that corridor.
Kansas City’s Innovation Corridor isn’t a new idea, it’s not dissimilar to the Digital Sydney project I put together a few years ago. The difference is it has both government commitment to it and a business community energised around the possiblities. Whether that’s enough to make it a success remains to be seen.
What is clear though is that today’s technologies are changing cities, just as roads and electricity did in the Twentieth Century and steam traction, railways and town water did in the Nineteenth.
That’s why the race to build smart cities is so important for communities that care about where they want to be in the 21st Century economy.
Many of the leading tech companies hide beyond mysterious algorithms or impassive customer support. That may prove to be their weakness.
One of the paradoxes of the modern tech industry is that while its leaders preach openness and collaboration, their own businesses are mysterious unaccountable black boxes.
This website has often looked at how the Silicon Valley business model leaves users and partners exposed to arbitrary enforcement of vague policies and indifferent customer service.
A good example of the black box business model is eBay’s major security breach where it appears millions of users have had their personal and banking details compromised. Instead of informing customers immediately, the company’s management hid the problem and hoped stonewalling inquiries would make the problem go away.
In the black box business model, not being accountable is the key – we see it with Amazon’s bullying of book publishers, Google’s high handed identity policies and Facebook’s puritan censorship.
Those high handed attitudes to customers’ and users’ rights is born out of arrogance; all of these company’s managements, and the corporate bureaucrats who enforce the policies, believe their hundred billion dollar businesses are untouchable.
Such arrogance might though be ill-founded as each of these businesses is less than twenty years old and, while they themselves have deeply disrupted existing industry models, there is no reason why their own market dominance and huge cash flows can’t be usurped by new technologies or challengers.
In age where trust is the greatest currency, hiding beyond a block box of algorithms and impassive customer support may not turn out to be a successful management strategy.
Can you drop off the grid and hide from Big Data? The results of one lady’s experiment aren’t encouraging.
Just how hard is it to hide from big data? ABC Newcastle’s Carol Duncan and I will be discussing this from 2.40 this afternoon.
Princeton University assistant professor of sociology Janet Vertesi decided she’d find out by trying to conceal her pregnancy from the internet.
She describes her experiences to Think Progress and the lessons are startling on how difficult it is to drop off the Internet and business databases.
While it’s easy to tritely say ‘don’t use the internet’, Janet found that using cash to avoid being picked up by bank databases raises suspicions while not using discount voucher or store cards meant she missed out on valuable savings.
For many people though dropping off the internet is not an option – not having a LinkedIn profile hurts most job hunters’ chances of finding work while if you want to participate in communities, it’s often essential to join the group’s Facebook page.
The amazing part of all is that Janet herself became a Google conscientious objector two years ago after deciding the company’s data collection methods were too intrusive. Yet she still found it hard to keep the news of her baby off the internet.
Ultimately her friends were the greatest risk and she had to beg them not to mention her pregnancy on Facebook and other social media channels lest the algorithms pick that up.
For Janet, it proved possible but it was really hard work;
Experience has shown that it is possible, but it’s really not easy, and it comes with a lot of sacrifices. And it requires some technical skill. So to that end, it’s my concern about the opt-out idea. I don’t actually think it’s feasible for everyone to do this.
So can you drop off the net? Do you know if you’re on it at all. Join us on ABC Newcastle with Carol Duncan from 2.40 to discuss these issues and more.
If Google+ is to be buried, it could be good news for Google’s other properties like local and mobile search
The announcement that Vic Gundotra, the executive responsible for Google+ at the search engine giant, is leaving the company has lead to the widespread assumption that the troubled social media platform is dead.
It’s not an unreasonable assumption that Google Plus is dead; the company’s trait of corporate attention deficit disorder means the project is likely to die of neglect without a top level executive supporting it.
Should Google Plus be dying, this won’t be bad news for some of the company’s other products, the enforced integration with the social media service irritated users, –particularly on YouTube — while reducing functionality for platforms like Google Places.
Google Places, or Google Plus for Business as it was clumsily renamed as part of the integration, could be the great beneficiary of removing the distraction of the social media service with renewed focus on local search.
Losing focus on local and mobile search has been the most damaging effect from the Google Plus experience and renewed efforts in those fields will take on Facebook while filling a gap in the market.
It’s also unlikely that the entire ‘identity service’ will live on with those features permeating through the company’s products.
Of course, it could be that Google Plus isn’t dead at all; we’ll have a better idea of where it’s going to go when we see the level of commitment from senior management towards the product, although the appointment of a relatively junior executive doesn’t seem to be good news for the platform.
Moving on from Google Plus is an opportunity for the company to refocus on neglected niches, it could be a good result for the company’s shareholders.
