mobile | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Putting machine learning into wine

Two South Australian students are showing how the wine industry can use machine learning and cloud computing

As we gather more data, the opportunities to apply it become wider. A good example of this is Seer Insights, a South Australian company started by pair of university students that calculates the likely grape yields for vineyards.

Seer Insights’ product Grapebrain is made up of two components, a mobile app that the farmer uses to count the grape clusters on the vines and then a cloud service that analyses the data and produces web based reports for the farmers.

The current methods are notoriously unreliable with Seer Insights estimating mistakes cost the Australian viticulture industry $200 million a year as harvests are miscalculated resulting in either rotting fruit or wasted contractor fees.

Born in an elevator

Seer’s founders, Harry Lucas and Liam Ellul, started the business after a chance meeting on their university campus. “We started off doing this after being stuck in a lift together,” remembers Liam. “Originally we were looking at the hyper-spectrum imaging for broadacre farming but when we started looking at the problems we ended up talking to wine organisations about this.”

“The technology predicts how many grapes will be coming off the vineyards at the end of the season to enable people to sort out their finances,” Harry says. “The growth process grapes go through is difficult to model so we use machine learning to do that.”

For both the founders having an off the shelf product, in this case Microsoft’s machine learning tools, to run the data analysis made it relatively easy to launch the product.

As a winner of Microsoft’s Tech eChallenge, the startup has won a trip to the United States as well as being profiled by the company as a machine learning case study.

Over time as these tools become more accessible to small companies we’ll see more businesses accessing machine learning services to enhance their operations.

As companies face the waves of data flowing into their businesses over the next decade, it will be those who manage it well and gather valuable insights from their information that will be the winners.

Delivering on the promise of the connected stadium

The connected stadium promises a lot but has a long way to deliver on those expectations

Once a year I come out of the closet in Sydney and admit I support Carlton in the Australian Football League. This usually ends in humiliation as Carlton hasn’t beaten Sydney in the last twenty years.

This year’s ritual humiliation coincided with an offer by Telstra to review their smart stadium rollout at the Sydney Cricket Ground’s rebuilt MA Noble stand following a tour of Etihad’s stadium earlier this year.

Late last month I interviewed Mike Caponigro, Cisco’s head of Global Solutions Marketing for Sports and Entertainment, around how smart stadiums are being rolled out around the world, including the Sydney Cricket Ground.

Caponigro sees the smart stadium as complementing the ground experience and Cisco are working with over three hundred venues in thirty countries around the world.

“Live is always going to be best,” states Caponigro. “You can’t replace that tribal passion of the crowd. No matter how excited I get in my living room or with some friends in a pub you’re never going recreate that enthusiasm.”

However the expectations of sports fans are changing Caponigro points out citing how HD television and the internet is changing the experience for spectators outside the stadium, “fans don’t want to be removed from that action.”

So how does the connected stadium experience stack up for a punter who’s used to being in the cheap seats and often wonders if buying that ticket along with putting up with the hassles of getting to the ground, being overcharged for bad food and water down beer is worthwhile compared to staying at home and enjoying it on TV?

A limited App

Like all the smart stadium rollouts, the SCG’s revolves around the onscreen displays and the spectators’ smartphones. Once downloaded the 35Mb app isn’t spectacular. The sports news focuses on cricket – somewhat irrelevant in a Sydney winter – while the transport map front ends into Google Maps.

Probably the biggest disappointment with the app is the venue map which is a detailed PDF lacking any interactive capabilities which successfully manages to pack a lot of information, like the location of light towers, without actually telling you anything useful.

In seat ordering is one of the attractions of the app. Unfortunately we were unable to test it as the collection points are within the members section of the Noble stand which we didn’t have access to.

The lack of real time information about seating, transport and ground information makes the app at best ornamental, indeed there are opportunities missed in upselling such as offering spectators seat upgrades or merchandising offers.

In stadium connectivity

Where the SCG smart stadium shines is in the Wi-Fi connectivity. Mobile connections over 3 and 4G services have always been problematic during match breaks. During the game, the connection was flawless, the only gripe being that the login screen reappeared for a moment everytime the phone was bought out of sleep.

Again though it’s hard not to think the ground management are missing opportunities with the Wi-Fi as the login screen asked for an email address but didn’t give the option of providing an SCG or Swans membership number rather than just an email address.

Not so smart screens

The biggest boast of smart stadiums are the connected screens, the previous tour of Melbourne’s Etihad Stadium showed what could be done but the SCG game was an opportunity to see the videos in action.

Unfortunately the screens actually detracted from the experience. While the main scoreboards were showing game details and replays the smaller screens were showing the SCG members in ground advertising which added nothing for spectators.

Even during the match play, the screens carried the Channel Seven television feed with food outlet advertising wrapped around it. Disappointingly the screens didn’t give any updates on the match play, the goal kicked by Swans’ debutante Dan Robinson (who played for my local junior club) didn’t receive a mention at all.

Overall the spectator experience from the SCG’s smart stadium rollout is underwhelming. This isn’t a result of Telstra and Cisco’s technology but of its implementation with a focus on low value advertising rather than adding value for spectators.

Leaving money on the table

The smart screens need to be delivering more relevant information to fans in the stadium while the smartphone app has to be giving dynamic and useful data to help spectators before during and after the game.

At the moment, it seems there’s a lot of money being left on the table as opportunities beyond pushing advertising onto spectators aren’t being explored.

It’s hard not to think that right now the smart stadium is a solution in search of a problem. Certainly for fans to take anything except the improved Wi-Fi service seriously there ground managements have to offer more than continuous ads for chicken outlets and expensive private schools.

Then again, maybe I’m just bitter as once again us Carlton fans were humiliated by another hundred point loss. For Blues supporters it was another dismal night at the footy ground.

Facebook’s and Google’s enlightened self interest

Facebook and Google both put their users first in their latest updates. It’s something other business should consider.

Over the last few weeks much has been written about Google’s mobile search update that went live on Wednesday, some said it would be the death of small business on the internet while others claimed it would be the end of corporates online.

While all the focus has been on Google’s search changes Facebook quietly made a change that will probably be more vexing for many businesses.

Both Facebook and Google are struggling with making their services more useful for users, with the Google changes the intention is to make search on mobile devices more useful in giving preference to websites that work on smaller screens.

In a post on Google’s webmaster blog, Developer Programs Tech Lead Maile Ohye answered the basic questions about the search engine changes which dispelled much of the hysteria and myths about the update. The main point of Ohye’s post is that Google want to show users useful information.

Facebook have a similar problem, they have to balance the often competing interests of their users and advertisers with the main aim being keeping visitors on their site for as long as possible.

The objective of keeping users engaged is the reason for a series of tweaks Facebook announced this week that change the newsfeed visitors see.

The goal of News Feed is to show you the content that matters to you. This means we need to give you the right mix of updates from friends and public figures, publishers, businesses and community organizations you are connected to. This balance is different for everyone depending on what people are most interested in learning about every day. As more people and pages are sharing more content, we need to keep improving News Feed to get this balance right.

Facebook are putting their users priorities first in making sure the news feed is interesting and relevant, which the company believes will entice visitors to spend longer on the site and make advertising more attractive.

If it works then it’s a win for Facebook, their users and those who pay to advertise on the site. Again though, the losers are the companies and brands not advertising who thought they could get views by the quality of their content.

Unless the content is very good, those companies not paying Facebook are in for more disappointment as their reach collapses even further than its current pathetic rates.

Google’s change too is something that puts users first; rather than dumping mobile web surfers onto an unreadable page, they are making sure people get to sites that are useful.

In many ways Google is only encouraging what has been best practice for at least five years, that every site should work equally well on mobile devices as they do on desktop computers.

What Facebook and Google are showing us is the value of putting users’ needs first. If your guests are happy then your business model has a much better chance of succeeding, regardless of who the eventual customer is.

Making business more user friendly should be a priority for all companies in a competitive world.

Local gets left behind by social and mobile in SoLoMo

Local reminds the poor cousin of social and mobile in the SoLoMo world

One of the tech buzzwords, or acronyms, a few years back was SoLoMo – Social Local Mobile. In reviewing the slides for the Future Proofing Your Business presentation next week, the term came up in one of the notes.

It’s interesting look at the fates of the three different concepts over the past few years; mobile has boomed and redefined computing and social has become big business with Facebook growing into a hundred billion dollar company.

Local though has struggled with Google, Facebook and a host of smaller and newer startups struggling while the Yellow Pages franchise dies. Despite the power of maps and geolocation, local just isn’t doing as well as the other two.

This could be down to the difficulty in harvesting the massive amounts of disparate data available to any service trying to draw an accurate picture of what’s in the neighbourhood.

Google Places tried to standardise that information for local businesses but the complexity of the service and its opaque, arbitrary rules meant adoption has been slow and merchants are reluctant to update details in case they fall foul of the rules.

Local services’ failure to take off has also had a consequence for the media as its in hyperlocal services that publishers have possibly their best opportunity to rebuild their fortunes.

That failure to properly harness mobile has also hurt merchants as many local operations are struggling to find useful places to advertise given Google Adwords and Facebook can be extremely expensive places to advertise.

So the mobile space is still ripe for a smart entrepreneur – a new Google or Facebook – to dominate.

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.

How Google could be about to disrupt the telco industry

Is Google about to disrupt the global telecommunications industry?

Google are in talks with Hutchison Whampoa for the Hong Kong based conglomerate to provide global roaming for Google’s proposed mobile phone network reports the London Telegraph.

Hutchison, who recently agreed to buy UK operator O2 for £10.2 billion from Spain’s Telefonica, are one of the quiet global telecommunications players with services in East Asia, Europe and Australia. An international roaming agreement with Hutchison would give Google a substantial global headstart.

While the mobile phone angle is the obvious service for a global cellular network, another attraction for both Google and Hutchison is the Internet of Things. Being able to offer a worldwide machine to machine (M2M) data service fits very well into Google’s aspirations with products like Nest.

For the mobile phone operators, the prospect of Google entering their market can’t be comforting with the search engine giant having three times the stock market capitalisation of the world’s biggest telco, China Mobile.

It may well be however communications companies have little choice as the software companies start to take the telcos’ profits just as they have done with many other industries.

Should the story be true about Hutchison and Google being in talks it will probably be the start of a massive shift in the global communications industry and one that will see many national champions threatened.

Google’s global network ambitions could change the future of the Internet of Things industry.

Preparing for the mobile data explosion

Cisco’s Visual Networking Index predicts massive growth for mobile data use as smartphone use and the internet of things grows.

Late last month Cisco Systems released its annual Visual Networking Index that tracks the company’s predictions for the growth of global network traffic over the upcoming five years.

It’s no surprise this year’s report predicts global data traffic will grow at over fifty percent compounded each year with Cisco expecting 24.3 exabytes to be pushed around the world’s networks each month by 2019.

Most of that network traffic will come from tablet and smartphones with Cisco predicting data use will grow by up to a factor of five on those devices with devices like wearables growing fourfold.

This growth creates a challenge for telcos as they invest in capacity to deal with the increased traffic and Cisco sees half of all smartphone connections will be handed off to WiFi networks by the decade’s end.

Summary of Per-Device Usage Growth, MB per Month

Device Type	2014	2019
Nonsmartphone	22 MB/month	105 MB/month
M2M Module	70 MB/month	366 MB/month
Wearable Device	141 MB/month	479 MB/month
Smartphone	819 MB/month	3,981 MB/month
4G Smartphone	2,000 MB/month	5,458 MB/month
Tablet	2,076 MB/month	10,767 MB/month
4G Tablet	2,913 MB/month	12,314 MB/month
Laptop	2,641 MB/month	5,589 MB/month

Source: Cisco VNI Mobile, 2015

Handing half the growth in mobile traffic over to Wi-Fi connections, most of which will be connected to fiber or ADSL services will provide challenges for fixed line operators as well who will see the demand for capacity also explode over the rest of the decade.

Much of this explains the moves by companies like Telstra to roll out public Wi-Fi services to start locking users into their services. It also gives them, and consumers, an opportunity to understand how networks that mix both cellular and Wi-Fi behave.

Another aspect of the Cisco VNI survey is the Internet of Things which is going to see exponential growth as industrial and household devices start being connected either directly through the telco networks, across unlicensed radio spectrum or over private Wi-Fi systems.

While Cisco predicts the bulk of that traffic as being generated by smartphones, the company sees connected devices as growing by 45% per year over the next five years with 3.2 billion sensors connected to the internet by the end of the decade.

Notable in the prediction that Low Powered Wide Area (LPWA) networks – non cellular systems mostly operating in the unlicensed spectrum used by Wi-Fi networks – will provide nearly a third of the connections by 2019. At the same time we can expect many M2M deployments to consolidate traffic locally with much of the data processing down locally before the residual information being passed up the network.

As usual the Cisco VNI report underscores, and possibly understates, the growth in mobile data usage we’re going to see over the rest of the decade. For businesses, it’s time to plan for managing both the flow and application that smart devices are going to generate in our daily operations.

Will mobile banking drive the developed world’s economies?

Banks and telcos look to transform Africa with mobile banking and payments

Microsoft founder Bill Gates suggests mobile banking can revolutionise developing nation’s economies says in a guest post for online magazine The Verge.

“People being able to participate on their phone, no matter where they live, even if they’re in a remote rural village in Tanzania or Kenya, they’ll be able to save small micro-payments,” Gates told The Verge during an interview in New York. “They can participate on the economy through their phone, but also in the fall when it’s time to pay the school fees, they’ve saved the money for the year. That’s transformative for their family.”

Gates’ piece appeared at the same time French telco Orange announced a partnership with Ecobank to provide mobile payments in several African countries.

Bringing banking to the masses through mobile phones is one example of how emerging markets can leapfrog the technological and institutional barriers that have given the western world a head start.

For poor and remote communities, a combination of cheap photovoltaic (PV) cells and cellular base stations mean it’s possible to connect into the global economy without the need of massive government or corporate investment.

As Gates points out, this has the potential to dramatically change the economies of many emerging markets.

Microsoft’s cloudy future

Microsoft is making the shift to the cloud and devices, but those markets are turning out not to be profitable.

This morning Microsoft announced its quarterly results and, once again, they confirmed the company’s move into the cloud, a transition that means the company has to deal with reduced margins in once immensely profitable markets.

While Microsoft’s earnings beat analyst estimates, the stock still dropped on out of hours trading on the US markets. The reason being margins showed a slight decline and the impending release of Windows 10, which will be free for customers upgrading, portends a further fall in income.

The fading of Windows is best shown in the results for the company’s Devices and Consumer licensing division which covers licensing of the operating system and is the second biggest contributor to Microsoft’s revenues and profits. The segment’s takings are slowly declining although surprisingly the division’s margins are standing up.

Windows’ decline shows the post XP recovery Microsoft was hoping for the division has failed to materialise beyond a bump last quarter, as the company explained in its media release;

Windows OEM Pro revenue declined 13%; revenue was impacted by the business PC market and Pro mix returning to pre-Windows XP end of support levels and by new lower-priced licenses for devices sold to academic customers

With company making various versions of Windows 8 and 10 free, it’s hard to see the division doing anything but accelerating its decline as fewer people actually pay for the operating system.

Fading margins

Also illustrating Windows’ falling fortunes is how the Computer and Gaming Hardware division’s revenue threatens to overtake the Devices and Consumer Licensing group’s contribution. The problem for Microsoft with this that the manufacture of Xboxes and Surface tablets only boasts a profit margin of 12% against consumer licensing’s 93%.

Last week at its preview of Windows 10 Microsoft showcased its HoloLens virtual reality technology, while impressive it’s unlikely to boast margins any better than Xbox consoles or Surface tablets. At best it will be a trivial contribution to the company’s bottom line.

Microsoft Margins by operating segment

Percentage margins	Q1-14	Q2-14	Q3-14	Q4-14	Q1-15	Q2-15
Devices and Consumer Licensing	87%	90%	87%	92%	93%	93%
Computing and Gaming Hardware	15%	9%	14%	1%	20%	12%
Phone Hardware	n/a	n/a	n/a	3%	18%	14%
Devices and Consumer Other	21%	21%	21%	17%	17%	23%
Commercial Licensing	92%	92%	91%	92%	92%	93%
Commercial Other	17%	23%	25%	31%	33%	35%

Dwarfing both divisions in both revenue and profit is the Commercial Licensing segment which also boasts fat margins of 93% and accounts for nearly half the money coming into the organisation. Commercial Licensing remains static and provides the bedrock for the company’s cashflow.

The big growth area remains the cloud with the Other Commercial division, which includes most of the online and professional services growing steadily. While showing growth, this part of the business boasts a relatively low margin of 33% so any market moves from Enterprise licensing to the cloud will have a sharp effect on the company’s bottom line.

Mobile black holes

Of all Microsoft’s divisions, the problem remains the Phone Hardware segment with low margins, declining sales and a shrinking market share. Reports released overnight indicate that over a third of Lumia devices sold are not being activated which may indicate distribution channels are having to deal with unsold stock.

Compounding Microsoft’s poor position in the phone marketplace is the resurgence of Apple’s iPhone, particularly in the Chinese market where Microsoft is failing dismally. Global market share figures are indicating Apple may soon overtake Samsung as the world’s largest smartphone vendor while Android systems are coming to dominate the global marketplace.

Tomorrow Apple will announce their results and we’ll see how the two companies are travelling, the contrasts will almost certainly be striking. For Microsoft, even if they do manage a shift to mobility and the cloud, they are unlikely to repeat Apple’s success in reinventing themselves.

A non toxic form of midlife crisis — Audible CEO and founder Don Katz

In an interview with Decoding The New Economy, Katz describes a startup journey that covers all the bases.

“I had what my wife describes as non toxic form of midlife crisis,” says Don Katz of Audible, the company he founded in 1994 and remains CEO of today. In an interview with Decoding The New Economy, Katz describes a startup journey that covers all the bases.

As Rolling Stone’s European correspondent Katz was engaged to write a book in the early 1990s about how digital technologies were changing music and what he realised was the industry was about to go through a fundamental change.

“I had a wonderful career as a writer, I was a long form magazine writer in the glory days of ten thousand word articles,” Katz says of his life in journalism. A book commission lead him to research the future of digital distribution of written works.

Survival in the digital economy

One of the driving ideas was how creators can sustain themselves in the digital economy, “my content was already being ripped off on the Unix internet and I thought ‘how will the profession creative class sustain themselves if there’s no ability to control the distribution?'”

Having founded Audible in 1995 at a time when few people were downloading or even using the net, Katz was in the box seat of the first tech boom and subsequent tech wreck in 2001.

At the peak of the dot com boom Audible was floated on the NASDAQ stock market, “In 1999 good companies that were leading categories went public and got massive amounts of free capital.” Katz recalls, “It was one of those weird moments, there were 1500 publicly listed internet companies at the beginning of 2000 and there were 140 by 2003.”

Surviving the dot com bust

Katz puts the company’s survival during that period to a conservative attitude towards capital and the alliances he had created with the industry’s major players — at one stage Microsoft held a 37% share in the company and Katz was one of Steve Jobs’ confidants during the early development of the iPod.

Eventually one of those alliances became critical when Katz became bored with running a listed company, “it was an amazing adventure being a public company CEO for nine and a half years. It was very exciting and an honour to serve shareholders.”

Katz’s patience ran out with being a public company CEO when automated trading came to dominate the daily operations of management, “suddenly you had this metaphysical sense of ‘who are you working for if someone wants volatility?’ That suddenly got old.”

Audible already had a relationship with Amazon who had taken five percent of the business in 2000 in return for bundling audio book links on the ecommerce giant’s book pages. Katz also found Amazon founder Jeff Bezo’s long term view towards investment and returns a much more satisfying business model than the day to day grind of meeting short term shareholder demands.

In early 2008 Amazon bought Audible for $300 million and retained Katz as the company’s CEO.

Building new startups

For new startups, Katz advises “make an absolutely fearless inventory of what you know is true about this idea and what you’re good at and what you’re not good at.”

“You need to have people you can trust and believe in. Beyond that, be very sober about business models that are sustainable. There’s a lot mistakes that people make where you’re solving a problem in a piece of a value chain that isn’t sustainable. It’s easy to get confused about who the customer is.”

“Figure out who the real customer is. Sometime people overplay the fact that the customer is the capital, the capital will come if people have the innovation and the passion.”

Hiding Hollywood

Changing maps devalues the trust in location services

What it comes maps, trust is everything. If you’re uncertain about what a map tells you then it’s pretty close to useless.

Gizmodo has an interesting story of how tourism and residents clash underneath the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles with the resultant changes to Google Maps and Garmin GPS systems.

It’s surprising that Google, Garmin and other mapping services have agreed to create misleading maps as this devalues the trust in their services.

That’s their business choice though, although in the long term this going to deeply hurt trust in their maps.

The mobile payments industry has a USB moment

Could the Apple Pay experience be similar to the development of the computer USB port?

Has Apple Pay legitimised mobile payments? It appears so, reports the New York Times. Since the launch of Apple’s payments service, Google and other mobile payment providers are claiming usage has doubled with customers exploring the systems.

If this is true, it’s similar to how Apple legitimised the USB port in 1998 with the release of the iMac.

Prior to the iMac the USB port was a bit of an oddity, on most PCs the sockets sat unused and the few devices available on Windows computers worked reliably, as Bill Gates himself found out during a live demonstration at the 1998 Comdex show.

Unlike Apple Pay, the move to USB on Macs wasn’t welcome and it was a high stakes decision by Steve Jobs given that Apple’s existence was still precarious and its user base was still made up of largely of true believers who had been through years in the wilderness with the company.

Those users also had many thousands of dollars invested in Apple Device Bus (ADB) devices, all of which became redundant with the move to USB. Many customers at the time swore this was the last straw and they would move to Windows PCs.

Apple’s users didn’t carry out their threats and stayed with the company whose move to USB turned out to be a winner for the entire computer industry.

For Apple USB’s success meant their customers were no longer locked into a proprietary technology, for manufacturers they were able to start moving off archaic serial and parallel ports while for Microsoft the shift meant a better range of more reliable devices — although their operating systems struggled with USB until the release of the far more stable Windows XP.

It appears in this respect Apple Pay is repeating history in giving a boost to a technology that has been struggling to find traction in the market place.

The difference this time is that the payments industry is a far bigger market with far more implications for the broader economy than the computer peripherals segment.

If Apple raise the boat on payment systems, there are some incumbent businesses who are going to find themselves in a very different marketplace in five years time.