Tag: technology

Keynote speaking and presentations

Paul Wallbank speaks on how businesses, workplaces and communities are changing in the twenty first century

How is your business or community adapting to radically changing marketplaces and society?

Speaker, writer and broadcaster Paul Wallbank has been at the forefront of helping businesses and communities find opportunities in this rapidly changing era for twenty years.

Paul’s presentations are lively, interactive and designed to both entertain and challenge audiences looking at how their companies, industries and communities are going to prosper in the connected century.

Some of the areas Paul covers are the workplace of the future, employment in the age of robots, how the internet of machines is changing markets and what technologies like cloud computing, social media and Big Data mean to your business.

All keynotes, presentations and workshops can be customised to suit your unique needs. Topics include;

Future Proofing your business
Decoding the new economy
Leadership in a digital era
Tools for the new economy
Why Broadband Matters
The Future of Business

You can view many of Paul’s presentations at his Slideshare site.

Previous presentations have included;

The future office. What will the office of the future look like?
Web 4 Free. Doing business on the web with a shoestring budget.
The elder guru; exploding the myths of the digital divide.
The top ten solutions for getting the most from small business IT
What does it all mean? cutting through computer jargon.

All presentations are available as keynotes or workshops and Paul will tailor the content to suit your organisation’s or industry’s unique characteristics.

Paul connects the dots to show how your industry, business and family are being affected by changing trends in technology, economics and global demographics.

In explaining trends and technologies such as the internet of everything, cloud computing, social networking and broadband technologies, Paul deciphers the jargon and helps audiences identify opportunities and understand the risks in the new economy.

If you’d like to find how your business or community group can get more from their technology contact Paul for more information.

Hillary Clinton’s bid for the future

Hillary Clinton’s Initiative on Technology & Innovation shows politicians are beginning to take the challenges of a changing economy seriously

As the 2016 US Presidential election settles down into a competition between Republicans and Democrats, Hillary Clinton has released her vision for the American tech industry.

Hillary Clinton’s Initiative on Technology & Innovation is a comprehensive document laying out the candidate’s plans to increase the American workforce’s skills and the nation’s infrastructure.

What’s particularly notable about the Clinton plan is her aim of “building the tech economy on main street,” which is “focused on creating good jobs in communities across America.”

Spreading the tech industry’s jobs, and wealth, beyond a few middle class enclaves is an important objective for all nations in the twenty-first century and Clinton’s objectives are an indication that the US political establishment is beginning to understand this.

Other countries should be noting Clinton’s objectives to raise the skills of workers, build the tech infrastructure and get investment into smaller communities as something they too have towards.

In an Australian context, Clinton’s initiatives highlight the missed opportunity of the Turnbull government’s Innovation Statement, a narrowly focused and weak document that has done little to encourage investment and even less to reform skills training.

The Clinton move though shows technology, training and stimulating new businesses will be one of the imperatives of nations as they deal with a rapidly changing economy.

Voice technology and the generosity wars

In the upcoming voice technology wars, the most open and generous player could be the winner

The winner of the upcoming fight over voice technologies will come down to who is the most open and provides the best utility believes Tad Toulis, VP for design at smart speaker manufacturer Sonos.

A struggle is looming between the different voice systems believes Tad Toulis, VP of Design at smart speaker manufacturer Sonos.

We were speaking at Sonos’ Santa Barbara office the day after Google launched its Google Home voice activated hub to compete with Amazon’s and Apple’s Siri systems.

“There’s a little bit of syntax difference with every device we use, so we’re about to re-enter this environment where we have competing formats.” states Toulis, hinting at the days of competing network types operating systems and file types.

For Sonos, that fight between formats is an opportunity believes Toulis. “Sonos was very early into this space, so much so that it’s had a few lives. The original proposition was a way to get people who were into music to have access to their digital music and enliven their home with that music.”

“At a certain point in that arc, that category started to shrink a little bit and streaming started to emerge. Now streaming has become mainstream and we’re facing another cycle.”

Generous systems

Voice though is a social thing and that changes how we interact with devices Toulis believes, “we want to talk out loud in generous way to a generous system.”

“What people want is a supportive, powerful experience that creates good options day to day,” says Toulis. “The technology is fast approaching a tipping point where it’s very human centric.”

“The promise is to figure who can do that in the most natural way so you’re not thinking about the syntax and more about the experience.”

Finding a place at the table

Like most smaller players in the marketplace, Toulis sees Sonos as being a nuetral intermediary between with the various technology empires.

“Sonos offers a place in that conversation. We also approach it in a different way because it’s not one of our businesses, it is our business.”

“I assume we’ll do what we’ve done with the music services. We’ve always believed that we do well when there are many players.”

Winning the voice wars

When asked who is likely to win the voice wars, Toulis is quite rightly guarded, “what I’ve seen over my career in technology is what wins is what works for people, it’s not always the best technologies that win. What wins is the technology value proposition, here’s a need that hasn’t been satisfied and here’s a way of doing it that is sticky.”

“The one that creates the solution with the least resistance will win,” says Toulis. “The best solutions are usually pretty obvious. The problem is you have a bunch of specialists looking at it, they can’t see how obvious it is because they are looking past the target. They’re either very close up.”

While Toulis’ view is attractive, the risk for companies like Sonos is the technology empires find their business models aren’t suited to being open or generous and controlling access to their services is more compelling for their managers and shareholders.

Hopefully open web and data will prove to be the market’s driving forces and certainly Ted Toulis’ and Sonos’ views are what users would prefer, the giants though may not prove to be so generous.

A constancy of change

One constant about the technology sector is change, and a visit to Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum emphasises just how much the industry has changed over the years.

One constant about the technology sector is change, and a visit to Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum emphasises just how much the industry has changed over the years.

Notable are all the gone and forgotten brands that were in their day giants of the industry along with the efforts by various countries, Britain in particular, to compete with the US in computing.

But most striking are the old roles that rose and fell as technology evolved over the past century, from the Morse Code operators whose skills were essential for safe shipping and telegraph communications through to punch card operators and the ‘tape apes’ of the 1980s.

Most of those roles rose, became lucrative and then disappeared as technology evolved, just as the loom weavers’ jobs did in the eighteenth century.

Like the loom weavers and the companies that employed them, history and technology overtook them. Something that today’s business giants and high paid occupations need to keep in mind.

No industry is static and few jobs are safe in today’s rapidly changing world. It’s why we need to be making the investments in the skills and technologies that will define the future economy.

We can’t assume today’s jobs will be those of tomorrow.

Closing the DVR transition window

The rise and fall of Tivo is a good example of the transition effect during technological change

A good example of the technology transition effect is the Personal Video Recorder (PVR) where a decade ago relatively cheap hard disk drives started to displace videotape, CD and DVD players.

During that period Tivo was the giant of the PVR industry but it wasn’t to last as the plummeting price of hardware made the devices a commodity while the rise of streaming media changes the industry’s dynamics.

Now Tivo is no more as it is bought out by entertainment company Rovi, a victim of the transition effect.

The state of Australian technology – and journalism

Australia’s Tech Leaders conference brings together three industries that are being greatly disrupted.

Today I’m heading to the Blue Mountains just outside Sydney for the annual Tech Leaders conference.

With the conference bringing together tech industry vendors, public relations representatives and journalists, it’s an interesting snapshot of an industry in transition.

Technology vendors are dealing with the shift to cloud computing which destroys what were very comfortable and profitable business models.

Needless to say the journalists are the most disrupted group of all with most of the dwindling number now being freelancers and the few remaining staff reporters working under tough deadlines with few resources.

This leaves the Public Relations folk in the middle, as the traditional media channels decline they are having to work harder in getting their clients’ stories into the public domain. At the same time, the compressed margins for cloud affected vendors are cutting into PR budgets.

So Tech Leaders is interesting to see how three very different groups are dealing with their changing industries. I might also get to hear about some new technologies as well.

Apple opens the kimono

Apple’s new openness is part of a shift to a new business model

Something strange is happening at Apple, the once secretive company is now becoming far more open in its plans and relations with the media.

The latest example is the company inviting Sixty Minutes and Charlie Rose into its inner circles to interview CEO Tim Cook and go on tour of a future concept store with retail chief Angela Ahrendts.

Apple’s media friendliness marks a big change for the company that’s reflected in its markets as engaging with other partners becomes critical for future success. Successfully achieving this will mean another fundamental shift in the organisation’s management.

 

Open sourcing artificial intelligence

Google making some of its artificial intelligence open source could change the software industry.

Yesterday Google open sourced many of the features in its Tensorflow artificial intelligence service.

Making the services available to the community will mean many more opportunities to develop the technology. It could well prove to be a turning point for Artificial Intelligence in making it more accessible to the general public and business community.

Building a digital hub – and why governments shouldn’t try.

The experience of the Sydney Digital Hub shows why Australian governments struggle to create industrial centres.

“I’m not sure what to do with this,” frowned the public service executive to a group of blank faced departmental staffers. “I’ll take it,” I said to break the silence.

With that, I was on a journey into exactly what Sydney’s startup and digital media communities looked like and learning why governments struggle to build technology hubs.

I’d been working for the state government for two months after a specularly unsuccessful exit from a business and in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis getting a public service job seemed like a good idea.

Vague ideas

The project being discussed by Bob, my then director, was a single line in the recommendations from the then Premier’s Jobs Summit which was convened in the panicky dark days of the 2008 global financial crisis – “A digital hub will be setup around the Australian Technology Park.”

Bob, and the management of the New South Wales Department of Trade and Investment had little idea of what a ‘digital hub’ was and my position of ‘Manager, Creative Industries” – with a staff of precisely zero – was vague given the state’s support to the creative industries was, and remains, based on throwing big buckets of money at the Hollywood movie studios.

So the Sydney Digital Hub was born and the quest to find out exactly was was needed, or at least would keep the Premier’s office happy, was on.

It immediately became apparent the Australian Technology Park wasn’t going to be the centre of anything as far as Sydney’s startup community was concerned. The complex was too far away from the city and too expensive for most of the businesses.

Replacing what’s existing

“We already have a digital hub,” was the other response. “It’s Surry Hills.” Which was a far call as a large part of the Sydney startup and digital media communities were based in the suburb on the edge of the city’s centre.

This actually worked well as the exact wording of the committee’s recommendation was “create a digital hub around the Australian Technology Park.” In this case, Surry Hills was ‘around’ the ATP.

Eventually the project became Digital Sydney and by the time it was launched, the state had gone through two Premiers, elected another party into government and I was long gone from the department, having lasted just 19 months.

Before leaving, I had managed to steer through a million dollars in funding for the project from the then Labor minister – since caught up on corruption charges surrounding coal mine leases – which, to their credit, was honoured by the incoming Liberal government that took power shortly after.

Dying a slow, unfunded death

That funding was renewed and the project died a slow death, which didn’t really matter as Sydney’s startup and digital media communities had developed despite of, not because of, any government policies. Indeed, the New South Wales’ government’s economic development policies were, and remain, focused on property development and coal mining.

Which brings us to the present day, where the Sydney startup community is upset at the Sydstart conference being poached by the Victorian government and moving to Melbourne on the promise of a million dollars in support as part of the state’s startup program.

The promoters of the now relocated and renamed conference are adamant it matters, but the truth is it doesn’t. In fact the biggest ticket item of NSW government support to the IT sector is the annual CeBIT conference that in truth has added little to the state’s technology industry and many similar initiatives in Victoria have had a similar lack success.

A lack of long term vision

Part of the reason for that lack of success is a lack of consistency and long term strategies, in fact the Australian Technology Park itself is under threat as the state government looks at selling the site to apartment developers despite the protests of the tech community.

Another aspect is state sponsored conferences, hubs and initiatives are not enough to create an industrial centre. There has to be an organic, or business, reason for a hub to develop.

For industry hubs, be they tech startups or anything else, the core need is a critical mass of investors and skilled workers with easy access to markets. For internet based businesses, the latter isn’t an issue which is why Wellington in New Zealand has done better than either Sydney or Melbourne in recent years.

Providing stable frameworks

The role of governments in this is to provide a stable framework for businesses to work within, something that hasn’t been a feature of state or Federal Australian politics in recent years with leadership instability and the increasing prevalence of policy by thought bubble, a good example being the latest scheme to create a new technology hub even further out of downtown Sydney on the site of disused power station.

While the talk of government sponsored initiatives is nice and keeps my former colleagues at the state government occupied writing ministerial briefings on pink paper, building the tech hubs of the future needs motivated entrepreneurs, investors and skilled workers. The best thing governments can do is make sure they encourage all three groups and leave the community building to the community.

Not following the herd – Investors discover agtech

Agriculture technology is a neglected space, which means opportunities of savvy investors.

One of the most ignored industries when it comes to technology is agriculture, which is odd as farmers and their downstream supply chain are probably on of the most tech intensive industries of all.

That may be changing though, New York analyst firm CB Insights reports Agtech deals jumped three fold last year following Monsanto’s acquisition of Climate Corporation.

A $150 million a year in investments though is still quite small compared to some of the sectors investors are piling money into.

That there is comparatively little attention paid to agricultural technology companies probably tells us much about the herd mentality of investors, it also suggests there’s some great opportunities for savvy business people.

China goes on the tech offensive

The meeting between US and Chinese leaders later this month could mark the pivot of China’s economy

The most important economic relationship in today’s economy is that between China and the United States, despite bellicose chest thumping by both sides their wealth and well being of their industries is inextricably linked.

Against the backdrop of that chest thumping and a slowing Chinese economy, the Chinese and US Presidents are due to meet in two weeks time where trade and security relations between the two countries are at the top of the agenda.

China’s leaders though plan to emphasise their nation’s tech prowess and its importance to the US’s sector, something the New York Times reports has irritated the Obama administration.

What would almost further irritate the US leadership is that US tech giants including Apple, Facebook, IBM, Google and Uber have been invited to attend a Chinese tech summit hosted by Microsoft and the PRC President will be dining with Bill Gates before flying to Washington to meet Obama.

Redmond gets on board

Microsoft’s role in the China Forum is interesting, the company is extending the hand of friendship not just to nations but also to companies that were fierce rivals in the past, just last week the company announced a partnership with VMWare despite deep rivalry in recent years and CEO Satya Nadella is due to appear at next week’s Salesforce conference.

Coupled with Microsoft’s battle to keep offshore customers’ email records out of the reach of US legal jurisdiction, it’s clear Microsoft are playing a long global game with their business plans so the support of China’s initiatives isn’t surprising.

Given China’s strength as an emerging tech powerhouse and its administration’s ambition to move the economy up the value chain, it’s also not a surprise that other US technology companies are reluctant to join the politicians’ games.

Choosing Seattle

The choice of Seattle is interesting as well, while the city is a major tech centre with companies like Amazon and Microsoft based there, it’s far more integrated with the Pacific Rim economies than San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Again this is a loud message to the US tech community.

For China, the success of showing off their technological strengths is an important in sending a message to its East Asian neighbours and the US that the nation is diversifying and shouldn’t be underestimated, a process that Chinese Premier Li described as “a painful and treacherous process” at a World Economic Forum event in Dalian today.

The meeting between Xi Jinping and Barack Obama in two weeks time, and the associated events in Seattle, could well prove to be the marker of where China moved into the next phase of its economic development and its relationship with the  United States.

Researching the next generation of wearables

The Obama Administration teams with industry to develop a Silicon Valley based wearable tech hub

The Obama Administration teams with Apple, HP, Boeing and others to develop a Silicon Valley based wearable tech hub with $170 million in funding reports Venture Beat.

Over $17o million will be invested by the US government and its private sector partners in hybrid flexible electronics manufacturing research that may well underpin the next generation of wearable and embeddable devices.

For the US, its success in the electronics industry is based upon its strong research sector. Making the investments today will help the nation compete as the technology landscape evolves.