Tag: web

Are local governments the key to hyperlocal media success?

Does New York City’s partnership with Nextdoor.com create an opportunity for hyperlocal media?

Wired Magazine reports New York City residents are to get their own social network as the local government teams up with Nextdoor.com to provide a neighbourhood information service.

The aim of the partnership between Nextdoor.com and New York City is to improve the delivery of local services to residents.

The partnership means Nextdoor, which connects residents into geographic social networks based on their verified addresses, will be fully integrated with New York government departments, to be used by police, fire, utility, and other agencies. Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia anticipates the city will use the service to post information about power outages, construction notices, traffic accidents, and weather events like tropical storms, among many other potential use cases, bolstering municipal efficiency and citizen engagement.

On the face of it, this seems a great way for local government to communicate with residents, but it may be this arrangement turns out be a way to make hyperlocal media work.

A continued disappointment are the failures of  creating local neighbourhood news  services — known as hyperlocal media — with NBC recently closing down its Everyblock operation and AOL struggles with its Patch service.

Part of the problem is that hyperlocal news is labour intensive, doesn’t scale very well and without the locals becoming part of the online community, these services struggle to get traction.

Another aspect is the advertising model, local newspapers were insanely profitable when they were the main way for neighbourhood businesses and real estates agencies to advertise.

The web broke that model and Google’s failure to execute with its local business service has meant there isn’t an online replacement for the local advertising model.

So it may be that partnerships between local government and the online platforms are the way to make hyperlocal services work.

It will be interesting to see if the New York City partnership does become a model for hyperlocal news or just becomes a glorified and expensive community noticeboard.

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How Green is the Internet?

What are the environmental costs of the internet, cloud computing and big data?

Earlier this month Google hosted “How Green is the Internet?“, a summit which looked at the environmental costs of the connected society and technologies like cloud computing and Big Data.

The environmental impact of the internet and related technologies is a subject worth exploring, like all industries there are real costs to the planet which usually aren’t bourne by those who make the profits or reap the benefits.

In complex modern supply chains which often span the globe, the costs are not often apparent either. What appears to be a relatively clean, innocuous product to city consumers could have terrible environmental consequences for others.

Google’s summit is a good example of overlooking many external costs in that most of the conversations looked at reducing energy usage, understandable given the company’s dependence on power hungry data centres which drive their cloud computing services.

move-to-cloud-cost-savings-on-the-internet

Energy usage is important in the discussion about digital technologies – the businesses of bits and bytes almost wholly relies upon having constant and reliable electricity supplies and power generation is one of the most environmentally damaging activities we engage in.

Focusing on energy consumption though is not the only aspect we need to look at when examining how green the internet is, there’s many other costs in building the supply chain that enables us to watch funny cat videos in our homes or offices.

The entire supply chain is complex and the session on infrastructure costs by Jon Koomey of Stanford University touched on this; there’s the environmental costs of building data centres, of manufacturing routers, of laying cables and – probably the most difficult question of all – what do we do with the e-waste generated by obsolete equipment.

Little of this was touched on in the Google conference and it’s interesting that the tech industry is focusing on the energy costs while overlooking other effects of a global, complex industry.

That isn’t to say the energy story isn’t valid. A number of the Google speakers emphasized the indirect energy saving costs as cloud computing and Big Data allows more intelligent business decisions that make industries and daily life more efficient.

A favourite example is the use of car parking apps where drivers save energy and reduce pollution because they aren’t driving around looking for the parking spaces. This puts Google’s acquisition of traffic app Waze into perspective.

Reducing driving times is just one area of where the internet is improving energy efficiency and these are important factors when considering the ‘greenness’ of the web.

However without considering the full impact of building, maintaining and disposing the equipment that we need to operate the internet, we aren’t really looking at the entire impact the internet is having on the planet.

Google’s conference though is a good starting point for that discussion which is one that every industry should be having.

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Dicing up the mobile web

A series of reports last week told how we use computers, tablets and smartphones is evolving. There are big consequences for all businesses.

Last week we had a series of reports on the changing web from Cisco, IBM and Ericsson along with Mary Meeker’s annual State Of The Internet presentation.

One thing all the reports agreed on was there is going to be a lot more data pushed around the net and the composition is changing as business and home users adapt to smartphones and tablet computers.

Cisco’s Visual Networking Index forecast online traffic would triple by 2017 while Ericsson’s Mobility Report predicts mobile internet traffic will grow twelve times by 2018.

What’s notable in those predictions is the amounts and types of data the different devices use. Cisco breaks down monthly traffic by device;

  • Smartphones 0.6 GB
  • Tablet computers 2.7 GB
  • Laptops and PCs 18.6 GB

In one way this isn’t surprising as the devices have differing uses and their form factors make it harder to consume more data. Cisco also points out that data consumption also varies with processor power. As PCs are the most powerful devices, it makes sense they would chew through more information.

Ericsson breaks down data use by application as well as device and that clearly shows the different ways we’re using these devices.

internet data traffic by mobile device

Notable in the graph is how file sharing is big on PCs but not on tablets or smartphones while email and social networking take up a bigger chunk of cellphone usage.

What’s also interesting in Ericsson’s predictions is how data traffic evolves. It’s notable that video is forecast to be the biggest driver of growth.

ericsson-by-data-traffic

Both Ericsson’s and Cisco’s predictions tie into Mary Meeker’s State Of The Internet presentation at the D11 Conference last week.

It’s worth watching Meeker’s presentation just for the way she packs over eighty slides into twenty minutes with a lot of information on how the economy is changing as the internet matures.

What all of these reports are telling us is that our society and economy are changing as these technologies mature. The business opportunities – and risks – are huge and there isn’t any industry that’s immune to these changes.

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57 million websites and nothing on

TV stations can get away with showing irrelevant, empty rubbish. Websites can’t.

Twenty years ago, Bruce Springsteen sang about TV having 57 channels and nothing on.

While little has changed on TV, today the web has 57 million websites* offering little beyond click bait and a quick rewrite of someone else’s work.

At the moment that model works for the kings and queens of the digital manor who pocket a few pennies for each of the ten stories their overworked interns pump out in a day but it’s hard to see how that form of publishing adds value to the audience.

The 1990s television stations and cable networks got away with no adding value – and still do today – because they are in industries that are tough for new entrants to enter.

But on the web there are far fewer barriers to new entrants which means offering 57 channels with nothing on, or 57 million websites with no real content, isn’t a long term path to success.

*a wild guess

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Airtasker’s crazy idea

Can Airtasker’s crazy idea redefine local businesses?

“Anyone who says something is crazy these days is crazy themselves,” says Jonathan Lui, the founder of Sydney based startup Airtasker.

The crazy idea Jonathan shares with co-founder Tim Fung is to create a global marketplace for small tasks.

If you need someone to walk your dog, do some gardening or be an extra in elaborate marriage proposal then Airtasker is a site to find the right person.

Since launching last year Airtasker has advertised more than 54,000 tasks with users looking for everything from dog walkers to computer repairers and actors.

Tim and Jonathan came upon the idea of a site for small tasks when moving house with the various hassles of cleaning, moving and packing. Instead of relying on friends and relatives to help out, they saw the opportunity for connecting willing workers with small tasks.

The site turns around how traditional classified advertisements work by paying on results rather than advertising. Lui sees it as “de-centralised social commerce.”

It’s not just small household tasks either, Jonathan sees Airtasker helping out larger companies with tasks like market research, mystery shopping or even local council inspections of street signs.

Unlike many of the crowdsourcing sites, the Airtasker team want to keep away from commoditising labour, instead seeing their ‘runners’ providing valuable local services.

One of the interesting aspects about the internet is how two opposite forces are working against each other – while the internet creates globalised marketplaces it also gives people new channels to discover local services.

Jonathan sees Airtasker as being at the forefront of hyperlocal marketplaces, with a global website enabling small traders and microbusinesses to deliver services locally.

That may be a crazy idea – but we live in crazy times.

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On being a good Internet citizen

What are the hallmarks of a responsible digital business?

I grabbed a quick coffee with Zendesk founder CEO Mikkel Svane and his Australian manager Michael Hansen in Sydney yesterday where they told me about the company’s story to date.

While I’ll be writing in the interview up in depth in the next few days one thing that stood out was Mikkel’s comment about Zendesk being a good internet citizen.

Those traits of being a good online corporate citizen include open APIs, a transparent culture and giving customers full access to their data.

Online companies have to embrace those principles if they are going to succeed and it’s the key to the fast growth of businesses like Zendesk and other cloud based services.

These principles have been the underpinning of the success of companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google.

What’s interesting with those companies is how they’ve moved away from those principles as they’ve grown and the pressures to ‘monetize’ have increased.

Abandoning those principles opens opportunities for many new players to disrupt the businesses of what have become the market incumbents.

With the pace of business accelerating, the assumption that companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter will retain their positions might be tested as the market moves to providers they can trust.

Those principles of being a good internet citizen may prove to be more important to online businesses than many of their managers and investors believe.

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Exciting but vague

A blank page for everyone is how Tim Berners-Lee sees the World Wide Web, this opens opportunities for inventors from all walks of life.

On Tuesday Tim Berners-Lee rounded off his Australian speaking tour with a City Talks presentation before 2,000 people at a packed Sydney Town Hall.

After an interminable procession of sponsor speeches, Berners-Lee covered many of the same topics in his presentations at the Sydney CSIRO workshop the previous week and the Melbourne talk the night before.

These included a call for everyone to learn some computer coding skills – or at least get to know someone who has some, wider technology education opportunities, more women in computing fields and a warning about the perils of government over-surveillance.

On government monitoring Internet traffic, Berners-Lee has been strident at all his talks and correctly points out most of our web browsing histories allow any outrageous conclusion to be drawn, particularly by suspicious law enforcement agencies and the prurient tabloid media.

Who owns the ‘off switch’ is also a concern after the Mubarak regime cut Egypt off the Internet during the Arab Spring uprising. The willingness of governments to cut connectivity in times of crisis is something we need to be vigilant against.

The web’s effect on the media was discussed in depth as well with Sean Aylmer, editor-in-chief of the Sydney Morning Herald, saying in his introduction that Berners-Lee’s invention had been the defining feature of Aylmer’s career.

While the web has been traumatic for a generation of newspapermen, Berners-Lee sees good news for journalists in the data explosion, “how do we separate the junk from the good stuff?” Asks Tim, “this is the role for journalists and editors”.

One person’s junk is another’s treasure though and the web presents one of the greatest opportunities for people to “write on their blank sheet of paper.”

When asked about what he regretted most about the web, Berners-Lee said “I’d drop the two slashes,” repeating the line from Melbourne the night before.

At each of his Australian speeches Berners-Lee has paid homage to his mentor at CERN, Mike Sendall. After Sendall passed away, his family found the original proposal for the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) which formed the basis for the world wide web.

“Exciting but vague” was the note Sendall made in the margins of Berners-Lee’s proposal.

Vague and exciting experiments was what drove people like James Watt and Thomas Edison during earlier periods of the industrial revolution. Tomorrow’s industries are today’s vague and strange ideas.

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