Blog Entries for Business Tech Talk

You can't buy internet cool

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:00:00 +0100

In many ways it was Yahoo! who pioneered Silicon Valley’s ‘Greater Fool’ business model during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.

The Greater Fool model involves hyping a website, online service or new technology in the hope a hapless corporation dazzled by the spin will buy the business for an improbably larg [...]

Sunset on the laptop market

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:00:00 +0100

Last week, Toshiba released their Kira laptop computer, a premium device aimed at the 'aspirational' market.

The Kira is a fine device with good specs, little weight and an ambitious $2000 price point. It probably also marks the laptop computer's decline.

As tablet computers and smartphones become most people's [...]

3D printing comes of age

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:00:00 +0100

It may well be that a technology has reached mainstream acceptance when the media starts writing scare stories and politicians demand that something must be done.

Should that be the case, then 3D printing has come of age with the story of the first gun being fabricated and demands that legislation be passed preve [...]

The rise of the robot barista

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 01 May 2013 14:00:00 +0100

One of the challenges in having a houseful of marauding teenagers is keeping the fridge restocked, particularly over the school holidays.

So last week I found we were out of milk at 5am, so off to the nearest service station I headed and found there was a line of tradesmen out the door waiting to buy a $1 self se [...]

Can maps change the way we work?

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0100

"Work the Way You Live" is Google's motto for the enterprise maps service which the search engine giant hopes to make as ubiquitous in business as it is in the home.

At Google Atmosphere, the company showed off their mapping technology and how it can be used by large organisations. It's a compelling story.

[...]

How more grunt in the IT engine got V8 Supercars purring

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0100

"We were penny wise and pound foolish," says Peter Trimble, finance and systems director of the V8 Supercars, about the IT set-up he found when he started with the motor sport organisation 18 months ago.

The V8 Supercars were like many businesses which had outgrown their basic IT set-up and were struggling as [...]

Dodging an internet apocalypse

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0100

There's nothing a like a little hiccup to the internet to bring the tech charlatans and other cockroaches out of the woodwork, although wiser heads are now starting to prevail.

As it turned out, the internet wasn't "shaken to the core" by a childish spat between two groups of self-righteous geeks.

It's worthwhile keeping non-events like this in mind the next time you read a breathless article about an evil hacker, cyber terrorist or rogue regime threatening to bring the onl [...]

The five stages of killing a tech product

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0100

Killing a technology product is never a clean process, as Google well knows. Microsoft shows the way to deal with a failed project and we're seeing its five stages of abandoning a product as it prepares to retire Windows 8.

The stages of Microsoft abandoning a product are well known – the failure of Microsoft Vista is the best example, but not the only one.

As Microsoft smooths Window 8′s pillow and prepares for its imminent demise we can see the process at work.

Den [...]

On being a good internet citizen

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 22:00:03 +0100

I grabbed a quick coffee with Zendesk founder and CEO Mikkel Svane and his Australian manager Michael Hansenlast week where they told me about the company's story to date.

One thing that stood out during the conversation was Mikkel's comment about Zendesk being a good internet citizen.

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

Online companies have [...]

First we kill email, then PowerPoint and office meetings

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0100

Two years ago, French technology firm Atos raised eyebrows after announcing the company would go email free.

Atos CEO Thierry Breton said at the time:

We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives. At [Atos] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organisations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.

Breton's idea is to [...]

Dealing with the data explosion

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0100

"Last year's mobile data traffic was nearly 12 times the size of the entire global internet in 2000."

That little factoid from Cisco's 2013 Virtual Networking Index illustrates how the business world is evolving as various wireless, fibre and satellite communications technologies are delivering faster access to businesses and households.

Mobile data growth isn't slowing; Cisco estimates global mobile data traffic was estimated at 885 petabytes a month and Cisco estimates it [...]

Is telecommuting another broken technology promise?

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 14:00:00 +0100

Telecommuting promised, or still promises, to free caged office workers from their cubicles, relieve the sardine-tin conditions on our peak hour trains and reduce traffic congestion on clogged roads. But has that promise been lost like so many other predictions of the technology age?

Banning remote workers is the latest edict from Marissa Mayer as she continues her daunting task of turning around Yahoo!.

Mayer's move follows Google's chief financial officer Patrick Pichette [...]

20 trends for 2020

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 21:31:07 +0100

Earlier this week I spoke at the Ovations Speaker Showcase about the 20 Trends for 2020, the big economic and technology trends that will define business over the rest of this decade.

The most important trend for business is how the pace of work is speeding up.

For the last 30 years business has been getting faster – the arrival of the fax machine, desktop computer, mobile phone and then the internet has seen the speed of workplaces accelerate dramatically and what used to [...]

IT pricing inquiry reveals systemic problems with the Australian economy

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 14:00:00 +0100

On Tuesday, ABC Radio 702 Sydney asked me to comment on Adobe, Apple and Microsoft being summonsed to appear before the Federal Parliament's IT pricing inquiry.

As SmartCompany has reported, the software giants will be asked to explain why there are such price differentials between Australian and overseas prices.

By way of example, Adobe Creative Suite 6 is available on the company website for $US1,299 which is $A1,263 on today's exchange rate. The listed Australian price i [...]

Sharks patrol these waters

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:00:00 +0100

Last weekend's story that The New York Times was attacked by Chinese hackers following a story exposing the financial details of the nation's Premier doesn't come as much of a surprise to anybody following either China or computer security issues.

Another aspect in the story that doesn't surprise is the poor performance of The New York Times' anti-virus software. According to Forbes, Symantec only caught one malware program out of the 45 installed by the hackers.

I have an [...]

Necessity, innovation and the birth of the web

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 14:00:00 +0100

The man who invented the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, spoke at the launch of the CSIRO's Digital Productivity and Services Flagship in Sydney yesterday.

In telling about how the idea the idea of web, or Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), came about, Berners-Lee touched on some fundamental truths about innovation in big organisations.

In the 1990s the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva had thousands of researchers bringing their own computers, [...]

Watching the costs: Why 2013 might be an expensive year for business

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 14:00:00 +0100

If you're the type of person who closely reads your bills and the letters from your gas supplier or phone company detailing changes in your terms and conditions you might have noticed something unusual last year – phone bills have started drifting up.

This started last July when Telstra reduced download allowances and mobile handsets subsidies and a few months later Optus followed them with a range of increased charges and reduced benefits.

At the beginning of the year Voda [...]

Were netbooks the Model T or Leyland P-76 of the computer world?

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:00:00 +0100

Last week Taiwanese technology website Digitimes reported Asustek have shipped their last eeePC netbooks, bringing to an end a product that promised to change the computing world when they were first released in 2007.

At the time, the eeePC netbook picked up on a number of trends – cheap hardware, the maturity of the open source Linux operating system, affordable wireless access and, most importantly, the accessibility of cloud computing services.

There'd been a pent-up dema [...]

Technology karma

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 14:00:00 +0100

In business as in life, your bad actions can come back to bite you. In Buddhism it's called karma – gran used to call it getting your just desserts.

Right now, Microsoft are getting their just desserts as Google blocks Windows Phones from accessing their maps service.

For those of us with long memories, this is a sort of justice as Microsoft did exactly the same thing to other weaker companies when it was the dominant company in the 1990s.

The worst example was the c [...]

Talk to your customers – the real lesson from Instagram's woes

pwallbank@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 21:57:48 +0100

One of the big lessons from Tuesday's outrage over changes to the photo sharing app Instagram is that businesses have to be upfront with users over alterations that will affect them.

Like most social media services, Instagram assumes a license to use anything you upload to their service – any picture, music clip or writing you publish on Facebook, Instagram or any other platform can be redistributed by the site's owner.

Those clauses in Instagram's terms and conditions are [...]