I’ve posted extensively at my displeasure at how backwards banking systems invariably seem to be, I’ve also commented at length about my belief that 2008 will be the year that we see social networking sites becoming truly value adding. Put the two together and you have a pretty strong case for subverting a significant proportion of commerce as it is transacted today and putting it into a 2.0 framework.
RWW predicts that 2008 will be the Year of Business Networking, with predictions that LinkedIn will either IPO or be bought. Clearly the sort of change we’re talking about here is significantly gargantuan to need serious amounts of both capital and credibility to pull it off, public listing or ownership by a publicly traded company would provide the fuel for LinkedIn to rally up the ante.
The ripple project seeks to subvert banking by creating an opportunity for peer to peer financial transactions to occur. The ripple project is an open source one and this will be its limiting factor. To really subvert banking will take a neutral platform players with significant scale and credibility.
Google would be the natural choice - anyone want to comment on the possibility?
The other day was our 11th wedding anniversary (gee, that long already!) and, as parents were visiting from Wellington, we took the rare opportunity to catch a movie.
We saw Gloomy Sunday which I can highly recommend (so much so that it’s now on my Facebook favorite movie list. The WWII Hungarian set movie especially rang a chord for me given my familial history (both parents Hungarian and an unfortunately close connection with the Holocaust) but I’d recommend it to anyone who appreciates good art house cinema. It’s in German with English subtitles but is a beautiful movie for all that.
On a slightly less intellectual level, I’ve been making pre and post Christmas amends for gluttony and have swum 10kms and run 40kms in the past week - unlike Rowan I’m training for nothing more than the most important race of all - The Human Race.
Over on the VortexDNA blog, Kaila came up with her take on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Kaila is a smart lady who has a large reading list (both printed and bit-based) so when she speaks (or writes), one tends to listen.
Kaila’s internet hierarchy of needs looked like this;
It’s a great framework and falls nicely into line with previous posts of Kaila’s about the ultimate potential of the internet. The way I see it at this point in time we’ve climbed the first three or so rungs of the ladder but all those rungs involve merely using the internet as an adjunct tool to what we do day to day. We are still yet to see widely adopted technologies (and it will be technologies that drive the paradigm shifts that allow us to climb to higher levels) that truly contextualise the web experience and drive personal growth possibilities.
So the question is, what will it take to get us to higher levels? Simply wider adoption of existing stuff to achieve a truly global and all-encompassing connected web? Or the introduction of the fabled semantic web? Perhaps context driven technologies such as VortexDNA’s interesting product?
I guess no one know for sure, what I do know is that the journey will be interesting….
PS - I’m just wading through Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave (summer holiday reading). Given that it was written nearly three decades ago, Toffler had a remarkable insight into where the world was heading. Recommended reading for those interested in the sociological aspect of paradigm shift.
An interesting editorial on the IT business edge site discusses the recent Netsuite IPO.
Of course there is the expected discussion on whether or not SaaS has come of age, and the arguments for or against Netsuite being a potential SMB product, but what really got my attention was this line;
NetSuite’s marketing pitch is more like those of traditional software vendors than best-of-breed SaaS providers.
The inference here is that the easiest way to circumvent the issues around buyer not understanding, having faith on, or preparing to adopt a SaaS product is to simply not push the fact that it is. Instead of jumping up and down and claiming that “this product is SaaS, SaaS is the way of the future therefore by default this product is the right one”, vendors should rather adopt the perspective that “this is simply the right choice” - sure push the benefits of central admin, no onsite upgrading required and an easier revenue stream, but rather than push those as some magical result of the SaaS model (and bear in mind that SMBs neither know nor care about SaaS per se), push them as a distinctive feature of your software product as opposed to the competitions software product.
Its a logical piece of advice when one remember that the customer doesn’t care about acronyms, just solutions.
Maybe the hot marketing tip for SaaS companies for ‘08?
Lance posted about this NY Time article describing the chaos post property bubble burst in Florida.
I’ve always been a little sceptical about th apartment developments sprouting up in Auckland and Wellington - the minimal returns (generally well below the rate of interest on borrowing), they hyped up valuations and the promises of capital gains to be made all sum up to a worrying and risky proposition.
So - with the holiday spirit in mind here is my top tip for Jan/Feb 2008 - if you have investment properties that run at a loss and were bought with the idea of making a capital gain on them, limit your losses now and sell - the price you get may be unpalatable but it’s significantly better than what you’ll get if you hold off selling for a few more months (and even more again than if the banks have to suddenly call in debt to ease their liquidity ratio woes).
New Zealand is a society built on volunteerism - I’m involved in a number of voluntary organisations, as a fire fighter, a paramedic, a board member and an advisor. All of this I do primarily for altruistic reasons. Altruism however is different from charity and I tend to shy away from roles where I need to donate more than just my time and skills.
I was amazed to read this morning that the Inland Revenue Department is taxing mileage reimbursements for voluntary workers while leaving mileage reimbursements for employees untaxed. To give an example;
Jim is a voluntary committee member, as part of his duties he is asked to attend a course away from home. He is paid a reimbursement for his mileage which the IRD tax
Joan is an employee of an organisation, she also has to attend the same course and is paid a mileage reimbursement. As an employee however her reimbursement is tax free!
Peter Griffin gave his perspective on the hot trends of 2008 in the technology space. Rod has already commented on the mobile data issue so I’ll not add to that debate. Rod commented in the past on his doubts arond social netowrking (or facebook anyway) so I’m sure he’ll be happy to pass the baton to me on this one.
Peter Griffin predicts some casualties in the social networking space next year - his prediction is that MySpace will be a victim, but Facebook will continue to grow.
My prediction is more complex than that, I believe 2008 will mark the “outing” of social media, when users demand some real value from the sites. Kind of an emperors new clothes epiphany if you like.
The value plays in social networking will come from unexpected avenues - potentially smart telcos will get on the programme, realise their legacy revenue streams are going fast, and work out how to truly monetise the social networking space. Possibly the incumbent platform players will start seeing th true value-add plays - if one looks for platform players with the smarts to do it, it’d be hard to look past LinkedIn to be a winner (or at least part of the winning group).
OpenSocial will either fly or bomb - I waver between the two. MySpace will retain it’s position as a pure-play social networking engine, while some of the more “grown-up” social networking sites will shift themselves to more of a transactional (rather than informational) model.
So there’s my picks for ‘08. (Oh and SSD’s for all laptop manufacturers as well!)
I’ve been talking a bit lately with Nina Villamar, AsiaPac sales manager for SuccessFactors. SF, for those not accustomed to it, is a talent and performance management SaaS product that has been deployed through small, medium and enterprise customers. It allows for goal and compensation management as well as performance review functionality.
Nina told me about recent successes in the Australasian region. Among the deployments include ones into the following organisations;
Minter Ellison
Deloitte Australia
New South Wales Audit
Swinburne University of Technology
ComputerShare
Xerox
Sears/K-Mart
Myer Pty Ltd
Micron Technology
Toyota of Australia
Skilled Group
Sun Microsystems
Mervyns
Texas A&M University
New Zealand Fire Service
Victorian Electoral Commission
Good wins and it’s also great to see SF providing a sales model that provides value of itself to businesses, SF hosts luncheon sessions in Australia/New Zealand for HR professionals and business owners to connect and share best practices in performance management. Sure they’re expecting sales to come from the connections, but there’s also innate value in bringing the people together into a forum for communication.
When Telecom New Zealand announced its plans for cabinetisation, there was outrage from some members of the Telco brigade who claimed it was an anti-competitive move and proof that TNZ should be further regulated.
Still others claimed that TNZ had been planning (and publicly at that) the move for years and as such should have been no surprise to the competition.
Rod tends to be seen as a fairly neutral party in matters such as this so it was great to see his post this morning which, after TNZ had run him through the practicalities, ended up with saying that cabinetisation was a good thing.
TNZ helpfully provided Rod with these diagrams which pictorially show the benefits of cabinetisation. True this only helps with domestic traffic and things need to be done to improve international service, but it’s a good start.
This is the diagram showing pre cabinetisation bandwidth;
And this is what it looks like with FTTC …
Disclosure - Diversity Limited is a consultant to Telecom New Zealand and its subsidiaries.
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