Archive for September, 2008

Arthur Grimes sets himself up for crucifixion

Published by Ben Kepes on September 30, 2008 in Business, Design, Economic Development, Efficiency, IT, New Zealand, Society and Strategy. 1 Comment

Now here’s a brave, brave man.

We’ve all been hearing recently of the step change that broadband will bring to New Zealand - it seems to be one of the big election issues with both main parties coming to it from different angles. Both of these angles have however main the mistake of assuming economic benefits from broadband as a given - without the empirical analysis and data to back that claim up.

Into that breech comes Arthur Grimes, of the Motu Research and Education Trust. Grimes spoke last week at Victoria University’s Institute of Policy Studies and discussed infrastructure in general and had some interesting points about broadband.

In essence grimes stated that unlike traditional infrastructure (roads, water etc), broadband has no clearly defined purpose and as such falls under the “general-purpose technology” category rather than pure infrastructure.

We’re trying to get a handle on what are the benefits of broadband and who might they accrue to. Give me another six months. At present I wouldn’t have any particular answers; but the conceptual answer is that there is a difference between broadband and road straightening. With broadband we just don’t know what the benefits will be. I suspect that under traditional cost-benefit analysis, we would say it’s hardly worth rolling out broadband. We’d look at what benefits we know about and apply appropriate discounts and consider that it’s very expensive anyway and we’d say ‘those numbers don’t add up’. But if I look at the uncertainty and its role as more of a general-purpose technology, then maybe the answers are very different. At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be much of a framework for thinking about it. We’ve just got two parties saying ‘we’ll spend’ and ‘we’ll spend more’. I don’t think there’s much real thought been given to why you would do that; but maybe there is a reason that justifies that approach.

Like I said - a brave man indeed. Not quite as pointed as Telstra-Clear CEO Allan Freeth who claimed that;

the main result of faster broadband links to the home may be more downloads of pornography and movies rather than improvements to productivity

Which is something neither Helen Clark nor John Key particularly wanted to hear.

My take on this? I believe widespread broadband is an enabling technology that is beneficial for the country - this however is a different statement from those who seek to differentiate the general benefits of broadband per se with the supra benefits of FTTH.

The jury’s out but we’re fools if we think they’re able to make a decision without the full data.

Bring it on Arthur Grimes and Motu!

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Big big oops…

Published by Ben Kepes on September 29, 2008 in Business, IT, New Zealand, Society and Strategy. 3 Comments

From that category of "what a complete cock-up" comes news that ISP Slingshot’s iTalk VoIP service went dead the other day. The reason? An expired domain - it seemed the Slingshot staffer set the domain up and used his/her personal email address as the contact, resulting in Slingshot not getting the subscription reminder.

It’s back up now but it seems there are a bunch of less than satisfied customers out there.

Justification for using a more robust telco provider perhaps?

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On building communities of interest

Published by Ben Kepes on September 29, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, New Zealand, SocialMedia and Strategy. 8 Comments

It was interesting to read this post by Ben (another Ben) who details the rise and rise of Vodafone’s community forum site.

Ben says that there is a reluctance within corporate New Zealand to invest the time to build web communities - possibly due to a fear that they’ll build it and no one will come.

Ben reports on the results that Voda have had;

launched an online forum at August 1st 2008.

Investment was:

  • $150 for forum license
  • 3 people engaged over a month, checking in every now and again to keep an eye on it
  • Link under Help on Vodafone website and a mention on Geekzone

Results:

  • 250,000 visits with an average time of just under 4 minutes.
  • That’s a whooping 1 million minutes/ month.  Or the equivalent of 697 days (back to back) of attention.
  • 356 registered members and ~3000 posts (till Sept 17th)

From other forum’s Vodafone has run, they have found only 1 out of 5 questions requires an official response.

Over time the forum will build a repository of information that will provide answers to users without ANY extra work by Vodafone.

I’m involved in a project that’s building a community of interest in New Zealand - we’re getting closer to going live now (a couple of months away) and these results are the sort of thing that are music to my ears - it’s not necessarily about the traffic (although traffic is good). It’s about the level of engagement, the efficiencies gained by conversing directly with your customer base and the credibility gain that comes from being out there and prepared to talk.

Of course the real test is what happens when the conversation on the forum takes an unplanned for, and uncomfortable turn - will Voda still be happy to invest the time in it? I certainly hope so.

We’re all to prepared to say that the online community is only a small proportion of the total population. While this is true the results above show that it’s a proportion that is more than happy to engage - and engagement is an exceptionally powerful driver.

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Knocking against silo walls

Published by Ben Kepes on September 28, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency and IT. 1 Comment

A friend of mine is involved in creating a community website overseas and recounted to me an interesting tail. It seems had a preference to using one of the open source content management systems, and maybe going out to the developer community for any tweaks that were required to make it work to her specification.

The development team she were dealing with decided that in the interests of a "robust and secure" offering, they’d hard code it from scratch in a proprietary development application.

This of course had some unintended (well hopefully unintended consequences) in that it then required a degree in computer science to make even the most basic of changes - thereby tethering her to the development team pretty much for the life of the project.

Now I’m no developer - but I’ve spent a fair amount of time using WordPress, Joomla, Virtuemart and of course the tools we’re using, and helping create, over on CloudAve - and nothing in that experience has proven fragile or insecure. Those systems all have the added advantage of being readily extensible (even by a klutz like me) with a massive community out there building widgets and plugins which, generally, work straight out of the (virtual) box.

Here in New Zealand we have the awesome company SilverStripe doing their own open source CMS, and making revenue from the add on servicing and customisation that invariably goes with a build job.

I was motivated to read this post after seeing a post by Rodrigo - in it he talks about the democratisation of the tools for software creation and congratulates both his own company but the marketplace generally for opening up and making things easier.

Now in the case of my friend, I don’t think it’s a pure and simple case of the development house being "evil" in an effort to guarantee themselves future work. I believe that they’re concerned about doing the job and also about the security of a platform they’ll spend hours creating - however this attitude flies in the face of the realities of the web.

The fact is that things change - and fast. Any platform needs to be ready to be changed, added to, deleted from and generally played around with in a independent, nimble and agile way - nothing that I’ve seen from proprietary systems gives me faith that they enable that.

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