I have received my Amazon Kindle a few days back and I am totally in love with it. I read a fair bit of books and one of my biggest headache is what book should I bring on the road? I normally have two to three books that is in progress at any one point of time, 1) a business/management books 2) something technological 3) every other genre but generally biographies, interior design or history books. Whenever I travel I can’t seem to be able to decide what I feel like and even if I feel like something when I am packing, I might change my mind when I am at the destination. Normally, I just suck it up and read whatever I have which isn’t a bad thing. However, now I have an option. I have held back buying some books until I received my Kindle and I bought two books over the weekend. Its great. All the reviews of Amazon’s Kindle for the American version applies to the Australian version. For those Aussies who are interested, both the books I bought downloads just within 60 secs!
Alot of my friends asked me to wait for other ebook readers to be released. But after I checked out the price, it didn’t make sense to wait. Based on the two books I bought over the weekend, I save approximately $15 – $20 per book. Let’s say on average I save $20 per physical hardcover/paperback book (inclusive of shipping), for me to break-even the cost of my kindle, I will need to buy approximately 14 books. For me, 14 books will take me anything between 6 months to 9 months to read. However, if you check out the prices of other ebook readers, they are generally double the price of the Kindle and my break-even point will double as well. I think the Kindle is very well priced and despite some features that it lacks, I am sure for an average reader like me, its fit for purpose.
I totally recommend Kindle to anyone who reads a fair bit of books and you get magazines delivered to your kindle as well! Woo hoo!
Some 15 over years back, I have been introduced dial up internet and approximately 5 years later, broadband internet was installed in my parent’s place. It really wasn’t that long ago that all these things happened. Recently, mobile internet took off and I have been extremely interested to understand the impacts of this technology in the future usage of the internet.
Mobile internet has so far done very well in the social networking, search, emails and voice communication area. Other services like GPS has also been very helpful. However, in areas where high bandwidth / computational processing power is required, the current set of handsets are not quite capable. Nothing is impossible and with the advent of netbooks, it could increase mobile internet usage but this is still unproven.
In this post, I will be looking at the following areas – network technology, network providers, handset providers, content providers and consumer usage trend. I will also be providing a brief overview of the issues and impacts on the future of mobile internet.
Network technology
3G and Wimax technology has been around for some time now and in some metropolitan areas, Wifi can be found everywhere, additionally, LTE (or 4G) is in the horizon. Speeds are increasing and as time goes by, the stability of the connections are improving. So far there hasn’t been a clear technology that is winning across the world. I believe there is still quite a distance to cover before we achieve a standard platform across the world – pretty much like GSM is quite standard in most countries. Depending on the technology chosen, the capabilities of what consumers can do on their handsets would be impacted.
With the increase of mobile usage very rapidly, backhaul stations would need to be upgraded constantly and if consumers are experiencing constant dropouts or slow speeds in a particular area, that will have an impact on usage, company image/reputation and pricing.
Network providers
Network providers are in a constant fight to win spectrum licenses from the government and that could have a drastic impact of the implementation of such technologies. Awarding these licenses not only have commercial impacts but also a technological and political one.
Network providers build the infrastructure to allow mobile internet access and so far they have also tried to play in the space of content providers by providing videos and music to their phones at a premium price. Due to the early phases of this technology on mobile phones, they are winning. However, content providers are emerging and this could change the game (this will be covered later).
Also due to the high levels of uncertainty in the technological future of mobile internet, the investments of smaller telcos have not been aggressive.
Handsets provider
Handsets in this case is not limited to mobile phones but also devices like broadband modems (3G, Wifi), netbooks, and laptops. These devices determine the types of access the user can get based on the operating system, applications, processing power, screen size and many more. The handsets at the end of the day would determine the amount of usage a user makes. It could easily be assumed that on mobile phones the amount of data that is used will be far lesser than a netbook or a laptop and the difference would even be larger is the connection was based on traditional ADSL connections. For network providers, they want more usage but for handsets providers they want to sell more products – there is a misalignment here.
Content providers
Content providers are finding it hard to play at the moment. Due to the large variety of handsets and network capability, there isn’t a clear way to deliver these content. Alot of these content at the moment is delivered via the browser which is still the platform of choice however, browsers on mobiles are not the best application to deliver content and users are expecting alot more. Content like mobile TV, real time news update, VOIP and locational social networking services. For these to be possible, there are alot of dependencies on network and handset providers.
Consumer usage trends
Consumers have so far not ventured too far with their mobile internet services. Emails and search is generally the key usage on mobile handsets. However in countries like Japan and Korea, the usage has moved alot more into videos and music. Also mobile internet usage is still mainly used by the younger generations and business people. Providers needs to target the other market segments to increase adoption and usage.
Conclusion
There are many unknowns and there are quite a number of parties that have the capability to change the market and the game. This market will constantly evolve for the next few years and as it evolves, it will impact businesses and individuals.
I am a strong believer of you generally get what you pay for. If one pays peanuts, they get monkeys. There has been some controversy on executives salary on TheAge recently. Now there is a move to allow shareholders to have more influence over executives salary. I think this is really interesting – I can see some benefits but also some disadvantages.
On one side, there are some levels of control over rouge executives getting a truck loads of salary when the performance of their company is not even doing well at all. Like many normal employees alot of our work is based on performance measures and I think executives should have a even larger portion of that. They are the chief of a company and they are given the power and authority to make money for investors and also supply employees with a safe, stable and enjoyable job. Shareholders needs to understand that it doesn’t mean controlling executives salary, they would make more money. It should only mean it doesn’t get out of hand. For example, executives should not be getting multimillion dollar packages when the company is losing heaps of market share, profits and missed targets by a long (negative) shot.
However, having said all these, should we just keep the executives happy by giving them what they want and let they do their job in peace? If I were an executive and I need to spend time trying to justify my salary, prepare presentations and documents, talk to shareholders and gather support. Why not spend the time to think of an updated strategy for the company or tweak something within the organisation and make it better? Their time is not cheap and it should be optimised. Remember, there is an old saying that goes like this: A hungry man is an angry man.
Enterprise 2.0 deals very well with human communication and unstructured data. People write something and RSS feeds gets send off and others come back with comments and updates. All good. Information is organised into spaces and people work within spaces they are interested in and are allowed to explore into other relevant spaces/articles. Still very good.
However, alot of employees deals with reports coming out from the ERP, CRM and other systems that contains numbers and structured information. These reports requires analysis and deep understanding of the data. So far many of the enterprise 2.0 software does not allow users to collaborate and communicate such information. I think its highly critical for software to start targeting this area of organisations.
Structured and unstructured data is supposed to be together. Its all information and all information should live in the same place. Historically, most systems cope well with one or the other type of data but not both. I think technology has come to the point where we can start doing both efficiently.
How could this be used? Imagine a manager gets a report generated on a regular basis and his team need to rectify some issues in the report or he needs to work on the report for a higher level presentation on business performance of his department or etc… Generally, these tasks requires some levels of collaboration, questions needs to be asked, tasks needs to be tracked, work needs to be done. If the report was generated and posted into the E2 platform regularly and automatically, then registered users can get notified when its up, start working on it and get other relevant people to come contribute as and when required. That will be so much more efficient, the report data is not hidden in the manager’s computer and everyone gets access to the right piece of information – that’s a winner.
What do you think? Should structured and unstructured data live together? (let’s leave the technical questions out for now – I know there are issues in that space but its really more for a discussion later down the track)
This is the largest flash mob in a single city. 21,000 people coming together dancing in sync – unpaid, connected via twitter, facebook and all the cool technologies. They came together, learn the dance steps and performed!
From Wikipedia: A flash mob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse. The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails.
This is an example of the power of crowds. There is no financial or economic model that can explain this phenomena – just like Wikipedia. Watch it and feel it.
So I have a new way of explaining Twitter, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 to friends.
When your friends explain to you how great sex is when you were in high school, you never really understand it until you have actually tired it. The same goes for Twitter, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.
I had this question for a really long time and even until now, I am still not sure. The technology is out there waiting to be deployed but are the people ready to embrace it? There are many somewhat successful Enterprise 2.0 stories floating around in Australia where companies in the banking, IT and resources sector are starting to embrace it. But still not at the full (not even close) extent of the power of Enterprise 2.0. More companies are also slowly monitoring what others are saying online about their companies. However these are small groups of people driving this change. What about the general public?
Recently, I emailed some builders in the Melbourne region with regards to quotes and pricing. Out of the five emails I sent, one responded with a good response. The other four did not respond even after a week. When contacted, one of them said I had to pay to get a quote as well!
I was just thinking, responding to online communication is a basic thing that all employees have to do. When you are contacted, respond within 24 hours. If you can’t give a satisfactory response, let the customer know and let the customer know what is the course of action you will be taking to get them their answer. Standard information should also be published – open and straight forward. The last thing consumers want is to feel that there are hidden costs and unexpected spending. I feel that there is alot of secrecy around businesses and I understand the reason why but there are certain information that needs to be out there in the public so that the basic consumer information is provided. No point saying that this and that can be done without other critical information like materials, administrative charges and price.
If someone cannot even respond to email, Enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 is for sure not ready. I can’t say if Australia is ready but from my experience with five of the most popular builders in Australia, I can say that four of them are not ready.
The normal course of an activity, particularly in circumstances that are out of the ordinary.
I really dislike this phrase. I am a strong believer that as the market moves, organisations have to move together with it. BAU in most situations means going through your normal course of work and doing alot of the monotonous stuff and get through the day. We are in business and we are here to create value in a dynamic and volatile market. Continuously innovating, testing, exploring and trying new ideas is the way to go. Yes, alot of ideas might be chucked aside due to a variety of reasons but as long as one have tried, that’s the most important thing.
I have been thinking about twitter within the Enterprise and how it can help. Yammer is the Enterprise twitter and the dynamics of it within an organisational context is extremely different from the standard twitter I use. Let me explain.
On my twitter, I generally follow and is followed by like minded people in the Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, social media space. Updates also generally surround topics in this space. This is all great because I can network with others in this space. I believe that within the enterprise, there is a space for such things to happen as well. Non-confidential and non mission critical information can be communicated via the platform like new ideas, bookmarks and company wide updates.
However, within an organisation there are many commercial confidential information that we deal with, especially in consulting. Some of the stuff we do, we are not even allowed to share with others outside the project team. Being in this business for a while, I absolutely understand why. Many of the stuff we do will delivers competitive advantage to our clients. Therefore I think that project team yammer could be a great asset. Status updates within a large project can be extremely useful. It allows streamlined communication, a virtual notice board, one stop updates for everyone in the team.
This is just one small aspect of Yammer I think could deliver real value. There are many others that I am still trying to iron out. =)
Its been close to 1.5 years since I changed the looks of my blog. Last night, my TinyMCE visual editor died for some reason and I decided that I needed some colours on my blog. Its way too boring. Template is boring, posts are not colourful and enhanced with graphics. I am not quite an artistic person but I shall try my best to improve on my blog posts and have more colours and pictures.
So here I am – new looks but same content. Do you like it?
G'day, Sean here. I am a senior consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers and also a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and my proposed thesis title is "Implementation of Enterprise 2.0 and its Value in Organizations"
This blog is dedicated to topics surrounding Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, and IT strategies for organizations with the aim of increasing efficiency, increasing profits and reducing costs. Hope you enjoy this blog.
Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer's and/or University of Melbourne's positions, strategies or opinions. I have not been compensated in any way for the content.
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