We were thrilled this week to learn that Locatrix has won the ACS Queensland Telecommunications award for 2009. Both Telstra and ourselves are planning some more formal announcements surrounding the win, but here’s a quick snapshot of the award and yours truly. Kudos to the brilliant team I get to work with at Locatrix for all their hard work, and to our great friends at Telstra for their ongoing faith and support.
One of the many small joys I get from business travel is the chance to read great newspapers. I’ve been a longtime fan of the Straits Times, and the South China Morning Post will be a starting point of any day I spend in Hong Kong. In the past few years, having added Europe and the UK to my “patch”, I usually gravitate to the UK dailies – I’d love to have a favourite, but I don’t find any of them to be a standout. On the continent it’s the International Herald Tribune, or Le Monde, only to exercise my pathetically basic French comprehension.
To be enjoyed, a newspaper needs time, a good coffee, and a quiet spot to read. An airplane has only one of these attributes, but a good newspaper helps fill the time anyway. At home I’m usually pressed for time, so I mostly restrict quiet newspaper reading activities to the deck on Saturday mornings, which is the one time each week I willingly buy a newspaper. (Of course it’s the Sydney Morning Herald – the Brisbane Courier Mail is effectively now a content-free advertisement vehicle).
It seems I’m not the only one that’s reducing newspaper consumption; publishers are going to the wall so quickly in the US that a Democratic Senator has introduced a bill to allow newspaper companies to reconstitute themselves as non-profits. (Remember the old joke Jeff Bezos used to tell about Amazon? The one where even he called it Amazon.org because it was a non-profit? Think about that again in 5 years when we all have Kindles.)
We can lament the downfall of quality newspapers all we like but it was flagged by cost-cutting in recent years; of course when classified revenues go downhill, journalists feel the pinch and are let go. There’s less journalistic opportunity in new media than many of us would like to see (”Content? That’s what our readers create!”) because the type of journalism I remember from my youth is now the way of the dodo. Details, agendas and context don’t seem to count as much to Generation Y as immediacy, colour and star quality. The journalistic effort that went into the events leading up to and resulting in the Fitzgerald Inquiry probably wouldn’t be reproduced in today’s newsrooms, and certainly not outside the ABC.
This challenge is being felt all over the world. The Huffington Post even has an entire section devoted to bad news about newspapers and the impact on investigative journalism.
All this explains why yesterday morning, reading the SMH at home over coffee, I read (in order) Peter FitzSimons, the sports results, the arts section and…… went back to my PC. Where I found nothing much of interest, either.
Seems I’d already read all the news that was fit to print. Or publish, in any form.
And it made me sad.
The lack of business media coverage of the Rudd government’s utterly irresponsible decision to dump the Commercial Ready program last May has been disappointing, to say the least. While a few IT journalists at News Corporation pointed out the program cancellation – with one even running with Innovation Minister Kim Carr’s alleged lack of prior knowledge of the decision – the business pages should have wailed on the shortsightedness of it.
Today’s Australian IT picks up the war cry again, with some gentle prodding from the University commercialisation sector, but I fear it is now too little, too late. While I have some considerable empathy with the good folks inside academia who try and “create” spin-off companies, I think that their crying poor now is really only the tip of the iceberg – and the Titanic may have already sunk.
There are dozens, if not hundreds of innovative Australian companies who are right now in commercial distress. At a time when times are pretty tough anyway – you might have heard of the global financial crisis – having a program which created jobs, and helped level the playing field for companies competing against well-funded international competitors be canned with absolutely zero business media scrutiny is appalling on many levels.
Again, we only see the iceberg’s tip when we hear the University sector crying poor. To suggest that Australia has a well-rounded venture capital sector is just untrue; yes there are several large funds quietly, and slowly, investing big dollars in a few companies. But there are few rounds in the $500k to $2 million range; programs like the AusIndustry BITS funds ran out years ago, and well-intentioned angel investors are currently keeping hands in their pockets (and cash safely in their bank accounts). There’s no incentives for superannuation funds to allocate holdings towards venture capital as an asset class, so the likelihood of man new funds emerging is low. To be fair, the Early-Stage Venture Capital Limited Partnership (ESVCLP) program now has one “active” licensee, and several more have been provisionally approved , but are yet to initiate investment activities – symptomatic I’d guess of their inability to raise the necessary funding commitments themselves.
What’s even more despairing is that the Australian attitude towards entrepreneurship or even early-stage innovation companies as a career option seems to be non-existent; I spoke today with a G8 university lecturer who suggested again that he’d a poor response rate in calling for internship candidates for early-stage companies. Like less than 10%. And this is from a postgraduate business class. In entrepreneurship.
I’d recommend those interested in this topic read this month’s excellent column in Fortune magazine by Glenn Hutchins:
So, the real question is “what’s next”? The answer resides where it has always been – in innovation and entrepreneurship. Lost in the fog of today’s economic storm is the fact that this is an exciting time to be a technology investor and entrepreneur. The way out of the doom and gloom of the seventies – which was a period much like today – was a wave of technology innovation that spurred a generation of company formation, job creation, productivity gains, wealth accumulation and GDP growth.
At a time when Australia should be nurturing and supporting competitive innovation companies, encouraging a wave of wealth-creating entrepreneurs and the jobs that get created as a result, we’ve instead cut one of the last life-support systems the venture ecosystem had in this country. Other countries from our region – Singapore being a prime example – are leveraging soverign wealth funds to create waves of startups which, if you believe Mr. Hutchins, will spur a generation of wealth accumulation and GDP growth.
And the business media of this country couldn’t really care less.
Clearly I’m a believer, but just how pervasive the mobile Internet is becoming was made clear to me yesterday while driving in the car: the ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, our less well-funded version of “the Beeb”) broadcast a short voice-over (Madonna King or Kelly Higgins-Devine, I can’t remember whom) promoting the new ABC mobile site at m.abc.net.au.
Now ABC local radio isn’t known for it’s pursuit of the youth demographic, that’s TripleJ. So this was clearly intended at the 45-54 age demographic, ABC Local’s largest audience segment.
The site itself seems to have been designed for people with poor eyesight – design is average at best, image-laden, and compared to the usually quite good portal and digital media efforts of Aunty, looks like a student project.
I don’t want to discourage this initiative in any way, but if this is what someones first view of the mobile Internet could be, I’d worry about their continuation in the medium. Hopefully before arriving at this site new adopters would see one of the operator portals which (in Australia, at least) look well-designed and quite usable. I also would hope and encourage the ABC to both continue with their mobile efforts and, in the first instance, try and work on their mobile design skills.
In November, when I was in Macau for the Mobile Asia Congress, I noted much optimism from the mobile network operators (MNOs) collectively expressing belief that mobile phones were now such a fundamental consumer utility, that they didn’t believe they would see revenues drop, despite the challenging economic downturn.
CEO after CEO stood at the podium, pointed at the hockey-stick growth of mobile broadband and (I paraphrase here) said (to use a blatant Australian-ism): “She’ll be right, mate”.
What I failed to observe at the time was that they were of course referring to the networks themselves, and clearly not the entire industry.
Earlier this month IDC forecast that the mobile handset market would shrink by up to 8% this year, and while the smartphone market would provide a glimmer of hope (with 3% growth) it appears 2009 will be the first year in history that the handset market will actually recede. And last week Sony Ericsson provided downward market guidance in advance of what could be a half-billion USD loss for the quarter.
One of the big drivers for the mobile handset industry, especially in Asia, can be attributed to the “bling” factor – anecdotally there were market segments in Hong Kong, for example, where the average handset life was a little over three months. Yes, consumers that would buy new handsets before Nokia could announce them. Between these voracious early adopters, and emerging markets like China and India, it was no wonder than handset shipments kept growing.
Now, of course, times are different. We may well keep up our spending on voice, SMS and mobile data – all of which are becoming cheaper on a daily basis – but we’ll think twice before we upgrade that 15-month old handset. And that will present a significant challenge for the likes of Nokia, LG, Motorola and Samsung – not just Sony-Ericsson (or whomever is left from the partnership).
Ever-conservative Gartner is suggesting the handset industry “continues to be challenging” – what will possibly end up as one of the understatements of the year.
I suggested in a presentation last week that the handset industry continues to be pretty uninspiring, at least if the “me too” features and announcements from Barcelona last month were any indication.
Now I feel I may have judged them a little too harshly. Forget new features, this is a year when basic survival might be the handset release of the year.