Digital Business
Business life in the digital age
How to be competitive
Jul 17th
Image via Wikipedia
Getting to work is one of the most competitive things many of us do each day. Firstly, we compete with ourselves to make sure we get out of the door at the right time to catch the bus, train, tube or even to miss the squeeze on the road while we drive to work. To get out on time, we get up with our alarms, drop into our routines of cleaning, eating, dressing, waking up the kids and getting ready.
Once we have left our homes, we then move into the ‘stream’ of other commuters and become beholden to the speed at which the majority is driving, or the speed of the train. We have little control over how much faster we can go because of the restrictions faced by us, including speed limits, road widths, traffic controls and the speed of someone ahead of us.
We become frustrated. We are delayed for meetings. We get overheated in our cars and in our minds. We become irrational and enraged when someone crosses our paths or blocks our way or creates a delay.
Our commute to work is similar to the challenges we face at work. We rely on each other at work and in our roles. Frustrations come to the surface in the form of bad politics and irrational behaviour and emotions.
And that’s why people start businesses because they see a way of improving on something we do everyday or which is unreachable where we work as employees.
To return to the commuting analogy, getting to work (when I am not working from home) is on two wheels. A motorbike, in fact. At this point, in many conversations I have had when planning to get a motorbike, people have been very negative about my decision. “They’re dangerous”. “It’s cold in winter”. “You’re mad”. “Don’t do it. I know someone who was killed on a motorbike”.
Many people have tried to dissuade me from it but I went ahead anyway. And people will try to dissuade you from starting a business, or pursuing an idea usually because of something they have experienced secondhand or because of a lack of knowledge and experience about it. People are conservative and mistake risk and danger with opportunity.
The things is, you get well trained to ride a motorbike in the UK these days. And, when you have driven for a few years in a car, riding a motorbike is less worrying than you might think. You are trained to be highly observant on a motorbike. ‘Ride with calm confidence’ is the adage. And it works. Don’t let yourself get wound up. Watch what’s going on. Let people know what you are about to do. Anticipate trouble. Planning.
Riding a motorbike in the UK is a highly efficient way to commute to work. With care, you can filter through four-wheeled traffic easily. You can park for free at railway stations. You don’t pay a congestion charge. Running costs are low. Road tax is cheap. On a motorbike, you get there quicker, cheaper and less stressed than in your own car or public transport.
The key advantages of a motorbike are small size and great acceleration. Yes, motorbikes an be fast but speed is not their main advantage which is the main misconception about them because people see nutters zooming past them at the weekend.
So, to apply this being competitive and finding better ways to do things, riding a motorbike is a good way to think about how to improve on something which other people do or use regularly. People riding a motorbike to work are in the minority because most people don’t want to try it. Most people are happy to sit in the mainstream. Entrepreneurs realise that the mainstream will provide them with an opportunity to provide new products and services to them to change habits.
But motorbikes are not for everyone. In winter, it can get chilly. You can’t cart large amounts of stuff around on them. Being an entrepreneur is not for everyone either. But, the freedom that running your own business can bring feels like the freedom that a motorbike provides when competing with everyone else commuting to work. And it does not feel like you are competing either. You have just found a better way.
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Listening for problems
Jul 15th
Earlier this week, I sent out a tweet saying that when I was experiencing a recently regular problem with my BT Broadband hub. I could get wireless broadband but nothing through the cable. It was something which happened erratically and usually at a time which was at the point when I needed it most.
I thought nothing more of it as fitted my 3 Mobile MiFi hub to use the good 3G signal around here. Later that day, I received a reply from BT Care asking me how they could help. Whoa! Unexpected but welcome.
I replied.
They came back with a potential solution:
I bought a new ethernet cable from my local computer shop, fitted it and there have been no problems since.
And the moral of the story? Big companies are listening to us and offering help. Well done, BT Care. A good use of Twitter.
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Nothing more to say. Just get on with it.
Jul 13th
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There seems to have been no end of discussions and ideas for the last two years in the publishing industry about the fate of books, the rise of eBooks, and the demise of bookshops. So much so, that it seems like people have run out of things to say.
Of course, there has been the hyperbole about how the iPad is going to change the world in a way that it has become so frenzied in the blogosphere that I think you might now be able to cook an egg on the damned thing. (I’d still rather try that out on the bonnet of a Land Rover in the Sahara).
But, now people are going to go into the building stage. The ideas have been ‘surfaced’ and now people are getting their heads down to build the boring stuff to make the ideas happen. In fact, the easy bit of generating ideas has happened now. Now comes the reality shock of actually seeing if you can make them work, profitably.
There are companies out in India which are grinding through the tedious functions of making books into eBooks, engineers deploying servers to manage all these digital ideas, and lawyers checking agreements to see if the publishers, the authors or the retailers have the rights to sell the digital ideas.
So, expect to hear more silence from the people that making reality out of fiction.
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Ebook deals ‘not remotely fair’ on authors
Jul 12th
- Image by mikebaird via Flickr
The eBook market doesn’t sound the most exciting topic of conversation, but it’s one which looks like it could become an everyday part of our lives very soon. The boring but important infrastructure for us to buy eBooks is being being in the background while we muse over the latest gadgets like the Apple iPad or the new Microsoft Windows 7 devices announced today.
Dealing with ‘rights’ for most of my working day, I know how important the discussions in the article below are in the future of the publishing as it becomes increasingly digital and decreasingly printed. Authors and publishers are dealing with a market about which they are not certain. eBooks are a small market now. In five years, the market could be huge.
This article was written by Alison Flood, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 12th July 2010 16.22 UTC
The chair of the Society of Authors, Tom Holland, has hit out at publishers’ attempt to seize control over electronic rights, calling ebook deals that lock authors in for the duration of copyright “not remotely fair”.
Speaking at the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s annual conference last week, Holland urged authors to push for ebook royalties that are “considerably higher” than the standard of around 25%. Although Holland said the market for ebooks is only about 1% of the total UK market, it is “growing fast” and the Society of Authors believes that, given publishers will eventually have much lower warehousing and distribution costs for ebooks, royalties should be divided 50/50.
“Most publishers are insisting they should control ebook rights and this will be written into standard contracts. I think it’s an entirely reasonable position to take, so long as the royalties and returns on ebooks are fair and proper and reasonable. If they are not, I suspect we may well find very big-name authors, such as JK Rowling or Dan Brown, will go their own way,” said Holland. “It’s a danger publishers need to recognise and a danger for writers as well. If JK Rowling controls her own ebook rights [then] there’s less money for her publisher to invest in new authors. We could face a situation of very big-name authors pulling the ladder up after them [and] we have a stake in seeing a healthy publishing industry.”
Although publishers “are inclined to dismiss the argument that costs are reduced on ebooks”, Holland said: “Once a system has been set up, publishers won’t be paying for warehousing, distribution and printing, and we have to ask ourselves what are they spending the money on?
“We accept that publishers have been investing heavily in digital infrastructure and at the moment they are losing money on ebooks because sales are so low. I can sort of understand their reservations over higher royalties at the moment, but nevertheless a contract that lasts for the duration of copyright is a hugely long time. Publishers in negotiations with Amazon, or whoever, say they want two-year contracts because there’s such flux, but at the same time are asking authors for the duration of copyright. It has to be wrong – it’s not remotely fair,” he said.
“Twenty-five per cent might be reasonable as the infrastructure’s set up but only for two years. The risk if we don’t do that is that the rate will essentially be set in concrete, it will freeze and be taken as the norm, not just for two to three years but for two to three decades. If we don’t fight it now, we will lose our chance to present and make our case, and that will be it.”
Katie Fforde, bestselling novelist and chair of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, agreed that a 25% ebook royalty “would be perfectly fair if it was for two years, or a limited period, and then could be renegotiated”. “We don’t want to go on and on paying for the set-up costs,” she said. “I think a 50/50 split is greedy, but if you don’t ask you don’t get, and I imagine that might raise the negotiations.”
The Samuel Johnson prize-winning historian Antony Beevor believes the Society of Authors is “absolutely right”. “To begin with, publishers were trying to set a royalty of a lot less than 25%, they were trying to get around 12.5-15%. Fortunately the agents have taken a pretty strong line and so has the Society of Authors, and I fully support it,” he said. “Publishers are suffering badly themselves [at the moment] but it’s a bit like Tesco and the farmers – the author as the producer will be squeezed the most.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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UK GDP since 1948
Jul 12th
- Image via Wikipedia
Uncannily, I wrote an earlier post based upon the blog of Umair Haque about how we think about the economy than along comes an article in The Guardian illustrating how we have always measured the economy – GDP. It’s still an interesting set of figures presented in a chart to show just how deeply in the mire we are.
Figures and charts can often put into context what headlines cannot. We really are in the mire, but it has been worse. Not that that is much comfort if you have lost your job or your business.
This article was written by Simon Rogers, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 27th July 2010 15.25 UTC
The Office of National Statistics announced on Friday that GDP increased by 1.1% in the second quarter of 2010, a much steeper rise than expected.
The announcement follows on from newly revised GDP figures which showed the recession was more severe than first thought. The ONS data revealed that the negative growth experienced in 2008-09 was the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s, with a decline in GDP of 6.4% rather than 6.2%.
The data below shows what GDP is in actual cash, ie what it was that year not adjusted for inflation. We’ve also added in total inflation-adjusted figures and per capita inflation adjusted figures. Download the spreadsheet to see more data by year or by quarter. A repeated decline in GDP usually means recession.
As several of our posters below have pointed out, there’s more to life than GDP – but here are the latest figures.
Download the full data
DATA: UK GDP since 1948
INTERACTIVE: GDP changes since 1955, %
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Summary table
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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Our economy lacks purpose
Jul 12th
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“The economy’s central problem isn’t a lack of demand, or a lack of supply — but a lack of purpose“, according to Umair Haque at the Harvard Business Review.
It’s an interesting statement but what does it mean? His article talks about the two arguments in play at the moment on the economy where one says ‘cut’ and the other says ‘spend’. His argument is that this is the old way of thinking about the economy, an economy founded on an industrial past which the developed countries no longer have and which the developing countries are experiencing.
How do the developed economies compete in a world which has changed so rapidly? More than focusing on just products and supporting old industries which have failed (e.g. the car industry), he suggests we rethink our approach to living in a post-crash society and we take , a more creative approach to building our futures.
He has got a point.
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Minister seeks high-speed broadband access ideas
Jul 12th
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
This recent article highlights the increasing divide between rural and urban life. With first time buyers struggling to buy homes in the countryside and the lack of access to services including transport and high-speed internet access for homes and businesses, rural life is becoming increasingly difficult and distant from those living in towns and cities.
This article was written by Graeme Wearden, for guardian.co.uk on Sunday 11th July 2010 23.04 UTC
The government will take its first steps towards tackling Britain’s broadband divide this week when it holds a summit to discuss ways of introducing high-speed internet access across the country.
Jeremy Hunt, culture secretary, will ask communications providers for ideas on how to give every home access to a basic broadband connection at an Industry Day in London on Thursday.
The meeting will also attempt to address the issue of availability of the next-generation of super-fast broadband services. At present, millions of homes and small businesses are excluded from new fibre-optic based networks being built largely in urban areas.
Having abolished Labour’s 50p a month broadband tax – a levy on fixed phone lines that was designed to raise funds to tackle the broadband divide – the coalition government says it remains committed to giving everyone a high-speed connection of at least 2 megabits a second by 2012.
About 160,000 UK homes still cannot get a broadband connection at all – a decade after services were first introduced. While BT’s ADSL broadband network now covers 99% of the population, technical limitations mean 2m homes cannot get at least 2Mbps. Industry figures welcome the government’s commitment to broadband, but warn that Hunt faces a clear dilemma – how to persuade telecoms companies to build commercially unviable networks in more rural areas in a time of austerity. Thursday’s gathering will examine how subsidies can be used to give commercial firms an incentive to invest, but the challenge of achieving full broadband coverage is formidable.
In Finland, broadband has recently been declared to be a human right. But Olivia Garfield, BT Group strategy director, warned that Britain’s budget deficit means the government is not in a position to mandate that broadband be available to everyone in Britain.”I cannot see it happening here, given the budget deficit we have.” Garfield told the Guardian.
She is hopeful that Hunt can provide “certainty and clarity” to the 80-plus companies attending Thursday’s event about the administration’s plans, including three pilot projects where public funds will subsidise introduction of broadband in existing blackspots. The location of these trials has not yet been released.
The government has committed about £300m to fund broadband schemes, money left over from the digital switchover fund. Hunt declared last month that he wants Britain to have “the best superfast broadband network in Europe” by the end of the current parliament in five years time.
BT is spending £2.5bn to introduce a new fibre-optic based network in Britain. By 2015, this should reach two-thirds of the population, giving speeds of up to 40Mbps, but BT does not currently plan to extend the network further. Virgin Media customers can already get similar faster speeds, and other telecoms operators are also building out fibre. But commercial considerations mean they are all focused on more urban parts of Britain.
“Unless the government has a few spare billion, it’s not going to resolve this issue on Thursday,” Garfield commented.
BT argues that it cannot be expected to build expensive fibre networks to areas where there are too few houses to generate a return. But the company admits that it, along with the government, will be criticised by those who find themselves trapped on the wrong side of a new broadband divide in a few years time.
“It will be so tough to understand that some people have faster speeds and you are still struggling with a slower connection,” predicted
Garfield. “There will certainly be a minority of people who want to blame someone, and they will blame us as well as politicians and the rest of the industry. We understand that.”
Some telecoms firms believe that the government’s plans are not ambitious enough. David Palmer, senior product manager at managed services provider Star, argued that the universal broadband target should be raised above 2Mbps to support the latest web-based services.
“We are seeing a growing trend of UK businesses using cloud computing and on-demand services, and the primary enabler for this is higher bandwidth,” Palmer said.
A spokesman for Broadband Delivery UK, the government body organising the Industry Day, said there were no plans to raise the 2Mbps target. He also indicated that the government was keen to hear about ways that regulations could be changed to aid the industry, as well as suggestions for public subsidies.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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Papers to website: stop quoting our stories. Website to papers: you’ll be the loser
Jul 9th
- Image via Wikipedia
This article sums up the trouble that the world of newspaper publishing is having these days and it is a common occurrence in my day job when publishers want us to pay for exclusive rights to content they also give away for free. They are fighting an inevitable tide of internet news and information.
For instance, this article is from The Guardian. They let me use their content on my blog. It’s likely that you will visit their web site afterwards where they can try to persuade you to look at other articles and maybe buy something. Neat. We all gain.
This article was written by Roy Greenslade, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 9th July 2010 08.17 UTC
Three US newspaper chains have demanded that a popular political website stop quoting from their papers, claiming that the site is guilty of a “flagrant and persistent theft of our clients’ intellectual property.”
The “cease and desist” letter was sent by a law firm representing Media News Group (publisher of 54 titles, including the Denver Post), Freedom Communications (100 titles, including The Gazette in Colorado) and Swift Communications (29 titles, including 12 in Colorado) to the Colorado-based ColoradoPols website.
It cites several specific alleged violations of the federal copyright act, referring to them as “wholesale and unjustified” use of news content from which the site is deriving advertising revenue. It further claims that the use violates “common law doctrine of hot news misappropriation.”
The letter, sent on 21 May, states:
These examples reflect only those instances involving the three clients on whose behalf we write today.
It appears that the entire business model of the Colorado Pols website is built upon flagrant copying of the hard work of all manner of news media organisations, including not just our clients… but others of this firm’s clients, including the New York Times, Associated Press and CNN.
As a result, Colorado Pols stopped quoting from the papers, finally explaining the reason to its readers on Wednesday this week. Its explanation was accompanied by a lengthy defence of its actions:
You can’t steal something that is already given away for free… We’re not going behind any paid system or other kind of firewall and offering up content that you would otherwise have to pay for online.
We would understand complaints if we had been repeatedly cutting and pasting entire articles, but we’ve always avoided doing that and have made that point to other posters on multiple occasions.
Not only are we posting only a few paragraphs from stories THAT ARE ALREADY FREE FOR EVERYONE ONLINE, we have gone out of our way to name the publication, highlight the author in particular, and provide a clear link to the story.
Legally speaking, we don’t actually need to do any of this, but we’ve always tried to be symbiotic internet purveyors and give credit where credit is due…
The idea that the Denver Post or any other outlet owns “hot news” is absurd.
In response, Colorado Pols is planning to make a bonus of not citing the papers published by the three chains. “We aren’t overestimating our own importance to say that not linking to the [Denver] Post will have a major impact on their traffic, but it certainly won’t help.
“The bigger point is that we lose absolutely nothing by deciding to cease from pulling a few paragraphs out of one of their stories, but the Post and their quality reporters lose plenty of exposure that comes from other links – which, of course, is the lifeblood of the internet.”
The website’s statement of intent continues:
There are really two ways to deal with the advent of new media and “uncontrolled” distribution of the news: you can either accommodate this new reality and find ways to mutually benefit (and increase your online traffic) like our partners at the Washington Post and National Journal have gainfully done, or you can break out the lawyers and try to retreat into a paid firewall content cave.
The first approach is useful in increasing website traffic and generating new links, which leads to more online traffic, and so on. We honestly can’t tell you the benefit of the latter.
We submit to you, our loyal readers since 2004, that only one of these approaches will result in survival for the print newsrooms we all greatly respect and value.
One of the leading contributors to Colorado Pols, Jason Bane, put it more succinctly in an interview yesterday: “We don’t need the Denver Post. Nobody does.”
For the record, the Denver Post sells some 333,000 copies a day, having picked up thousands of readers since the closure of the Rocky Mountain News in February last year.
Colorado Pols received more than 617,000 page views in April.
Sources: ColoradoPols/Editors’ weblog/Denver Westword
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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Qwitter: was it something I tweeted?
Jul 8th
- Image via CrunchBase
I have stacked up several thousand followers on Twitter. Not as impressive as you might think. Much of the ‘following’ was aided by the use of some tools which followed people automatically who then automatically followed me back. Instead of now feeling that surge of delight that I might actually popular, I am now watching slowly drop away as I have stopped using those tools and I am glad to be ‘getting real’ about followers on Twitter. Less is more, but some people still take an ‘unfollow’ too personally as Rob Fitzpatrick in the Guardian demonstrates below.
This article was written by Rob Fitzpatrick, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 7th July 2010 19.30 UTC
If you are interested in testing your resistance to psychic pain, may I recommend Qwitter? This is a service that emails you daily to impart who has “unfollowed” you on Twitter in the last 24 hours – who, among all the new friends you have acquired online, has decided they no longer want to read your hilarious 140-character posts. If Twitter is the bright, open heartland of limitless conversation, then Qwitter is the abandoned wheelie-bin behind the boarded-up kebab shop of failure, a place where the limitless conversation ends.
The email arrives heralded by the strapline “Your latest Twitter Qwitters!” – has there ever been a more unwelcome exclamation mark? – and your eye is immediately drawn to that day’s number. Today it was small: just one, a T-shirt company. Why was a T-shirt company following me? More to the point, what did I do to make a T-shirt company unfollow me? Losing something a step up from a spambot (an automated identity that posts malicious links) is nothing; much worse is when the rejections come in groups. Last week I lost six in a day. Six entirely (as far as I can see) unconnected people decided they could live without my sun-bleached pictures of Dulwich park and excitable Spotify recommendations. To be Qwit is to be reminded that someone has stopped listening, stopped caring. It’s as if they have, very quietly, put the phone down on you while you are still talking.
In the past I have unfollowed many people, recently jettisoning a number of blowhard wafflers, a young rapper constantly plugging his CD, and a maddeningly ponderous website editor. I’ve dropped people I have interviewed, worked with and even like, in an attempt to keep the online noise down a little. And not one of those decisions was personal – apart from maybe the website editor. I just wanted something else from my Twitter feed. So I know how ridiculous it is to feel bad about being digitally dumped. Yet this distancing still stings. What did I say? What did I do? Don’t go, you feel like shouting, tomorrow I might tweet a blurry picture of my lunch or even say something mildly amusing about a Coronation Street character.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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India’s impossible inflation
Jul 14th
Posted by Will Hawkins in business
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Image via Wikipedia
Articles like this warm my business soul. Through some simple use of ubiquitous technology in India, the mobile phone, farmers, producers consumers can benefit from the real advantages of the internet, namely information and distribution, and cut out the middlemen who are taking them for a ride and driving the country’s inflation through the roof. Read this article to understand why. I think my children should learn Hindi, at least, at school if they want to prosper in the future, if the rise of the Indian economy carries on like this.
The Indian economic story has been marked in the last decade by outstanding success. The stock exchanges have outperformed leading indices worldwide, the demographics are favourable and the IT outsourcing sector continues to boom. Inflation presents an aberrant thread running through this story. Aberrant because it works not on the basis of how much money consumers have, but on the basis of how little consumers know.
If we look at the numbers, Indian inflation was historically at its lowest in the last 10 years when the economic boom was at its peak. This year, with growth set at 9.4%, as per the IMF’s 8 July forecast, India will likely suffer from double-digit inflation. By contrast, in 2008, growth was a healthy 9%, while inflation was only 6.4%. A bad monsoon last year has been repeatedly blamed for this upsurge, but grain lies rotting in government warehouses.
India’s problems are unique, because it is possibly the most inefficient market in the world. Two historical phenomena are to blame for this.
First, changes in the Indian economy in the early part of the 20th century led to the value of labour, innovation and management plummeting and the value of capital rising disproportionately high. This imbalance continues to this day. Our employment laws are a joke, our scientists staff the top 40% of Nasa, but research lags at home and corporate governance is in its infancy, to put it politely.
Second, Gandhi’s freedom movement and Nehru’s socialist politics have made profit a dirty word. Although the government’s economic liberalisation efforts helped some, Indian capital still continues to be in the unique position of being both extremely powerful, and strongly despised. This is not a good combination, and as a result corruption flourishes, healthy competition is nipped in the bud and middlemen work at the expense of the disorganised producer and the consumer.
A workable solution to this problem is to empower the consumer with knowledge. In 2002, an Indian conglomerate started an experimental internet portal. This portal worked at bringing transparency to the supply side of Indian commodities. By logging in, farmers could check current prices of commodities, and arrive at a good deal.
It is impossible to adequately convey the importance of this knowledge to a western readership. It can mean the difference between starvation and prosperity. A lack of regulation, entrenched purchasing cartels and chronically low social capital means that if not forced, middlemen will give the worst possible deal to the farmer. On the flipside, if not forced, shopkeepers, grocers and retail outlets will and do give the worst possible deal to the Indian consumer. Commodities are largely unbranded, retail is a “mom and pop” sector and consumers are woefully ill-informed. The consumer purchasing groceries or vegetables simply has to take the word of the vendor that he is paying a fair price.
On 25 June, for example, the price of diesel increased by two rupees in India. Diesel is important because most of our commodities are transported by road in diesel-burning vehicles. A 0.9% increase in inflation in wholesale prices was expected. Prices of commodities have instead gone up within two weeks by 15%. Prices of vegetables have gone up by between 35% and 100%. This is sheer carpetbagging opportunism by retailers.
Experience tells us that were the price of diesel to drop tomorrow, these increases would not be reversed. Price increases in India defy the laws of physics. The trick is to curb the initial upswing itself. Much like the portal for farmers, we need an internet portal for the Indian consumer as well: one that allows retailers and grocers to text in prices they can offer for unbranded commodities and vegetables, and arranges these prices by city/town and by five-mile areas within cities. This portal would need to be designed to be lightweight, so that it is accessible to the many Indian consumers with low internet bandwidth, and it should also be able to respond by text message to standard price enquiries by consumers.
A consumer setting out for his monthly grocery shop will check and home in on the shop offering the best deal, within his five-mile radius. Similarly, the weekly vegetable shopping trip could become less uncertain. Such a portal would allow true competition to flourish and would reduce opportunism. It would not be difficult to administer in a country where nearly every urban adult has a mobile and where chip-makers run text-based competitions more complex than this.
• This article was amended on the 14 July at 18.30
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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