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| Backblog July 2007 |
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Toronto ranks as business city, Tokyo for tech IQ
July 31, 2007 By Peter Wolchak
Categories: General
Knowledge economy new measure for cities
The new cities of the future may be Shanghai and Singapore, according to a ranking compiled by the Partnership for New York City and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Eleven cities—Atlanta, Tokyo, Chicago, Frankfurt, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Shanghai, Singapore and Toronto—were measured against nine indicators: cost, intellectual capital, technology IQ and innovation, transportation assets, demographic advantages, financial clout, ease of doing business, lifestyle assets, and safety and security.
Each city in the study, Cities of Opportunity: Business-Readiness Indicators for the 21st Century, was at or near the top in at least one measure and no place dominated across the categories.
London, New York, Paris and Tokyo received the highest rankings in intellectual capital, transportation assets and financial clout. In the areas of cost, ease of doing business and demographic advantages, Atlanta and Toronto ranked near the top, as did Los Angeles, Chicago and Singapore. New York dominates the financial clout indicator, while Tokyo is the leader in technology IQ and innovation. London is the top-ranked city in intellectual capital while Paris leads in lifestyle assets. Shanghai scores highly in developing recreational space, while Frankfurt tops the list in terms of safety and security. Atlanta dominates the cost indicator, and Chicago emerges as an up-and-coming global city in a number of indicators, including cost and demographic advantages.
“At the beginning of the 20th century, benchmarks such as port capacity and manufacturing capabilities were the driving forces for success among global cities,” said Dennis Nally, U.S. chairman and senior partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. “But we believe that new forces will drive a city’s business competitiveness in this new century and our study examines those more modern and relevant assets.
The report is at www.pfnyc.org and at www.pwc.com/cities.
Peter Wolchak
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LinkedIn for research
July 27, 2007 By Danny Bradbury
Categories: General Social Networking
I’ve been mucking around with LinkedIn. I’ve had an account for ages, passively amassed about 65 contacts on it, but didn’t really do very much with it. Then, someone asked me to write an article on social networking so I went and had a play. Blimey. It’s the new Sourcewire.
Automated pitching services like Sourcewire have been around for a long time. I used to use them a bit, and I programmed my own web site so that PR bods could pitch interviewees for articles. But I ended up binning Sourcewire and turning off my own site, because I found myself wading through lots of PR pitches that were more or less the same. You run the risk of doing journalism by numbers if you fall into the habit of using these services too systematically.
The other problem is that when you respond to a PR pitch, you’re going through a PR consultant before you get to speak to the interviewee. Love ‘em while I do (some of my best friends, etc etc), no matter how good a PR person is, they’re essentially a stepping stone to an actual interview with the expert.
So these days I rarely accept PR pitches for interviews, unless they’re really targeted, and from people I know and trust. Instead, I do more of what I’ve always done and manually find the people that I know I want to talk to. It’s fine, it’s easy and it’s what journalism is all about. ‘Nuff said.
But when I was playing with LinkedIn, I checked out the Answers feature, and oh my, does this contain a lot of possibilities. Given that I was writing an article on it I thought I’d test it out, and asked a question related to another article I was working on, just to see what would happen. I got back about six answers - all very relevant, intelligent, and right on the money. And the answers came directly from people associated with the subject. No intermediaries, no proxies. And I was able to check out their profiles to assess their background. This lets you know where they work, so you could call up their company, ask to speak to them, have a conversation and verify that they’re creditable.
This strikes me as a more honed, targeted way of supplementing your research and unlike some automated PR services it also means that you’re likely to end up speaking with people who haven’t paid for PR (which is a limiting factor elsewhere). It’s not something that you’d use as your only form of research, of course, but it’s a useful tool nonetheless.
I don’t think Facebook (which is trouncing LinkedIn in terms of numbers) will be useful for this. It’s too consumer-focused, even though it’s now being discussed by the business community, and there doesn’t seem to be an ability to reach out across an extended network in the same way.
Danny Bradbury
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CEOs and CIOs both see rosy futures
July 26, 2007 By Peter Wolchak
Categories: General IT Staffing Solutions
The majority of the world’s CEOs are very confident of future revenue growth, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 10th annual Global CEO Survey. CEOs expect expansion will come from improved market penetration, geographic expansion, and mergers and acquisitions.
The survey covers 50 countries. Fifty-nine per cent of canadian respondents and 52 per cent of global respondents are very confident for revenue growth prospects in the next 12 months. But canadian CEOs believe threats to growth include the lack of skilled labour (88 per cent), downturns in major economies (68 per cent) and overregulation (61 per cent).
Over in the CIO offices, 19 per cent interviewed for the Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Index and Skills Report plan to add full-time information technology (IT) staff in the second quarter, while two per cent anticipate personnel reductions. The poll includes responses from more than 270 canadian CIOs.
Other findings:
> CIOs cited business growth as the top factor driving IT hiring
> network administration and Windows administration skills are in greatest demand
> technology executives at the largest firms (1,000 plus employees) will be most active, with a net 45 per cent increase in hiring activity forecast
> the finance industry led all business sectors with 42 per cent of CIOs expecting to add personnel and none projecting staff reductions
More information is at www.pwc.com/ceosurvey and www.rht.com.
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CTV.ca/idol: avoiding the zero sum game
July 20, 2007 By Peter Wolchak
Categories: General
Traditional television is falling into a hole, so guess what some broadcasters are doing? Yep, they’ve opted to dig faster.
The other day I was watching a Raymond rerun with my wife. If you’re married and have kids, it’s a funny show.
Suddenly, the show halted: it just paused. Before I had a chance to wonder what was going on, a character from another show appeared in a small bar at the bottom, told us his show is good and we should give it a watch, and then held up a remote, clicked a button and Ray continued wisecracking.
I was open-mouthed with shock. The network had decided it was a good idea to interrupt a show I chose to watch in order to advertise a different show. Why did it do this? Because people no longer watch commercials; we now either record shows and fast-forward the boring bits or we channel surf till the show returns.
With no actual ideas on how to get us to sit quietly and watch commercials again, some networks are just baking commercials into their shows. Two things will happen if this trend grows. First, many of us will simply stop watching TV. I was so disgusted I simply turned Raymond off, so the advertisers who actually bought commercial space lost me as a potential customer. Way to go TV execs. Second, this tactic will push people towards illegally downloading ripped DVD content or to renting TV on DVD and copying the discs. Wrong it may be, but you actually get to see the show.
Then the networks will carp even more about piracy, insert more commercials and the cycle will continue.
Now, I freely admit I don’t know how to fix the TV advertising model. I do know that annoying the people you are trying to reach is not the way to go.
This dilemma has been neatly summed up in The Future of Television, a study conducted by Nordicity Group for the Banff World Television Festival and the Canadian Television Fund.
From the study: “An increasing appetite for consumer viewing of TV online, evolving distribution technologies, and shifting revenues streams are threatening an imminent collapse of the Canadian Broadcasting System.
“New entrants in the broadcasting system—content aggregators, curators, and niche channels—will challenge the existing players, and a zero-sum game may emerge with clear winners and losers based on, among other factors, who owns content rights and can exploit them. But this zero-same gum can be prevented if broadcasters, producers and BDUs [Broadcast Distribution Undertaking, a CRTC term for a cable or satellite service providers] can work together to exploit the opportunities of new platforms.”
The full report is available here. http://www.bwtvf.com/pdf/2007_Banff_Green_Paper_WebVersion.pdf
One broadcaster taking at least some steps to avoid the zero sum is CTV. Check out the video section at www.ctv.ca/idol. Video highlights have been on offer for quite some time but as of July 20 CTV will begin offering All Access, online-only behind-the-scenes video segments that essentially add a third night of programming to Idol’s twice-a-week schedule.
What this does is build Web traffic among the people already watching the show on TV and encourage the hip online-only crowd to actually watch the show. Both the old and new media folks benefit.
Now, I’m not suggesting that CTV is a pioneer in this space—NBC’s online content for The Office is almost as good as the show itself—but TV execs who create these online promotions are light years ahead of the dim and ham-fisted geniuses who interrupted Raymond and actually got me to turn off the TV.
If television is being challenged by new media, then perhaps it is only those who have grown up with new media who can make TV work in a world of blended content.
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Productivity is important. So is sanity
July 12, 2007 By Peter Wolchak
Categories:
Half of all mass-transit commuters in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver spend approximately 240 hours per year sitting on trains and buses, according to a new survey from Intel of Canada and Decima Research. Intel suggests that mobile technology such as notebook computers could turn this downtime into productive time.
The company then argues that working on the way to and from the office would also help reduce the productivity gap evident between workers in Canada and the U.S.
From the Intel study release: Converting just 40 minutes of that average daily one-hour commute into productive work would eliminate the gap in additional hours worked by the average American, which is currently 164 more hours per year and still under the 40 hours a week average.
Now, we here at Backbone believe Canadian productivity is an important topic, so much so that it is the front page story of the July issue. We also believe technology—and especially mobile tech—can increase productivity. I personally buy into this: I own and use a notebook and I always have either a Palm Treo or an HP iPaq hw6955 with me. That means I have access to my work documents, e-mail and the Internet at all times, and that is extremely useful.
We also have no specific quibble with Intel Canada head Doug Cooper’s assertion that mobile tech can free up other time during the day: “Taking that downtime commuting on mass transit and converting it to productive time potentially reduces the need to stay later at the office, provides flexibility for employees and increases productivity for the employer.”
But here’s the problem: we regularly see studies, like this one, which encourage us to squash any bits of downtime in our days like cockroaches seen skittering across the kitchen floor. But is a day with no free time really good for us?
Here’s the study I would like to see: a comprehensive examination of how many hours per week the average knowledge worker can invest in the job before short-term fatigue and long-term burnout decrease work quality and overall productivity. If we take a standard seven-hour office day, add in working during commutes, working before leaving home in the morning and working before going to bed, how many accumulated hours can we pump out before our work quality suffers?
Tired and burned out workers are not truly productive, no matter how much technology they carry.
I am not suggesting that Intel and other vendors are trying to chain us to our keyboards; they’re not. I am suggesting we need a more holistic approach to the total work day, especially as technology makes it increasingly possible to work everywhere.
I also suggest we need to cling with grim determination to some small portion of our mindless daily downtime. The occasional mental break is as important as returning two or three e-mails.
Peter Wolchak
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Firm using Facebook to recruit in Toronto
July 11, 2007 By Neil McIntyre
Categories: Social Networking
I’ve grown a bit tired of Facebook lately. I think it’s because what originally was a torrent of friend additions has gradually slowed to a trickle. (I meet lots of new people through my job but I doubt they want the auditor on their Facebook!)
It seems I’m not the only one who is questioning the system, but for other reasons. The lack of openness is leading some to compare it to AOL.
But despite our misgivings, the beast continues to grow. My city, Toronto, is apparently the “capital of Facebook”:
As a city, we have more members than New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco combined. Thirteen per cent of Torontonians have signed up. We not only have more members than any other city – 670,038 as of this week – we have more groups within the site talking about the goings on of our town.
What does this mean? The value of Facebook to its members increases exponentially as more people join, and for Torontonians, the value of a Facebook account is much higher than it would be for someone from, say, Saskatoon (29,475 members).
I wrote about Facebook before and compared it to LinkedIn. In the post I linked to some accounting-specific Facebook groups, including one I’ll mention again today: Ernst & Young Toronto.
I searched Facebook for groups for Toronto accountants, and the search turned up nothing very good other than the above group. Why are no more accounting firms in Toronto taking advantage of the massive percentage of the population using the site?
Recruiters are taking advantage of the clustering of Toronto accountants, as this screen grab from the Chartered Accountants of Canada group shows.
How long before firms in Toronto realize the recruiting potential of Facebook, as Ernst & Young has?
Neil McIntyre
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Mashing up the search platform
July 9, 2007 By Don Tapscott
Categories:
It wasn’t so long ago that Google was seen as a, if not the key driving force of innovation and new business models on the web - and with good reason. But one of the more interesting trends to watch in the Web 2.0 is not what Google is doing, but rather the variety of new business models that are emerging to attack Google head on using collaborative technologies and the power of community.
For example, last night Powerset came out of “stealth mode” to unveil their new search platform - one that’s designed to leverage the wisdom of the crowds for development. To quote co-founder and COO Steve Newcomb:
“Imagine a mashup between Facebook, Digg and Google Apps, but you get to participate in the building of the products that sit on top of our platform. You log into a social network, like you would Facebook, and you get certified to be a Powerlabber. Once certified you can join different interest groups, such as travel, and participate in idea and mashup competitions. QA is embedded and its all bloggable.”
“Instead of being stealth mode, we are being more open than any other company has been in the launch process. If we screw up and it’s not going well, we will take the hit, and if it goes well we take that. It’s a wisdom of the crowd idea of competitions. We will build the winners and widgets for Facebook, blogs, and others”
Imagine indeed. This could be a very big deal, and Powerset is not alone in exploring this area - Jimbo Wales’ Search Wikia engine is going down a similar path. In turn, it’s at least worth wondering whether one or some new players in the Web 2.0 could eventually leave Google behind -and/or whether Google will ever respond with more collaborative, community based offerings of their own.
I certainly think that they should - which is why when Eric Schmidt asked me a little while ago what Google should be doing differently, I suggested they needed to push even harder into applying mass collaboration to their business model - including their core search capability. The full video of that discussion is available here.
Don Tapscott
Visit Wikinomics: The Blog
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How’s our Internet speed? Great. Or fairly slow
July 4, 2007 By Peter Wolchak
Categories:
Internet technologies contribute to economic performance, and because of that Internet access speed is important. The faster the access, the better.
On that basis, Canada is kicking some international butt—we are way ahead of the U.S., for example—but we are also getting kicked by other countries.
The median real-time download speed in the U.S. “is a mere 1.9 megabits per second” (mbps), according to a study from the Communications Workers of America (CWA). Canada’s median download speed is 7 mbps.
So way to go Canada. Until you look further afield. France clocks in at 17 mbps, South Korea at 45 mbps and Japan is blazing along at 61 mbps.
From these numbers, the CWA rightly concludes that America “risks losing our competitive edge in today's global economy—and the jobs that go with it.
“The benefits of true broadband access for communities across the country are innumerable. From e-government and distance learning to telemedicine and public safety, high-speed Internet access for all Americans—from the rural plains to the inner cities—is essential to improving the quality our economic, civic and personal lives.”
That is exactly right, and while our speed numbers are pretty good here in North America our economic perspective should be a global one, and on that stage we are far behind South Korea and Japan. And just like our American cousins, we need to get faster.
Peter Wolchak
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