Category: News & Updates

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Build capability in your organization so you can pivot fast and build a competitive advantage without breaking your vision

 

 

As we proudly progress with another product update released today (refer digivizer.com) I am reflecting on what it takes to continue to grow and do more than just survive. With key outcomes that include launching our new product, now made affordable for every business, expansion into Asia, 30% of revenues earned overseas, and the launch of our gaming and esports specialisation in goto.game, it has taken a number of pivots for Digivizer to grow to where it is today.

Knowing how to survive by building a culture of learning and pivoting fast is essential because in the world of startups and early growth, nothing is for ever. As serial entrepreneur Steve Blank says in his book The Four Steps To The Epiphany, a startup is “a temporary organization used to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” I think that’s true of most startups. It’s certainly been true of Digivizer.

We’ve learned, though, that to build out our ability to grow-fast in our organization, we have needed to build the capability to pivot quickly. If you do, you can thrive and change direction to take advantage of new opportunities, and move quickly away from slower growth, and from initiatives that don’t provide returns or suck up resources.

Let’s take a look at the journey so far.

Changing direction to move faster

We started Digivizer with a vision to build a technology company, initially to track all Australians on the social web. Early customers were larger enterprises that included a number of Australia’s banks, tech and telco companies. All loved the data, insights and input into strategy that Digivizer was able to provide. Understanding the digital footprint and behavior of their customers with context was used for the first time by many of these organizations.

The promise of overseas expansion beckoned early on. Australia represents just 0.33% percent of the world’s population. Our horizon was always global, even as a startup. Early engagements included for a global company, as one example, incorporating and analysing Chinese language within our analytics engine.

Our pivot history

However, the learning in the smaller (and younger) Digivizer led to the first in a number of pivots: the investment to support such a multi-language contract ultimately proved too high for a fast return that would also depend on local representation. To help scale Digivizer technology we decided to stop other language support (despite the lucrative contract) and focus only on English.

By this time, more organizations recognized the value of real-time insights. They wanted turn-key solutions, support in real-time decision-making, content and managed digital and social marketing programs, and measurement of performance in real-time.

Our second pivot was to build a creative services team centered on social community managers and creatives that could rapidly build, input and track performance within the Digivizer platform. This allowed us to bootstrap growth and product development off client creative services revenue, whilst providing a point of differentiation. We were not an agency because everything we did was based on our own data analytics engine, and we were not solely a technology company because we could action insights in real-ime with creative services. This saw sales doubling each year for the three years.

With our technology now able to identify social segmentation around what mattered and who people were following, pivot number three beckoned – in audience-first thinking. Identification of influencers within market segments, and adding the ability to engage, track and report on the impact of any influencer programs, offered the next opportunity for growth.

The underlying platform that had worked in our early history began to slow scalable growth, and to stretch precious resources. We had originally built our own data platform to take advantage of low comparative cost, only to see the costs of maintaining that platform becoming excessive. A migration to the cloud, not a decision we took lightly or one that was simple to execute, allowed us to focus on building our IP, changing the focus for our valuable engineering resources.

Our most-recent pivot takes us back to our original vision: to provide a way to help grow every business by helping them understand and make better decisions around their digital investment.

Whilst continuing to deliver creative solutions, we’ve now our brought our technology to companies of any and every size, including and especially SMBs and startups, with our SaaS product.

Tough decisions reap rewards

At the time, some of these decisions were hard to take, but the results speak for themselves: we have gone to market faster than we otherwise would have.

Pivoting need not be drastic, nor mean discarding years of strategy and work. Our pivots were not fundamental changes in our strategy, but they were in prioritization of resources and implementation plan. And while some were momentous at the time, they were made with care and were completely congruent to our vision. What became obvious is that hiring, developing and building capability around pivoting, and seizing new opportunities, fast becomes the true business competitive advantage. When we started there were about 20-30 players in the same space. Now there are just two of us left in Australia of those early players, and we do and offer very different products and solutions.

Lessons learned

In planning to pivot, as part of developing a strategy that will meet your image, you must also incorporate a people strategy flexible enough to accommodate change.

You need to understand what your customers actually need and ensure that’s what you deliver in a way that they see as being valuable.

Always seek to build on the learnings from the steps you’ve taken before, without being hidebound by the actual steps or sunk costs.

To pivot is more than not breaking your business: it is about seizing the moment as each opportunity presents.

This article also published on LinkedIn

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‘This will hurt’: Innovation stifled by tough R&D scheme

Last week I was interviewed by Emma Koehn of The Sydney Morning Herald, about the changes currently being debated and legislated by the Australian Federal Government to its R&D Tax Rebate scheme. Her interview appeared today. 

Digivizer has been claiming the research and development tax incentive for the past five years, relating to a range of software development projects for our digital content analytics platform.

The incentive had been invaluable in growing Digivizer, but we now find ourselves spending hours proving ourselves to AusIndustry, which administers the scheme with the Australian Taxation Office (ATO).

At the time of the interview we were reviewing two research and development tax incentive claims that were granted to Digivizer over the past two years. At the time of writing, this had already cost us another $22,000.

As I say in the interview, I don’t know what this will lead to, but it will hurt us either way.
A number of people active in the Australian startup and technology sectors have reached out to me about this. It’s clearly an issue that resonates with many. I’d welcome your thoughts.
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Winning the ACS CXO Disruptors Award

Humbled and taken by surprise. Last night I was awarded the inaugural CXO Disruptors Award. Not that I needed encouragement or acknowledgement, but I feel an even greater responsibility to keep driving change and disruption for good.

Thank you to my amazing Digivizer team who inspire me every day. And of course my amazing family who support and encourage, love and nurture me every step of the way.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

An amazing night. Congratulations to all the winners!

Original post seen on LinkedIn.

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How unsure are you of your digital channel performance?

In a recent article in the Think with Google series, Casey Carey,  Director, Platforms & Publisher Marketing at Google, makes a telling point: just 17% of advertisers surveyed said they are looking at the performance of all their digital channels.

Which leaves the following questions unanswered: What about the missing 83%? And why is it so difficult for them to know what’s actually working across their various digital platforms?

It gets worse. The same article also carried another insight: 25% of markets cite organizational and structural challenges as reasons for not adopting data-driven attribution – what the real causes for a purchase by a consumer actually is.

It seems that many organizations, even big ones with budgets and resources , struggle to make sense of what they spend.

And all of this gets worse for smaller and medium sized businesses, who have most to gain from using digital, and perhaps most to lose from missing an opportunity or deploying precious budget in the wrong channels or on the wrong content.

The problem has been that knowing the performance of your digital campaigns across multiple platforms has previously been too hard, too late, too inaccurate and too expensive.

Part of the challenge is that to make this a reality is difficult. For example, IBM says we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data a day. That’s a lot of zeros.

Breaking that down to what matters to your customer, where they are and what they will engage with becomes critical to get right and of great concern to those wanting to get the most of their budget.

To do so, data has to be normalized across multiple platforms for it to become useful in a comparative sense, with even something as trivial as the start of the day being different for each platform, but also to see the same measures of engagement or click throughs to be consistent and to make true price and conversion rate comparisons.

Data is the lifeblood of marketing, customer satisfaction and selling, yet it seems data solutions tend to either be priced out of the hands of most businesses – either in licensing costs or in the time and complexity required to get this up and running.

This is the core thing that Digivizer has worked on solving for businesses of all sizes.

We’ve taken eight years of product development and six years of using our own technology with some of the biggest brands and companies in Australia and overseas, and made both available to companies of any size.

You can now see how your investment across all the main digital platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Google Ads – is working.

You can choose any number of paid media measurements for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google – total spend, impressions, CPM, engagement and engagement rate, CPE, video views,  Link Clicks, click-through rate (CTR), and cost-per-click (CPC) for campaigns and adsets.

You can track who’s talking about you and to you.

You can use hashtags to create and follow conversations important to your brand.

You can track your in-channel performance.

We have removed  complexity and obstacles to understanding in detail what’s working about your digital marketing – making it easy to see where to continue to invest.

All for US$89 per month on our starter package – about the price of a daily cup of great coffee.

If you have the authority in your accounts to see your social channels data and paid, you can be up and running in minutes and finally see everything at once. You can create an account (with 30 days free)  at digivizer.com.

This article is also published on LinkedIn.

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People strategies in fast-growth startups: creating sustainable growth foundations

When companies are in fast- growth stage, it is not unusual to have new people, reporting to new people, who report to new people, working with new technology, serving new customers. The growth inevitably leads to a ‘cascade of newness’. Despite your smaller size, you need to be super- disciplined at ensuring that in your haste to build and resource up as fast-growth demands, that you do not make hasty or incorrect hiring decisions. Nor can you afford circumnavigation around deep onboarding and knowledge-transfer programs designed to ensure new people understand the culture, their role, and performance expectations and measures.

Equally in fast-growth you need to resist the urge to prescribe and over- engineer on process. The key to growth is getting really smart people in, making sure they know where the company is heading, and then enabling and encouraging them to forge the path within a “one team, one dream” business focus, yet at the same time be encouraged to take individual responsibility for making smart decisions, and delivering measurable success.

Building foundations

Foundation elements in getting this right start with the talent and skills of those you employ. Alongside these sit attitude – does this person share your values, will they be a good collaborator, and aptitude – are they the right ‘fit’ for your fast-growth environment. You then want to ensure everyone aligns around customer success first. If you focus with clarity on the customer’s success (and what you do to enable it), it is the best way of ensuring your own business and everyone’s personal success.

How do you hire to ensure you have the right people?

For Digivizer, hiring starts with the mandate: look for smart, talented people, who get things done, are infinite learners and are not an arsehole. Our values crafted by our employees themselves are not negotiable, focusing on “one team, one dream”, truth and transparency, responsibility, courage and growth.

Getting our foundations right is one I think Digivizer on the whole has done well. We ensure everyone is clear about our vision, our objectives, our values, our success measures and our recruitment and care of people. We then continually check on progress with everyone. Nothing beats survey data around employee engagement, performance, and satisfaction to ensure we get this part of our business right and the best it can be. Our leadership mantra is simple – grow people and you grow business. Spending time understanding and providing challenges for people, is the surest way to deliver growth.

Despite knowing the importance of getting our people culture right, we have recently experienced growth pains we needed to address. As such, I wanted to share our painfully learned and reinforced lessons to help others going through similar growth periods:

  1. Some people won’t grow with you. They liked it small, they liked it when they were more important and integral. As you grow you need people who can grow ahead of you and those who see the need to continuously grow and learn. People either grow with you through multiple levels and evolutions, or they can’t (or won’t). You need to quickly identify and deal with those who can’t grow or cope with fast change,. They will be happier elsewhere, and so will your team who want to stay focused on the growth challenge.
  2. Employees who come from larger corporates or consultancies, where process and bureaucracy are well-established, can be uncomfortable and unhappy in a fast-growth company. Whilst some say they want the start-up/growth experience, you need to find a way to identify people who have the capacity and the willingness to switch from big corporate steady-state mode, to hectic ground-moving growth mode. Whilst you need principles to guide decisions, it is far more important to hire and encourage people’s comfort in fast-moving environments, where they thrive on continuous change, risk and complex challenges. You want people who want to choose the scary upside-down roller-coaster over the safe merry-go-round. You can’t ever afford for anyone try or desire to make things slower or easier. If you see that is the motivator, you need to address it immediately.
  3. Excuse-making and sub-cultures are like cancer – you need to address it with radical candour and if not completely and quickly realigned, cut it out of your organisation immediately.  Coach those who are willing but never allow those who think there is an option to resist change, or to not take on responsibility for culture, values, performance and outcomes. It is never OK to have an alternative view counter to your company vision. Explain the surgery to the rest of the team once you have acted, to remove any concerns of those who are doing the right thing. It is important that people are encouraged and feel protective of their environment, and see that they are responsible for the changes they want to see, and feel empowered, energised and secure about doing the right thing.
  4. Don’t ever lower the bar on hiring. And the more critical the role, the more important it is to have multiple interviews, and multiple interviewers. Whilst you need to move quickly, you need to get your recruitment right as the opportunity cost on getting this wrong (distraction and what is not delivered from someone who is holding the seat of someone who could be great for you). For hires that you are unsure of, or for teams with a structure in flux, turn these roles into timed contracts which allows you to more easily change and shape your organisation. If for whatever reason someone is not right, deal with this immediately. You can’t afford to allow those who don’t represent your values to erode the teamwork and team values already built.
  5. Ensure the values are real every day – your team must know what they are, you must talk to them, share them, live them, relate decisions to them and ensure they are present in all you say, do and communicate. You can never over communicate the values and drivers for the business.
  6. Make sure your leaders know how to practise radical candour and can do performance management discussions. It is critical that everyone in the organisation has regular discussions around:
  • Here is what you are doing really well – provide specific examples and what behaviours you observed that lead to great outcomes
  • Here is what you really need to be focusing more time on. You need to be really clear about what is expected, how this helps, and how they will know if they are successfully performing. Ensure you commit to a follow-up time to address it
  • Here is something that will be a potential issue and hinder your performance if you don’t address it immediately. Be 100% clear if someone needs to take some immediate action to ensure that their success or ability to stay in their role is not at risk
  • What can we do to help ensure your success (and then help them)!

What does a successful people culture in early-growth companies look like?

It is important to understand that start-up/fast-growth cultures are not for everyone.

Smart people who have traded in roles at larger companies are replacing having lots of other people, processes, systems, money and prestige/leverage that they may no longer have in start-up/fast-growth stage companies. This can cause tension between those used to working at organisations with deep pockets and plentiful resources, and those who understand the tight cash that most start-ups operate within which requires smarter thinking or happiness to do without. I have seen some of the best and creative ideas flourish when being developed within budget and time constraints.

It’s important to keep aspiring to build, change, and improve a people-culture as you grow, and ensure everyone plays their part in its nurture. The most valuable people are those who are happy to work to objectives, no matter how difficult they are, and are happy to be measured by key results, clearly identified, and answer whether they are on track or not. Assume everyone is there to do the right thing, and then build off that base-assumption to improve the results.

Always focus on results, not effort. It’s important to have a results-driven culture rather than one that rewards effort. It should never be around the number of hours someone works, or how much time goes into a project. Either you achieved what you set out to do or you are not doing the job needed. If the latter is the result, conduct constructive retrospectives to identify what needs to be done differently.

A great growth culture has your team happy to be challenged, to continuously learn, test and apply. To change tacts when things don’t go to plan. They are happy to ask whether there’s a better way – and most-important of all, to take responsibility for making that happen.

They are highly adaptable, can roll up their sleeves, take responsibility for delivery and understand all kinds of challenges and options for a company at any of its stages.

They also enjoy the feeling of success that comes with delivering on the objectives for the customer, and in celebrating the milestone achievements along the way,

As a leader in fast-growth, what you do and say impacts culture. Everything must be your own team and your customers success front and center. It will keep your culture grounded in high performance, high enjoyment, high care, and trust in the high rewards that will come.

What are your experiences and tips for managing people culture and performance in fast-growth?

This article is also published on LinkedIn.

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Why the government needs to invest more in Australian innovation … or perish

Last week’s AFR Innovation Summit raised a number of challenges Australia is facing. These challenges remained without solutions.

Conflicting views seemed to run counter to what the long-term view should be: how Australia plans for future prosperity, what we need to do today to ensure that we will have jobs tomorrow, defining a positive role for AI, and supporting innovation in software and technology. What’s at stake here is a relevant future for the Australian economy and a diversity of companies in sufficient numbers that create the greatest benefit over the longest term.

Our collective intent seems confused. The government should be inspiring and supporting the investment made every week, by companies like Digivizer, in product research and development, market development, export development and growth, so that we develop world-class products that create export wealth for Australia.

We have invested millions of dollars in product research and development — not on esoteric experiments that meet subjective measurements of proof of some sort of “pure” R&D, but on R&D that confirms new ways to create business value. For our part, we continue to research, develop, test, apply, learn and iterate to create something commercially viable.

Companies that grow through continuous development, which are able to separate what generates revenue today from investment in what generates revenue tomorrow, should be applauded and incentivised — especially those with track records of taking previous years’ R&D and apply it to future revenues.

We will only stay relevant and valuable if we continue to devote a good percentage of our time working out what will be important in the future. Yet speakers at this week’s conference opined that what companies like Digivizer do is somehow “not real R&D”. Certainly, the government’s policy now seems clear: to return savings from a cornerstone program back to the government, regardless of the fact that a number of speakers quoted figures showing how low Australia sits in the global innovation stakes. Let’s not forget that today’s R&D support in Australia is for many a forward tax rebate against investments already made, involving many hundreds of hours of self-assessment, often subject to seemingly subjective assessment, diverting energy and focus away from where it really counts: actual innovation.

It is a great disappointment that our government’s rhetoric is now focused on savings rather than on investment  for the future.

As CSIRO CEO Larry Marshall said, you can’t save your way to success.

Or, as Daniel Petre of AirTree Ventures phrased it: “The government shouldn’t f— up the R&D tax incentive — it’s critical for start-ups and critical then for founders to retain equity.”

Meanwhile, countries such as Sweden, Israel and Germany redeploy up to 100% of the savings from earlier R&D schemes into direct R&D grants.

Australia runs the risk of being an innovation backwater. Figures from the conference cite a drop in Australia’s gross R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP from about 2.25% to about 1.9% between 2007 and 2015. The OECD’s figures grew from about 2.3% to nearly 2.4%. The World Intellectual Property Organisation puts Australia at 17th in our region, behind Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea.

For a nation with just 0.33% of the world’s population, we need to do better at going global. The government needs to create certainty, clarity and consistency with a focus on future global relevance, and then do all it can to allow businesses to flourish. By all means demand rigour, but don’t confuse forcing companies to jump through an endless procession of hoops with innovation.

We need to prove we are building a nation that supports innovative businesses with something new to offer. We need to support these businesses in their critical growth stages, to ensure they will continue to make a positive difference.

This article was also published on Smartcompany

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Making the best of our technology available to every business

At Digivizer we continue to learn so much from providing services to our enterprise customers. We’ve spent a lot of time with customers like Microsoft, Lenovo, Intel, Barilla, McWilliam’s Wines, Snapfish, and more.

We’re grateful for their continued support as we broaden our range, and for all that we have learned and grown together.

Increasingly, we’ve been asked to help smaller-sized businesses. We still want to look to deliver services like digital creative, paid media and analytics at different budget levels.

We also see the much larger opportunity to help empower and arm all small-to-medium businesses with the same insights that we provide our enterprise clients – and that we use ourselves to our own advantage.

We’re passionate about helping all businesses easily understand their investment in digital marketing, whether that be organic, earned or paid. Businesses need to know exactly how they are performing across all their social and search channels. We want to make this available in an affordable way to every business.

We want to make it easy for businesses to do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.

I’m excited to share with you that for some time now we’ve been building a new product. It brings all our high-tech, big-end-of-town data crunching into a much more streamlined, accessible, affordable and valuable experience.

We have been testing and gaining feedback from our existing customers and are now ready to extend a beta version to more businesses.

For a limited time, we would like to invite you to register your interest to join our private beta at no cost or obligation to you. The more it’s used, and the more feedback is shared with us, the more we learn and understand what is important to you, and the better the experience for everyone becomes.

What does Digivizer deliver?

The Digivizer app brings all your digital data – paid and organic – into one live interface. That way, you can see what’s working on any given channel at any given time.

Digivizer gives you live data and insights to help ensure you deliver the right message, on the right channel, at the right time, to drive measurable business results. We answer questions like:

  • How am I performing?
  • What’s working and which platform?
  • Are we doing better than previously and where is doing better?
  • How much am I spending at any one time and where?
  • How am I performing against my objectives:
    • Impressions
    • Engagement
    • Video Views
    • Lead Conversion
    • Sales
  • How can I make sure I am not wasting my money as I am spending it?
  • How can I get this information easily and in one place?
  • How do I make my reporting easier?

One platform

Before now it’s been expensive – in time and tools – or just impossible to get an easy, single view across all platforms in one place.

We hear from our customers how painful it is for them to co-ordinate across each social and search platform. This has been made harder with the changes each platform makes. They move things around, change their algorithms, change what you see, and what things mean.

With Digivizer, you can easily connect all your paid accounts across social and search into our platform, see key insights and make easy comparisons. Today our product supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google Adwords, and Google Display.

Real time

A key pain point for many customers is that they find out how their investment in digital is performing weeks and months after they have spent the money. This is far too late to action any learnings.

Traditionally, small businesses are forced to access each platform manually and pull out the data, which takes hours. Then they have to interpret it, cobbling together a single report to see how their investment is working for them. Alternatively, they look at the final delivery point of lead or sale, and which individual platform has delivered it.

By the time you’ve been able to get the answers, the chance to adjust your strategy has passed. If it’s not immediately obvious with a big spike or dip in the numbers, then often you’re left frustrated, feeling like you’ve spent money and time without the ability to influence the outcome.

Having one view of cost-per-lead versus a view of what is delivering best value for money and what’s most-valued by customer, are missing. That’s what Digivizer can provide.

Easy to use

With Digivizer, you’ll be able to see how your ad campaigns are performing graphs and tables that are easy to control and explore. You’ll be able to add and remove the variables you choose – like date range, platform, objective.

When some part of your campaign is working really well – or not working as well as it should – you’ll be able to see it in the data and jump right in to start figuring out why. Want to take the long view and see how your campaigns have performed against each other? You can do that, too.

Best of all, you won’t have to just invest your money and cross your fingers for three months. You can see what you’re paying for as it happens. This gives you the freedom to turn it up, or turn it off, as you choose.

Affordable

We’re working to ensure the best of our technology is made available for the lowest per month price so it can be available to all businesses, with all your owned, earned and paid social and search media data and insights at your fingertips.

Over time we will continue to add a greater number of platforms and insights to cover the broader digital marketing funnel.

It’s an exciting time for Digivizer. We can now start offering the best of our technology built over nearly 8 years to every business. Those who we know deserve to get the best out of their digital spend, who are sorely in need of tech tools that remove the stress and pain, we hear you!

Please join us in a private beta. Register your interest to join at no cost, no obligation now, at digivizer.com.

A version of this article is also published at digivizer.com.

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The future NSW stadium debate cannot ignore esports – where the future fans, audiences and revenues are

The debate about the NSW Government’s plans to demolish and rebuild two of Sydney’s sports stadiums – the Allianz Stadium, in the SCG precinct, and the ANZ Stadium (formerly the Olympic Stadium) at Homebush – is predictably-heated: great politics, appropriate debate about investment across the State, and a lining up of the two camps for and against.

And in all this sound and fury, the future – esports – has been ignored.

Omit esports from the business case, and Sydney runs the risks of seeing the huge opportunity and upside of future esports audiences attending major events in major Sydney stadiums, and the economic benefits it represents in attracting overseas visitors and continuous audience revenues, pass it by.

The party-political “either-or” rhetoric needs to be replaced an economic argument based on long-term opportunities which didn’t exist when both stadiums were built.

These economic benefits to Sydney and NSW do extend interstate: as an example, 40% of the 20,000+ attendees who attended last year’s PAX event (in Melbourne), the largest gaming event in Australia and the largest penny-arcade expo outside the United States, were interstate visitors. In America, it’s common for half of those who attend gaming events in any given state to fly in from others or overseas.

Go where the audiences are

New stadiums, built for the future, will act as catalysts for additional revenues. Let’s look first at audiences, and where they are. Here is a summary of sports attendance for the main Australian codes relative to esports:

(Source: individual sports web sites and media coverage via Wikipedia)

Esports audience sizes inside stadiums can only grow. At last year’s Intel Extreme Masters held at Sydney Qudos Bank Stadium, 7,000 fans were present in person, in a venue only partly available to the organizers. However 8 million people around the world watched the main day’s events live online and within 3 weeks, earned them 92 million impressions.

As the following chart shows, while bigger venues have the capacity to attract more people to attend esports in person, esports already dominates in global viewing numbers:

While care is needed with these comparisons – it’s not possible to break out how any people outside Australia watched the Australian sporting codes, nor the proportion of those who watched IEM output based here in Australia – one thing is clear: esports attract greater audiences and a larger number of overseas audiences. This is why we need to advocate early for our new stadiums to support these type of events and digital infrastructure and support required.

Now on to the positive effect on additional revenues that we suggest result from having stadiums built for esports.

Media rights for esports events are forecast to crest US$340 million by 2020. They will act as new centres of gravity for additional pay-per-view and other forms of new media, all driving additional revenue around online participation advertising, content, merchandising and more. We should not underestimate the power of the tagline “…streaming to you from Stadium Sydney.”

Aussies have always loved our sport and music, but the question remains: will these numbers on their own sustain the Government’s proposed $2.5 billion investment, a policy that now seems to have ministers running for cover?

We think so. According to Statista, the size of the APAC esports market is worth US$406 million – 36% of the global market. Broader-still, gaming is worth US$51.3 billion in the APAC region, half the global figure of US$116 billion as reported by NewZoo. And with two-thirds of all Australians active gamers, we are seeing the economic impact of this market, with consumer brands and sports brands investing in the lucrative 25-35 year old demographic (nearly half of which is female). The Australian games industry already generates over $3 billion a year.

Overwhelmed with figures? You should be: with esports, they’re always big.

The largest-ever esports event – the Intel Extreme Masters Final at Katowice in Poland in 2017 – attracted 173,000 attendees. That’s twice State of Origin, 73% larger than either of the major codes’ Grand Finals, and 100,000 more than this year’s Super Bowl.

Opening Ceremony, Intel Extreme Masters World Championships Katowice 2017. Photographer: Helena-Kristiansson. Via Forbes.

If we consider the positive economic impact of hosting such an event, attracting teams and fans from interstate and overseas, we can see each major esports event paying for any investment in the new stadiums. Peter Fitzsimons, in his opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald this week, questions whether the proposed investment can pay for itself in two years. With the detailed data behind the indicative summaries above to hand, that claim looks reasonable – and certainly deserves more analysis.

New thinking for new stadiums

Thirty years ago, when both stadiums were in planning, neither esports nor the Internet infrastructure that enables it existed. New thinking beyond steel, concrete and turf is now needed. The technology, screens and streaming infrastructure (especially super-high-speed Internet connectivity) to support interactivity, social media sharing, and new revenue generation requirements, must be part of any business case and any development planning. Tomorrow’s stadiums must be able to stage multi-purpose events that can scale. Inevitably, China is ahead, with the purpose-built Zhongxian stadium set to seat 7,000 people with significant investment in the digital infrastructure required to leverage their much larger online audiences, and our cousins across the Tasman in NZ already see the light.

But here’s the good news: Sydney is already on the esports map in the list of go-to cities. Hence why it is critical to ensure it stays there and our political debate incorporates the numbers and impact that this opportunity represents.

So to everyone in this debate, don’t ignore the future. Esports are already racing away from merely being options that fill the empty venues between sports events and music concerts to becoming the events that underpin stadiums’ revenues.

Esports events will fill any new stadium in Sydney, and attract global online audiences (and revenues) in their millions as long as the design and infrastructure supports it.

The government has an opportunity to consult with a new breed of experts, and take soundings from this vibrant and burgeoning industry sector, to tap into the new generation of sports fans. Research will easily show the defendable business case, that this type of new investment in Sydney will attract economic benefits that can be invested across the State, bring vision to the thinking, and consider stadium options that support today and the future.

It’s time for Sydney to look to the future, and when it comes to stadiums, that future must include esports.

This article is also published on LinkedIn.

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The relationship between government and business in supporting a digital-first economy

 

Yesterday I was on a panel of technology CEOs and leaders hosted by the Australian Business Software Industry Association (ABSIA) discussing the challenges that face Australian Businesses today, and exploring what would be required to support a truly digital economy.

 

The other panel members, representing a cross-section from industry and government, were Deborah Ralston, Kate Carruthers, Marjukka Maki-Hokkonen, Ramez Katf (Second Commissioner and CIO, ATO), Stuart Korchinski, Trent Innes and Karen Lay-Brew, moderated by Matthew Prouse.

Ahead of ABSIA’s own report on the discussion, here are my personal thoughts on where we are in this country.

Remove all constraints: be truly digital-first

Interestingly consumers are already digital first in their everyday actions. Our discussions related to how ready we were digitally in serving today and the future. In particular ABSIA asked the question whether Australia’s software industry was big enough to be a driver of the changes required to support the future and if so, what would be required.

What was a rarity less than 10 years ago is now the norm: people transacting, in their personal and business lives, readily giving up their personal data, often through mobile devices, desiring (and increasingly demanding) fast connectivity at all times.

Yet businesses often remain bound up too much by where we physically are – in our thinking and our infrastructure. This can be local infrastructure implementations itself – just think how much time is wasted trying to physically connect to a screen in a meeting room – or broader infrastructure limitations – for example, our inability to access fast bandwidth for processing large amounts of data from anywhere. Just yesterday I was unable to send a large file to a government body due to their file transfer limitations. This government department would not link to a Google Drive or Dropbox, nor take a USB drive, so instead we had to separate a single (and relatively small) PDF into three parts. Needless to say, this is not spending time on high-value activities.

This is before we look at the much more serious competitive limitations around the speed and cost of data processing, which is much more expensive here in Australia relative to other countries, and much slower. According to the Akamai State of the Internet Connectivity reports, Australia regularly ranks 50th in country connectivity speeds.

And whereas we still tend to fix employees to fixed workstations or points here in Australia, we see the removal of these constraints in some industries such as retail, and in some countries entirely – China’s consumers are operating almost entirely in a mobile world, including all financial transactions.

If we want to compete seriously, Australia’s future needs to be about supporting businesses and consumers operating without infrastructure or device constraints of any kind. Whatever you want to do, wherever you are, however you want to engage, it should be not only possible but totally personalised within an enabled environment.

This requires a fast and (ideally free) ubiquitous network.

The real promise of data

Data is all about opportunity. As I write this, debate rages about data privacy. We do need to build secure networks and data housing, but the issues that arise tend to be more around ethics, building trust, and permission. Organisations that have breached their customers’ trust have been punished throughout history.

For businesses the opportunity is to not focus on providing data infrastructure but rather to determine what questions we ask of data, and how do we want to engage, synthesise, transform and action data in meaningful ways that create value for the consumer. Unfortunately, infrastructure, speed, cost and connectivity become critically important: the closer your data analysis can get to real-time, the better-informed you are, and the more options around actions you have, also in real-time.

How do we choose to use data? How much data do we want or need? How comfortable are about the agreements we make with those with whom we share our data? These are decisions we are making every day.

If other countries are going to be able to hold and process data faster than we’re able to, and can more easily afford to do so, that we will limit our ability to compete for the global customer without considerable infrastructure investment.

When we factor in that tomorrow’s global workforce and consumers will know no other world than one rich on data and (mass) personalised offerings, we have some challenging questions to consider as a country.

One thing is certain, though: asking the right questions and determining how to action real-time data is the best advantage we can create for ourselves as businesses.

New dimensions for assessing skills

With the third of my three children now half-way through her high school years, I believe Australia’s education system needs major overhauls to equip our children for the future. This is more than an emphasis on STEM, important as that is. Unfortunately, today our children can “do well at school” through focusing on repeat activities and by building strong memorisation skills. With all the world’s information at our fingertips, this is not enough. With AI, robotics and machine learning impacting the way we work and the roles (and skills) required in the future, our advantages will come from exercising creativity, philosophy, ethics, and being able to think critically, take risks, and build, assess and refine strategies on the fly.

Already at Digivizer we are discarding any formal education as a measure of employment. Instead we look to hire on employees being able to demonstrate that they are smart, talented, infinite learners, get things done, and not assholes! We need people who are adaptable enough to a fast changing world full of many opportunities.

Back to our education system: I’m starting to see awesome pockets of capability being built through project-based learning when children get a mandate to build something, to create solutions to real problems and opportunities. These take form in fully fledged responses that include service offerings, websites, apps and new ways of doing things. This generation going through school don’t have to learn to think digital: they simply are digital. They are better-equipped than those who are 10-20 years older than them to navigate the world of opportunities available in a digital economy. This becomes a key advantage – or disadvantage if we are not considering this in our workplace designs.

If we want to compete globally, Australia’s education system needs to do a lot to help people think, more than how to remember. Talent needs to be defined and valued in new ways.

On the role of governments

Views on the role of government always seem to move between the government doing a good job and how the government needs to do more.  As anyone who has started and grown a business would attest, we are not playing victims expecting handouts. We are building great businesses based on determination, our own investment, grit and an appetite for risk. We have found a way – and have often overcome obstacles through sheer force of will. But with a population that represents just 0.34% of the global population, we need to be hyper-focused on how to compete globally. This is where we need the support of government.

The biggest benefits governments can provide are the infrastructure needed to be competitive and successful, updating our education system, opening up global opportunities for workforce and business, and financial incentives designed to support economic growth and value. The current R&D tax rebate incentive is an example of a good incentive designed to focus the minds of those seeking the rebates, so that true innovation, research and breakthroughs occur, but it is not enough.

As to future funding, we must ensure that the mechanisms for funding in Australia compete with those available overseas. Australian technology companies are receiving much more support at start up, yet need to go overseas for their next level funding – often never returning.

Final observations

As to the future of Australia’s software industry, yes – I firmly believe we have the opportunity to influence and lead, but we need to have the political and business will to make this happen. We can be smart and get things done, but it really will come down to our speed of adaptation to the digital future and a global mindset.

To scale globally we need access to funds and incentives to stay. And we need digital infrastructure like never before. As panellist Marjukka Maki-Hokkonen, who was born in Finland, noted, a small population spread over a wide, inhospitable landscape need not be a barrier to investment. Finland built a nationwide mobile network that connects the entire country, including unoccupied tundra, and citizens and business have access to very low-cost superfast wifi nationally. Sound like a plan?

It did strike me that much of the emphasis on creating a common data model, policies and infrastructure was being supported and lobbied by our financial industry and yet this industry is itself ripe for disruption. It is critical for us to consider the empowered future consumer: to win their business we will need to compete in environments where everyone has access to so many options. Emphasis will be on empowerment and value, and the consumer will respond with their virtual wallets and votes.

Whatever the solution to infrastructure, customers will expect, demand and insist that these options, services and systems deliver value and are available to them on their terms. As businesses, it’s our role to create the applications, product, services and capability that brings meaning to such infrastructure.

As always, the decisions and opportunities – as individuals, and as a nation – are ours to take.

This article is also published on LinkedIn.

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A personal observation of travel time – the impact of mobile technology

Photo: Manly Fast Ferry

Quelle horreur! – my iphone battery died just as I entered my 20 minute Fast Ferry ride home last Wednesday at 6.15pm. I usually use this time to catch up on emails and I felt at a loss about what to do with this time. I could have enjoyed the gorgeous view of Sydney Harbour. Instead, I thought it opportune to observe my fellow travellers, to answer the question, “what do other people do on their journey home”.

My data sample was 50 people.

  • 80% were on a mobile device
  • 2% were on computers
  • 2% were on tablets
  • 14% were reading printed materials (<1% on kindle)
  • Fewer than 1% were in conversation, which was double those that were looking out the window and those that were writing on notepads or in notebooks

Of those on their mobile device:

  • 9% were on the phone/talking
  • 29% had earphones in/watching a screen with some occasionally smiling/laughing – I presume they were watching entertainment or perhaps a Ted Talk – they were not engaging with their screen
  • 29% were scrolling – quick-flicking through their phone feeds (I am guessing most were social but they could have been flicking fasts through newsfeeds or emails)
  • 1% had earphones in and just were listening to something, perhaps music
  • the balance, also just under 30%, were engaged in some form – e.g. texting, typing, engaging with the content they were viewing.

It may have looked a bit creepy with my notepad, pen, and staring at people whilst jotting notes and creating tallies – but I was struck by the enabling power of mobile technology.

The question for me is whether we are using this time most effectively, or just conveniently.

I like to plan my day and use the morning before I leave for work to prioritise what I need to do (including what I want to do on my trip in). But I am definitely more lax just catching up on emails on the way home.

How do you use your travel time? Purposively?

This article is also published on LinkedIn.