Grame Barty Delivers Talk Transcript at CASOC 2000"Lets Get Lateral"

Transcript of the talk delivered at CASOC 2000:

"Lets Get Lateral: Vertical Verus Horizontal in Building Online Communities."

Gerry Gannon introduces Grame Barty MD of Harvest Road who delivered this talk.

Gerry Gannon said, " I would like to introduce to your a pioneer, a very innovative person who has built up a company who
has the fastest growing online company now in Australia doing work not just around Western Australia, not just around Australia but around the world. Grame Barty is the Managing Director of Harvest Road and one of our prime sponsors of this conference and
also as I said a man who has a huge depth of knowledge about this industry. One of their great tools of course is Web-Power which has revolutionised the web sites are presented and managed. When I read through Graeme's C.V., I said, " get out of here …this man's got a military background and spent some time in military intelligence which is usually a contradiction in terms but not where Grame was concerned". He specialised in communications intelligence and electronic warfare…. He spent ten years as a commissioned officer in the Australian Regular Army and in that time he was assigned to NATO forces in Europe, Dux of the Royal Australian Core of Signals Advanced Communications course and commanded the Seventy Second Electronic Warfare Squadron. Ladies and gentlemen please put your hands together for General Grame Barty."

Grame Barty's speech:
" Thanks very much Gerry, that must have been a very old C.V. I think. My soldiers used to call me 'Major Disaster' actually but of course a lot of what I had done previously involved communication and really analysing communication systems to understand why people did things. In those particular days of course they didn't have a particular manuals printed up to say why they where doing it, that's another particular insight. What I would really like to talk about today is not just the future but what you can do. This is all about you and what you want to do in the community. We are interested in Amazon and we are interested in all the big players but what we are really want to know is 'how does this affect me?' And at the end of the day reason or community may not change the world but it is very important to every body that belongs to it. And I think that there is intrinsic value that you cannot measure in e-commerce terms. Let's think of the overall picture not just the e-commerce one.

Now I want to set the scene and luckily I had a lot presentations, a lot of terminology already explained to me so that's kind of handy. I want to set the scene with tow quotes that I really like and I use all the time. Because it really talks about why are we doing this and what we are really about is the 'Information Economy' our world is changing in front of us and certainly a company like mine could not have existed five years ago so something must be going on.

There are two important criteria and they are both different. The one by Professor David James from then University of Ballarat, who is a customer of ours, who says," between now and 2010 the total volume of information ever published in the world will double". Anything that has ever been created in the world today will double and will be digitised. That means there must be other means of communicating information than the way we currently are doing it today.

More importantly 40% of the required for 2010 don't exist today. So, that's a particular issue for education authorities. That means that even most of us sitting in this room will be doing things in ten years time, at least half of us will be doing things that we won't be doing today. So that's a very important impact. So there has to be a different set of tools to do things. And I still think the bottom one is the most important quote of all," the early wins in web sites, in this case portals," we haven't defined portals at that stage," most likely to be responsible are those with huge amount of information". Just what David was saying before but more importantly that information is always is changing. If you look at the information why people go online it is for purposeful exploration in other word the Internet is a utility. So from my point of view that means that the portal or the ability to generate that information does not reside in one single location, it does not reside with the web master.

If this was a portal then it means that every body in this community world be contributing to the portal. That's the only way we are going to get a huge amount of information in your environment that is constantly going to change. The reality of this just like small links,
modem links what's driven very wide band infrastructure and not pay TV over the past five years. Is all those little bits of information that you have, that you personally have and that a farmer has about the way he grows a canola crop and all those sort of things is what is important. It's necessarily the big picture, its lots of the little pictures combined together that will actually create the value, that's what is useful on the Internet.

So across Asia and recently I've just come back from India and in Japan a number of very very common drivers. I know when dealing with your communities and the communities that I'm dealing with within Australia these are really common factors that we have seen. First of all we have to think of web portals as the information hubs of the knowledge economy that is no different from an airport, that is no different from a train station. You have got airports wether they are big or small in your location and you are going to have to have knowledge hubs, information hubs in your location. Its important it is part of the infrastructure so we need to think about that. The other component that I noticed which is the most consistent thing through out is that every single virtual community no matter how big you find it and we saw lots of definitions before, wants control. There wouldn't be a client that I meet that does not want control of their own portal and their own environment. That would be the single greatest theme.

So Yahoo can do what they like and Excite can get as excited as they like at the end of the day you have your own reasons for wanting to drive the information back into your community and they involve a whole host of things.

The other point that I want to make and touch on was just mentioned previously is that I firmly believe that personal portals, you know the portal of wine, personal portals will replace the desktop laptop and I'm going to explain how that works. So we are going to operating at a completely different environment. From a technology point of view the paradigms that are going to cause that to happen are mobile Internet, the Linux operating system and XML extensible mark-up language, which is a new mediated standard for actually recording things and actually notifying what things are…tagging things. So I'm going to explain a little bit of those things to you.

And then, the final point that I want us to get in our mind is that bandwidth will cease to become an issue. Bandwidth is not a case of IF. Bandwidth is a case of WHEN. And I could list at least ten different service providers that are all lining up right now even in Western Australia and even in rural Western Australia or rural Victoria that are all aiming to provide high-banded services. So in your thinking when we are looking at the future, you need to eliminate bandwidth as an issue.

So, when we look at the environments that we've had previously, in the old days, which was pre-1999, we operated in an environment where we had a client-server type application. In other words, you loaded something onto your PC in order to have an interaction with the server, whether the server was on the Net or whether it was on local area Internet. Now, in virtual communities, and we've seen this time and time again, there's a kind of drop-off point of about a hundred users, where it ceases to become effective. You simply cannot ask people in your community to load things. You know, it would be very hard and very difficult to say, "If you actually load this particular application, you'll be able to do these things." There's a remote kind of syndrome, " I couldn't be bothered… I couldn't be bothered to change the channels I couldn't be bothered to load it…I don't understand it." We've discovered that there is probably at least thirty per cent of the world that are still running 486's and Netscape Navigator 3.0 is still very predominant. So you have to be very careful about asking people to load things, because it simply won't expand. And it also means that you don't have to speed the market.

So what is emerging is this application-server environment where in fact all the authorities and permissions for the tools reside on a Web-based server somewhere…doesn't matter where it is…let's say in the case of mainstreet.com in Ballarat, it's actually in a Ballarat Enterprise Centre, so everybody is getting their authorisations and applications off that particular individual centre and you simply access a browser, and the tools are delivered to you, the authoring tools are delivered to you, and your permissions are delivered to you…exactly what you can see and what you can do. The point about that is that we have to have a different method of access, not just laptop or desktop, what we're really talking about is a mobile access. Not just mobile access of information, but a mobile communication device. Now it's not necessarily the sort of device that you imagine today. We're really talking about mobile communication devices. Now if you think about it, you might say, "well application-service providers won't work." Well, actually it will work because the mobile network already provides you instant access. In Japan, in Dokimo, their mobile service provider, they went from one years service providers to six million in nine months purely based on providing Internet access to the mobile phone. And a hottest service is of course dating services by mobile phone, but that's the service that the market wanted. So, the point about that is, that if you want to have that access, I can't ask you to load something onto a mobile phone. How do we physically load an ASCI-Text secure file onto a mobile phone; well that's pretty well near impossible, and that's not going to happen. So in other words, with 500 million phones already deployed in the world, and those network infrastructures already in place, then you are going to find a very rapid take-off. That will drive the application-service provider environment that we're operating in. In our own environments then, what we'll see is not a plain old telephone, a little beige telephone, but what we'll actually have in every office environment maybe in addition to a plain old telephone, we'll actually have a thin flat screen with a browser-type interface. And that will enable us to login and do our things. So, as long as we have access to a browser, we have access to our own space.

So the important thing is that going forward the Network is the Computer. And in a diagrammatic representation of course, it simply means being able to access via the Web, publish your information via a service provided service somewhere, and then accessing it wherever. What we're really talking about is automatic creation, aggregation, and dissemination portal-wide, Internet-wide, of information.

Now, I want to make a point about e-commerce versus information, because there's been a kind of wrong focus I think in the early days about e-commerce and transactions alone. The real focus should be on information distribution. So, I'll give an example, and I apologise if anyone has heard the example before. If my mother who lived in Wygunyah in North-Western Victoria was first delivered her black phone in 1960, and the third phone call she got was from Optus to pass over her credit card details to change service providers, of course, what would she say? "I don't know you. I don't know whether I'll ever use this thing, maybe I'll only use it once a month, and I don't see the purpose of that and I haven't the confidence in you." Of course that confidence took several years, maybe a decade, two decades for us to get used to handing over credit card numbers over the phone. So that will happen as a natural discourse of actually being able to understand why you want to use the medium. So I think we shouldn't be too concerned about e-commerce at the moment. It will happen, and these mechanisms I'm going to show you actually allow everybody in your community to actually be participants to create and disseminate the information.

The other point I want to make in relation to mobile devices, is not just mobile phones, but the emergence of devices. This is very important. Because at the moment, you think the only information that's important in your area is perhaps some text-based information or some images, but that's not true at all. You probably have some seismic data, or some geographical data, or in the case of wheat silos, perhaps some storage data – the fullness or emptiness of the silos, parking-lot data, or the other example I could use, is the Coke machine on-line. If the Coke machine's on-line, then in a mobile sense as a truck driver, I can dial the website, interrogate the portal, identify that the Mandurah Coke machine at the Performing Arts Centre is full or low, and therefore make a decision as to whether I go there or not, and if it's only down to six cans for example and there are seven people waiting for a drink, does the machine have the authority to change the price? Possibly! Why not? Why not? That's a logical extension, isn't it? And of course, you see in the electronic fridges and those sorts of things why I want a fridge on-line? Well you might not. But I absolutely bet a restauranteur who pulls out one of those big tins of beetroot and swipes the barcode on the on-line fridge and shoots that information automatically off to the supplier's web portal that says that " one can of beetroot has been taken out. Please resupply the next time you go there." That's pretty good service. I didn't have to do anything. All I had to do was notify automatically on-line that I had done that.

So I need you to start thinking about devices. And the reason that Bill Gates is really struggling at the moment, is because in a CE Windows environment, between desktops and palmtops, there's probably about 70 million, I'd make it 100 million users worldwide. But if you start to incorporate devices, we're talking about 1500 million users, and unfortunately Windows CE doesn't operate on devices. So, there's a fundamental problem that Microsoft has as to how to approach its actual business model.

The other point that I make is that there are a whole range of different protocols emerging and in various stages of phases which are actually going to make this happen, so even in a regional sense, whether it's via satellite or whether it's from a microwave, believe me you're going to be provided a service, very soon. So, Devices, think about your community. Devices actually provide another level of information.

Now, the other thing that you'll need to work on in the future, is providing context. People now talk about access as the driver. To go to India, they're worried about access at the moment. They talk about content. Of course, "Content is King" is the expression, but now it is not just content but context, and that's the point I was making when I first started up. The context of your content is that everybody in your community or that used to live in your community will still want to know how the local footy team is going. The context of that content is very valuable. So, you've got to be conscious of your context. Now, to do that you have to have some work flow, and editing controls for your portal management for sure. So you have to have some sort of processes for doing that. You also have to have a kind of website village; in other words, you have to have a market centre where everybody that's interested in participating in your portal, in your virtual community, has an area to come and park their stall, and tell the rest of the market about themselves.

The other component that I think just about everybody has missed, is you have to have some sort of historical record…You have to have an archive. How many times have you built a website, someone's come along and trashed it, and the stuff that you had on there is gone! There's actually a person in Tasmania that's been archiving Mosaic and Netscape Navigator 2 type websites – that's actually quite important from a technology point of view – but from an archive point of view, we can't keep going on for the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, and be trashing information that we've been putting on websites. You need a repository of information that's online. And that needs to be multi-media as a minimum. We've already just seen some multi-media presentations, "Gerry doing his thing, going up on the web" and that's going to be more and more common. Why wouldn't it be, if you were the Citizens Action Group actually filming the area that you are concerned about, and publishing that on-line. Or the before and after shots, if afforestation was an issue for example. So, a repository, and thinking about on-line repositories is a key point.

The other thing that you do need to look at is retaining transaction income and this is not just on good soil. and I'm going to show you some ways you can create genuine income that's not worrying about advertising or those sorts of things. I think the advertising model might be all right for E-corp but that's just about it. When we look at the information hub for example, they have a mechanism by which they can allocate publishing authority and verification skills for their main portal site. It's also an area where you can have this virtual village sort of capability. So it's got nothing to do with the poor loaner. It's my information. I'm using the application service provider creating my own information. And then we have this information repository, where we're publishing documents or video files or audio files, or CAD documents, or Excel spreadsheets, or time sheets or whatever it is, in their native format on-line, in other words, we're talking about a lower levels of skills. The skills required are the skills we already have. This is an important component in getting the rest of the community on.

You need a news tool to quickly update people just with that fresh bit of information. You definitely need some form of Chat and Bulletin Board, because that's a genuine communication mechanism. Then we need an e-commerce method. Then we're interested in transactions and selling things over the Web. And in my view, I'm only interested in doing that after we've actually created the rest of the framework

Now the other component that's very important, is what I call a "3 by 3" business model for core growth. Thus far, I've described the first two layers. The actual main reference portal itself and how you control the publishing of that. Then we provide a multi-media library of document publishing capability and kind of personal web pages area. Then the layer three is xxx . Once that becomes popular, the next thing you're going to be asked is to provide a sub-community capability. In other words, "we don't want you to administer our area. So, we're the Footy Association, or we're a City Council. as part of a reasonable portal,…we'd like to control our own stuff, thank you very much…and by the way we'd also like our own customisation." And you have to allow, just as you demanded that you have your own look and feel, after you complete Layer One and Layer Two, you are going to have to allow the sub-community as more people come on to have their own branding. And I'm going to tell you now, in the many experiences I've had, some people find that really hard. You know it's like, when they were doing it , it's o.k. But when they have to hand over, it sometimes becomes a little difficult. So start thinking about sub-communities. Once you are successful, sub-communities will become very powerful.

Let's talk about some of the advance services I see occurring now, and coming out in the future. Probably the most important one, or the top two are probably the most important one, reports syndicating content. If we provide people personal portals, and we allow you to publish documents in any format, and we provide you with personal web space, well now I can give you permission to publish to the main server. And if that's an information service that the service provider chooses to make available, I can now choose that as a link to have on my personal website. Which becomes a URL that dynamically links to that information repository and pulls the document out. So, in other words, content is not necessarily information services from Reuters or from Fairfax or those sorts of peoples, it might be information content from any one of you. Or from a farmer who is producing certain results, or someone who is writing short stories or something like that. So there is actually a mechanism now where if we've got a personal portal space, we can make available our content as an information service, and you can now draw down that information service. That can be done on a pay-per-view basis or a subscription basis. And in the case of Kondinonin, who have just published, launched their Insight report, they use a very similar mechanism to actually allow you to fetch a document, after you have paid for it, in other words to view it on-line, or to order the document and have it mailed to you, after you have paid. And that information can be published by whoever they give approval to. The other big driver I believe, will be GIS Mapping data, or any other sort of data that is in the GIS format. In other words, whether it's meteorological data or whether it's roads or whether it's terrain, then I might be most interested particularly here in Western Australia, in the main highways north of Karratha over the last three weeks. "Show me the mapping detail for that." And that's a natural service to be provided. If the syndicated content providers are showing seismic data, or maybe there's a plague of locusts coming across and there's some sort of data associated with that, then you can actually draw that down. So we're now talking about much higher levels; and we're not concerned about bandwidth.

The other thing that I believe will occur, is we will have very high levels of directory personalisation. In other words, when I register myself in an opt-in, or an opt-out mode, I can choose how much information I want to make available, and therefore that will determine how much level of services I will be provided. So there will be high degrees of interrogation, that will enable you to filter what it is you are actually delivered, rather than people scanning personal details for example, at the moment. Also if we are all doing this, then we'll have to have very advanced methods of archiving and retrieving information. That is why XML and those sorts of standards are to become very important. Because when we come back in twenty years time, we want to be able to find those things.

We also need to be able to search across multiple databases if there are common interests, not just your own. And of course, we need seamless World Wide Web and mobile multimedia access. In other words, when I publish my information, I don't care whether you get it on a mobile phone, or whether you get it on a PC. And of course, this integration of device data. Probably the other point I'd make is synchronisation of data from a mobile to a desktop. Of course, those of you who have palmtops, have seen what a fantastic early application that is. And the other one if you just notice is that Motorola have announced their speech recognition to Internet voice capability. Everything I've said to you now about updating and maintaining your personal portal, you could now do by voice, by your mobile phone: web address, edit, page 2, para 2, insert delete…away you go. Order the tickets, pay for tickets or whatever. Mobiles, and synchronisation of data, voice recognition, are very important.

So, what do you need to start thinking about your long-term future computer? You kind of need to think about that total portal solution. But you may not need all of that on Day One. So just think about the bits you need now, and then develop a strategy that will allow you to go forward with that information repository or whatever. You have to be web-enabled day one. I couldn't imagine anymore that anyone that anyone would develop for a local area network or a wide area network something that isn't web enabled. Some people are trying to integrate non web enabled systems. It should be purpose designed for ASP delivery, Application Server Provided Delivery because ultimately you will be able to deliver these services through your protal. If it is a really smart calculator for example to calculate FBT (Fringe Benefit Tax) or some other tools then that's a service that you can be offering your community and all of those things eventually will delivered eventually through the browser. It should be scaleable because we are going to assume you are going to be successful. And you are not going to think about something that is not scaleable and not secure.

You need to think about the environment that you are in, if you do have a very low bandwidth environment that is working on older browsers or what ever or if you are an education environment using MAC's G3 (a type of Macintosh computer) on Netscape 5 there are quite a few Microsoft products that wont work with you. When you are designing those sorts of services you need to take into account the environment that you are in. In that case education is going to be a problem. Vanilla flavour capability will allow you to customise because this is your personal control. If you are buying software products then start to see how that is done. And of course revenue generating schemes in my mind are not just advertising that's a small thing. So if that's all true where are you going to get some help from? I think this is one of the great ironies, who needs you most? The banks do big time, that's a same isn't it. They kind of thought that closing the bank offices and all the rest of it that they could save money. The problem with that is that if all your electronic actions, lets say Kondinonin became an e- commerce B2B portal and all its farmer members decided to put all their commerce transaction through Kondinonin and Kondinonin chose Citicorp as a banking service that's a problem for BankWest. The banks have just woken-up all that flurry about activity online is all because that they have just woken-up that the whole B2B process, search, procure, fulfil, and transact they are the bit at the end. Now I have got the plug, if I don't like you, it is not going to go there. You are going to find that the banks and I know that there are some very good stuff being done by Bendigo Bank around Australia and those ones that are smart havereally cottoned onto what this is about. Let's screw the banks because they need you. The Telcos also need you big time all this stuff, even my stuff is about keeping the traffic, if the traffic is lost big trouble. All the service providers require the traffic you will be in a good bargaining position going forward.

The other guys are media. Kerry Packer just announced his B-CORP, E-Corp now B-CORP, Ian Grundy presented yesterday from WA News. F2 I heard numbers the other day about what F2 are investing in, I got to tell you.. woo..well! And its kind of funny WA News on one scale and F2 on another and there is kind of nothing in the middle. And the point is why..why ? Well lets imagine, lets go fifteen years down the track. Why does media care about you? Why does Kerry Packer actually care about you? Because they are all buying mobile businesses did you see that, Kerry Stokes has got a mobile phone business and Kerry Packer is in OneTel. Lets go fifteen years down the track, voice activation, I can call up a hologram so if I can call up a hologram then that's my personal portal hologram then I can order, if there is a matrix on that hologram then I could order or execute action on that hologram. Now that's kind of futuristic but what we are already doing is sitting in front of TVs and we are already doing is sitting in front of PCs so as long as we are in front of the medium by which they can access us then it does not matter that we are going forward by which ever means that is, they have got us today. But if they don't get us today then they have got a big problem. And so what is really happening is one of those clash of the titans at the top end of town because they know some one is going to lose. And that is also the reason why the guys are in India at the moment. So don't under estimate that media needs you and not from a yellow pages point of view but ultimately the services they provide and you use just the reason why you come back to a site. Its just another content thing and what you have actually got is of much more value.

I also believe that city councils or authorities within city councils groups can actually emerge going forward in a major utility role in other words become the hub for these microwave radio networks for the various communications systems or these sorts of services. Why not? You are doing all of your transactions there now so why not embellish that role and turn them into a utility organisation. And of course your clients and trading partners want you, I know a number of clients that have had this stuff demanded of them, it is quite interesting they hadn't understood it. Our kids are going to make this happen anyway, so why not get our kids in our communities to start driving that and from a virtual community content is going to keep the kids in the community which is a very important thing.

In summary in the near future, which anything beyond that is kind of impossible, is a seamless creation, by seamless I mean transparent, no more skills than you do today wether it is voice activation wether is browser or wether it is my mobile phone. It will be a seamless creation of content, it will be a seamless aggregation collection of content and then how ever we determine that, the information will be delivered automatically. There will be a rapid emergence of sub communities underneath this and I think the mobiles will be part of the driver; there will be a rapid emergence of sub communities.

And I think with out doubt personal portals is clearly apart of the community portal and one of the things that you are racing for now is to get personal portals associated in your communities portal and I will quote my Ballart friends again if we look at Western Victoria, who is interested in personal portals? Who is interested in getting that space? Well Mainstreet are for that portal, Bendigo Bank is, Commonwealth Bank is, and the city councils themselves. There is at least four groups I can think of that are all trying to get the same space. And at the end of the day as users will go to our portal with our personal portal space which is of most value for us and it is the easiest for us to use. And once we are there we probably wont change. And so for the big guys particularly the banks and the media players they can see that they have got a window of about three years, three years in which not only to scope up all their existing clients in their personal portal space but also to scope up the other guys clients as well and that's the window that is available to them only once I do believe, only once in this information change decade even in this century will that be available to them. This time will not come again for them which is why those who get it, F2, Kerry Packer and the rest of it will succeed. And those who don't get it will be gone. Thank you very much. "