When I was a kid I spent my head locked away in a book anytime I could get. Reading was a way of discovering lives far beyond the fertile plains of Wagga Wagga in southern NSW. It was a way of learning about how the world was different, how people were different, and how I could be different, and that it was OK. My first lessons in deceit, murder, adventure, sex, love, hate. and joy were all experienced through books and stories.
I’ve been listening to the Beer, Blokes, and Business podcast which is made right here in Melbourne, and on a recent episode featuring Fenn Bailey from Adioso learnt a new term – permissionless innovation. Bailey used it to describe how damn tough the travel industry was to break into and how Uber and Airbnb didn’t seek permission to innovate the transport and travel industries. They took advantage of the open nature of the Internet and created a new space that no one had seen before (and billions of dollars for investors). Permissionless innovation seems to me to be a key feature …
During the Sydney Cafe siege on 15 December I watched Twitter melt down into a morass of self-congratulatory compassion over the #illridewithyou hashtag. In an incredibly short time there were 120,000 tweets from Australians bravely standing up to anti-muslim behaviour by offering to ride with Muslim’s on public transport. News.com.au described it as a twitter movement which would “restore your faith in humanity”. Buzzfeed thought that it was “one of the few positive things to come out of the horrific events in Sydney.” The Sydney Morning Herald was a little more measured, seeing it as a bulwark against the “climate of fear and …
As a model of how our society works, you can do a lot worse than Monopoly. When I was a kid I loved playing (and cheating) the game. With the racing car as my token I would accumulate as much real estate as possible, focusing on buying railway stations and utilities, as well as having a very special relationship with the banker. I rarely lost a game, but that was due to my exemplary cheating rather than any innate talent for imaginary wealth creation. The distinction between talent and luck is important. Last week after Credit Suisse released their Global Wealth Report, the Australian media …
Coffee was once seen as a sophisticated antidote for a society drowning in the ill-effects of alcohol. In 1887, in the Alexandra and Yea Standard under the heading Progressive Melbourne an enthusiastic writer wrote that Melbourne was the “most comfortable city in the southern continent” for the “casual visitor” chiefly because of the coffee houses which were “intended originally as a corrective to the baneful effect of the numbers of drinking shops”. In 2014 coffee is still making news in Australia.
Someone asked me the other day about hashtags, when and where to use them, and when and where not to use them. I was glad they asked because it meant I could look into whether having heaps of hashtags on Instagram was effective or if it pissed everyone off.
This is an odd post for me that I am not really qualified to make, so if you’re a qualified economist please accept my apologies. If you believe the papers, you would think that Australia is being swamped by Chinese investors, who armed with thick wads of cash are driving up property values and making owning a house unaffordable for ordinary had-working Aussies. Here’s a sample of recent headlines: Chinese investors are pushing into Melbourne and Sydney ‘Kua zhang’: Chinese real estate investors ask, what’s the drama? Chinese eye WA property The China syndrome: At the frontline of Australian property …
I’m late on this but in the past two weeks it seems every second politician or pundit has been warning us about an “existential threat”. I only became aware of the use of this silly term because of a most excellent article by Bernard Keane. A quick look at Google Trends shows that existential threat first gained currency in 2009 with The International Herald Tribune warning Pakistan faced an existential threat from militants, and that the term is being used more and more in 2014. Our very own Australian Attorney General, George Brandis recently blustered that ISIL “represents or seeks to be an existential …
Last night I heard a story. The zoologists at the Melbourne Zoo thought they knew their animals pretty well, but wanted to check out what they were doing at night, so they started videoing what went on. What they discovered surprised and amazed them. There was a kind of clash of civilizations between the native fauna – brushtail possums – and the imported Zoo tenants. When a possum trotted across the elephants quarters, the elephants would stamp on the unsuspecting possum crushing them into a mess of blood and gore. Unsurprisingly Possums don’t know much about elephants and elephants must get …
Square, the financial services business founded by Jack Dorsey one of the Twitter co-founders has just released a pretty cool new appointment and scheduling product. Founded 5 years ago with a elegant mobile credit card reader and app for micro and small businesses, Square now offers an impressive range of products that streamline back-office operations for small to medium businesses in a very slick way. What they are doing is fantastic product management and a quick review of their approach offers some some great learnings for product managers.
