Technology rating on BRW Young Rich list: Atlassian founders now number 1, combined wealth of $480 million up from $360 million, company believed to have turned over $100 million in revenue last year, US venture capital fund Accel Partners paid $60 million for a minority stake in 2010. Young Rich List is the top 100 wealthiest self-made Australians aged 40 and under. Total combined wealth of $5.1 billion, down from $7.3 billion last year. Four of last year's top six members turned 41 and are ineligible for the list. 48 percent of returning members maintained or increased wealth over the past 12 months. Online retailer Ruslan Kogan increased wealth to $145 million from $62 million, up from 34th position to 8th, says biggest challenge is scaling, outgrowing capabilities of service providers they use. Number of women fell from 8 to 6, lowest in the list's ten years. [CR: It would be interesting to see differences in how the under 40s spend their wealth compared to the over 40s.]
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak moving to Australia within two years, not planning on joining a company or board, will be available for speaking engagements, moving to Sydney but may make home in Melbourne or Hobart. [CR: I admit the man is incredible. I also ask to what extent genius and success is a combination of talent, perseverance, and opportunity.]
Sharp to cut more than 10,000 jobs, 18 percent of its workforce, in plan presented to lenders on Monday. Selling TV factories in Mexico, China and Malasia and US solar developer Recurrent Energy.
Barnes & Nobel introducing new video stream into Nook. Service will allow customers to stream and download movies and television shows for a fee onto televisions and mobile devices, while storing cpontent in the Nook cloud. Microsoft invested hundreds of millions in April in Barnes & Nobel's digital division. Service will be similar to Apple's iTunes functionality. Walmart entered the streaming space in 2010 with the $US100 million acquisition of Vudu. Verizon and Redbox recently partnered to introduce their own streaming service. [CR: The future is paved with media from the past. It will be interesting to see to what extent older content can be monotised through new services.]
Outdoor clothing company Kathmandu update: Company listed three years ago, sales rose more than 60 percent ($NZ347 million) since 2009, profit grew 130 percent to $NZ34.9 million. Has delivered 20 percent growth in like sales. Biggest hurdles include delivering further same-store sales growth, avoiding cannibalising sales at existing stores from new stores, and growing market share from competitors Anaconda, BCF, and Mountain Designs. Australian sales penetration is one-third that of NZ, Australian sales generate 61 percent of group revenues. Plans to open more small-format stores in shopping malls rather than "destination locations" to capture bigger share of consumer spending on leisure apparel and footwear. Also boosting online sales, relaunching webstores in Australia and in the UK to boost global presence, investing in new online channels such as Amazon, TradeMe, and eBay. Online sales less than 5 percent of total sales, believes they can reach 30 percent. [CR: I keep seeing that 30 percent number quoted as the future benchmark for retail digital sales, repeated by the likes of Myer and David Jones who are hanging around 1 percent. Is the gap due to a lack of consumer awareness and trust, because of existing poor ecommerce offerings, or a lack of adequate distribution?]
BYO device discussion: Melbourne-based law firm Cornwall Stodart, reduced per user costs from over $2,000 per year to under $1,500 per year when it introduced its 130 staff to use their own devices. Gartner estimates 59 percent of companies allow staff to bring their own smartphones, 52 percent laptops, 42 percent tablets. Consumer purchases of mobile devices outnumber corporate purchases by 10:1, but corporations expected to purchase over a third of all mobile devices by 2015. Laptops expected to last three to five years, tables expected to last 15 to 18 months due to "product envy" as product is perceived to be obsolete. Mobile device network management revenue expected to exceed $US500 million in 2012. Opens issues with security, DSD says 65 percent of cyber attacks on Australian targets have an economic focus. 85 percent of "cyber intrusions" could have been prevented by patching software, restricting administrative privileges, and using application whitelisting. [CR: Security policies need to be reviewed pretty frequently these days.]
Mobile banking stats: Deliverables from first nine months of Westpac CIO's role: release of the bank's first iPad application, a trial to turn Android smartphones into contact-less payment devices, introduction of an iPad app to replace printed board papers, a 1000 iPad pilot for bank executives, and St George innovation that allows payments from mobile numbers. Edgar Dunn & Co predicts 250 million mobile banking transactions per year in Australia by 2015. Gartner predicts global value of mobile payments will increase 62 percent to $US171.5 billion in 2012. It took 80 months for online banking to reach 1 million customers, only 30 months for mobile to reach 1 million customers. In two months, Westpac iPad app downloaded onto 58,000 devices, used in 137,000 transactions worth $125 million. By comparison, there are 1.5 million users of Westpac smartphone apps. In August, 17 million of the 48 million online sessions (35 percent) across Westpac group came from mobile, 166 percent more from the year prior. One focus of the bank's $2 billion five-year strategic investment priorities program is to web-enable much of its back-end systems while boosting reliability, robsutness, and resilience of core infrastructure. Acknowledges a three to five year addressing of the "long tail of legacy".
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