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12 and 13th of March was the Cranfield StartUp Fair. It had been reduced to 2 days from its more normal 3 days due to the Cornavirus outbreak.

I was one of 5 mentors who worked with the group, helping them develop their ideas.

The attendees were drawn from current MSc, MBA and PHD students within the university.

Dr Shai Vyakarnam, Former Director of Cranfield’s Bettany Centre for Entrepreneurship, led the activities on Friday.

The event ended with all members of the group having the opportunity to perform a 2 minute pitch of their ideas to the mentors who provided feedback. (I’m there on the far left)

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I am pleased to say that I have been shortlisted as a finalist in this years BrightSparc Awards in the Green Tech Award category.

This is for my new Map Your Event digital Festival guide

I was a finalist last year as well. Here’s hoping that I manage to go one better this year!

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Mobile Spend

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As you would expect, I am a believer in innovation and how it can help businesses both big and small to grow. I read lots of articles describing what innovation is, how to innovate, how to apply innovation within your business.

But sometimes it is important to get outside of the filter bubble we create for ourselves.

I came across this article with a differing view of innovation.

We need to stop glorifying innovation. Here’s why.

The author posits the idea that:

…if we want to create a balanced society, which can sustain itself while continuing to progress, it’s time we come to terms with the reality of innovation, and stop neglecting the other components of a productive, progressive society.

and what is that other component – maintenance.

…our obsession with innovation leads us to devalue or deprioritize maintenance, which is necessary to keep our world running. It’s far more appealing to invest money in a new tech startup that has the potential to change the world than it is to invest in repairing a bridge, or making upgrades to a highway system.

The guy writing this post did so before the Genoa Bridge collapse.

The Business Heirarchy of Needs

You may have come across the “Heirarchy of Needs”. It is a theory of Human motivation first proposed by proposed by Abraham Maslow in 1943. I won’t go into a detailed explanation, that can be found here, but one of the key tenents is that the lower needs must be satisfied before a higher level need can influence behaviour.

In the bottom layer, Physiological,  there will be things such as : Food, Sleep, Shelter. In the Safety layer there will be things such as: Financial Security, Health and wellbeing.

I have a view that there is a Heirarchy of Needs for Business as well.

In that Heirarchy, the bottom layer should contain: Customers, Thing to sell (Product or Service)
The next layer should contain things such as: Maintenance
Innovation would appear higher up,  in layer 3.So what is wrong with innovation?

So what is wrong with innovation?

I’d say nothing, innovation is an important aspect of a business, but to start to work on innovation, it is important that a business has some other block in place first. So what is wrong with innovation?

What do you think? Does your company glorify innovation?

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VISA issued a report recently called “Digital Transformation of SMB’s – The Future of Commerce” . It’s 53 pages, and it contains some quite interesting findings for anyone who is interested in supporting Small Businesses in their Digital Journey. Whilst the report is US focussed, the core findings hold up in the UK as well.

Online Presence

80% of customers say they are motivated to shop at a business if they have an easy to use digital presence

81% will browse, research or compare products digitally

70% will then make the purchase online

50% of businesses don’t have an online presence

Most businesses do actually appear online – through the plethora of online directories. But these will at best list phone number and address, maybe opening times. In a search for local printers, the top 5 results were online directories. But my eye was immediately drawn to the results below these which were for individual businesses.

I speak to businesses all the time, quite often I still hear people saying that their customers prefer the personal touch, to talk to someone, try things on, obtain their item immediately and so there is no need  to do anything digital such as a fancy website or mobile app. Also, they point out that they appear in a couple of online directories so anyone looking online will find them. All these things are true, but as we know in a very competitive marketplace, they are generally not enough to find new customers.

Another point that is not covered well in the report, is that digital transformation is not only about finding customers it can also be about cost saving automation.

An example:

My local car mechanic posts MOT reminder letters to all his previous customers. When I quizzed him on why he does this, he says that his customers like it. I personally, like the reminder, but I would be just as happy with an email or a text message reminder, which would be much cheaper for him than the 58p second class stamp (I had to look that up!) plus admin time. Perhaps he should ask his customer what they would prefer.

The digital solution can also contain a Call to Action, such as “Click here to Book”.

Shopping Local & Offers

87% of customers think it is important to support local businesses

Customers want to buy from local businesses, but we need to make it easy for them to do so. The report identified offers and loyalty programmes as a way of attracting customers.

In the report only 20% of businesses offered loyalty programmes. Those that did agreed that it improved both repeat business and order size.

There are serveral digital loyalty solutions available. I even offer a starter version free on my website https://www.digitwell.co.uk/index.php/prebuilt-apps/free-loyalty-card-app  The report offers some case studies of the benefits of loyalty programmes.

Where next?

The report provides some useful evidence of how Digital Transformation can improvide a Small Businesses outcomes. It also helps to address the Value objection by providing some useful case studies. I would have expected some more research into “mobile first” as well as “digital first” as there is anecdotal of evidence that customer will check pricing / availability on their mobile, even while they are in the shop. But it was good to see the report consider services as well as bricks and mortar retailing.

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Being a part of Natwest’s Entrepreneurial Accelerator you get to meet all sorts of interesting people.

I met a chap recently who was starting a new business that was going to use blockchain to record a users personal data on their phone. I asked the obvious question,

“Why Blockchain?”

The reply was quite long and rambling and contained word such as “distributed”, “consensus” and “Smart Contracts”.

One word that was missing was “private”.  Blockchain by its very nature is a puclic ledger which is shared and validated across multiple parties. Why would you want to put personal data on it?

The blockchain concept is a very interesting idea, but I get the feeling that it is a “solution looking for a problem” in much the same way that lasers were after they were first invented. Years/decades later, lasers are an integral part of some key technologies that we all use on a daily basis and I feel the same way about blockchain – eventually applications will be found which will make full use of its capabilities.

This article seems to hit the nail on the head for me: Blockchain startups are selling visions of the future, not technology

The article end with the following paragraphs:

Blockchain is an experiment

The creation of bitcoin and its blockchain brought to life a vision. It showed the possibility of a new future, that allowed for a deviation on to a different path of innovation. It didn’t just create a technology but opened the door to create a spreadable rhetoric.

…

Currently, blockchain tech is constructing the tangible structure to make these visions a reality. It’s currently not much more than the first stages of an experiment. And given the massive interest in this “experiment,” it could have a significant impact on our future. Even if what actually materialises is very different from what we are being promised by the blockchain startups of today. 

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Does your website use WordPress?

If the answer to that question is yes, read on. There is something very important that you need to do now, right now.

If not, put your feet up and relax (at least until the next security scare comes along)

TLDR? Click here to jump to what you need to do. and then come back and read the rest of the post.

Full disclosure, this website uses Joomla as its content management system, so this particular problem does not apply, no doubt there are others though…

The story

Recently I have been developing a membership app for a local networking group that I am a part of. Currently there is a profile/info page for each member on the website, but it was recognised that an app would be a great way to promote both the group and the members within it.

Currently, the admins, update the website very infrequently, so member profiles can be quite out of date. Also most members do not have a direct contact link on the website. A separate email reminder is sent to members for new events and meetings.

The app was intended to overcome these things.

• being able to contact/call a member at the touch of a button
• meeting and event notifications
• members being able to update their own profiles
• etc

As one of the objectives of this work was to reduce the amount of administration involved in maintaining, a requirement was to share the information that appeared on the web pages. As you might guess from the theme of this article, the site is built on WordPress.

I started to look into ways of getting the info out, the easiest way is with some sort of API.

Fortunately, WordPress does have an API which allows you to have access to pretty much every part of the system, Users, Pages, Posts etc.

The Problem: It is enabled by default!

Try this:

– Make sure you are not logged into your WordPress account using a new Browser in Incognito mode,

– Enter the following in the address bar : yourwebsite.co.uk/wp-json/wp/v2/pages

(Replace yourwebsite.co.uk with your website)

What will be displayed in your browser is a list of all of the pages in your site with the data for each page neatly structured for easy copying.

Change pages to users and a neat list of users information will be displayed, fortunately no passwords, but full name and user name does appear.

The history

It seems that since December 2015 with Version 4.4, WordPress introduced a plugin which provided this access to your website. However, you needed to install and activate it for it to work, which most people didn’t do.

In December 2016, Version 4.7 was release which incorporated the plugin into core WordPress, so now it was automatically available when you upgraded your site (you do keep your website up to date… ). Unfortunately, the developers decided to that the API should be enabled by default.

What to do

Fortunately there is a very easy solution. A developer called Dave McHale has developer a plugin called Disable REST API which is ver simple to use. It takes only a couple of minutes to install and it will disable all unauthorised access to the API.

If you don’t know how to do this talk to your webmaster or hosting company.

The size of the problem

At the time of writing, there are currently 437 millon active websites of which approx. 30% use WordPress, thats approx. 131 million websites. The installation stats for the plugin show 40,000+ active installations, which means that only 0.03% of websites have taken any active steps to protect themselves.

 It’s clear that more people need to be made aware of this potential problem, so please go ahead and share with your friends.

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