Ben Ashton

Are tech companies getting it wrong in that they’re still celebrating complexity and what they see as whiz-bang innovation rather than trying to make technology actually work for people?

I guess the tech companies themselves are going to come up with all sorts of gadgetry and applications and bells and whistles that enhance their product and make it really attractive in the eyes of the consumers. The whole point is that different people will want different outcomes from their technology and that’s where you want to get a bespoke model. It’s a bit like what we were saying earlier with the internet security – different homes will have different requirements and different sets of rules.

What are the big trends you guys are picking up with the sort of work you’re doing?

We’re certainly seeing increasing technology into the home, which is then leading to second and third purchases of pieces of technology. At the same time the price dropping quite markedly so becoming affordable for more people in an environment where broadband’s more accessible. So you’re just going to see more technology in the home is the short answer.

What about the trends in the gadgets themselves?

One question is how do the various product manufacturers differentiate themselves and that’s where we find a service offering like Gizmo might be the way a product manufacturer will start to differentiate themselves. So much so, if you’ve got a mobile plan now in fact the actual phone just gets thrown in for free as part of the overall plan, we anticipate over time that your basic laptop will come packaged up with a service plan and an extended warranty and potentially a broadband solution. The whole lot will come up in a sort of bundled package which you buy as opposed to just buying a single laptop in its own right.

Is that the direction Gizmo would like to go where you’re providing a laptop or PC to a home with all these other services sort of worked out for people?

It’s not so much where we would go ourselves but what we would see is that our service would be packaged up with others, whether it’s through a retail channel or a telco channel or a vendor channel. So we’ll continue to expand and build our partnerships. There will probably be deeper, fewer partnerships with key players, but we don’t see ourselves as being in the market of actually selling product itself.

It does say that some of this technology has really become a commodity really quickly, hasn’t it?

Absolutely.

I guess that’s a potential challenge for some of the big companies out there?

They are constantly fighting that challenge and I guess that’s the way of technology and has been for a period of time. I mean you can look at the evolution of televisions, the evolution of computers, the evolution of laptops, you now look at the evolution of mobile phones into iPhones, iPads. It’s going to keep moving and moving very quickly. That’s why Gizmo identified this gap in the market and sees great opportunities and long-term opportunities in that services space.