Ged Carroll

Month: August 2011

  • Palm | HP portable devices

    I decided to jot down some thoughts on the demise of the Palm | HP portable devices business. I am not going to say whether it was the right or wrong thing to do mainly because other people have been doing that already.

    HP and the mobile device

    HP was arguably the original modern mobile computing device manufacturer, coming out with the HP-35 scientific calculator back in 1972. The company had a long history of being a pioneer in mobile computing; so the move away from mobile devices is actually putting an ending to a long line of devices.

    Compaq had a set of handheld computers in the mid-1990s called Aero. These ran DOS and Windows 3.1, being the predecessors of devices like the ASUS eeePC netbook.

    HP developed a number of PDA devices in the early and mid-1990s including the 95LX, 200LX, 100LX and the OmniGo 700LX which allowed a Nokia 2110 to piggyback on the PDA with a specially molded section on the back of the case.

    The Jornada series of devices was a range of Microsoft Windows-powered PDAs were launched in 1998 and had a number of achievements including the first Windows Pocket PC colour touchscreen device and a UK-only GSM smartphone. The Jornada brand was phased out following the merger with Compaq.

    The iPAQ succeeded Compaq’s Aero line in 2000 and the HP Jornada line after Compaq had been acquired. The last iteration of the iPAQ range was in 2010.

    The Palm range of devices were first launched in 1996, the operating system was tweaked and prodded over the next decade to power various different devices including the iconic Palm III, V and Treo range of smartphones. Ultimately it eventually came up with the webOS after repeatedly fumbling its future.

    This is a long and rich history of engineering innovation for which the Touchpad and Pre don’t stake up as worthy successors.

    Things I never got when the Palm acquisition was first announced

    I wrote up some bullet points of things that I didn’t fully understand when HP originally announced the Palm acquisition:

    • Is HP overpaying for the company? There isn’t that many people interested in Palm and analysts had set a target share price of zero. Is this price as much about emotion as assets?
    • Why is the Palm WebOS going to live up to HP’s faith in it?
    • Much was made of Palm’s cloud services technology in the webcast, but how many extra servers or services will it actually sell for HP?
    • SKUs. I was alarmed at the amount of proposed device variants HP was envisaging in the future on the call with possible support in differing form-factors for Microsoft Windows, Windows Phone, Android and WebOS in personal devices

    With the benefit of hindsight:

    • Unless HP manages to parlay Palm’s intellectual property assets into a patent war chest either through an auction or successful legal action, it is unlikely to make its money back on the Palm acquisition and its Palm | HP portable devices. There isn’t likely to be licensing revenues from other manufacturers that would make up Palm acquisition. Whilst, the current uncertainty around Android may make manufacturers open to looking at an alternative operating system; but why take on webOS when both Palm and HP couldn’t make it work properly? It’s not like both these brands didn’t have a good reputation and heritage in building mobile computing devices, also in order to license the operating system HP would have to maintain and continue to develop it. What would that road-map look like and why would HP continue to develop consumer-facing software given its renewed focus on the enterprise
    • I never did find out how webOS was going to live up to HP’s leap of faith in the operating system because it evidently didn’t pan out, hence HP withdrawing it’s Touchpad and Pre devices

    The value of the Touchpad and its implications for the webOS

    Many of the eulogies for the Touchpad and the Pre point out that webOS was good software held back by Palm | HP portable devices hardware chops. This was the same criticism leveled at the original Palm Pre; so it begs the question why didn’t new owner HP try and deal with the performance issues second time around? I suspect that the leadership of Palm knew that the original Pre sucked, which why it was kept out of journalist hands for so much of the launch period.

    Given the resources of a large company like HP, I would have thought that the former Palm engineering team and their new HP would not have wanted to continue making poor performing products; and instead would have looked to draw a line under everything with a superior device.

    Yet when you look at the price that the remaining Touchpad devices are flying off the shelves in the US: 99 USD, this tells you a lot about the perceived value of the product.

    The 99 USD price point is some 220 USD below the tear-down price of the HP Touchpad. The tear-down price is a conservative estimate of the total cost of a Touchpad to HP. Now you can allow for the fact that the product has some discount priced in because HP was withdrawing from the market, but even Nokia isn’t taking that kind of bath with its Symbian handsets.

    So a fair amount of this discount must be due to the device experience provided by the webOS software. The risk versus rewards offered to users by this operating system far outweigh the intrinsic value of the hardware on which it runs. I would have to question why anyone would want to license webOS? You can find more more related content here.

    More Links

    HP | Palm deal thoughts

    HP: What Léo Apotheker’s Decisions Mean | Monday Note

    HP gave up on cool webOS devices but promises webOS PCs and printers | VentureBeat

    HP TouchPad Carries $318 Bill of Materials – Teardowns at iSuppli

  • Irish Post goes into liquidation

    As a youngster growing up in Liverpool, The Irish Post was one of three papers that my Mum and Dad brought into the house on a Sunday. These were The Irish Press (with it’s epic typographic errors) or The Irish Independent (depending on what was available), the Connacht Tribune to find out about fluctuations in the price of land back home and who my parents knew that had died and The Irish Post which made them feel connected to a wider diaspora in the UK.

    They still purchase the paper on a regular basis, but that won’t be for much longer as what looks like the last issue is now on the shop shelves. I picked up my copy this morning which I usually skim to have something to talk about with my parents, alongside the Irish Times. According to the Irish Times, the paper went into liquidation on Friday, with administrators look to find a buyer or sell off the assets. The 10 editorial staff were let go with redundancy.
    Last edition of the Irish Post
    It is interesting that both online and offline staff were let go and that the web page did not carry the news of the paper’s demise.

    If the paper was in your media buying mix or a PR target then it is worth noting that many of the readership will have moved on to The Irish World, The Irish Emigrant and Irish mainstream media. The bigger issue however for the ‘forgotten Irish‘ like peers of my parents who moved here in the 1950s and 1960s, the lack of a paper copy of the ‘Post leaves a gap that the web won’t fill. The ‘Post gave a sense of community and connection that Irish state broadcaster RTÉ had already eroded when it turned off it’s medium wave service.

    More information

    Another blow for TCH as ‘Irish Post’ closes with loss of 10 jobs – Irish Independent

    Irish Post newspaper to close – Irish Examiner

    ‘The Irish Post’ goes into liquidation – Irish Times

  • The futility of QRcodes on tube

    Traveling on the London Underground ‘tube’ recently I have noticed that more and more adverts have a QRcode. But the trips also highlighted the futility of using a QRcode, particularly on many of the deep lines.

    I am not too sure if tube QRcode is a recent phenomena or that I have been paying more attention as a number of the projects that I’ve been recently looking at are about the ‘web of no web‘: the interface between the web and the real world. I am a big fan of progressive approaches to marketing, however, the more I thought about the phenomena, the greater the waste of time that it seemed to be:

    • Londoners often joke about the tube being like cattle trucks; in reality European Union regulations wouldn’t allow livestock to travel on a train with the conditions of the tube on a hot summers day. A combination of overcrowding together with the lack of air conditioning  means that some of the lines can be as hot as a walk in the desert. The over-crowding also means that would be hard to take a picture of a QR code. So whilst the advert may have a large reach, the realistic reach of the QR code call to action is a lot smaller
    • So you happen to be lucky in terms of where the crush places you and try to snap the QR code with your phone. You probably won’t be successful, tube lines aren’t known for the smooth ride of say the Paris Métro, so you will be trying to hold your camera still whilst the train carriage rocks and sways in front of your smartphone. Your phone won’t be able to focus and take a clear image of the QR code. That’s one of the reason’s why there isn’t a tube advert shown here to illustrate this post, despite at least three attempts over the past week to snap a picture of an appropriate advert
    • Unlike other mass transit systems in the likes of Singapore and Hong Kong, huge high-traffic sections of the lines are underground or in such a deep cutting that they are inaccessible to mobile phone networks so QR code won’t take the audience through to an appropriate web page, but instead prompt a ‘network unavailable’ message

    The futility of QRcodes on the tube shows that the media buyers, marketers and or designers don’t pay much attention to the context of their advertisement art work, which could artificially skew campaign objectives and measurement adversely. In order to combat ‘the futility’, we need to go beyond TGI data and media packs. We can start this process by keeping our eyes open to the world around us.

  • Funds of funds + more news

    Funds of Funds

    Funds of Funds May Actually Increase Risk, Study Finds – NYTimes.com – this feels counter-intuitive at first, until you realise that funds of funds are a synthetic financial instrument from the prospective of the end investor. Synthetic financial instruments led to problems like the 2008 financial crisis and the Savings and Loans crisis of the 1990s. The reason for the problem of funds of funds for the end investor is that there lots of known unknowns under the hood. It is conceivable that several funds make a similar wrong headed bet and get stung by it. Without directing the funds, how do you maintain continued diversity of investment and strategies to ensure the bet hedging. Lastly funds are less liquid assets in the grand scheme of things with limitations on when and how much you can withdraw. I wonder if a similar study has been done around thematic ETFs as well?

    Beauty

    At Makeup Alley, Advice From Online Peers – NYTimes.com – how user reviews are demolishing beauty treatment company claims and promoting other products that previously didn’t claim benefits

    Economics

    Wealthy Investors Grow Pessimistic About Economy – WSJ – US economy, due to government debt and economic growth

    Japan records surprise trade surplus – FT.com – rescheduling manufacturing work around power fluctuations

    Ethics

    danah boyd | apophenia » “Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power

    A Billion Dollars Isn’t Cool. You Know What’s Cool? Basic Human Decency | TechCrunch – social norming around the social web

    Ideas

    Could Quantum Computing Kill Copyright? | TorrentFreak

    Korea

    Five Lessons From Samsung’s Second Quarter Results – WSJ – interesting that Samsung is husbanding its cash by reducing shareholder returns

    Luxury

    Second-Tier Spotlight: “Rich Second Generation” Fueling Ningbo Luxury Market « Jing Daily : The Business of Luxury and Culture in China – interesting divergence in consumer preferences

    Media

    To Spread Your Brand On Facebook, Don’t Target Your Fans–Target Their Friends | Fast Company – propagation planning

    More British papers dragged into hacking row ‹ Japan Today – not surprising, the practice may have started at the News of The World but could have been taken around the papers as journalists and editors move on to new roles

    Murdoch Selects Advisers Carefully – WSJ.com – it makes sense he needs a ‘clean’ team that can stay together through this

    Online

    danah boyd | apophenia » Designing for Social Norms (or How Not to Create Angry Mobs)

    With the Bing Search Engine, Microsoft Plays the Underdog – NYTimes.com – I am not seeing a cohesive vision to change search from Microsoft; this looks like the ‘we are innovative’ foot-stamping PR wrapped in a storytelling methodology that comes out of Microsoft corporate PR. I think that the social search stuff at Google and Facebook is of more interest. Bing needs to come out of the box with something 10 times better to get people to move in significant numbers. Qi Lu didn’t manage it at Yahoo!, what makes them think he can manage it at Microsoft?

    A Bomb in Oslo? What Google Lost by Ending Real-Time Search – The Atlantic – Google News just wasn’t as fast, it needs Realtime

    Official Google Blog: More wood behind fewer arrows – interesting change, more focus on fully formed products?

    Security

    Majority of South Koreans’ data exposed | FT.com – the interesting bit is the data wipe of PCs used in the attack to hide fingerprints

    Technology

    Data Centers Using Less Power Than Forecast, Report Says – NYTimes.com – green technology and virtualisation kicks in

    The Key Subtle Notes From Apple’s Earnings Call | TechCrunch – exclusives are doled out on the conference call without hype

    Wireless

    Apple Passes Nokia and Holds Off Samsung to Become World’s Top Smartphone Vendor [Updated] – Mac Rumors – Android is Toyota and Apple is Mercedes & Porsche