Month: May 2015

  • Tech trends myopia in ideas

    Tech trends event at The Churchill Club

    The Churchill Club recently had their annual Top 10 Tech Trends event in Silicon Valley. This was the 17th time that they had their event. It’s a great bit of content to have on in the background. The collective opinions in the panel bought up concerns for me with a consumer behaviour myopia exhibited around tech trends in Silicon Valley.


    Cognitive behavioural therapy

    A classic example was some of the very smart things said about wearables and health monitoring in the session. There was skepticism expressed for some very valid social behavioural reasons – if one looks at Facebook, consumers generally share only the good things in their lives, with the notable exception of life events, such as the death of a family pet. Stephen Waddington even describes his behaviour on Facebook as ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’.

    So people really into fitness are far more likely to employ self tracking than couch-dwellers.

    Quicken problem

    Self tracking was described as a ‘Quicken Problem’. Quicken allows US consumers to easily complete their tax returns – a universal problem, yet is only used by five per cent of the population for various reasons.

    All of this is very valid stuff of its self, but what happens if it isn’t only consumers making the decision?

    Self tracking tech trends

    My reservations about self tracking technologies are well recorded, to quote myself from Stephen Waddington’s Brand Vandals

    Self-tracking adds massive amounts of data to your personal data pool and social graph and raises huge privacy concerns that users need to be cognisant of

    A number of the key points that I made in my conversation with Stephen was not about consumers using their self-tracking data but how the data could be used to recalibrate car insurance, home insurance (based on absence from home) and health insurance based on activity and risky behaviours.

    Let’s look at a specific type of self tracking, the car insurance black box. Aviva (Norwich Union) trialled the use of telematics to set car insurance premiums on a monthly basis as a type of continuous assessment. It looked at factors such as:

    • When the car was used, nighttime driving was considered to be risky behaviour
    • What distance was covered, charges were on a per mile basis
    • Car location (particularly when cross-tabulated with crime statistics)
    • Speed
    • Braking data

    In IBM Research’s case study, Norwich Union envisaged that black boxes would allow it to sell insurance to consumers that drive less often. Norwich Union dropped the pilot in 2008, apparently due to a lack of consumer interest, but resurrected the car insurance black box when the European Union ruled that charging for car insurance on the basis of gender was illegal. Presumably the needed some other form of actuarial data instead of whether the driver was a female or not. This is just one example where consumer behaviour didn’t drive  product innovation that wouldn’t be accounted for in the tech trends discussion.

    Credit ratings were driven by the need for businesses to mitigate risks, direct (rather than operator) dialling on a telephone was developed to help reduce the manpower required to run telecoms networks. Night safes and ATMs (automatic teller machines) were about providing services without staff. The US airline tradition of baggage charges came from shareholder pressure not consumer demand yet is worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

    The point at the end of the day is that opportunities for venture capitalists are broader than meeting consumer needs and wants.

    More information

    Brand Vandals by Stephen Waddington & Steve Earl
    AA launches black box car insurance | Guardian
    Norwich Union heralds new Pay As You Drive insurance – Aviva Media Room Archive
    Norwich Union Insurance Telematics Pilot – Pay As You Drive Telematics trial of usage based motor insurance by Volker Fricker of IBM Research – (PDF)
    Aviva Telematics Insurance Review | Telematics.com – Norwich Union (now Aviva) abandoned telematics insurance a number of years ago and is now reinstating it

    More related content here.

  • Corporation tax + more things

    Amazon to begin paying corporation tax on UK retail sales | The Guardian – it is good to see that Amazon is paying corporation tax. But the thing no one is asking is how does this affect businesses that might have ‘global accounts’, for instance Ford, Colgate and HSBC’s relationship with WPP? Does this mean that clients will suddenly start getting bills on a per country basis for corporation tax rather than in one place? What happens when different tax authorities have different views on what is earned where?

    Why We Have an Oversupply of Almost Everything (Oil, labor, capital, etc.) | Our Finite World – some interesting economic data in here

    The Savoy opens take-away eatery to provide entry point to dining | Luxury Daily – interesting that The Savoy feels the need to do local ‘sampling’

    Huawei launches ‘internet of things’ operating system – FT.com – Paywall

    [1501.02876] Deep Image: Scaling up Image Recognition – interesting machine learning paper from Baidu

    Interview: How did an ex UX designer get 50k WeChat fans? – interesting article and plan

    What will happen to Silicon Valley when demographics strangle the global economy | VentureBeat – this isn’t necessarily as bad as this article makes out mainly because many VCs are sitting on more money than they can invest anyway

    The Blogging Dead: WeChat’s ‘zombie relationship’ invasion|WantChinaTimes.com – sounds like a classic dunbar number problem, but it is interesting that they consider it to be WeChat specific

    Integrated Intelligence: IWC Connect – Luxury News – interesting wearable concept, they seem to have deliberately avoided the mistakes made by others (including AndroidWear and Apple Watch. Still not convinced however. More luxury related content here.

    Seymour M. Hersh · The Killing of Osama bin Laden · LRB 21 May 2015 – I am not surprised, but the damage that this does to US is huge, particularly the body politic. I recommend reading this critique of Mr Hersh’s critics – The media’s reaction to Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden scoop has been disgraceful – Columbia Journalism Review

  • Yakuza Apocalypse + more

    Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War Of The Underworld

    Awesome trailer for Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War Of The Underworld from Takashi Miike

    Yakuza Apocalypse is a visceral shock to the system. It strips away the glamour that surrounds the yakuza in Japanese culture, a bit like like the way the Krays are glamourised in British culture. The reality is rather more squalid, like Tadamasa Goto who is known to have provided information to the FBI. While they didn’t get anything, a grass is still a grass.

    Optical data communications technology

    Really interesting Panasonic technology for data transfer, is it more than a less obvious QRcode in terms of the data that it contains?

    Stüssy x Sophnet

    Stüssy have done a really good collaboration with Japanese brand Sophnet which dropped this week. I managed to pick up a Stüssy x Sophnet t-shirt and hooded top. I was surprised by two things. The quality was more up to the old school Stüssy standard than is usually the case now. Secondly, for a Japanese brand collaboration, they both came in western XXL size. We won’t see the like of this collaboration for a good while again, if ever.

    More luxury related content here.
    stussy

    SoftBank changes tack with adverts

    SoftBank seem to have moved away from their kooky ‘family’ adverts using modern samurai Isao Machii cuts many objects with ”Iaido” sword strokes

    Drones in advertising builds on work that has been done since the Beijing olympics on the use of drone swarms for massed visuals that are complementary to fireworks and 3D projections

    Audi advert: Kevin Smith, Jason Meyes. Enough said (oh and some cameos from actors who’ve appeared in Marvel comic film adaptations including pioneer Stan Lee)

    Enterprise storage outfit Box.net have a great interview with Stewart Butterfield of Slack (and Flickr fame). Some interesting comments on how a GUI isn’t always the right interface for people who use keyboards. This is so right. I remember working on terminal screens when I worked in a call centre and the ease with which I could quickly tab around screens, rather than having to reach for a mouse to click a multitude of radio buttons. More design related posts here.

    Scottish National Party member of parliament Mhairi Black gave an interview back in March. I found it interesting as it shows that kind of impact social media will have on future political careers, particularly when it it will provide greater clarity than the 2009 debate around David Cameron’s raving history. Imagine if you were presented at the age of 50 with selected fringe thoughts you had at 19 years old?

    As Black notes:

    My uncle summed it up when he said that, when he was a teenager, he just used to shout at the telly. My generation tweets and there is a record of it.

    What adult doesn’t look back to things they said when they were 16 or 17 and go, ‘Oh my God?’

    The difference is my comments are being dragged out for the whole world to see.

    No trite social media analysis or fantastic technical wizardry just a great idea, client belief and a budget made 3M Korea’s Unforgettable Post-It Proposal

    Finally Helios is a new Hong Kong film gaining traction in the Chinese box office. In the face of a lack of new Hong Kong actors coming through, it was interesting that the new blood came in the form of Korean boy band member Choi Siwon who also performs some of Super Junior’s mandarin repertoire