Ged Carroll

Month: March 2018

  • Ronnie Drew & things this week

    Listening to the late, great Ronnie Drew telling the story of Cú Chulainn. Cú Chulainn is one of the most famous figures in Irish folklore and Drew’s ravaged voice adds much to the telling.

    Ronnie Drew was the leader and vocalist in Irish group The Dubliners. In attitude, The Dubliners were more rock n’ roll than rock n’ roll. The Dubliners were famous for their version of McAlpine’s Fusiliers and The Black Velvet Band. Ronnie Drew and The Dubliners were influential to  The Pogues and Dropkick Murphys.

    My parents view of them is more ambiguous. They were jackeens or city dwellers, which they thought was incongruous with Irish traditional music, which was kept alive in the countryside. Secondly, their drinking was seen to be a stereotype reinforcing cliche. They looked more like university students rather than turning up in a nice suit and tie, which was seen as disgraceful.

    Ronnie Drew and the rest of The Dubliners love of their culture and stories comes out in their recordings. More related content here.

    Nice bit of pop songwriting with Twin Shadow

    I’ve been listening to Audio Books on YouTube as higher brow background noise Free Audio Books for Intellectual Exercise – YouTube – YouTube

    Buffer is now allowing for direct scheduling of Instagram posts. Its a bit of a kludge. I tried it this week and it worked really well.

    You can write the post on the desktop version of Buffer, but you have to do a number of things:

    • Have mobile notifications set up on the Buffer iPhone app and Instagram
    • Set your Instagram account up with a business account (this includes pairing with a brand page on Facebook)

    As far as I can tell the Buffer mobile app then publishes to your Instagram mobile app at the scheduled time. But that’s the kind of BS you have to go through with Instagram’s restrictive APIs that it has to try and ensure it is the source platform for all graphic posts.

    My next step is to see if this kludge will help me auto-post from Flickr to Instagram…

    Matt Farah goes over the oligarch-like relationship of the Swiss watch industry – Episode 10: The Watchmaking Family Tree – YouTube

  • BBC World Service + more news

    BBC Blogs – Technology & Creativity Blog – Shifting gear with the BBC World Service – interesting opportunities for developers, this mirrors the expansion of Chinese and Russian media internationally. The BBC World Service has also had its funding disrupted in a manner that make it more political. The long term impact of this bias is likely to damage the BBC World Service as a soft power tool

    Apple manufacturer Foxconn just bought iPhone accessory maker Belkin – great move for Foxconn. Foxconn now gets a number of consumer brands including Linksys and can make better Apple accessories faster based on their knowledge of Apple production – if they can maintain secrecy

    What Supreme and streetwear say about fashion today — Quartzy – really nice history write up

    The Oral History of Stüssy: Part 1 | Complex – great background on how the Stüssy brand was built, but with feeling compared to modern day streetwear

    I, Cringely The real problem with self-driving cars – I, Cringely – a meditation about everything that’s wrong in the product process for current day Silicon Valley

    Louis Vuitton’s new men’s designer Virgil Abloh is known for streetwear, not high fashion — Quartzy – A new generation of consumers is emerging with different values and desires than previous buyers of high-end goods. Instead of spending their money on fancy suits, young shoppers are dropping hundreds of dollars on items like logo tees and sock sneakers. As clothes continue to move away from formality, brands from Berluti to Balenciaga are adjusting their wares accordingly – with younger Asian consumers as the growth market of the luxury sector the two worlds are merging. Its only been four decades in the making

    Fwd to CEO: THE MOST VALUABLE BUSINESS TOOL EVER INVENTED – BBH – the fact that this would have to be said to the CEO says a lot about what’s wrong in boardrooms now

    Alibaba to set up Thai logistics centre, extend deepening investment in Southeast Asia | South China Morning Post – interesting how Alibaba is expanding internationally

    Chinese tech firm that once vowed to disrupt Tesla and Apple faces delisting under pile of unpaid debt – the LeEco train wreck continues, at the moment it looks unsolvable unless the government gets more involved

    Sensor Supplier to Self-Driving Uber Defends Tech After Fatality | Bloomberg – it is interesting how the legal ramifications of this will shake out

  • Reid Hoffman on tech sector issues

    This Reid Hoffman video stands in sharp comparison to the Ayn Rand-loving frat-bro culture that seems to infect technology  sector companies based in Silicon Valley. However Hoffman in his past has reflected at least some of their libertarian views.

    However Reid Hoffman is cut from different cloth and represents a slightly older generation in the technology sector who pioneered the dot.com era.

    He grew up in Berkeley, back when the technology sector was more hardware focused and Silicon Valley actually made micro-chips. Back then HP (now Agilent) and Techtronix made measurement equipment in the Valley and it was the centre of the cold war missile technology. The east coast from IBM in New York State to the Boston corridor represented a worthy adversary of Silicon Valley. The technology sector only opted to have Silicon Valley as its home during the move to personal computing.

    eWorld

    Hoffman worked at Apple on eWorld – an early way of connecting Macs to the nascent public internet. There was interesting ideas that came out of that at the time including work on object orientated programming. Apple later abandoned eWorld when they saw the ‘net taking off and instead collaborated with selected ISPs like ClaraNet and Demon in the UK.

    Reid Hoffman later founded a prototype-social network and was part of the PayPal mafia before founding LinkedIn. The irony is that the PayPal mafia were ground zero for the current generation of technology company CEOs.

    Reid Hoffman offers a more thoughtful considered viewpoint on the future of the technology sector.

    How Technology is Shaping the Future of Human Society was filmed by the Aspen Institute.

  • Join hands on apps + more news

    China smartphone makers join hands on apps, pose threat to WeChat | Reuters – this effort by vendors to join hands on apps reminds me of work that Google did on ‘streaming’ apps as needed that went a bit quiet. Interesting that the manufacturers are willing to go against Tencent. In a mature market handset providers want a bite of services, but is there an advantage with brands to throw in with one or more of the handset eco-systems given their disparate app stores?

    Americans less likely to trust Facebook than rivals on personal data: Reuters/Ipsos poll – trust and leaving the platform are two different things. What was surprising is how low a rating Apple had compared to its tech peers given its efforts in privacy protection by design. Facebook starts looking looking like Microsoft did as a brand

    South Korea fines Facebook $369K for slowing user internet connections – The Verge – why was Facebook ‘trumpeting’ their traffic about the place? This is really odd, almost like there was ‘man in the middle’ inspection of data going on. The fine Facebook faces represents about 0.05% of Facebook’s Korean revenue for a year

    Having Your Smartphone Nearby Takes a Toll on Your Thinking (Even When It’s Silent and Facedown) – interesting research. Think of the relationship as similar to Gollum and the one ring

    Yahoo Japan Plans To Launch Cryptocurrency Exchange Amid FSA Crackdown | ZeroHedge – interesting move by SoftBank. Yahoo! Japan brand is a strategic asset, yet Son-san is willing to risk it on cryptocurrency which I perceive to be a tactical play. I can’t see continued interest in consumer speculation on it in the longer term. More related content here

    Dennis Yu on the Facebook debacle – Dennis is the chief technology officer Facebook marketing business called BlitzMetrics. If anyone knows their stuff its likely to be him

  • Technology uncanny valley of the web

    The technology sector is in a maelstrom.

    Strange Magicks

    Cambridge Analytica

    Whilst Cambridge Analytica surprised most people in digital marketing who get the technology. The claims surprised for three main reasons:

    • Facebook’s scope of data access wasn’t surprising to marketers, but the level of shock the media felt was seismic
    • Cambridge Analytica was considered to have some mythical secret sauce by the media. Those marketers close to the political scene were surprised. How was Cambridge Analytica thought effective?
    • The media have avoided discussing the advertising technology that underpins modern online media. This creates richer data profiles and improves media targeting. Unfortunately this technology runs on their website, analysing their traffic, vending their advertising
    ‘Supernatural’ technology

    I caught up with a friend who had recently upgraded the operating system on their Mac laptop and iPhone. They made a restaurant booking and were surprised when the web site ‘knew who they were’. and automatically completed their information. Then, on the day of the booking a notification popped up. It said that they should leave now as there was moderate traffic.

    They ascribed all this magic to the the website ‘knowing’ everything about them. I explained to them that this was their Apple products trying to be helpful rather than dialing their anxiety levels to 11.

    People are powerless

    There is an assumption amongst the general public that technology has supernatural powers.

    It makes them uncomfortable, but they feel powerless in the face of it. This discomfort reminded me of the ‘uncanny valley’ experienced with humanoid robots. For the rest of consumer there is latent inertia. They will generally put up with a lot of discomfort.

    They realise at a base level that The Technium is – . They don’t realise how they should adapt to it.

    The technium is a superorganism of technology. It has its own force that it exerts. That force is part cultural (influenced by and influencing of humans), but it’s also partly non-human, partly indigenous to the physics of technology itself.

    It’s just the way things are. Consumer actions won’t make a difference. #deletefacebook will barely make a dent and that’s what’s scariest of all. More related issues here.

    More information

    The Technium and the 7th kingdom of life | Edge.org

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