The Wall Street Journal explores the history and technology behind Google Maps. The mapping equipment decrease in size over time is particularly interesting to see. The origin of Google Maps starts with a PC app developed the Rasmussen brothers. Jens went on to help found Apple’s map application as well. What quickly becomes apparent when you look at the camera and mapping equipment is the lack of designing for operator comfort. Even these are produced in commercial amounts, the Google Maps camera and LIDAR equipment still looks and feels like an engineering student project. Google Maps is now 17 years old from launch. It spurred a large amount of development on what was termed ‘where 2.0‘.
The impact of where 2.0 in our world today can be seen in local recommendations from Siri on your smartphone to the Institute for the Study of War, which has created the defacto map for what’s happening during the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine.
Aquafresh fortune-telling
Grey Japan based the campaign on a behavioural insight. During COVID, Japanese toothbrushing habits changed. While brushing your teeth morning and night was common within the Japanese lifestyle prior to COVID; the emphasis has also slowly shifted to brushing in the night and less in the morning.
The campaign asked Aquafresh users to upload a photo on Twitter showing the toothpaste applied to their toothbrush. They would then receive their fortune-telling results from the famous Japanese fortune teller Johnny Kaede based on the colour and shape of the toothpaste on the brush.
Brabus Invicto
German Mercedes tuner and the sultans of bling Brabus have got into the armoured G-Wagen business with the Invicto. I am not quite sure who it will be marketed to since the security sector is already well catered to by the likes of Alpha Armoring. But if you need a team of armed bodyguards to rollout and deploy rapidly on the Kings Road in Chelsea, be reassured Brabus have the gun truck for your ex-special forces types.
The engineering and manufacturing processes that go into making the vehicle is very interesting. It contrasts with the process that Jankel uses for its Land Cruisers. The main challenge I see is the large number of pieces that Brabus has to use compared to Jankel’s hot forming process.
Lyle Goldstein on U.S. Strategic Challenges
Goldstein is a director at a dovish US think tank and formerly taught as the US Naval War College. I don’t necessarily agree with Goldstein since I view the challenges that the west faces more apropos to the Axis powers, rather than the cold war.
Manulife Hong Kong
Manulife insurance for personal injury and health costs is what this ad is using. The actors are famous in the Hong Kong film industry and the ad uses tropes from police and spy films.
Exclusive: China preparing an antitrust investigation into Google – sources | Reuters – it would be interesting to see how a Chinese antitrust investigation into Google would play out. I could understand an antitrust investigation being put on the table of the politburo, I am less sure how it would work. Chinese companies need Google advertising, whereas Google is shut out of the Chinese market already. Google could turn around and tell them to do one; it would lose one R&D centre. A bigger issue might be the forced rejigging of its Google Home | Nest product supply chain. I suspect an antitrust investigation into Google is more likely to happen in the US than China
The perils of life in Beijing’s backyard | Financial Times – while it is all too easy to stereotype China and its companies as pantomime villains, Hiebert is skilled at teasing out the nuances and ambiguities, including local elites who have welcomed Chinese money, sometimes under corrupt circumstances. For south-east Asian countries, Beijing has proved a more predictable partner than the US, continuing business as usual with Myanmar when it faced isolation under its former military dictatorship, then more recently when it faced international condemnation for the military crackdown on the Rohingya. Beijing continued military sales to Thailand after the most recent coup in 2014
American Engagement Advocates Sold a Dream of Changing China – efforts to downplay the missionary impulse of engagement with China amount to historical gaslighting, an attempt to retcon the record to conceal the extent of failure. During the Cold War, American leaders justified engagement with China as reining in China’s revolutionary foreign policy, establishing a stable bilateral relationship, and countering the Soviet threat—all reasonable goals. But for the first 20 years of the post-Cold War era, American leaders, backed by their advisors and strategists, unambiguously sold engagement with China on the basis of fostering a democratic and responsible government in Beijing
Daring Fireball: Apple Is Removing Feed Readers From Chinese App Store – this doesn’t surprise me in the least. I used to use an RSS reader app when I would go to China. It’s interesting that RSS is now undergoing that much of a focus in China though as the audience will be distinctly niche. More on my RSS adventures in China here.
When coffee makers are demanding a ransom, you know IoT is screwed | Ars Technica – Security problems with Smarter products first came to light in 2015, when researchers at London-based security firm Pen Test partners found that they could recover a Wi-Fi encryption key used in the first version of the Smarter iKettle. The same researchers found that version 2 of the iKettle and the then-current version of the Smarter coffee maker had additional problems, including no firmware signing and no trusted enclave inside the ESP8266, the chipset that formed the brains of the devices. The result: the researchers showed a hacker could probably replace the factory firmware with a malicious one. The researcher EvilSocket also performed a complete reverse engineering of the device protocol, allowing remote control of the device. Two years ago, Smarter released the iKettle version 3 and the Coffee Maker version 2, said Ken Munro, a researcher who worked for Pen Test Partners at the time. The updated products used a new chipset that fixed the problems. He said that Smarter never issued a CVE vulnerability designation, and it didn’t publicly warn customers not to use the old one. Data from the Wigle network search engine shows the older coffee makers are still in use – the bit I don’t understand is why you would need these appliances connected to the internet in the first place
Apple vs Epic may go to jury; Google finally speaks on Fortnite ban – While Judge Rogers merely upheld her previous position, and didn’t dismiss Epic’s case outright, she was very obviously skeptical of their claims. Actually, that might be an understatement — she outright said that Epic lied, and, regarding the separate payment apparatus Epic insists on calling a “hotfix,” she said, “Lots of people use hotfixes. That’s not the issue. The issue is that you were told, and you knew explicitly because of your contractual relations, that you could not have that, and you did. It’s really pretty simple.” She was also rather unimpressed with Epic’s repeated claims that they were being denied access to large market of gamers who play Fortnite only on iOS, saying there are many other avenues through which those players can access the game.”
Ai Weiwei: ‘Too late’ to curb China’s global influence – BBC News – “The West should really have worried about China decades ago. Now it’s already a bit too late, because the West has built its strong system in China and to simply cut it off, it will hurt deeply. That’s why China is very arrogant.”
China under Xi Jinping feels increasingly like North Korea – The Washington Post – across China, it has become extremely difficult to have conversations with ordinary folk. People are afraid to speak at all, critically or otherwise. Students and professors, supermarket workers and taxi drivers, parents and motorists have all waved me away this year
Sex Workers Say Porn on Google Drive Is Suddenly Disappearing – Motherboard – don’t assume that the contents of your Google Drive hasn’t been thoroughly examined by Google. Adult entertainment is merely the canary in the coal mine for Google Drive privacy. I would be very careful about using a cloud storage platform if you haven’t encrypted the entire folder as a bundle before uploading it. And don’t use Google Drive. More related content here.
Consumer behaviour
The unparalleled joy of writing with a fountain pen – and five beautiful pens to inspire you – Country Life – Among the obituaries of a former Conservative Minister a few years ago, there was one delightful snippet. A line in The Daily Telegraph described how, when she received the letter from Mrs Thatcher appointing her to the Lords, Lady Blatch initially believed it to be a hoax, because the letter was signed in Biro and she had been ‘brought up to believe that nobody who matters uses a Biro’.
Millennials: you will not be quite so special in the ‘futr’ | FT – could it be that millennials, the most scrutinised, criticised and debated generation of our time, were not that special any more? “Millennials are still important as a customer,” Ms Ganatra told me later. But there is now a “millennial mindset” that has nothing to do with age, she said. In other words, millennials may have been the first generation to have grown up in a digital world but the rest of us are catching on fast. People of all ages are now so used to shopping with a click or talking to a chatbot that retailers need to think about the needs and desires of all their customers, not just those born between 1981 and 1996 – or an artificial construct in terms of their digital uniqueness
Ideas
Cigarettes are the vice America needs | FT Alphaville – Cigarette smoking is essentially the anti-Facebook. While Facebook is a fundamentally misanthropic venture that pretends to be a community, smoking is a community activity for people who pretend to be misanthropes. The activity itself is fundamentally pro-social! It gives people reasons to interact with strangers (“got a light?”). And since it was banned indoors — undeniably a good choice — it gives people a reason to go outside and make idle small talk, all while pursuing a common activity. And unlike alcohol, cigarettes alone don’t often lead to property damage or missed days of work (paywall)
Study: Smart Speakers are Changing the Way We Select Products – interesting how this is impacting retail. FMCG brands in particular should be really concerned as this is far beyond what supermarkets could do with dodgy shelving layouts and look-a-like private label brands
Building for the modern web is really, really hard | O’Reilly – average website clocks in at 4MB with 100s of elements including 3rd, 4th and 5th party based interactions – which also explains page load times – and slow AF ad related technology such as trackers
Is Facebook Really Scarier Than Google? | Nautilus – worthwhile reading about the effect of Google – of course they both have an impact otherwise you wouldn’t advertise on it. The question needs to be does the utility justify the impact? I think search has a better case than a social network, but both have merits
Alex Stamos, Facebook Data Security Chief, To Leave Amid Outcry – The New York Times – Some of the company’s executives are weighing their own legacies and reputations as Facebook’s image has taken a beating. Several believe the company would have been better off saying little about Russian interference and note that other companies, such as Twitter, which have stayed relatively quiet on the issue, have not had to deal with as much criticism
Technology
China’s Huawei Technologies reshuffles board for first time since 2012 – I presume the reason why Mr Ren is getting back behind the wheel is that overall and smartphone revenue figures for 2017 was Huawei’s slowest growth in four years. I am not convinced that premium products will be the way forward when they are locked out of the North American retail system. I am also not sure why the management team at Huawei Mobile Devices hasn’t been refreshed
The Valley of Death: the students vying to be millionaires | Telegraph – In 2015 Oxford, the UK’s number one university for research, produced four spin-outs. Not per professor. That was for the whole university. The situation was not better elsewhere. Data on British university spin-outs is not in any publicly available league table. But it exists, via what’s called the HE-BCI survey (it stands for Higher Education – Business and Community Interaction). For 2015-16, Cambridge University recorded a total of two spinouts in the HE-BCI survey. Imperial College London, another of this country’s most vaunted research universities, listed three. Of 160 institutions, 59 officially produced no spinouts at all.
The Shallowness of Google Translate – The Atlantic – Google Translate really weak on language that uses metaphors or symbolic elements in their discussion. So examples that I am familiar with Google Translate failing on include both Cantonese and Mandarin. It’s Mandarin is slightly better, likely due to a wider body of material to work from.
Are you addicted to your smartphone? You may need professional help | SCMP – it is interesting that ‘internet addiction’ isn’t diagnosed as say obsessive compulsive behaviour or sociopathy but its own unique disorder. The likes of TV soap operas or music offered similar escapes – the amount I spent on vinyl was definitely the wrong side of sanity (paywall)
Watchdog voices fears of privatisation risk to ethical standards – FT.com – Commissioners tended to assume that providers would conform to ethical standards so they were not explicitly incorporated into either the selection of providers or contracts. If monitoring occurred at all, it was focused on performance and financial measures rather than ethics, the committee said. (Paywall) – because that’s going to work well…
In a Mobile-First World, Shorter Video Ads Drive Results | Facebook Business – Average watch time for both the 6-second and 30-second video ads was the same, but ad recall was significantly higher for the 6-second ads. The difference in ad recall underlines the importance of keeping video ads short and communicating key messages in the first few seconds. – And here is the flaw in the argument
Daring Fireball: Only Apple – interesting article. I think that Apple’s decision to not try and build a curates egg helps, also iOS and OSX are being evolved rather than being completely shaken up at the moment. Lastly Apple has to worry about a smaller amount of variance in hardware than other software teams
Web of no web
BBC News – Tomorrow’s Cities – thought that this was interesting primer for smart cities, internet of things, programmable web, machine-to-machine
Really interesting design experiment from Chinese university students. It is interesting that they use the ‘goldfish’ as the avatar of the AI. It also asks questions about how we relate to pets and whether augmentation like this would work.
Very interesting student project from Shanghai Jiaotong University, has your pet fish serve as an avatar/front end for a smart device pic.twitter.com/tHDODQHArM
