Ged Carroll

Search results for: “iOS”

  • Avios rewards

    I have over 106,000 Avios, enough to get me from Heathrow to Hong Kong first-class and still have some left over. These are frequent flyer points given out by British Airways. I have a lot of them and wanted to spend them. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to cash them in the four times or so that I have tried. In fact I wasn’t able to book a Heathrow to Hong Kong flight in any class of travel. I admit,   I was more than a little disappointed. But my curiosity was bigger than my disappointment and so my last failed Avios experience got me thinking.

    In fact when I went forward a month or so I still couldn’t get a Heathrow to Hong Kong flight, apart from one flight which required a stopover in Riydah, Saudi Arabia. The Riydah stopover isn’t really an option at all, unless one is:

    • A Saudi national
    • Part of the tour group (of four or more) with a Saudi visitors visa
    • In possession of a Saudi business visa, which requires an invitation from a Saudi company
    • In possession of a Saudi employment visa

    If you don’t fit into any of those categories, you aren’t allowed to transit through a Saudi airport, this would include the lions share of the BA customer base.  In other words, I had two hopes: Bob Hope and no hope.

    So I did an unscientific survey amongst my contacts and found that they’d managed to spend their Avios (and their predecessor Air Miles)  on trans-Atlantic flights occasionally, but mostly for short-haul European flights.  They like me had found it hard to book longer haul flights.

    This time I tried going through customer services who checked and told me that there were no reward flights available when I wanted to go. I enquired via the British Airways Twitter account about trading options and they said how would one put a monetary value on Avios?

    So bear with me whilst  I break this down:

    There are a limited number of rewards seats, how many on the journey I want to go? I don’t know. Where they go or when they are, apart from searching via the British Airways site. It isn’t exactly a transparent process, what proportion of seats could notionally qualify? This sounds to me like the start of a game of chance, rather than the traditional rewards scheme like my local coffee shop, Superdrug or Boots cards.

    Why are there a limited number of seats? Presumably to reduce the redemption rate down to an ‘acceptable’ level. Given that Avios are earned in proportion to transactions:

    • Airline flights
    • Promotional partner purchases
    • Credit card transactions

    This implies that there is some form of monetary value exchange by the affiliate marketing parter, there is some from of monetary value to British Airways and by implication there is some form of monetary value (after BA has taken it’s cut) to the consumer (me).

    So how do we derive a value? I suspected it is likely to vary according to route. Here are some examples based on single flights from London (all airports) on December 1, 2012, versus how many Avios the trip requires. I have taken out taxes from the flight price to make the comparison between the payment methods fair. I have also not included the credit card surcharge and picked the cheapest flight shown. All data has been provided from the British Airways website with a currency setting in pounds:

    Destination | class Avios Price in pounds Avios/Pound
    Hong Kong (1st) 91,000 7,312.01 12.4453
    Hong Kong (business) 60,000 4,709.01 12.7416
    New York (1st) 60,000 6,822.71 8.7942
    New York (business) 40,000 4,199.71 9.5245
    Dubai (1st) 60,000 3,627.01 16.5426
    Dubai (business) 40,000 2,755.01 14.5190
    Helsinki (1st) 22,500 439.95** 51.1422
    Helsinki (business) 15,000 439.95 34.0948
    Manchester (business) 4,500 2.60* 1,730.7692

    *  Avios lists a business class option to Manchester, the ticket booking system only offers economy. The price is minus the airport tax.

    ** Avios lists a first-class option to Helsinki, the ticket booking system only offers business and economy class

    So this is a very small sample size, but there seems to be some sort of pricing strategy at work, which implies that British Airways has some sort of notional value on the Avio as a currency unit and they are trying to elicit customer behavioural change and maximise the Avios/pounds price that they get for flights.

    I presume that they would probably move around reward seats to use Avios iron out gaps in demand. But given that Avios price can alter, why does British Airways need to also restrict demand with ‘reward seats’ availability?

    Given this research there are a number of attributes that I think would go into deriving a the notional value of an Avios if it was to be traded:

    • Where I want to go and when I want to go which dictate a probability of getting hold of a reward seat
    • How long the Avios are needed for. If you want to fly next week, it doesn’t matter whether the Avios you are buying the flight run out in a month or four years time. If you are buying Avios to use in 12 months their expiry date matters more

    Some of these attributes start to make Avios look like a derivative, so an algorithm similar to the Black-Scholes equation would factor in:

    • The risk that you wouldn’t be able to spend the Avios
    • The notional value of the Avios based on where market players actually want to go to rather than where British Airways wants to game their flight plans to go

    In a market like Points.com, were Avios to be floated as currency or against other rewards programmes, one maybe able to see their true value. A massive deflation in their value would support my hypothesis of Avios not being rewards per se, but more analogous to a lottery ticket.

    And such a situation would be counterproductive to customer  loyalty, because the gamed nature of the programme would become more readily apparent. Imagine if you were told you can enter a game of maybe getting on some flights for free (excluding airport taxes), but more points doesn’t necessarily increase your chances of winning. British Airways Avios customer loyalty scheme wouldn’t seem so attractive, would it?

    I’d leave the final words to John Lydon:

    Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night!

    which he apparently said at the end of the last Sex Pistols concert, Winterland Theater, San Francisco, California January 14, 1978. More marketing related content can be found here.

  • Consumer interest in iOS etc.

    If you’re like me you read far more journalist analysis of the wireless phone market than is good for you. I thought that it would be instructive to have a look at what consumers are looking for instead and look for any patterns. After sales availability and visibility consumer interest is probably the biggest determinator of success. My weapon of choice was Google Insights for Search. My research was based on a few assumptions about consumer interest in the wireless space and some limitations in the tool that I was using:

    • Consumers know what type of smartphone that they want
    • Consumers decisions aren’t carrier loyal
    • Consumers used Roman script to search for the brand
    • Search is a good proxy for consumer interest – it hasn’t been disrupted by Facebook in this regard yet despite what others may tell you
    • China despite being the world’s largest market isn’t going to be providing meaningful data because Google Insights for Search doesn’t cover that market
    • The Russia sample is indicative of overall consumer sentiment in Russia (Yandex is a big search player in Russia)

    Consumer Interest in platforms
    Some of the biggest interest in handset brands is in the developing world. In many respects this is their PC revolution. In developed Asian markets like Hong Kong and Singapore there is a much higher interest than EU countries – partly because of on-the-go lifestyles and partly because of the economic cataclysm that the western world is facing. The iPhone still attracts the most interest, but what is interesting is the acceleration that Android seems to have in terms of increasing interest. Microsoft’s efforts, whilst lauded by critics haven’t yet turned into consumer interest.  Research In Motion’s Blackberry platform seems to be down but not out yet in the consumer stakes.

    Nokia

    I took a snapshot of consumer interest in Nokia over the past three months to try and see what effect the global launch campaign for Nokia’s Windows phones are doing to consumer interest in the brand.

    I deliberately didn’t compare them to the iPhone because Nokia themselves acknowledge that they are competing against Android handset makers like HTC and Samsung. Nokia launched the Lumia phones with their biggest marketing campaign ever and had a lot of column inches written about the brand alongside a gamut of marketing commnications tactics from experiential events and advertising to point of purchase.


    Whilst Nokia’s new range of Lumia phones have had a substantial marketing budget put in place, but it doesn’t seem to have significantly affected search interest: it’s not quite living up the Amazing Everyday billing yet. This is also the case for Windows Phone with interest remaining consistently low in comparison to the Nokia brand. I think that the stubborn consumer disinterest in Windows Phone is a big challenge.

    More wireless related content can be found here.

  • Donkey Bong and other curios

    I’ve had a number of links sent to me that were too good not to share with you all: Donkey Bong, Graff Jewellery, PBS on porn and more.

    Donkey Bong

    JoeCartoon clogged up many networks in the late 90’s with his un-PC and puerile flash animations, creating characters like the Cheech & Chong ‘Stoned Fly’ and Gerbill. The most memorable animations like the frog in the blender and gerbil in the microwave allowed office workers to unleash the passive sadism that lies beneath us all and put the phrase Who’s ya Daddy? into popular English usage. His work has defined what a viral campaign is. He is back with another dollop of surreal weirdness and ultraviolence in Donkey Bong. More on it here.

    Graff Jewellery

    No not Graff – the most fabulous jewels in the world, but graffiti enabled by the reverse setting on a diamond ring by Tobias Wong. Get caught making use of your ring to make your mark on the world by tagging car and train windows, luscious pearlescent paint work on a TVR or your boss’ computer screen. You can see Tobias’ diamond project here.

    PBS On Adult Entertainment industry

    OK, we are currently pitching for a UK-based adult entertainment orientated television channel and web site, this this website designed to complement a PBS Frontline documentary on the adult entertainment industry was useful for research into the business . Seriously though, looking at this, there are some scary people out there, interesting facts – a starlet in the industry has an average career lifespan of just 12 months. Sombre, disturbing and yet compelling reading here. Glamourous like Boogie Nights it ain’t.

    Supercharged Records

    Email text from Supercharged Records: “Click on the link below to hear an exclusive preview of all the tracks from the forthcoming Freestylers ‘Raw As F**k’ album!

    Turn audio off on the front page and click on ‘album info’ and then ‘preview album’

    http://www.thefreestylers.com/

    We would also like to take this opportunity to say thank you to all of you how have purchased Push Up. Thank you!

    The album is out in the UK on the 5th July, contact you local record store to pre-order a copy!”

    More culture related posts here.

  • William Gibson + more things

    William Gibson

    I have been thinking a lot about William Gibson recently. Judging by my social feeds, the Neo Tokyo aesthetic has saturated mainstream culture (from 90s anime clips, tech wear, creator built cyber decks and Hong Kong at night) and our Silicon Valley elites sound more like Wintermute at every turn.

    William Gibson in Berlin, 3.2008

    The K-shaped economy described by Gary Stevenson in his thesis, feels very much like the have-nots of the sprawl trilogy.

    Finally, Apple is on the cusp of releasing a TV adaptation of Gibson’s first novel Neuromancer next year. So I had to post these vintage videos of Gibson as they feel so ‘now’ despite being decades old.

    William Gibson talking about cyberpunk as a genre in 1990. He calls a distinctively post-modern fiction genre. In a prophetic turn they talk about the unique way in which cyberpunk has been manifested into the real world; just not in the countercultural way that Gibson envisaged. Although the relationship now between Gibson’s work and the real world are probably too close for comfort. And there is a great interview with Timothy Leary.

    Related to that was the cypherpunk movement who realised that cryptography was essential to online worlds.

    Cypherpunks were concerned about the government a quarter century before the Edward Snowden leaks and the algorithmic web with a web of data for sale to advertisers and bad actors.

    And in this clip, William Gibson contextualises the early web in this interview

    Business

    The Technology Industry Is Stumbling Down The Path To Becoming A Proper Supply Chain | Forrester – I think is a polite way of saying that the industry has moved from growth to value investment. Whether the industry has a maturity in thinking that reflects this new position is something else.

    China

    Spain’s largest Chinese investment to rely on workers from China | Investment Monitor – very similar to the belt-and-road model elsewhere. Interesting the lack of pushback that came from Spain, given the size of the country’s construction industry.

    Design

    30 Years of Micro Motors to Robot Dexterous Hands: MINDSYNC TECH and Jiangsu Leili Solve the Mechanical Stiffness Problem in Humanoid Gripping – interesting article in Pandaily. It’s basically smaller sizes of strain wave gears. Back when I went to the launch of Automata’s EVA robotic arm launch, strain wave gears came up as a topic of conversation. Robotic precision focused on software because only standardised strain wave gears were available from a limited amount of suppliers like Harmonic Drive. The Chinese seem to have sidestepped this innovation pinch point with powered strain wave gears small enough to operate a robotic hand with a high degree of dexterity.

    Gadgets

    Open Source Vacuum Avoids Cloud | Hackaday – thanks to open source software, a Raspberry Pi board, off the shelf parts and accessible additive manufacturing there is now an open source Roomba style vacuum cleaner.

    ŌURA and LillyDirect to Expand Support for People Using GLP-1 Therapies with New Tools and Savings Options – The Pulse Blog – I was there when wearables were proposed as a digital kit to another obesity management product years before this deal was announced. I am surprised that it took so long. The partner selection implies a heavy female bias to the expected customer base.

    ChinAI #366: Most Companion Robots Die by Day 30 – model capabilities will become increasingly cheap, while scenario-specific evaluation datasets will become increasingly expensive. Most companion products will not die because their AI models lack power, but because users stop opening the app by Day 30.

    Germany

    Watching China in Europe – August 2026 – by Noah Barkin – Volkswagen is now pursuing a strategy that consists of:

    • Doubling down on manufacturing at its EV hub in Hefei, China as part of what Blume describes as an “in China for China” approach.
    • Exporting the cars it produces in China, in Blume’s own words, to Southeast Asia, Australia, India, South America, Africa and Europe, in what looks more like an “in China for the world” strategy (minus the US market).
    • Pursuing mass layoffs in Germany, while luring Chinese carmakers into the German factories that Volkswagen is struggling to sustain.
    • Urging the EU to accelerate and broaden its trade defense measures against Chinese competitors that are seizing market share for plug-in hybrids at an astonishing rate.

    If your head is spinning, you are not alone …

    Ideas

    FCC approves orbital space mirrors, first test satellites will launch this year — large spacecraft reflects sunlight to Earth’s surface for construction sites, search-and-rescue lighting, and more | Tom’s Hardware

    Indonesia

    Indonesia’s 9 Dragons. Who Are They? Are They Too Rich For Indonesia’s Good? | Dr Wealth

    Innovation

    Why the US is losing Chinese AI stars | FT – comparable opportunities at home.

    Russia’s Newest Kh-101 Cruise Missile Upgrade Points to Chinese Help | Wes O’Donnell – the recent upgrade to Russia’s Kh-101 missile capabilities owes far less to stolen Western secrets than it does to Chinese industrial hardware. Whilst espionage may have ironed out a few technical creases, Russia is quietly acquiring the machine tools and microelectronics from Chinese suppliers. These are needed to turn a dormant Soviet-era innovation into a mass-produced reality.

    The rationale for putting such high-spec, durable components like single-crystal engine blades into a single-use weapon comes down to a recent design trade-off. Having substantially increased the missile’s warhead size at the expense of its fuel capacity, Russian engineers required a hotter, vastly more efficient engine to recoup the lost flight range. Manufacturing equipment sourced from Chinese vendors provided the industrial “kitchen” necessary to make this crucial engineering workaround a reality.

    Porous material could pull 1.8 liters of drinking water daily from dry air | TechXplore

    IP

    The 6 wildest claims in Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI | The Verge – OpenAI allegedly “coached” Apple employees on how to bypass security measures. Apple alleged Tan kept an internal document that outlines employee off-boarding procedures. OpenAI allegedly used this information to warn employees coming from Apple about the company’s security checks and “coached” them on how to avoid it.

    OpenAI advised departing Apple workers not to disclose their new employer and also offered tips on how to avoid a “dreaded walk out,” which would result in their immediate removal from the company, preventing them from accessing Apple’s systems for a standard two weeks, the lawsuit alleges. OpenAI is accused of telling Apple employees not to “sign anything at the exit interview,” and if they’re asked to sign a document, to tell OpenAI “asap.”

    In the lawsuit, Apple says that OpenAI’s alleged tactics “appear to be having their desired effect.” Apple claims it has noticed “a recent trend of employees who are leaving Apple for OpenAI and taking steps to evade security measures,” including workers “ignoring outreach by security personnel to schedule exit processes and security reviews.”

    Luxury

    Why luxury brands are falling for Asia’s queer romance shows | FT

    Rolex accused of hiring ‘crowds’ for Shanghai centenary exhibition | Reddit r/Watches – the use of gig workers to bulk up footfall numbers is unfortunate but understandable. It’s not a great look. They may have not have been hitting footfall numbers.

    Secondly there is a need in Chinese culture for events to be bustling with people. I remember going to the China South City wholesale mall in the Shenzhen region. Some of the car park was converted into basketball courts so that there would be the sound of people there, even if they were having fun rather than purchasing supplies for their business.

    The problem for Rolex got much worse when this story breached beyond the Chinese internet into the feeds of western watch enthusiasts.

    Security

    OpenAI admits AI ‘agent’ caused major cyber breach by itself | FT – I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a certain amount of PR behind this story.

    Royal Navy Drops a Drone Boat Out of a Plane | Maritime Executive – this feels like an important step towards more autonomous warfare, particularly in rapid expeditionary deployment.

    German firm files for insolvency, blames cybercrims who shut down production for 6 weeks | The Register

    UK, EU officially pin Poland energy cyberattack on Russia | The Register

    Space Force officially has its own weapon for taking out satellites | Task & Purpose

    Five Takeaways From the Times Investigation Into Larry Ellison’s A.I. Gamble – The New York Times – The United States had one major advantage in the A.I. race: China lagged behind in computer chip technology. The Biden administration cut off Chinese access to American-made chips, but China could still obtain computing power remotely through other countries.

    In 2024, Oracle made a $6.5 billion deal to build an data centre complex in Malaysia from which it could supply computing power to ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, and other foreign companies. Oracle’s facility in Malaysia was soon on track to become the second-biggest in the world, providing by one estimate more than one-fifth of China’s total A.I. computing power. Ellison is now powering the A.I. ambitions of China aka America’s biggest geopolitical rival.

    Cybersecurity expert Steve Sims discusses how hackers are now using AI.

    Software

    3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber | News from Google – but no Gemini 3.6 Pro yet.

    Exclusive-Beijing is looking at curbing overseas access to China’s top AI models, sources say | Yahoo! Finance

    Microsoft to axe 4,800 jobs as it resets Xbox | FT

    Palantir CEO Alex Karp says ‘something has gone completely wrong’ with how AI is sold | CNBC – Palantir CEO Alex Karp caused a stir by discussing what he says is growing unhappiness among U.S. businesses about the costs to access models from the biggest AI companies, like OpenAI and Anthropic. And he asserted that those customers are getting “no value” from the technology.

    Taiwan

    China-friendly KMT stunts Taiwan’s attempt to grow into a fully formed hedgehog | The Strategist

    Technology

    Hyundai buys SoftBank’s Boston Dynamics stake for $325 million | Quartz – Hyundai is using the robots in its own operations from factories to construction sites. They are even being used in Posco’s steel foundries too.

    RISC-V Is Inevitable, State of the Union Keynote Argues – EE Times

    Axios AI+ |⛽ Trading compute – 1 big thing: Wall Street wants to trade AI compute like oil. This reminded me a lot of Enron’s doomed attempt to trade bandwidth in a similar way, which was the core offering of Enron Broadband Services.

    Wireless

    OnePlus, the ‘Flagship-Killer’ Smartphone Brand, Is All but Dead | WIRED – this surprised me given that Samsung has been on the ropes and OnePlus had such a good relationship with Qualcomm.

  • Jensen Huang + more stuff

    Great interview with Jensen Huang

    Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia was interviewed by Axios. In the wide ranging interview he is advocating for open LLM models. He thinks that the benefits of closed models ties in with the benefits of scale and convenience from cloud computing infrastructure. Jensen Huang also talks about sovereign AI at an enterprise level as well as country level.

    What struck me was Huang’s strong advocacy for open source and open models. He points to the central role that Linux plays today. (Android is Linux as is Google Chrome, macOS, iOS, iPadOS and tvOS all run on Darwin which is open source and relies on BSD and the Mach micro-kernel – which are also open source). He points out that open source allows inspection, customisation to harden the software and ultimately be trusted.

    It one of the best interviews that I have seen where Jensen Huang is at his most articulate. It’s also interesting that the interview is so wide ranging. Huang’s last point about now being the most important time, gave me a moment for pause. Huang’s time is mediated by his staff rather than by outlook or his watch. But it also made me wonder about the nature of strategy and horizon-scanning at Nvidia.

    The interview was published at a time when the media realised that Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 as an open model was competitive with US frontier models on many measures.

    Contrast Huang’s viewpoint with Palantir CEO Alex Karp on CNBC. Karp discussed a growing unhappiness amongst US enterprises about the cost of accessing models from large AI companies, yet receiving ‘no value’ from the technology.

    Surfing the wave

    Kind of a tangential point to to Huang’s the most important time is now is about timing in technological innovation. Robert X Cringely in his book Accidental Empires made this point through the use of surfing as an analogy. If you hit a wave too early, you wipe out, if you hit the wave too late the momentum and energy has gone out of the wave. Hitting it at the right time the most important factor. It’s a timeless truth.

    Film maker David Hoffman documented behind the scenes at General Magic as part of the process to make a launch video for their product. General Magic were too early to the wave as this behind the scenes footage shows.

    Ladders

    I like Justin Taylor’s videos because of their insightful content delivered in a snarky slacker way. In this video he uses ladders to illustrate the importance of supply chains and logistics to support US air power. Which explains why the US is restricted to predictable bases in the current Iranian conflict amongst other things.

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