Search results for: “luddite”

  • August 2024 newsletter – unlucky 13?

    August 2024 newsletter introduction

    Welcome to my August 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 13th issue. When I lived in Hong Kong; four was the unluckiest number. 13 featured in confucian beliefs and in tai chi. In western culture 13 has a similar reputation. The status of 13 goes all the way back to Babylonian times. A baker’s dozen contained 13 items; rather than the usual 12 items.

    This time last year, I had a daft idea to put together stuff I’ve written, read, been inspired by or have watched that I thought some people might find of interest. Along the way, I shared my Ma’s recipe for a traditional Irish Hallowe’en dish, book recommendations, articles, a review of 2023 and much more.

    Hunt Hospital Helipad
    Salem State University Archives August 18, 1987 “Boston Medical Flight helicopter using new helipad”

    I spent a good deal of August outside London to recharge and take care of family business. I am now back and getting ready for September.

    New reader?

    If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • My cousin selling the ‘ancestral’ family farm back in Ireland, got me thinking about roots.
    • I explored Rob Henderson’s concept of ‘luxury beliefs‘ and other things that I found of interest from around the web.
    • I looked at some of the themes that have emerged around generative AI in the first half of this year.

    Books that I have read.

    • The Ribbon Queen – I am a huge fan of Garth Ennis as a graphic novel writer and the publication of The Ribbon Queen was the second best news I had received this year since Ennis announced his return to The Punisher series at the beginning of 2024. With The Ribbon Queen Ennis returns obliquely to religion with a tale that sits somewhere between a police procedural and Lovecroftian fiction. Nothing is simple with Ennis and the work touches on themes like police brutality, woke culture, sex trafficking, domestic violence and ancient beliefs.
    • Part of my love reading comes from my Dad’s library of crime and espionage books. I started reading John LeCarré, Hammond Innes and Alistair Maclean in primary school. Secondary school had me reading Gerald Seymour and Robert Ludlum. Seymour’s work felt more grounded and Harry’s Game during The Troubles felt especially pertinent. Despite being 82 years old Seymour still writes. I haven’t picked up a Seymour novel in decades until I got to read In For The Kill. its the third book in a franchise of Jonas Merrick – a soon-to-retire spook with a love of caravanning and frugality. As a holiday read, I really enjoyed it.
    • Richard Stark’s Parker is an anti-hero beloved of Hollywood who has appeared in film over years. Richard Stark’s Parker: The Complete Collection is a collection of graphic novel adaptions of The Score, The Outfit, The Score, and Slayground, The Man with the Getaway Face and The Seventh. Stark’s Parker is written with crisp lean copy to match the no-nonsense dark ruthless character. He is at end of America’s hard boiled noir literature like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. But Richard Stark’s hero was an armed robber, not a detective. As a genre it was later revived by James Ellroy’s works from the late 1980s on. While Parker has been played on screen by a variety of actors including Lee Marvin and Mark Wahlberg – he is not a character for our times. Darwyn Cooke’s adaption of Parker to a graphic novel format is a 500+ page love letter to mid-century graphic design including vintage newspapers and petrol station maps. It’s a coffee table book that you actually want to read.
    • Qiu Xiaolong is an American crime writer, who is famous for his character Chief Inspector Chen. In his book Becoming Inspector Chen, was recommended by my friend Ian. The book feels autobiographical in nature. Like Chen, Qiu had studies TS Elliot at university, both had lived through the opening up of China post-Cultural Revolution. Their paths divert when Qiu moved to study in the US and decided to stay there after the ‘June the 4th incident‘. Qiu describes the complex relationships in families due to the Cultural Revolution and the nature of change in China during its opening up phase. The book is an implicit critique of the current Xi administration, as yet again Chen faces the imminent impact of the party machine.
    • Kara Swisher is a long-time journalist who chronicled Silicon Valley from the dot.com boom onward. In Burn Book Swisher gives us her potted history and hot takes on the people and companies that she tried to report on. I say tried because technology firms have made life difficult for journalists since blogging became a thing and they could go direct to the audience. Swisher came from an unhappy but privileged background and jumped into journalism with gusto. There isn’t anything that surprising in her reporting save how was it so late that Swisher really dialled into how toxic and nihilistic some of her subjects really were? Swisher’s book is more engaging than Fred Vogelstein’s Dogfight, but lacks the wit and panache of Michael Malone’s books or Robert X Cringely’s Accidental Empires.

    A bit of aside to the books, I found this article by Dazed Digital quite interesting. Apparently, straight men are much less likely to read novels. I read a mix of fiction and non-fiction as you can probably tell if you are regular reader. If you want fiction recommendations as a start, I have some in an old post I wrote about 50 books I would recommend (scroll down to fiction).

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Quantum advertising.

    Faris Yakob had dropped a banger of an opinion piece on WARC. In quantum advertising Yakob calls out marketing management for optimising to the wrong things and believing that creativity is predictable.

    La rouge Aston Martin DB2/4
    Aston Martin DB2

    It also led me to Jeremy Bullmore’s ‘Aston Martin’ essay published by WPP as A 20th Century Lesson for 21st Century Brands.

    Return-to-office mandates

    Gartner the research house most famous for its technology reports has taken an in-depth look at return-to-office mandates beloved of large enterprises such as Apple, Amazon or Boeing and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Gartner looked at employee research and HR leaders as part of an up to date research done in May 2024. Any small gains in discretionary effort and employee engagement are wiped out by drops in intent to stay, with the implied disruption and cost cause by employee churn.

    Factors that contribute to lower intent to stay at a job

    The findings are similar to what we saw with Slack Future Forum’s Inflexible return-to-office policies are hammering employee experience scores published in 2022.

    New voices

    Zoë Mann started an initiative that would get some of the newer strategist voices heard.

    Things I have watched. 

    I haven’t watched A Clockwork Orange for a while and revisited it. I am still amazed by the way Kubrick used lighting, Beethoven and the Wendy Carlos soundtrack to such good effect. It also felt much more creative and transgressive than anything one would see at the cinema now. The modernist and brutalist architecture gives it an otherworldly quality now.

    I wanted to watch Weathering With You since it came out. I finally got to watch it. The animation is almost as rich as Studio Ghibli and the plot has some fantastical elements of it as well. But the story is grounded in the darker side of Tokyo.

    Red Neon Kabukichō Ichiban-gai Gate, Shinjuku

    The protagonist is homeless and lives in a net café near the Kabukicho gate that marks the entry to the red light district that is part of Shinjuku ward. In this respect the anime provides a realistic portrayal of a ‘freeter’ – an under-employed young person.

    Alain Delon died and I had a movie marathon with my Dad to celebrate his life: Un Flic, Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge.

    Useful tools.

    Whatfont

    Whatfont is a Google Chrome browser plugin, Safari browser extension and bookmarklet (I use the bookmarklet) that tells you what font’s are on a given web page.

    Google Analytics health check

    Yes I know GA4 is hateful, but Fresh Egg have put together a template to make a data health check easier to do. Give them your details and download their GA 4 Health Check for free.

    Decrapifying LinkedIn

    At last a compelling use case for the Arc Browser: as a LinkedIn client. Luddite LinkedIn is a ‘boost’ (think plug-in) cleans out things like AI powered elements of the LinkedIn experience.

    Better Reddit and YouTube search

    GigaBrain provides an alternative to the broken experience searching on Reddit and YouTube. It’s available via webpage and a Google Chrome browser plugin.

    The sales pitch.

    I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements, I am available for much of September. Contact me here. I am also open to discussions on permanent roles.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my August 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into September and the balmy days of an Indian summer!

    Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!

    Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues. 

  • NTC Volcano + more stuff

    NTC Volcano erupting?

    NTC Volcano or NTC Vulkan in westernised Russian is an information security firm (think Crowdstrike, HackerOne, Mandiant or the part of BAE Systems formerly known as Detica). Information leaked from the company show that NTC Volcano has played a major role in Russian state sponsored cyber attacks.

    Volcano

    NTC Volcano also work on protecting large corporates and include Sberbank and Aeroflot. NTC Volcano has partnered with IBM up to last year.

    Like the Panama Papers before it, it looks as if there is going to be a succession of NTC Volcano related stories over the next few weeks coming out by the participating media outlets collaborating on the reporting.

    More security related content here.

    Business

    Alibaba Reorg – by Kevin Xu – Interconnected – so many motivations wrapped up in this from conglomerate discount to dissipating market power that made them such a high profile target for Chinese government attention

    China

    TikTok CEO on spying allegations: ‘I don’t think spying is the right way to describe it’ | BGR – while there was a lot of politicians grandstanding, TikTok came across as dishonest in their answers. Only a lawyer could love some of these answers

    On National Humiliation, Don’t Mention the Russians – China Media Project – China is curiously reticent about pushing its Russian land claims. That might change if they see Russia getting skinned alive in the Ukraine conflict

    The Search for the Origins of SARS-CoV-2: “The Results on My Screen Were: Raccoon Dog, Raccoon Dog, Raccoon Dog!” – DER SPIEGEL – it currently looks like the Chinese scientists, at the very least, slowed down the search for the origins of the pandemic, if not actively hindered it. More questions than answers on this, given the current low level of trust, is the data faked?

    Fighting Beijing’s long arm of repression — Radio Free Asia 

    Current state of US-China relationship. This doesn’t take into account the dumpster fire of China’s relationships with the likes of the European Union.

    How China’s Spies Fooled an America That Wanted to be Fooled – LawfareRather than untangle the ways in which the MSS seeks to gather U.S. government or corporate secrets, Joske argues that the MSS’s greatest intelligence strength is its massively successful influence operation against U.S. political and business elites – reinforces a lot of the findings in The Hidden Hand by Hamilton & Ohlberg.

    US charges Sam Bankman-Fried with bribing Chinese officials | Financial Times

    Economics

    Brooks: The Cold War with China is changing everything | San Jose Mercury News

    World Bank warns global economy at risk of lost decade of growth | Financial Times read with China grants billions in bailouts as Belt and Road Initiative falters | Financial Times and How China may keep subverting sovereign debt workouts | Financial TimesChina is a rich bilateral creditor acting like a developing country. (There was a different but also obvious mismatch in incentives, by the way, when the Europe-dominated IMF started bailing out EU governments in 2010 during the eurozone sovereign debt crisis.)

    Energy

    Saudi Aramco strengthens China ties with two refinery deals | Financial Times 

    Ethics

    TIER: How The Labor Market’s “Double Disruption” Impacts Your Talent Strategy – this feels quite ageist in its recommendations

    Hong Kong

    Breakingviews – Hong Kong sharpens fine art edge over Singapore – Reuters – last bastion of capital flight in Hong Kong as it pulls towards the Greater Bay Area

    Indebted Chinese developer Shimao Group to sell Hong Kong airport-area Sheraton hotel property for US$828 million – not sure if this is Shimao Group’s lack of confidence in Hong Kong or if its part of the wider Chinese real estate sector looking to slowly unwind their over-leveraged balance sheet

    ‘We were like a family’: Hong Kong’s traditional shops are fading as ageing owners struggle to keep businesses alive | South China Morning Post – continued unwinding of Hong Kong’s economy leaving more in the hands of the oligopolies attached to the ‘big four families’, yet no growth engine

    Ideas

    Why Americans fear the AI future – by Noah Smith 

    Innovation

    Levi’s to Use AI-Generated Models to ‘Increase Diversity’ | PetaPixel – Related to this story I saw the following post on LinkedIn by Jodi-Ann Burey.

    The lengths some companies will go… the amount of money, time and effort they will spend… just to avoid paying women of color.

    Jodi-Ann Burey

    The reality its that AI-generated models aren’t about systemic racism; but the creative class equivalent of John Henry vs. the steam drill, or the Luddites against textile manufacturing machinery. At a systemic view: when capital and labour come into conflict, capital wins.

    The only stakeholder group actually being considered is the company’s shareholders. They are usually put in place for efficiency gains that are traded off against ‘just good enough effectiveness’. The need has probably been accelerated by the inflation in influencers prices and the need for a faster turnaround time.

    Finally you don’t have to worry about breach of good behaviour clauses which might occur with working models or photographers. It started with virtual influencers pioneered in Japan notably Imma who first appeared in 2018.

    China’s fake science industry: how ‘paper mills’ threaten progress | Financial Times 

    Korea

    Japan’s Uniqlo, Asahi and Lexus brands profit from warmer ties with South Korea | South China Morning Post – all of which shows the complex relationship between Japan and Korean consumers 

    South Korea to Surpass China in Chip Machine Spending Next Year – Bloomberg 

    State of Grocery Retail 2023 South Korea | Retail | McKinsey & Company 

    Marketing

    Russians reluctantly embrace Chinese cars after Western brands depart | Reuters – I wonder how Geely and Great Wall etc are getting around sanctions given their exposure to western markets?

    Media

    Disney’s first round of layoffs knocked the metaverse off its priority list 

    Retailing

    Pinduoduo App Malware Detailed by Cybersecurity Researchers at Kaspersky – Bloomberg 

    Security

    European ammunition maker says plant expansion hit by energy-guzzling TikTok site | Financial Times 

    Putin is a rest stop on the road of post-Soviet collapse | Noahopinion 

    How the security strategy of European countries has changed in recent years. TL;DR – the peace dividend is over.

    Software

    How to Save Android | Digits to DollarsAndroid is not in good shape. After 16 years on the market, Android remains heavily fragmented. This requires developers to build hundreds (thousands?) of versions of their app, and consumers face a bewildering array of user interfaces. Developers are deeply frustrated by this. We know many software developers who insist on using an Android phone out of principal, but their green message bubbles stand out as exceptions. Consumers, especially young consumers (aka customers of the future) prefer iOS by wide margins – the problem is testing rather than developing lots of versions

    Baidu cancels launch event for cloud services integrated with Ernie Bot | South China Morning Post 

    Style

    Beyoncé and Adidas mutually agree to call it quitsA Wall Street Journal report states that this development comes a couple of months after Ivy Park witnessed a 50 per cent decline in sales. The label pooled USD 40 million in 2022, however, the news outlet showed a projection of USD 250 million. This is a massive shrink from USD 93 million in sales in 2021. – the latest collection looked more like high vis workwear than stylish activewear.

    Taiwan

    ‘The Plan to Destroy Taiwan’ – The Wire China – Want Want Media is owned by a fifth columnist

    Inside North Korea’s oil smuggling: triads, ghost ships and underground banks – I was a little bit surprised by the Taiwanese leg of this enterprise

    Technology

    We are all secretaries now | Financial Times 

  • Under Armour + more news

    Under Armour

    I love sleep so Under Armour’s new performance pyjamas are ideal for me. Under Armour has managed to position itself as an innovator in a similar way to Nike. Under Armour was also smart to tap into sleep which is a consumer anxiety in our always on world. Under Armour is doing to clothing what Nike did to shoes. More related content here.

    Consumer behaviour

    Edelman Trust Barometer 2017 – UK Findings – trust in business, politicians and media all dropped precipitously

    Culture

    A Beginner’s Guide To Iconic House Vocalist Colonel Abrams – Electronic Beats – amazing tracks, even a couple I hadn’t heard of previously. As a 14 year old Trapped alongside The Conway Brothers Turn It Up and Paul Hardcastle’s 19 blew my mind

    Design

    Ventusky global wind, rain and temperature map – this is mesmerising to look at

    NEOMECHANICA – the best Tumblr account ever

    Economics

    Why Trump Doesn’t Tweet About Automation – will the Luddite fallacy be proved right again? Don’t count on it

    Ideas

    Science AMA Series: I’m Joanna Bryson, a Professor in Artificial (and Natural) Intelligence | Reddit – great AMA on AI

    Luxury

    Usually the luxury industry uses Instagram as a marketing channel. Omega have used it to inspire product development and tap into a ready made market. More on the Omega Speedster Speedy Tuesday

    Security

    Stealing passwords from McDonald’s users – Tijme Gommers – weakness in angular.js

    Software

    China Orders Registration of App Stores | NYTimes.com – Also partly down to the proliferation of Android app stores in China

    Wireless

    Xiaomi stops disclosing annual sales figures as CEO admits the company grew too fast | TechCrunch – a couple of things. Smartphone manufacturers need to move as a metric from market share to share of market profits. Secondly Xiaomi makes many more products than smartphones now. Finally they seem to recognise that they need to dial down the hype engine

  • Media diary of a gen X man

    Stephen Waddington’s daughter Ellie posted a media diary with a guest post on his blog, go and have a read of it. This snowballed into what is likely to be a series of media diary posts by different people. My contribution was published on his blog this morning. I penned the original version of my media diary as a stream of consciousness whilst laid up. I’ve tried to clear up any typing and comment on the reactions to date here which I have bundled together as the directors cut.

    The directors cut

    So why the media diary directors cut? I have cleaned up a few typos and expanded on a few bits for clarity, hence the directors cut comment.

    I wouldn’t say my media diary is that of a typical consumer, I have lived inside the technology-media industrial complex since the late 1990s and worked in the scientific side of the UK’s now largely defunct industry prior to that. I am steeped in counter-culture since the mid-1980s and spent a fair bit of time in Hong Kong – which changed my outlook somewhat. I am also unencumbered by family life at the moment.

    Reactions

    The reaction so far to the posting has been interesting:

    • Stephen described me in his intro to my post as having ‘iconoclastic tendencies’. I guess so, though this is coming less from wanting to tear systems down, than finding tools that work for me. This is done in the ethos behind Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools and the earlier Whole Earth Catalog. Despite being a long time Apple user, I don’t have all my data in the Apple ecosystem and I felt a similar way about the likes of Google and Facebook. I also like the idea of services that do one thing well. And like to support services like Newsblur or Pinboard that are made by one person or a small team. I guess this explanation of my framework allows the directors cut view to provide a little more context. And I guess iconoclastic works as shorthand in the meantime, Stephen has known me on and off for over 20 years.
    • I was amused at being called a mature hipster, although in this day and age it might be a way of saying metropolitan elite. This I guess would be accurate. The sunny side of this viewpoint would be that it goes to prove that geeks are the new cool. I always thought of myself closer to the comic store owner in The Simpsons. I have never considered myself an elite; which I hope comes across in the directors cut.
    • The last part of the article was called out by a few people who got in touch, my comments on privacy seemed to touch a nerve in a way that my concerns about innovation didn’t. The UK economy is not going to get saved from going into decline like Greece during the last financial crisis with just a few blockchain start-ups

    Messenger for keeping in touch and on track

    Over a decade ago I used to use Adium X, a multi-service instant messaging client for the Mac to keep in touch with a wide range of friends, colleagues, suppliers and clients. Each client was like hitting a different layer of clay in an archeological dig, indicating when I knew them.

    People on ICQ where the longest held contacts, then Yahoo! Messenger (I even ended up working at Yahoo!), Windows Live messenger was purely about my time at Waggener Edstrom and GoogleTalk became de-rigeur when the bots on Yahoo! Messenger came too much.

    Now I use WeChat, LINE, Signal, Skype and Telegram. Like IM platforms before it each messenger platform fits a segment of friends, colleagues and clients.

    Flickr is an archive

    I have friends that are talented photographers and you can’t convince me that some nice filters and a square picture adds up to the pretentions of photographic art that many people seem to feel it has. I have been on Flickr for 11 years and 18,345 photographs later, it would have to be a really compelling service that would get me to move. Flickr is my stock image library,it is my visual diary, image hosting for my blog and my mood board for when I am looking for inspiration at work.

    I think it has a better community than Instagram because it isn’t ubiquitous, it still has that early web 2.0 smell to it, though my heart is in my mouth every time Yahoo!’s finances take a wobble.

    Facebook is utilitarian

    I use Facebook in a similar way to developer friends using Stack Overflow or other forums for professional social discourse on a couple of private groups. I don’t even bother with cognitive dissonance type of posts of it always being sunny on Facebook. I know it’s crap; in your heart-of-hearts you probably know it too. Facebook events are often used, alongside meetup.com and Eventbrite. For loose network contacts, Facebook acts like a poorly designed phone book.

    Twitter: I have a bot for that

    Twitter is used as a messaging service for some of my friends, but mostly I use it to passively consume content like breaking news in lists and syndicate content that I find interesting. I do this syndication through various ‘recipes’ set up in IFTTT.

    Media content

    Steve Jobs talked about the only way to fight music piracy was to have a better idea. So for a number of years I have bought my music on iTunes, Bleep and Beatport alongside my love of vinyl records. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the record labels as they have consistently focused on short term blockbuster hits at the expense of slow and steady selling artists – which is especially retarded when you think about the long tail model of media consumption. They need to evolve their business model to become cheaper and more efficient in their A&R processes in order to do this. I have recently started ripping CDs into my music library again as an arbitrage play (these are often cheaper than digital downloads) or offer back catalogue content that digital services don’t.

    I use a late model iPod Classic because of its 160GB storage. For streaming music I listen to mixes, mash ups, edits and remixes on Soundcloud and deephousepage.com. My current favourite remixer is Luxxury. I use the online radio channels (not Beats 1) in iTunes to have as relaxing background music prior to turning in at home.

    I watch live news on television as the broadcast network is better for supporting big audience numbers in comparison to the infrastructure of the internet. We have more bandwidth at the edges, but still the same bottlenecks I experienced some ten years previously during the July 7 bombings in London.

    I have an Apple TV box that I use for Netflix, internet radio and iTunes store content. Out of the terrestrial channels I tend to only use iPlayer as it is so much better designed than 4oD, ITV Player or Channel 5’s offering. I stream RTE News, Bloomberg TV and the BBC World Service. My favourite news content comes from Vice – it feels like the channel that CNN should have been and is less shaped to meet the norms of the establishment, though this will undoubtedly change in the near future.

    News is apps and RSS.

    My RSS reader of choice is Newsblur.com. I was a minority amongst my peers in that I never trusted my bookmarks and OPML data to Google’s Reader, instead using Bloglines and then Fastladder.com. Both of which where driven out of business by Google prior to them closing Reader.

    Instead bookmarking is done with pinboard.in. I also get news from the RTE News app, a breaking news list I built in Twitter, stratfor.com, vice.com and the South China Morning Post mobile app. If you’d asked me this ten years ago then The Economist would have been on here, but its been replaced by vice.com and Monocle magazine.

    When I get to read a newspaper; it is the FT and the Wall Street Journal on the way home from work as a way to decompress, or the weekend FT for a mellow Saturday morning. I still read the US edition of Wired magazine in a print copy as the accompanying digital subscription has somehow become borked on my iPad. My media indulgence would be occasionally rifling through the pages of Japanese style magazine Free & Easy.

    I subscribe to a number of email newsletters for specialist analysis.

    Brands that cut through

    The brands that cut through for me are ones that cut their own path. I don’t wake up in the morning and think:

    hell yeah I want to engage with a brand on a social channel

    With people like Carhartt, Gregory Mountain Products, Canon, Nikon, Mystery Ranch, Barebones Software, Apple, S-Double Studios, Porter Tokyo and IWC Schaffhausen the product is the marketing – the online marketing efforts of these brands are coincidental. I do know that many of these brands do spend a good deal of effort to influence the kind of publications that I read. Monocle magazine does a really good job of integrating marketing and content.

    I buy much more online now, the high street has become quite bland, especially after having lived in Asia. I use trans shipment company buyee.jp to buy items in Japan and lightinthebox.com has replaced many of the none-impulse purchases that I would have made at Argos.

    Challenge for brands, media and life itself

    The internet has come to mirror the wonders, banalities and horror of everyday life. As I write this Ellen Pao had resigned as CEO at Reddit. Reddit is a poster child for all of these categories from organising gifts for the poor to water cooler chatter, racism and death threats against Ms Pao.

    Culture has now been made massively parallel by the internet. As an 18 year old, I remember having to get a train down to London to go trawling through specialist shops from Camden to Soho  looking for Stussy clothing and records on the Japanese Major Force label. Now everything is up on YouTube or Soundcloud for you to enjoy.

    Making a difference is a work in progress

    Like Ellie, I am not that optimistic about aspects of the world. In many respects the concerns of gen-y&z mirrored concerns of a young gen-x. I held McJobs and had a constant fear of unemployment over my head, was concerned about nuclear holocaust, economic meltdown and an environmental dystopian future – concerns that I still have today. There is an anti-science bias and a lack of hard innovation coming through that will fuel the next forty years of innovation. The current outlook reminds me a bit of the film Interstellar where the lack of willingness to focus on anything but on our own small plot was killing humans as a species. The current political climate with regards to privacy and digital services indicates a luddite and megalomaniac political tinge, where freedom is being sacrificed for the illusion of safety from extremism. The only thing that actually offers that freedom is a better idea, not an Orwellesque vision of privacy.

    About Ged Carroll

    Ged currently works heading up digital services at Racepoint Global in London. He lives in the East End and spends a lot of time in Hong Kong. You’ll find him online at renaissance chambara.

    So that’s the directors cut of this not so secret internet diary.

    More information

    WeChat
    LINE
    Signal
    Telegram
    Flickr
    Pinboard
    Newsblur
    Bleep
    Beatport
    Luxxury on Soundcloud
    deephousepage
    RTE News Now
    South China Morning Post
    Monocle
    Buyee
    lightinthebox

  • OLED + more news

    OLED

    Samsung Display to invest $3.6 billion in new OLED production line | Reuters – interesting that they are doing this after Sony abandoned OLED technology.

    Sony had an early lead in OLED display technology. Like many inventions OLED technology has a long history. The first practical OLED was created in the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington in the UK. Eastman Kodak built practical OLED devices in 1987. A team at Yamagata University in Japan achieved the commercialisation of OLED backlit displays and lighting with white OLED technology.

    Samsung’s display business came out of a partnership with NEC for mobile phone displays. Kodak had partnered with Sanyo. Pioneer, TDK and Sony got involved in production as well. The Sony XEL-1 in 2007 herald a range of future TVs that could be hung like a picture frame it was that thin. But Sony struggled with production and withdrew from OLED manufacturing. Meanwhile Samsung took over their joint venture with NEC.

    Business

    There is no internet bubble, and never was, according to this tech visionary | Quartz – semantics

    China’s Xiaomi to open shop in the US this year, but not for phones | The Verge – no phones due to likely intellectual property related issues for Xiaomi. However even with accessories there will probably patent disputes involving these as well

    Accel and DJI Will Introduce a Fund to Invest in the Drone Ecosystem | Re/code – interesting move positioning DJI at the head of a drone movement and at the centre of an ecosystem a la Android or GoPro. I met them a couple of years ago and they felt marginally more squared away than your typical Chinese start-up

    The Short Life and Speedy Death of Russia’s Silicon Valley | Foreign Policy – (paywall)

    Grindr Said to Explore Sale of Gay Men’s Dating App | Bloomberg Business – this could be an interesting social barometer if they manage to go public or what value they sell for, in comparison to the challenges AdultFriendFinder faced a number of years ago due to its niche product offerings

    Banjo Announces $100 Million in Additional Funding | Banjo – not too sure about the valuation, but it seems to think that social media war rooms and real time marketing will continue to be a thing

    Consumer behaviour

    Luke Johnson – Animal Spirits: Silicon Valley robber barons tuck into Mad Men’s lunch – on an emotional level it struck a chord, but then I am sure the luddites would have said similar things if they were part of the Islington chattering set

    Computers aren’t making us better workers like they used to | Quartz – I wonder if this is similar to effectiveness of online marketing, some of Nigel’s Scott’s analysis would tend to suggest yes

    Gadgets

    LG launches a ‘try before you buy’ program for the G4 | BGR – reflects confidence in the product

    US phablet market soars – Kantar Worldpanel – driven by iPhone 6 Plus

    Media

    Shazam’s struggle to become a profitable verb (Wired UK) – classic web-of-no-web model, it’s time maybe now as native apps struggle for attention, but I could see this tech eventually being in LINE or WeChat

    Apple pushing music labels to kill free Spotify streaming ahead of Beats relaunch | The Verge – do record labels really need to be pushed on this, when one thinks about how they have moved away from licensing content for magazine cover mount CDs, which seemed to peak in the late 1990s

    Online

    Twitter Confirms Google Firehose Deal To Target Logged Out Users | TechCrunch – also benefits Google in terms of search quality

    Google Shuts Down PageSpeed Service For Accelerating Websites | TechCrunch – interesting piece on PageSpeed, it is part of Google’s retreat including getting rid of 20% projects and making Adplanner less useful

    Retailing

    Amazon doubles free delivery minimum spend in UK – BBC News – you can see the strain delivery costs take on Amazon’s finances

    Competition becomes tougher in the Chinese slowdown economy – Kantar Worldpanel – international retailers taking a kicking from local retailers

    Security

    AP Exclusive: Chinese banks a haven for web counterfeits – not terribly surprising given that these are also China’s most widespread banks

    The World’s Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who is Going Broke – ProPublica – indicates the precarious nature or some of the most critical open source projects

    Russia and China Pledge Not to Hack Each Other – WSJ – the technology exchange is much more concerning given that the U.S. considers Russia the more dangerous cyber threat

    Keeping Your Car Safe From Electronic Thieves – NYTimes.com – fridge as a Faraday Cage

    Software

    Android Switchers Drive iOS Growth in Europe’s Big Five – Kantar Worldpanel – some interesting stats

    Deep Learning Machine Solves the Cocktail Party Problem | MIT Technology Review – does that mean in five years from now we won’t need stems for remixes?

    Technology

    Robot makers from China look to expand into global market|WantChinaTimes.com – interesting clean room focus – semiconductors?

    A Chinese company is replacing 90 percent of its workers with robots | Fusion – robotic factory a la Fiat, for product assembly they aren’t likely to have fine enough movement, at the moment

    Why Eurogamer dropped review scores for games | SiliconAngle – implications for gaming PRs

    Telecoms

    Utility: Verizon To Exit Wireline Business Within 10 Years | DSLReports – which has to make one ask what is the long term value of wired/wireless or triple play models in Europe and APAC?

    Web of no web

    How A Computer Can Anticipate Users’ Needs (Without Driving Them Crazy) | Fast Company – interesting essay on the web-of-no-web and user intent

    Why Google Glass Broke – NYTimes.com – product not ready for prime time and team ripped apart by personal relationships. Ego drove out quality management. More on web-of-no-web related technologies here.