Ged Carroll

Search results for: “semiconductors”

  • August 2026 – the more than eleven edition

    August 2026 introduction – (37) 

    Welcome to the 37th edition of my newsletter or as a bingo caller would say ‘more than eleven’.

    37

    37 in Chinese is largely considered positive as a number, based on its component numbers of 3 and 7. On the Chinese internet 37 is used to say thank you because of its similarity in sound to the English phrase.

    37 seemed appropriate given the searing heat we’ve experienced across Europe during July and August.

    It was roughly this time three years ago when I started writing Strategic Outcomes. I was burnt out working far too many hours at an ad agency due to being massively oversold (150 – 200% utilisation rate during a typical week with new business pitches on top) to clients.

    So took myself to Paris for a short break to recharge, truth be told it took until the end of the year for me to recharge fully.

    I watched programmes, finally finished a great book I had been trudging through for months, while enjoying coffee and cake in the lobby of the George V Hotel.

    The first issue was written in 20 minutes and I didn’t think I would still be writing some three years later. Since then over 600 people have subscribed, I had no expectations – so it was definitely more than I had expected and I am deeply appreciative that it gets a glance, let alone a read; from so many people in such attention-poor times 🙏.

    Over time Strategic Outcomes has developed a format and a voice, but now takes longer to write despite me being more practiced in writing each episode. Secondly, the length of the episode doesn’t equate to the amount of time that it takes to write.

    Onwards.

    The soundtrack this month isn’t the usual track selection or mix, but a podcast from the European Space Agency highlighting sounds that are literally out of this world. If that isn’t your cup of tea then I also offer this live concert recorded in the US by Cabaret Voltaire for radio station KEXP. Think of it as a modern-day version of the BBC’s Peel Sessions.

    New reader?

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

    SO

    Things that I’ve written

    Back in 2015, Stephen Waddington invited people to submit a media diary based on a common set of questions. I revisited during the middle of the CoVID lockdown when we were in peak-Zoom usages. And I decided to revisit again this month to compare and contrast with my past installments.

    Apple is launching a TV adaptation of Neuromancer, William Gibson’s seminal novel and you can see the trailers online. I had been been thinking a lot about Gibson recently from the saturation of the Neo Tokyo aesthetic in mainstream culture to the surreal nature of Silicon Valley which sounds more like Wintermute at every turn. So I curated some video interviews that Gibson had done down through the years; as well as miscellaneous things from around the web.

    ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn

    1. I wrote about Aston Martin putting up for sale the majority of its non-automotive naming rights. It’s an important issue for marketers, but the attraction of the Aston Martin brand for people interested in cars had my post seen much more widely than I expected.
    2. I posted a video where Les Binet discussed brand loyalty from a marketing science perspective and the trap marketers face by focusing on the loyalty of generation-Z customers.
    3. A breakdown of the BBC Research & Development’s research report on the state of the social Internet.
    4. Michael Farmer triangulated advertising agency problems: big workloads, plummeting fees, clients trapped in low growth or de-growth.
    5. Temporal mismatches can affect corporate innovation as much as it can affect hedge fund strategies like Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness LP.

    Books that I have read

    Like many people I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby at school. At the time I was uneasy at the class interpretation of the book as a portrait of a tragedy set in 1920s excess. Re-reading it years later, I thought of it more as a clash of antiheroes dripping of prejudice and latent racism. The book is full of grifters and cads. What makes the narrator a more likeable at a surface level is that he’s a more inexperienced grifter who hasn’t managed to exorcise his own conscience at the time of the incident. Now, more than ever, it feels very of our times.

    It was unintentional that I read Regime Change: Inside The Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump in tandem with The Great Gatsby. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan craft a book that is a blow-by-blow account of the second Trump administration over its first 18 months in office. It’s gossipy without the analysis one got from Bob Woodward’s books on previous administrations. What struck me was the illusion of coherence.

    A lot was made in the media about the publication of Mandate for Leadership The Conservative Promise Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project published by The Heritage Foundation as a plan for government. But Haberman and Swan’s book paint a picture of a government improvising it up as they went along with appointees who were often drowning in their roles. One thing stuck with me more than anything else was how partners like GCC nations and Jeff Bezos who courted the administration were bilked. This didn’t seem to be out of malice but incompetence and ineptitude.

    Finally in a time of a thin skinned administration taking action against its critics, it’s a wonder Haberman and Swan haven’t been embroiled in legal disputes.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    I was thinking a lot about the rise of betting culture, from the rise of Robinhood and crypto wallets or prediction markets to ‘trading courses’ promoted extensively across social media. IPSOS encapsulates the why elegantly with its trend of Nouveau Nihilism. It becomes a rational response to constrained circumstances.

    Luxury brand CHANEL has been doing some interesting fireside chats in their CHANEL Connects project. I was particularly interested in their interview with Thomas Bangalter. He framed Daft Punk in terms of an experiment in anonymity. They were initially inspired by Detroit’s Underground Resistance but that evolved into cinematic science fiction.

    Bangalter’s critiqued streaming media as eroding the ritualistic and symbolic power of listening space. Bangalter avoided generative AI because it reduces art to verbal prompting and pre-calculated outputs. He considered creation as an intuitive, non-verbal journey; bypassing the process misses the entire point of art. More from Bangalter here.  

    Chart of the month. 

    Growing up we were a family who read. My Mum was the first person to sit the Irish leaving certificate and civil service examinations in her family. My Dad, left school at 13 to serve an apprenticeship, but had a love of books. One of the books we had was an account of The Kennedy Family by Joseph Dinneen.

    In the book there is one section where Joseph Kennedy Sr talks about the inciting incident that encouraged him to sell all his shares. Kennedy goes to get his shoes shined near his office. The boy shining his shoes immediately took him for an investor and began offering specific stock picks and market tips.

    Kennedy then realised if a shoeshine boy knows as much about the market as he did, then it was time for him to sell up. Kennedy goes back to his office, closes out his portfolio and starts to short the market in advance of Black Thursday. How true the story was is a whole other story, but the ‘late’ buyer market theory underpinning it is sound enough. When those with the least disposable income are highly leveraged in the market, it means that the pool of ‘new buyers’ no longer exists to push prices higher.

    late buyer market

    Thinking about Joseph Kennedy’s story I dived into how Americans hold wealth. On the face of it Kennedy’s rule doesn’t seem to be coming through at the moment. However there might be several other factors:

    Things I have watched. 

    Many people of heard of Akira, which was originally a manga and then an anime film written and directed by Katsushiro Otomo. Later on Otomo wrote and designed Roujin Z that was directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo. Roujin Z on the surface of it is social satire that addresses concerns about caring for the elderly population in the early 21st century, there are concerns about technology and the possibility of a resurgent military being authoritarianism.

    The film taps into the phenomenon of social hospitalisation for the elderly where their families would sign them away to hospitals once they were admitted and refused to take them back. This happened because care homes carried a stigma that hospitals didn’t. This stigma came from the post-war collapse of the le system, where the eldest son and his wife lived with his elderly parents taking care of them to the end.

    Stylistically, Roujin Z is interesting for its use of mixed media techniques including live film and photo-reference photogrammetry layout. This was part of a stylistic movement in anime called 90s realism. It includes Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Patlabor 2: The Movie and Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade.

    Watching it 35 years after the film was produced was interesting in terms of the foreshadowing within the film.

    • At the time Sony was secretly designing the Apple PowerBook 100 for Apple. Its design appears in the film with a Sony logo. The film launched in cinemas at least a month before Apple launched the laptop.
    • Sony appears all over the film and throughout the hospital equipment. It foreshadows Sony’s pivot into elderly care and its abandonment of its iconic consumer electronics business.
    • The film shows a ubiquitous, always-on network with messaging and what we’d now call artificial intelligence. This was way before the web was commonplace.

    The film matches all these heavy themes with great physical comedy.

    Useful tools.

    Copynpaste is a single purpose website that acts as an intermediary moving copy between applications. It’s more of a lifesaver than you realise and works just as well on mobile devices as it does on desktop.

    Googler is a cleaner way of experiencing search. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and people came into work hungover, Google was separated from search rivals like Infoseek, Excite and AltaVista by its clean interface. Now you have lots of things on a search engine results page fighting for your attention. If you install Homebrew on your computer, you can then install Googler which gives you the Google search experience without distractions in your terminal window.

    The sales pitch.

    I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”. The kind where complexity, business goals, and human culture collide, requiring synthesis into actionable insights.

    I have a decade-plus of expertise across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I have been embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots with the rapid rise of Gen AI. Following the completion of this engagement, I have continued to partner with agencies and founders on high-impact projects. My recent freelance work includes architecting the brand narrative for a fast-moving startup, driving strategic creative for new business pitches, and developing a dynamic sports partnership activation.

    I focus on what works: balancing long-term brand growth with short-term sales. I don’t just write presentation decks; I build campaigns that actually ship. I’m hired to develop, or strategy QA their ideas before they go live, helping leadership teams avoid expensive mistakes. I prioritise commercial reality, smart budgets, and measurable results over cosmetic solutions.

    How I help leadership teams:

    • Strategy QA: I put clarity into complex roadmaps before you commit capital.
    • Cultural Translation: I bridge the gap between technical infrastructure and human adoption, across EMEA/JAPAC.
    • Commercial Grounding: I build strategy for campaigns that ship, prioritising measurable ROI over “hype” metrics.

    The Strategic Toolkit:

    • Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
    • AI-Enhanced Planning: Literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
    • Modular Strategic Leadership: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).

    I am an operator who reads—using a deep archive of industry expertise to ensure your next pivot isn’t just “new,” but actually sustainable. If you have a challenge that requires an all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

    now taking bookings

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my August 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other, stay cool and enjoy the well deserved bank holiday.

    Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

    Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on my blog,  Substack as well as LinkedIn.

  • July 2026 – the three dozen edition

    July 2026 introduction – (36) 

    Welcome to the 36th edition of my newsletter or as a bingo caller would say ‘three dozen’. And yes that’s the most uninspired yet functional bingo lingo I’ve come across on this journey so far. 36 seemed strangely appropriate as that was the temperature inside my house on the celsius scale most days this month.

    AS11-36-5390

    There is no fancy symbolism of the homophones in the Chinese language for 36. But The 36 Stratagems are sayings and tactical manoeuvres used in areas of Chinese life from business to politics.

    My personal favourite is ‘borrow a corpse to resurrect the soul‘ – take something that has been forgotten or discarded and appropriate it for one’s own purposes.

    This month’s soundtrack is by Horalion who created a divine mashup of Daft Punk and Miki Matsubara. Matsubara is famous for work in city pop and anime soundtracks. Together Something About Us and 真夜中のドア〜Stay with Me sound sublime.

    New reader?

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

    SO

    Things that I’ve written

    I explored moral licensing from agency behaviour to a global health crisis.

    Consumer grievance is coming as a steady drumbeat from consumer and economic research and has an impact on marketing.

    I curated things of interest from around the web including an interview from Jensen Huang in advance of his publicly support for open models and open weight LLMs as cybersecurity tools.

    ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn

    1. Global brand strategy has got harder with tainted national brands. Europeans are now torn between the US and China.
    2. Rolex’s use of chōngchǎng (paid gig workers) as a rent a crowd in Shanghai caught the attention of watch collectors around the world
    3. Corporate earnings skewed agency growth targets due to the artificially high values of hyperscalers.
    4. Hard luxury outperforms soft luxury
    5. A video where Les Binet endorse Byron Sharp’s line on loyalty.

    Books that I have read

    Gnomon by Nick Harkaway. Gnomon is a speculative fiction book set in the near future. The UK is totally surveilled by an AI. The main character Mielikki Neith is an investigator and is looking to the death of a suspect who dies in state custody. Neith explores the neural recordings of the dissident to try and work out what happened.

    The recordings consist of four surreal impossible lives, but the lives are a form of hidden code designed to affect anyone exploring them. Questions then arise about the purpose of the surveillance system and whether it has undergone what could be called ‘model drift’.

    It’s not the easiest book to read, but his rewarding as Harkaway takes you through the different worlds that Neith explores and her own experience in the real world.

    This month I have been working my way through Dan Wang’s Breakneck. A book that looks at China’s development versus US development, written by a Chinese author who grew up in Canada. I am almost finished and it’s very readable.

    The key thrust of the book is that China is a society governed by engineers and scientists, whereas the US (and by extension much of the west for that matter) is run by lawyers. In the US and the west that breaks down slightly but the point Wang makes is China asks what’s possible, the West winds its way through restrictions. I think modernism vs. post-modernism would have been more accurate short hand descriptors; as difference goes beyond government to the ‘industrial party’ and even science fiction like Liu Cixin’s TheThree-Body Problem.

    Wang’s work has started to shape how I look about the ‘why’ behind the divergent approaches to LLMs and other products between the US and the west, but more on that another time.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    I am a long time fan of Kevin Kelly’s writing from his work with Wired magazine to the book What Technology Wants I have found his thinking right on the money. He reframes large language models as a latent space due to their massive compression of knowledge and information.

    For instance it knows all Shakespeare plays, and it could create a new play that sounded exactly like Shakespeare, and can even quote famous lines in his plays, but nowhere in the model are the actual texts of Shakespeare. Instead there is simply the abstract information about all the plays, the plots, the characters, the words, the style, the references.

    Until recently we might have thought that all the information about a thing would take up more storage space than the thing itself. That may be true for a single thing, but not for the aggregate of all things. That is because most things share a lot of common attributes with other things. The neural nets of an LLM do a magic trick by abstracting the information of everything at once, so that it uses the myriad common relationships between things and ideas to compress and abstract them into this virtual “latent” or hidden space.

    Kelly reflects on this latent space as a new form of medium, implying more potential than a productivity hack. Kelly describes this latent space as a map built in millions of dimensions making it sound like science fiction or theoretical physics.

    Gig Economy in China

    Inspired is the wrong word, but I was surprised and shocked to find out by a piece from Think China that 44% of the country’s workforce now work in the gig economy.

    Chart of the month. 

    McKinsey have published a paper on Agents, robots, and us: How AI reshapes work and skills in Europe. In it, they have estimated what tasks LLMs will do well.

    “Most human skills will endure, even as they are applied differently. Three-quarters of the skills sought by European employers today, including problem solving, writing, and research, are used in both automatable and non-automatable work. This overlap means they are more likely to be applied in collaboration with AI than replaced by it, at least in the near term.”

    McKinsey on LLMs and skills

    Things I have watched. 

    German TV series Where’s Wanda made some light watching as a Germany family manages to stay together while searching for their missing daughter. It’s got humour, creative problem solving and a giant Sasquatch-type creature. I will leave it there so I don’t give away any spoilers.

    I rewatched To Live and Die in LA for the first time in years. The film was written and directed by William Friedkin, and second only to The French Connection in his filmography of outstanding films. William Friedkin was part of the New Hollywood movement, alongside figures like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Peter Bogdanovich.

    The screenplay was based on a book by a former Secret Service agent and documents an investigation into a talented counterfeiter. Like Michael Mann’s Thief which demonstrated how to crack a safe vault with a thermic lance, Friedkin went into detail abut the photolithographic process that counterfeiters used prior to desktop publishing. You get fantastic performances from an edgy young William Defoe and William Petersen.

    I found it as enjoyable to watch as I remember but I picked up on different things, particularly the detail in Friedkin’s introduction that showed the art and grim edginess of 1980s Los Angeles with retina-burning typography, with an interesting use of fonts to give ‘place’ and the cinematography which made the city a key character.

    Useful tools.

    Ever done research, or tried to pull in data from a website or table and had the format go funny. You then spend an inordinate amount of time fixing it? That’s where TextSoap comes in. Its a Mac app that cleans the data that you are bringing across, It has a number of built-in cleaners or you to choice from and also allows you to create your own one using its cleaner editor.

    Hookmark cleans up weblinks, this helps with bit rot since a lot of links add additional privacy related information that stops working over time.

    The sales pitch.

    I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”. The kind where complexity, business goals, and human culture collide, requiring synthesis into actionable insights.

    I have a decade-plus of expertise across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I have been embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots with the rapid rise of Gen AI. Following the completion of this engagement, I have continued to partner with agencies and founders on high-impact projects. My recent freelance work includes architecting the brand narrative for a fast-moving startup, driving strategic creative for new business pitches, and developing a dynamic sports partnership activation.

    I focus on what works: balancing long-term brand growth with short-term sales. I don’t just write presentation decks; I build campaigns that actually ship. I’m hired to pressure-test their ideas before they go live, helping leadership teams avoid expensive mistakes. I prioritise commercial reality, smart budgets, and measurable results over cosmetic solutions.

    How I help leadership teams:

    • Pressure-Testing: I put clarity into complex roadmaps before you commit capital.
    • Cultural Translation: I bridge the gap between technical infrastructure and human adoption, across EMEA/JAPAC.
    • Commercial Grounding: I build strategy for campaigns that ship, prioritising measurable ROI over “hype” metrics.

    The Strategic Toolkit:

    • Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
    • AI-Enhanced Planning: Literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
    • Multi-Sector Expertise: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).

    I am an operator who reads—using a deep archive of industry expertise to ensure your next pivot isn’t just “new,” but actually sustainable. If you have a challenge that requires an all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

    now taking bookings

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my July 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other, stay cool and enjoy the sun when you can. We have less than one month to wait until the next bank holiday. 

    Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

    Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on my blog,  Substack as well as LinkedIn.

    PS: Why Buzz Aldrin as this month’s picture? I try and have a photo that matches the theme, in this case 36. This photo taken during the Apollo 11 mission was from the film magazine 36/N – Trans-Lunar. A tenuous but cool link.

  • AI reckoning & more stuff

    AI reckoning

    AI reckoning as a term is a rather stark warning. Even more so when it comes from Aswath Damodaran who is a professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at NYU (New York University).

    The reckoning that Damodaran is concerned about is a ‘Minsky moment‘ and represents a stark contrast to the boundless techno-optimism of Marc Andreessen.

    The AI reckoning wasn’t on the mind of investors who bought into Cerebras Systems.

    Cerebras Systems makes wafer sized chips with memory and processing on the same die. This reduces latency and increases speed. As cool as Cerebras Systems technology is, the company currently has sales of $510 million and was valued on its opening day of trading at $71 billion.

    Business

    Long Lake agrees to acquire American Express Global Business Travel, the world’s largest corporate travel platform, for $6.3 billion, with support from General Catalyst and Alpha Wave | Amex GBT

    China

    Trump’s China Trap | Foreign Affairs

    Consumer behaviour

    When the Internet Was a Place – Front Porch Republic

    Design

    Great documentary on the history of Braun and its relationship with the Ulm School of Design.

    Economics

    Is AI the New China Shock? | The Daily Spark

    AI Job Loss Tracker — The Alliance for Secure AI

    The Shanghai Cabaret Theory of Globalization | Patrick Kho

    FT Alphaville (@ftav): “Remember when tech was a cap-lite industry? lol, lmao even.”

    Amazon Employees Say Layoffs, AI, and RTO Are Reshaping Jobs – Business Insider

    Energy

    Peter Thiel backs $1bn ocean data centre start-up powered by waves | FT

    EV ownership at ‘tipping point’ in many parts of the world, experts say | FT

    FMCG

    Chinese bubble tea chain with more stores than McDonald’s wants to conquer the world | FT

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong banks dependent on SWIFT are warned of new US sanctions – Asia Times

    Innovation

    Microsoft 2026 Work Trend Index Annual Report

    Philippa Sigl-Glöckner, economist: ‘Germany lacks breakthrough innovation’ | Le Monde

    China unveils driverless mining truck that can ‘crab-walk’ across rough terrain | South China Morning Post

    Korea

    In Korea AI is merging with folk religion.

    Marketing

    adidas has made World Cup shirts for dogs | Famous Campaigns – its a pity that they didn’t roll this out in the UK as well

    Lululemon Just Committed Brand Harakiri. – by Camille Moore

    Media

    The Devil Wears Prada 2: a comms strategy masterclass | Will Poskett

    Paid media budget planner – Empower Agency

    UK adspend increased 6.4% in 2025 as AA/Warc updates data presentation – The Media Leader

    Online

    Reggie Fils-Aimé Says Amazon Asked Nintendo To Break The Law | Kotaku

    A.I. Helps Online Ad Businesses Boom – The New York Times

    Security

    AI-Powered Cyberattacks | Robert Scoble and A glimpse into cyber-security’s AI-driven future | The Economist – A few years ago a participant used the conference network to hack a water-treatment facility in America (Messrs Wyler and Stump are cagey about the details). Another hid behind the din of legitimate hacker traffic to attack government websites and payment systems. The noc team traced him, sent him a message reminding him that doing illegal things from Black Hat was still illegal, then watched him close his laptop and walk away. Hackers on the other side of the world try their luck too. When the registration server was switched on, attacks began at once, including traffic that appeared to originate in Romania….Mr Stump says the noc has seen a pattern across multiple Black Hat conferences in which Taiwanese participants show up with hacked devices. “Most of [the traffic] goes back to China,” he says. ai-powered attacks by nation-states or cybercriminals are likely to intensify..
    The team thinks the ai race is only beginning. For Mr Wyler, the vulnerabilities discovered by Mythos, including some that have gone undetected for decades, are to be welcomed rather than feared. “We now know they’re there.”
    All the same, cautions Mr Stump, the next two years will be turbulent, as more flaws will be uncovered; more breaches will occur as firms feed sensitive data into ai systems; and more insecure code will be written.

    “No Man Left Behind”: American Technology Ships with Our Values | A16z

    Tank maker KNDS pushes Berlin to decide on taking stake before IPO | FT

    AeroVironment Switchblade 400 drone joins US Army LASSO program to replace traditional anti-tank missiles

    Green Berets Deploy Ship-Killing Drone in Luzon Strait Maritime Strike Exercise | USNI News

    Semiconductors

    AGI CPU: Arm’s $100B AI Silicon Tightrope Walk – EE Times

    Arm projects $2bn in sales of its new AI chip from next year | FT

    Arm CEO promoted to head Softbank’s international operations | Electronics Weekly

    TSMC sells its Arm shares | Electronics Weekly

    CASCI Composite Shows AI Chip Strength as Mid-Stream Output Slows | Tim Culpan

    Commentary: Intel names TSMC as key partner; insider drives its comeback | DigiTimes

    Huawei targets US$12 billion in AI chip sales as China firms seek Nvidia alternatives | DigiTimes

    Software

    Have LLMs improved patient outcomes? – by Gary Marcus

    The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness — Google DeepMind

    Technology

    Apple Doubles MacBook Neo Production, Orders Fresh Batch of Chips | Culpium

    China to Invest in DeepSeek at $50 Billion Valuation – WSJ and Three reasons why DeepSeek’s new model matters | MIT Technology Review

    Iran war disrupts the circuit board supply chain, raises costs for tech firms | Reuters

    Quantum’s Industrial Moment | CNAS

    Interesting even put together by Sequioa Capital – AI Ascent 2026 event.

    Web-of-no-web

    Huawei targets US$12 billion in AI chip sales as China firms seek Nvidia alternatives | DigiTimes

    Wireless

    Starlink vs OneWeb | Electronics Weekly

  • 2026 World Cup + more stuff

    I am not a football fan, but I recognise the power that the 2026 World Cup has to move hearts and minds. This year it’s being hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States. The 2026 World Cup fan experience is shrouded in uncertainty.

    https://flic.kr/p/2aqzM1j

    I found it interesting that both adidas with the launch of its match ball and Panini with the launch of its sticker book both marked the start of the countdown to the 2026 World Cup season.

    adidas has made World Cup shirts for dogs | Famous Campaigns – its a pity that they didn’t roll this out in the UK to celebrate the 2026 World Cup as well.

    Branding

    How many brands are there? | Europanel

    Business

    Publicis has built the best house on the street. Now it needs to move neighborhood | The Drum – undervalued due to poor performance by Omnicom and WPP

    China

    Chinese countryside’s quieter strains – by Yuxuan JIA – Decades of son preference have left villages full of unmarried men, driving bride prices higher and sustaining a shadow market for “Vietnamese brides” that can slide into fraud, coercion, and trafficking. Young people, especially young women, are drifting away from rural patriarchy and the obligation-heavy world of kinship and “face”, while the influencer economy and short-video apps offer fantasies of easy money to teenagers with weak school prospects.

    China reviews $2bn Manus sale to Meta as founders barred from leaving country | FT

    Consumer behaviour

    Argos sparks consumer outrage over toddler ‘influencer kit’ – Retail Gazette

    Half of Gen Z Uses AI, but Their Feelings Are Souring, Study Shows | New York Times – this reminds me of consumer sentiment around email and information overload during the late 1990s and early 2000s. We’re going through a period of norming now

    Why Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men | Washington Post – “I don’t want to be too disparaging about them because they’re our Christian brothers and sisters, but worshiping in a big former supermarket with dry ice machines and a pop band, it’s not really traditional Christianity,” Father Longenecker said. His new parishioners are attracted to “very traditional worship with lots of incense and altar boys and sacred music in the traditional style.”

    Design

    EAGA – East Asian Graphics Archive

    The interesting odd story behind the design behind house numbers.

    Economics

    Berkeley professor Robert Reich on the factors that he saw that brought President Donald Trump to the White House.

    This War Will Make You Poorer – by Ed Elson – Prof G Media

    FMCG

    Danone doubles down on its area of strength in functional foods: Danone to buy meal-in-bottle maker Huel in €1bn deal | FT

    Health

    Battle for weight-loss supremacy shifts from jabs to pills | FT

    How China is supplying America’s “biohacking” craze – GZERO Media

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong’s complex role in bypassing sanctions against Russia | Le Monde – this isn’t doing what little is left of Hong Kong’s reputation any good

    Hong Kong arrests hedge fund and brokerage staff in $300mn insider trading probe | FT

    More NatSec | Big Lychee, Various Sectors – From the government’s press release… Safeguarding national security is a continuous endeavour with no end point. At its core this sounds like the Stalin derived Maoist principle of struggle. National security ‘enemies’ like Jimmy Lai, Chow Hang-tung, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho serve the same purpose as George Orwell’s character Emmanuel Goldstein in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The ever-tightening system is allegedly concerned with leaderless lone wolves, small cells and external actors – but the reality is just control in Orwell’s novel.

    Revising Hong Kong’s Past – Lingua Sinica – Among the changes noted was a complete erasure of references to the Tiananmen Massacre, which was recast as “political turmoil in the late spring and early summer of 1989.” Gone from the exhibit entirely, the Ming Pao reported, is a previous image that showed one million Hong Kongers taking to the streets in 1989 in support of the demonstrators in China.

    Silence Follows Harassment – Lingua Sinica

    Hong Kong’s claw machine boom is mutating into a Pachinko-style trap | Dim Sum Daily

    Hong Kong’s dying news stands tell a story of change – BBC News – I loved Hong Kong newsstands and loved the magazine racks which were brilliant. I remember religiously buying Milk magazine

    Customs criticised for pursuit of outdated CD and VCD piracy | South China Morning Post

    How to

    I am skeptical about ‘gurus’. However, I found this Tony Robbins video good for getting out of a period of ‘stuckness’ in my thinking. Robbin’s ideas about priming, in particular they way he links physical activity to mental exercises works and has a good deal of neuroscience behind it.

    Access and repair a broken disk image – The Eclectic Light Company

    Ideas

    Hawk shape shifting in flight may guide future drone control | Spacewar

    How Wong Kar-Wai Created the Future – by Patrick Kho

    Why Swedish Schools Are Bringing Back Books | Undark & Opinion | Technology Weakens Our Minds. It’s Time to Resist. – The New York Times

    Innovation

    ‘A Cheaper Javelin’: New Anti-Tank Missile Advances Through Testing | Next Gen Defense – what’s interesting in this is the horizontal integration wth an Android application layer and the cost savings

    We Need a New Science of Progress – The Atlantic

    Japan

    Japan loses its thirst for vending machines | FT – Tens of thousands of vending machines are vanishing from Japan, as machines that once symbolised the nation’s love of innovation are shunned in a climate of rising inflation and deepening labour shortages.

    The nation’s stock of 2.2mn drinks vending machines is down 23 per cent from its bubble-era peak in 1985, according to the Japan Vending System Manufacturers Association.

    The faltering economics of running a national vending machine empire were exposed when DyDo, Japan’s third biggest operator, this month said it would scrap almost 7.5 per cent of its network of 270,000 units after posting its largest ever annual loss. – what surprised me was that the vending machines weren’t digitised.

    In the studio with Nigo – Japan’s premier polymath | Ft

    Korea

    The new food fad sweeping Korea | FT – dujjonku or Dubai cookie

    Luxury

    The Brand Age | Paul Graham

    Why do men love Stone Island | FT – “Football in the late 1980s and 1990s was a heavily policed environment under surveillance, where visibility carried risk,” says Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster. “On the terraces, clothing wasn’t decoration, it was risk management. Stone Island mattered because its garments were already structured around concealment, modulation and elective visibility. The detachable badge, reversible constructions, modular hoods and certain fabric treatments enabled wearers to calibrate how legible they were, depending on context. Football casuals were not simply performing taste; they were managing recognition.”

    Materials

    Chinese Titanium – by Irene Zhang – ChinaTalk

    The Seasoning Company Behind Your Food Flavors Controls The Future Of AI Chips, And Supply Is Running Dangerously Low | WCCF Tech

    Shipbuilding feels pinch from war-driven paint and lubricant shortage | FT

    Media

    Apple TV, Siri Targeted in EU Broadcaster Complaint Citing DMA Rules – MacRumors

    Meta stole Sarah Wynn-Williams’s voice. It couldn’t stop her exposé | The Times – her publisher on the author of Careless People

    A.I. Helps Online Ad Businesses Boom – The New York Times

    UK adspend increased 6.4% in 2025 as AA/Warc updates data presentation – The Media Leader

    Online

    Every influencer eventually becomes a merch store | The Verge

    Apple rolls out UK age checks for iPhone users | FT – interesting move, I did notice that it assumed my account was adult due to the length it had been held. It reminded me of friends who registered email addresses, domain names and even social media handles for their newly born children – and did just enough to keep the accounts alive.

    The 49MB Web Page | thatshubham – Beyond the sheer weight of the programmatic auction, the frequency of behavioral surveillance was surprising. There is user monitoring running in parallel with a relentless barrage of POST beacons firing to first-party tracking endpoints (a.et.nytimes.com/track). The background invisible pixel drops and redirects to doubleclick.net and casalemedia help stitch the user’s cross-site identity together across different ad networks.

    When you open a website on your phone, it’s like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.

    Ironically, this surveillance apparatus initializes alongside requests fetching purr.nytimes.com/tcf which I can only assume is Europe’s IAB transparency and consent framework. They named the consent framework endpoint purr. A cat purring while it rifles through your pockets.

    So therein lies the paradox of modern news UX. The mandatory cookie banners you are forced to click are merely legal shields deployed to protect the publisher while they happily mine your data in the background

    Security

    Interpol – Operation Synergia III leads to 45,000 malicious IPs dismantled and 94 arrests worldwide

    The AI-driven ‘kill chain’ transforming how the US wages war | FT

    Iran war lifts K-defence company offering cheap Patriot rival | FT

    Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages | FT – a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.

    The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterised by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.

    Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”.

    FBI is investigating breach that may have hit its wiretapping tools | The Register

    Andrew Cockburn · Beware the mattress: Mossad’s Kill List

    The Geopolitical Chokepoints of Artificial Intelligence | AI Supremacy

    France Introduces Telecom-Based Counter-Drone Network Using 19,700 Towers to Protect Critical Assets

    China Is Cracking Down on Scams. Just Not the Ones Hitting Americans | WIRED & Scam Inc has a new weapon | The Economist – Chinese organised crime run Cambodian ‘scam’ factories that use social engineering techniques are now using malware as well.

    Anthropic says Claude Mythos model is dangerous enough that the company isn’t selling it. | TechBrew

    Russia Hacked Routers to Steal Microsoft Office Tokens – Krebs on Security

    A glimpse into cyber-security’s AI-driven future | The Economist – A few years ago a participant used the conference network to hack a water-treatment facility in America (Messrs Wyler and Stump are cagey about the details). Another hid behind the din of legitimate hacker traffic to attack government websites and payment systems. The noc team traced him, sent him a message reminding him that doing illegal things from Black Hat was still illegal, then watched him close his laptop and walk away. Hackers on the other side of the world try their luck too. When the registration server was switched on, attacks began at once, including traffic that appeared to originate in Romania….

    Mr Stump says the noc has seen a pattern across multiple Black Hat conferences in which Taiwanese participants show up with hacked devices. “Most of [the traffic] goes back to China,” he says. ai-powered attacks by nation-states or cybercriminals are likely to intensify…
    The team thinks the ai race is only beginning. For Mr Wyler, the vulnerabilities discovered by Mythos, including some that have gone undetected for decades, are to be welcomed rather than feared. “We now know they’re there.”

    All the same, cautions Mr Stump, the next two years will be turbulent, as more flaws will be uncovered; more breaches will occur as firms feed sensitive data into ai systems; and more insecure code will be written.

    Semiconductors

    Arm launches own AI chip in high-stakes strategy shift | FT

    Google taps Intel for another round of custom network chips • The Register

    TSMC’s Kumamoto Fab Upgrade: A Security-Driven Reconfiguration of Indo-Pacific Chip Competition – The Diplomat

    Software

    China’s AI Companies Are Going Closed Source | ChinaTalk

    OpenAI acquires popular tech talk show for ‘low hundreds of millions’ | FT – ChatGPT-maker moves into broadcasting with deal for TBPN after it had pledged to abandon ‘side-quests’ – I think that this is trying to balance the narrative with Anthropic which is ripping ahead. In past decades you would have dumped a lot of money into a campaign run by a PR agency, but time moves on

    Axios AI+ | AI’s compute wars – pretty much what I have been talking about on the Dot LLM Era

    Taiwan

    There’s a Whole Lot of Taiwanese AI Winners Not Called TSMC

    The PLA has stopped flying aircraft close to Taiwan – I can’t figure out why and that worries me | Drew Thompson

    PC price hikes and a test for Taiwan | Ft

    Technology

    MacBook Neo Teardown Reveals It’s the Most Repairable Apple Laptop in Ages | Cnet

    Oracle prepares for lay-offs as it hails efficiencies from AI coding tools | FT

    The Debt Beneath the Dream – On my Om – Minsky moment in the offing?

    AppleUnsold – The Apple products they won’t sell you

    Google’s TurboQuant breakthrough is rattling memory chip stocks | Quartz

    Web of no web

    New Internet of Things Plan Targets Global Infrastructure – Jamestown – A new action plan for the Internet of Things (IoT) increases the possibility that Chinese-built connected infrastructure in the United States could become a platform for data access, cyber pre-positioning, and attacks on U.S. cyber-physical systems in a prolonged crisis or confrontation. The plan, launched jointly by nine ministries, defines IoT as a total cyber-physical environment that links “people, machines, and things” across sensing, networks, platforms, applications, and security, and sets targets for 10 billion terminal connections, more than 50 standards, and deployment across production, consumption, and governance. The plan indicates Beijing is moving from connected devices to connected backbone systems. It reinforces the new Five-Year Plan, suggesting that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to supply not only endpoints like sensors, appliances, and vehicles but also the next generation of AI, computing, and space-ground communications infrastructure that will underpin them.

    Wireless

    At MWC, Ericsson Details AI-Native 6G Timeline – EE Times

    The 6G clock ticking: Why silicon architecture for 2030 must start in 2026 – EDN

    Ireland’s first mobile video call via satellite is made | RTÉ

  • April 2026 newsletter – 33rd edition aka ‘dirty knee’

    April 2026 introduction – (33) dirty knee

    This is the 33rd edition of Strategic Outcomes, I had briefly toyed with calling it 33 1/3rd edition – but parked that foolishness as only Jed Hallam and Alec Samways would have half-heartedly smirked at a rather naff DJ dad joke.

    In bingo halls ’33’ was announced as dirty knee. For generations past, this would brought up memories of organised sports like winter football games ad the more real-life social activities of playing outside with friends. According to research conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Save the Children back in 2022, only 27% of UK children now play outside.

    https://flic.kr/p/392Xqw

    However, other data, like the UK government’s own The Children’s People and Nature Survey for England: 2025 update implies that number may be higher than the OnePoll research suggests. The University of Exeter published research which seems to be more in line with the UK government’s research. They found that 34 per cent of children don’t play outdoors on school days, while 20 per cent don’t play outdoors on weekends.

    In Chinese culture 33 is considered to be a good number. 3 sounds similar to birth or life. Two 3s is considered to intensify or double this idea. Which seems an appropriate sentiment for spring and the beginning of the financial year. Bring it on!

    This month’s soundtrack to the newsletter is a sublime 1980s disco mix by Toronto-based Japanese DJ Sakiko Nagai.

    New reader?

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

    SO

    Things I’ve written.

    A collection of inspiration from Malaysia Airlines mascot Pilot Parker to Sir Martin Sorrell.

    Some thoughts how WPP might deal with its Burson dilemma.

    ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn

    1. Aston Martin issued its third profit warning in a year and sold its Formula 1 naming rights for £50 million to raise cash thanks to internal delays and international tariffs.
    2. Meta is projected to pass Google in digital advertising spend thanks to Reels, Threads and WhatsApp.
    3. The implications of Tottenham Hotspur being relegated from the Premier League has implications beyond the pitch and into sponsor’s boardrooms.
    4. Nike made a bold leap for the UEFA Champions League match ball contract with a bid that doubled the value of the previous Adidas contract.
    5. Tom Roach outlined frameworks that help navigate the transition to more sustained growth once initial performance marketing channels hit saturation.

    Books that I have read.

    My friend Ian lent to me Ikenami Shōtarō‘s book The Killer on The Streets which is part of his Samurai Detectives series. The book follows the adventures of a 60-something retired swordsman and his son as they become embroiled in the hunt for what we’d now call a serial killer.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Supply chained

    Even before the current debacle in the Persian Gulf, globalisation brought logics and supply chains into high focus. Supply Chained is a new podcast with great presenters that provides top quality analysis on different aspects of global supply chains. The first episode looks at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

    Generative AI & cooking

    I first met Rowan Kisby a decade ago this year at 100 Victoria Embankment, back when I was contracting for Unilever on their Family Brands global range of margarines. Rowan worked for what was then MullenLowe Profero. Recently we reconnected on a shared Slack group. Rowan put together a report on the intersection of generative AI use and cooking.

    I found it unsurprising that one of the behaviours consumers are doing is telling the generative AI service what they have in their fridge and asking it for dish / recipe recommendations. Back when I worked for Yahoo! we saw similar behaviours in the search box, particularly amongst US users. Reddit now gave Rowan better qualitative insights on how these results play out.

    More interesting from the point of view of retailers was its ability to create and manage a shopping list for weekly groceries. The idea of a retailer or an FMCG building an AI skill (or Gem on Google Gemini) is just begging to be sold in by agencies to their clients.

    Praykinson

    I got to judge the amazing entries from around the world at Adforum’s PHNX awards. One campaign really stuck with me. A health campaign by Dentsu Creative Thailand and Vajira Hospital in Thailand to help people with Parkinson’s disease was smart, solution-based and had a great insight behind it. More on the project here.

    https://flic.kr/p/2s6adiF

    CHESS

    I was listening to the MM+M podcast interview with Chris Brandow, head of account management at VCCP Health US and came across the acronym / nemonic CHESS. It comes out of thought leadership research ‘Checking the Memory Code‘ that VCCP did in conjunction with Cowry Consulting.

    CHESS looks to encapsulate some of the key attributes that makes marketing creative effective. It codifies marketing science findings that you would be familiar with fromthe likes of, the IPA, System1 and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and provides it in a list that pharma clients and their agency partners can use as a RAG (red-amber-green) guide to evaluating everything from initial creative concepts through to output.

    • Character – what be called a fluent object elsewhere. It is a mascot or memorable element like Alexandr the meerkat from Compare The Market. It could also be a spokesperson like Tommy Lee Jones’ appearances in Boss Coffee adverts as ‘Alien Jones‘.
    • Humour – the power of humour used to be well known as an advertising device and in recent years has come back on trend at Cannes. It helps create talkability and memorability
    • Emotion – Binet and Fields established the power of emotion over rational advertising. Daniel Kahneman conveyed the power of emotional ‘system 1 thinking’ in Thinking Fast and Slow.
    • Surprise – the unexpected. Our enjoyment of storytelling is the process understanding which story archetype a tale belongs to. If we guess it easily it falls flat like a Dad joke, on the other hand a twist in the tale makes it memorable.
    • Sonic branding – jingles fell out of fashion, yet made ads memorable.

    Chart of the month. 

    Ofcom released their 2026 Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes  report, more here. I went back through past reports to look at smartphone only internet access, households with no access to internet and claimed usage of generative AI services.

    • Internet access is now at a point comparable to where broadcast television was previously.
    • The digital divide is now about the mode of access, with smartphones on mobile internet providing a poorer service.
    https://flic.kr/p/2s69P1v

    Things I have watched. 

    My internet went down on April Fool’s Day, so I revisited Wong Ka wai’s back catalogue. I watched the films the first time after I got a portable DVD player and there was a massive surge in video labels including Artificial Eye and Tartan publishing arthouse titles. This provided a great way to explore and experience world cinema and I gravitated towards Japanese and Hong Kong cinema.

    I was familiar with traditional martial arts films and the ‘gun fu’ of John Woo. Wong Ka wai was Hong Kong’s answer to French new wave auteurs. Around the same time, I ended up going out with someone who lived in Hong Kong when we bonded over Faye Wong’s performance in Chungking Express. In a moment of delicious irony, I got to watch Wong Ka wai’s ‘western’ film My Blueberry Nights while staying in Hong Kong.

    This time around I was working my way through Curzon’s Wong Kar wai boxset which was bought for my birthday during COVID time. It contained

    • As Tears Go By
    • Days of Being Wild
    • Chungking Express
    • Fallen Angels
    • Happy Together
    • In The Mood For Love
    • 2046

    More on my time watching The World of Wong Kar wai boxset here. You can enjoy most of the films listed at the Prince Charles cinema ‘The Films of Wong Kar wai season‘.

    After all that I needed something a bit lighter, so I watched the Japanese film Supermarket Woman. It is a light hearted comedy caper about a middle aged woman, a poorly performing supermarket, business rivalry and a bit of skullduggery. Nobuko Miyamoto plays Hanako Inouse who brings her customer eye view to revitalising the Honest Goro supermarket. The film was written and directed by Jûzô Itami, better known for Tampopo. Supermarket Woman was made a decade after Tampopo, but both feel of the same time. Itami-san was often compared to the French new wave directors of the 1960s and I can see why.

    OSS117 is a series of books and films written from the late 1950s onwards. The films were made in 1963 onwards, with a reinvention and reboot in the 2010s.

    • OSS 117 is Unleashed – is a French film about an American agent with French heritage who works for the CIA. Compared to the Bond franchise, its French new wave. No gadgets but a dollop of guile. It’s notable for its underwater scenes, scuba diving was new thing opening up a new world under the waves thanks to Jacques Cousteau.
    • OSS 117: Panic in Bangkok – is the first colour film in the series. Our hero goes to Bangkok to investigate a dead colleague who looked into ineffective vaccines.

    Useful tools.

    PopChar – PopChar is an old but good utility app that has been supporting Mac users since the late 1980s. You are trying to find the right emoji or symbol to type, in each font.

    Beats Studio Buds + – while I usually use Shure wired earphones for most applications there are some times that wireless is handier (like reducing wired clutter on a busy desk, or listening to podcasts while cooking or folding laundry).

    I was leery of the Beats brand because of their reputation of having a muddy bass sound with a poor sound stage. I was pleasantly surprised by these. They are as balanced sound as a pair of AirPods. They have reasonable noise cancellation, comparable to my old Bose earbuds. They charge on the USB-C cable as my iPhone and MacBook Pro. They are less noticeable than a pair of AirPods and still integrate into Apple’s ‘Find My’ service seamlessly.

    Google Gemini app for Mac – I hope that this will help with my current tab and window juggling in Safari. I will let you know how I am getting on in a few months once I have given it a full shakedown.

    The sales pitch.

    I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.

    With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors from narratives and new business pitches to sports partnerships.

    My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.

    The Strategic Toolkit:

    • Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
    • AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
    • Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).

    I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

    now taking bookings

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my April 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the May bank holiday. 

    Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

    Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on my blog,  Substack as well as LinkedIn.

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