Ged Carroll

Category: france | 法國 | 프랑스 | フランス

Salut! – welcome to the France category of this blog. This is where I share anything that relates to the Republic of France, business issues relating to the France, the French people or culture.

France in some ways feels outside Europe. It has the biggest love of Japanese culture from all European countries. It has also cut a swathe in science fiction and graphic novels. France also does things differently like doing big infrastructure better than other European countries such as high speed rail or civilian nuclear power. Skills that the UK seems to have lost somewhere around the OPEC oil crisis of 1973.

On the flipside, there are aspects of France that define Europe, such as the George V Hotel or the country’s luxury powerhouses LVMH and Hermes.

Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Renault launched a new advertising campaign. And that I thought was particularly interesting or noteworthy, that might appear in branding as well as France.

So far, I haven’t had too much French related content here at the moment. That’s just the way things work out sometimes.

I don’t tend to comment on local politics because I don’t understand it that well, but I am interested when it intersects with business. An example of this would be legal issues affecting the media sector for instance.

If there are French related subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.

  • Ruining Oxygene

    I didn’t mean to write a post about ruining Oxygene by Jean-Michel Jarre. Instead I had hoped to write a post about the joy of having got my hands on one of Sony’s legendary D-Z555 Discman. That post will have to wait for another time.

    Jean-Michel Jarre - Oxygène (1976)
    Oxygene shot by luna715

    I had a 1980s vintage CD of Oxygene. Moving to Hong Kong had seen it go along with a lot of my other belongings. I had wanted to listen to it to hear the quality of the D-Z555. I got a new copy from Amazon. The Oxygene I remembered has highs and lows. It makes use of stereo spacing to move its sweeping sound around you. I paired it with a modern pair of Sony in-ear monitors (MDR-EX800ST) with custom Snugs ear moulds.

    This is wasn’t the Oxygene that I’d previously heard. The first thing that I noticed was the that the constant peak across frequencies on the on-board display. Then it stayed loud, when it doesn’t go quiet. So loud it made the hair stand up at the back of my neck and became uncomfortable to continue listening.

    I took the CD out and played E2 – E4 by Manuel Göttsching. But this sounded glorious and the onboard display was more what I expected. The highs, the lows. The space that allows all the instruments room to shine.

    Tried a new copy of Jean Michel Jarre’s album Magnetic Fields and had a similarly uncomfortable listening experience.

    So I went back to the Oxygene CD case. In the small writing it said that the album had been digitally remastered from the original analogue tapes. The same remastering company had also done the Magnetic Fields CD as well.

    This remastering process has been what was ruining Oxygene for me. Looking at reviews around the web, it was obvious that this process had been unpopular. Looking at the prices of Oxygene and Magnetics Fields CDs on Discogs showed that there was premium price on the original CD versions. This wasn’t just about rarity. Like Dire Straits and Sade albums, these were commonplace in CD collections.

    I delved into reading about the loudness war. I was aware of the loudness war and the effect that it had on pop music. But Jean Michel Jarre isn’t really radio play material. (Although Magnetics Fields had been used as a signature track for an Egyptian numbers station* in the past. His albums whilst popular are slow steady sellers.

    A lot of the music that I listen to didn’t need high dynamic range compression. I knew that sampled instruments and digitally synthesised instruments are naturally more compressed, lacking the peak transients of live performances. My friend Joe used to record dance music before building a property empire. His uncle was a long-time musician (ex-Mission, Pulp and Artery) who then left to record electronic music in New Mexico. I vicariously got some of my studio recording knowledge from him through Joe.

    Overall I hadn’t really been exposed to large amounts of high dynamic compression in music before. This practice of making loud music. This had started in earnest in the 1990s as digital signal processing put more tools in the hands of the mastering engineers.

    Historically compression techniques had been used creatively. Motown frequently pushed the limits of vinyl recordings, particularly 7 inch singles.

    Motown was notorious for cutting some of the hottest 45s in the industry

    Nashville mastering engineer Bob Olhsson

    Digital signal processing seems to have led to a dramatic acceleration in this evolution

    There’s a 12 to 14dB apparent loudness difference between Black Sabbath, produced in 1977 or so and transferred to compact disc in the early ’80s, and the Black Eyed Peas’ ‘Let’s Get It Started.

    Bob Katz, mastering engineer

    Both quotes were from an article written in 2005 and things seem to have got only worse. The reasons for this are myriad:

    • In-car listening and iPods were considered to blame. But the level of compression is far beyond that
    • The decline of consumers actively listening to music, using it as audio background
    • Inexperienced engineers who don’t know what good sounds like
    • Inexperienced artists think that overly compressed masters sound better

    Whilst record label A&R people were considered partly responsible for loud mixes on vinyl singles. By 2005, record labels weren’t considered to be pressuring mastering engineers for louder mixes.

    Ruining Oxygene seems to have occurred a few years later as streaming services built up steam. I remember how Yahoo! Music used to master their streams when I worked for Yahoo! Europe. They were ripped straight from CD on a desktop HP computer by whoever had time in the music team.

    All of my research into the process of ruining Oxygene seems to have been a vicious circle. Various pressures on compression lowered the bar on what was good and that went through several cycles.

    The morals contained the story for music listeners are

    • Progress doesn’t mean better
    • We have lost something with the move away from actively listening to music

    *Numbers stations are a rabbit hole that you can descend into on the internet. So rather than having to go there, here’s a potted explanation. Countries would have spies embedded abroad, often for years at a time. In order to give them instructions or information, it would be preferable to do it in a manner that didn’t involve directly interacting with the agent. Shortwave radio filled this breach. The signals carry over huge distances. The messages would be concealed in numbers, often read out using speech synthesis – which gives them an other worldly feel.

  • Arbys + more news

    Arbys trolls McDonald’s over Filet-O-Fish | US Today – you realise how important christianity is in the US when this is going on for the Lenten fish sandwich market. (As far as I can tell, Arbys is like Subway, but serves at least some of their sandwiches in a bap rather than a roll. And has a sides menu closer to say Pizza Hut.) Prayer meetings in the White House and creationism given equal time to evolution on NPR is one thing. Conscious christian consumerism is quite another for your average secular marketer to consider, which is why Arbys vs McDonald’s seem unusual. Given the rise of ‘nones‘ in the American population, particularly young people, Arbys may put off more customers over the long term than it attracts

    Brand New: New Logo for BMW – looks a lot flatter, better for glanceable app icons, printing, possibly printed or vinyl car badges rather than the traditional car badge. More branding and marketing related items here.

    Keep clean and carry on: the new etiquette of Paris Fashion Week | Financial Times – seems to be much more pragmatic than many events

    Chinese teens are shying away from posting about their lives on WeChat to avoid prying parents | South China Morning Post – WeChat is where Facebook was in terms of ubiquity

    Apple now allows iOS developers to send ads using push notifications – Developer Tech – this is going to be annoying

    Repl.it – CLUI: Building a Graphical Command Line – interesting overlap with conversational interfaces

    Didi Chuxing – State of play. – Radio Free Mobile – interesting analysis on Chinese government’s interference

    The Dark Side of China’s Idol Economies | Jing Daily – enraged by Xiao fans’ censorship plot, millions of free speech activists began boycotting Xiao Zhan and the dozens of brands he campaigns for, including Estée Lauder, Piaget, and Qeelin. But they’ve gone further than the usual boycott by promoting competitors of Xiao-promoted brands, crashing Xiao-sponsored brands’ customer service lines, and pressuring those brands to end their collaborations with Xiao. So far, the Weibo hashtag #BoycottXiaoZhan# has exceeded 3450,000 posts and 260 million views.

    Streetwear still hot, influencers not | Financial Review – Forty percent of North American and European respondents said that “community” had been key to their interest in streetwear; only 12% of Asian respondents said the same. (But 41% of Chinese and Japanese respondents said that wearing streetwear was a political act, something that only 11% of North Americans and Europeans reported.)

    Biometric Recognition White Paper 2019 – Google Docs – good translation of an interesting Chinese biometrics whitepaper. Biometrics in China circa 2006 – presentation – and if you compare with this you’ll see the progress made over the past decade or so

    Is Social Selling China’s Next Big Marketing Trend? | Jing Daily – actually being going on for a while with influencers like Mr Bags

    Innovation of the Day | Panera – Panera launched its MyPanera+ Coffee subscription program, offering customers unlimited coffee for USD 8.99 a month. Burger King apparently did a similar scheme it would be interesting to hear how they got on

    For a Whole Month, Pornhub Is Streaming Acclaimed Documentary ‘Shakedown’ for Free – interesting that documentary is running on PornHub

    Mediatel News: How to make, break and shape consumer habits – But when Febreze added a nice smell and advertised the product as a spray to use at the end of cleaning – using the tagline ‘two sprays & we’re clean’ – it became very successful. This is because it created a new habit. It was able to do this because it created a consistent trigger and reward for use. The trigger was when someone finished cleaning. The reward was the added nice smell, which customers came to associate with a cleaning job well done. By having a consistent trigger (people often finish cleaning – or at least people who aren’t me often finish cleaning) and reward, the product shifted from failing launch to a billion dollar brand.

    Catch the news in a glimpse with the new NewsBlur Today View widget on iOS – The NewsBlur Blog – if you aren’t using NewsBlur already, get on it. Like Google Reader, but alive and much better

  • Galloway on Louis Vuitton & more

    Section 4’s Scott Galloway on Louis Vuitton. Professor Scott Galloway talks about the way Louis Vuitton has re-engineered its business to handle the modern luxury consumer consumer’s needs and tastes.

    Modern consumers are younger and based in Asia rather than the traditional older luxury purchasers in Europe and the US. This has meant that digital became more important, as had casual luxury over formal luxury.

    All of that innovation was extended by Louis Vuitton with streetwear type drops rather than seasons. Shops are a brand experience in their own right. Including online games and pop-up Instagrammable stores. They focused on products that can be driven into the market faster with an agile supply chain.

    Casual styling allows you to go to smaller goods with a lower price point and replaceable more often.

    The line between streetwear and luxury has been blurred. More on luxury related issues here.

    A great mix of the hits of European disco producer Daniel Bangalter (Vangarde). Daniel Bangalter started with a husband and wife team, writing and producing their songs. Around this time, he partnered up with Jean Kluger. Their first project was a pseudo Japanese band called the Yamasuki Singers. It was the early 1970s and a bit strange. Kluger and Bangalter then went on to produce Ottowan including D.I.S.C.O. They also produced the Gibson Brothers song Cuba. You can hear the influence of his sound (and probably at least some of his studio equipment) in the Daft Punk sound.

    Daft Punk includes his son Thomas Bangalter. Apparently Daniel helped Daft Punk when they were starting out.

    Mark Ritson on 50 years of Effies. Some of the content is as worth watching as listening to Ritson’s commentary.

    Scott Galloway on online business. Some interesting points here

    Fabio Wibmer does to the Austrian city of Wien (Vienna) what Bullit did to San Francisco.

  • The Bureau season 3 & other things

    The Bureau season 3 on Amazon. It is one of the most well written series I have watched in a long time. The Bureau season 1 and 2 where taunt thrillers that were James Bond reimagined by John Le Carre. It is the show that Spooks should have been. The ending was on a cliff hanger and I didn’t think that we’d see The Bureau season 3 The Bureau season 3 sees our protagonist captured by ISIS. Guillaume Debailly is captured by ISIS who know him by his former cover of Paul Lefebvre.

    A brass band cover  of Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name

    This amazing episode of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert featuring Rakim (of Eric B & Rakim fame). What people tend to forget is the difference that Rakim made to hip-hop. Before him, most rappers rapped on the beat. Rakim used his rhymes the way a jazz musician plays their instrument. They go around the beat, yet are in time.

    With Amazon delivering analytical data like this, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a lot more sites signing up to Amazon’s affiliate marketing scheme, even if they don’t want to sell anything for the beast of Seattle. The recommendation areas draws from its massive retail data set that shows what consumers are interested in across various different product categories.

    This week I have mostly been working my way through John Kelly’s Mystery Train for my listening pleasure.  Kelly is a veteran Irish DJ who has a rare skill in the quality of his sections. Naturally this is all backed by the massive music library of RTÉ. The original run of it in the mid to late 1990s was legendary and thankfully Irish state broadcaster resurrected it. Kelly just nails music selection. More culture related content here.

  • ZFS + more things

    A ZFS developer’s analysis of the good and bad in Apple’s new APFS file system | Ars Technica – this is a good guide by Adam Levanthal. The thing that puzzles me is this. Apple had a working implementation of ZFS running on early beta versions of OS X and then decided not to implement it. Apple adoption of ZFS would be a major boost (it is already supported on Linux and Solaris). It takes about a decade for a file system to mature sufficiently; ZFS has that maturity and is still bleeding edge tech. Apple has a good relationship with Oracle so that wouldn’t be a problem, Larry Ellison is still the shot-caller over there and he still hates Microsoft and Google. Instead they build their own version, which has nice encryption facilities but lacks the data integrity features that ZFS has. It doesn’t seem to be about squeezing the footprint of ZFS for mobile devices either. Apple just decided to go it alone for reasons that aren’t readily apparent at the moment with APFS.

    Huawei sees building alternative to Android as insurance amid US-China trade tensions | SCMP – not a big leap from an OS point of view. The big jump would be the app store since both Google and Amazon’s app stores would be out of reach if Huawei were found guilty. A way around this would be the likes of SailfishOS which would also deal with lingering security concerns about Huawei handsets. More Huawei related content here.

    Someone might’ve hacked the company that can hack any iPhone – BGR – another reason why backdoors are bad

    Mobile advertising represents 91% of Facebook’s ad revenue | Marketing Interactive – I suspect that there is a lot of wasted ads here. Linking through to sites that aren’t mobile friendly or things that don’t work on mobile for instance

    Kraft Heinz works with JKR to introduces quirky new biscuit brand JIF JAF | Marketing Interactive – Kraft Heinz launching product in China going head to head with Mondelez; that spun out of Kraft….

    British adults using Facebook less to communicate with friends | Technology | The Guardian – according to Ofcom there is also a wealth divide in how Britons use the internet, with poorer individuals more likely to rely solely on a smartphone to get online and have “lower levels of online confidence and critical understanding”.

    APAC markets exceed global benchmarks for viewability, brand safety | Digital | Campaign Asia – fraud rates for campaigns that optimised against fraud remained relatively flat, showing optimisation efforts are paying off by keeping fraud rates low. Singapore and Hong Kong had higher fraud risk at 20.7% and 14.0% respectively, because ad fraudsters tend to follow where the digital spend goes and where CPMs are higher.

    Can This System of Unlocking Phones Crack the Crypto War? | WIRED – this sounds dodgy AF. If the US gets access, every country gets access

    Facebook beats in Q1 and boosts daily user growth to 1.45B amidst backlash | TechCrunch – basically people don’t care if Facebook invades their privacy or usurps their government. All of that is a mere bagatelle

    AMD earnings confirm it’s biting into Intel’s market share | VentureBeat – it likely won’t be permanent

    Addressing Recent Claims of “Manipulated” Blog Posts in the Wayback Machine | Internet Archive Blogs – interesting hack that should be in the tool bag of reputation managers

    U.S. DoJ probing Huawei for possible Iran sanctions violations: WSJ – interesting that they are getting dinged for similar things to ZTE. Stopping US vendors from selling to Huawei would be a bit less impactful than on ZTE. But it would retarget the Huawei R&D budget away from innovation to replacing American component technology and engineering services currently provided by the likes of Ciena or Qualcomm. This actually fits neatly with Mr Xi’s China 2025 manufacturing initiative that is designed to free the country from relying on international suppliers.

    Amazon is releasing a new Alexa gadget specifically geared toward kids – Recode – but what about the privacy settings?

    Meet John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, Silicon Valley’s first disruptors | Recode – great read about when Silicon Valley actually made silicon and solved ‘hard’ innovation problems, rather than sociopathic web services. You couldn’t have your modern computer or your smartphone without Hennessy & Patterson

    Nike’s Converse Loses Chief Marketer to Supreme | BoF – not that Supreme really needs marketing with its over-subscribed drops. Unless they are changing direction to become more mass affluent?

    A French billionaire is being investigated for bribing African officials for lucrative contracts | Quartz – this surprised me. France has used businesses like Total and Elf with the likes of Jacques Foccart to keep a relationship and control in the Francophone. Why are they turning on Bollore now? Especially odd when you think about how China is pushing western interests out of the continent

    Electric Autos – Long life – I think it’s more complex, depending on vehicle range and driving patterns will factor into demand. Of course the shit is really going to hit the fan when lithium ion technology fails to provide for transport needs like long distance heavy goods vehicles, becomes too expensive and essential materials become too rare. There is likely to be a pivot to hydrogen combustion engines or hydrogen fuel cells due to superior energy density. The economics around risk, infrastructure and other capital costs will change.