Ged Carroll

Category: germany | 德國 | 독일 |ドイツ

Willkommen – welcome to the Germany category of this blog. This is where I share anything that relates to Germany, business issues, the German people or culture. Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Berghain launched a new brand collaboration with Volkswagen. And that I thought was particularly interesting or noteworthy, that might appear in branding as well as Germany.

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

Where I have talked about Germany much of my discussions have focused around innovation or design due to German history and reliance on its manufacturing sector. It hasn’t deindustrialised to the same extent as the UK did during the 1980s.

However it hasn’t been all good. A classic example is how German car manufacturers. They had been behind the curve on both electric and hydrogen powered vehicles compared to China, the US and Korea. While German strength is in traditional engineering areas such as software have been much more hit and miss.

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 German 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.

  • German nuclear plant + more things

    German nuclear plant infected with computer viruses, operator says | Reuters – So Sarbannes Oxley meant that a lot of corporates disabled USB ports. Technology company Huawei used to have ‘dirty machines’ and clean machines. Neither of which were connected by a network. The same was true in many agencies where I worked. Yet a German nuclear plant allows easy access via USB. Secondly, why do the USB chargers on airplane cockpits have any intelligence at all that would store a virus and allow it propagate? I would be very paranoid about using any USB chargers in coffee shops or an aircraft seat moving forwards. This is the problem when everything from light bulbs and doorbells now contain a Linux server. More security related content here.

    Ogilvy’s rebrand reveals an ad industry in confusion | Thomas Barta – an inhouse marketers perspective on things. If you substituted the word advertising for PR in this as a discipline it could be an analysis of all agencies.

    iPhone maker Foxconn is churning out “Foxbots” to replace its human workers — Quartz – I am not convinced that they will be that successful. This is partly down to some of the manual dexterity required being similar to a watchmaker in some parts of the assembly. And that is down to Apple driving an industry race to squeeze phones into tighter factors for the guts. The process is repeatable, but hard to deliver. Back in the day Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers used to use pick-and-place machines for a lot of consumer electronics. It is why Japan went more towards micro-chips faster than players like Philips. Japan did a lot of component standardisation in terms of sizing and connectivity to the board. The boards were relatively simply designed and gave a bit of latitude to allow for a lack of precision from the machines. That meant slightly larger goods. More expensive devices like Sony’s Walkman  Pro, were handmade because they crammed so much technology inside them .

    [Publish] Facebook Profiles can no longer be connected to Buffer Publish – Buffer FAQ – well that’s a bit of a bummer. But you can still publish content via more expensive systems like Percolate. Is this Facebook trying to discourage organic content from anyone but brands (that spend advertising money?)

  • GDPR resources

    Partly due to Cambridge Analytica, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is going to have a more profound impact on data usage globally. GDPR would have been seen as an extra-legal reach, but Facebook is making it look like a good idea.

    I thought I would pull together a few resources that I thought would be of interest around GDPR since there is a lot of snake oil being sold as consultancy around it at the moment. I am not going to pretend that I am an expert, so I thought it would be useful to share some of the GDPR related resources that I have been looking to learn from.

    Not only in terms of what the regulation is, but what techniques can be deplored to act in the spirit as well as the letter of regulations. Demonstrating a basic respect for the consumer won’t harm any brand, but might point to badly designed KPIs that direct and digital marketers might be measured from.

    Andreessen Horowitz put together a good podcast on it.

    Privacy by Design – The 7 Foundational Principles by Ann Cavoukian, Ph.D. (PDF) – is a must read paper for creative agencies and product teams. It is based on work that was started in the late 1990s. Cavoukian lists a site as a reference ‘privacybydesign.ca’ – but that seems to be down.

    1. Start by thinking about privacy by design from the start or as Cavoukian says preventative rather than remedial, proactive rather than reactive
    2.  Privacy as the default setting
    3. Privacy embedded into the design of systems and processes (which sounds like a reinforcement of her first point
    4. Not viewing consent in terms of a zero-sum
    5. Privacy secured throughout the lifecycle from end to end.
    6. Being open and transparent about processes to keep the organisation honest and stakeholders informed
    7. Respect for user privacy based on a user-centric ethos

    Via James Whatley’s newsletter this article on UX –  GDPR: 10 examples of best practice UX for obtaining marketing consent seems to be complementary to Cavoukian’s work. This is in sharp contrast to the dark patterns often used to force consent by many sites.

    More related posts here.

  • Great Scud Hunt + other news

    Great Scud Hunt

    What the Great Scud Hunt Says About War With North Korea | War Is Boring – pretty grime reading. The Great Scud Hunt was a key aspect of the Gulf War. The Great Scud Hunt pitted allied special forces units against the Iraqi army which had scattered its Scud launchers across the desert. The Great Scud Hunt was important to stop Israel coming into the war and fracturing the alliance against Iraq. it was also to prevent scud missile attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure and cities. Despite the terrain being reasonably flat and barren, the allies weren’t as successful the Great Scud Hunt as they would have liked. By comparison North Korea is mountainous and covered in vegetation making the job orders of magnitude harder. North Korean missiles could target the US, Japan and the whole of South Korea. 

    https://flic.kr/p/MvAAss
    A relic of the Great Scud Hunt – a missile being examined after having been shot down in the desert by a Patriot missile

    Economics

    3D printing a threat to global trade | ING – Research report with hyperbole

    Legal

    INMA: Pros, cons of EU’s General Data Protection Regulation for publishers  – GDPR could lead to a reduction in programmatic ad spend because advertisers will struggle to measure whether their ads lead to purchases, according to Eric Berry, CEO of TripleLift. There’s uncertainty about how the law will be enforced, but if users have to give consent to individual publishers, demand-side platforms, and attribution vendors, the attribution companies won’t have enough data to make accurate measurements

    Luxury

    Supreme Said Close to Deal with Carlyle | Business Of Fashion – was the Louis Vuitton deal just rolling out the carpet for private equity interest?

    Media

    My new chapter: joining Google to better explain search & help bridge the gap – Danny Sullivan is a great person to fill the hole left by Matt Cutts and more. Sullivan’s status as the godfather of search marketing gives him the kind of authority and audience few others have

    Online

    A Farewell to AIM: AOL Instant Messenger Shutting Down in December – ExtremeTech – wow. The ironic thing is that messenger services could (and should) have been the WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger of today

    Retailing

    How supermarkets choose where to open … and where to close | Cities | The Guardian – even retailers don’t like chavvy areas

    Security

    The Uber app can secretly spy on iPhone screens – BGR – mother fucker…

    Screwdriving. Locating and exploiting smart adult toys | Pen Test Partners – one more security issue to worry about

    Guess what Chinese travellers are bringing back home? VPNs, lots of them | South China Morning Post – exaggerates the volume of desire for unfettered access – outside the intelligentsia, most won’t care

    Yahoo says all of its 3bn accounts were affected by 2013 hacking | Technology | The Guardian – how is this only coming out now?

    Technology

    Why isn’t Apple Pay taking off? | The Drum – and other NFC payment technologies for that matter

    Survey: Facebook (FB) is the big tech company that people trust least — Quartz – its only 1,600 Quartz readers

    High Sierra’s Disk Utility does not recognize unformatted disks | Tinyapps – a lot of a fuck up there Apple, although its now fixed by a security update. Related – Think twice before encrypting your HFS+ volumes on High Sierra | Carbon Copy Cloner – big issue

  • Mosby + other things

    Mosby

    Mosby is a long haired Belgian shepherd. His owner put together a monologue and some carefully curated footage to come with simply great content. Mosby’s Motto is deceptively simple. I imagine that it required a lot of raw candid footage that was then skilfully edited down into this two-minute video. The copywriting around Mosby also taps into popular themes around YOLO and follow your passion 

    Wrestling vs. rap

    The hyperbole of wrestling commentary with the rhymes of Snoop Dogg, it sounds like a marriage made in heaven right?

    Leica manufacturing

    I am a sucker for manufacturing and process videos. This video by Richard Seymour (not the Richard Seymour, design god and the talented one in SeymourPowell, but a similarly named photographer) on how Leica turns out its M-series cameras

    Verbing Velcro

    Velcro using humour to make a serious point about their brand IP. They challenge that Velcro faces is the degree to which their name ‘verbs’ as Faris Yakob would put it. Think about the way people might label their pet a ‘velcro’ dog because it sticks with them all the time. Velcro has been used as a synonym for clingy. All of this is great for marketing, bad for legal affairs.

    Greg Wilson

    This week I have mostly been listening to Greg Wilson. Wilson was one of the first DJs at The Hacienda and has been doing great productions for the last decade. This mix of early house classics surprised me a little because of his programming style (what he chose to play, the order and how he segued between the tracks). Wilson’s style was much more akin to that of the disco era DJs – it was all about the smooth flow, less about taking people on a journey or driving the dance floor in a more kinetic style and it caused me to re-listen to tracks that I have been familiar with for the best part of three decades. The context of Wilson’s had shifted them so fundamentally. More related content here.

  • Rosemary Smith + more things

    Rosemary Smith is a 79 year old Dublin woman who owned her own driving school. But from the 1960s through the 1970s Rosemary was one of the world’s foremost rally drivers. With the right support, Smith could have done so much more. Part of her problem is that motorsport is still a very privileged sport. Renault decided to put Rosemary Smith behind the wheel of a single seater racing car. Rallying and racing are different disciplines, but Smith still had some of the magic as you could see in this video. More Ireland related content here.

    Westbam featured in a short film talking about how he started off and the intersection of music and culture in Berlin during 1989. It is hard to  comprehend how West Berlin with its cheap accommodation at the time became a hot bed of art and culture in Germany during the 1980s. The constant cold war threat gave art a space to flourish

    American Petroleum Institute has put together a video reminding the public of all (ok just a small amount of) the stuff that oil actually goes into. When Teslas rule the roads, we’ll still need oil. If you’ve painted a room in your house, or built an Ikea Billy bookcase; you’re been handing a product made with oil. Pharmaceuticals are based on oil, so are many medical devices.

    The sound track of my week has been various mixes from DJ Nature

    Campfield Futon – Snow Peak – I love the design and quality of Japanese outdoor brand Snow Peak. The Campfield Futon is an amazingly flexible piece of furniture that would be great outdoors or in an apartment. There is a lightness to Snow Peak design that is fascinating. It is more similar to the design approach of Norman Foster than the technical outdoor approach of Arc’teryx and The North Face.