Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

On innovation

Before I start to reflect on innovation, let me tell you story from my my old agency days. Back in the day I used to work agency side on the Microsoft account. Unlike a lot of my colleagues who worked on it full time, my workload was usually tangental to everything else that I had going on. My senior colleagues had worked on the business for a long time and became what you might term institutionalised. They had a definite dogmatic world view, which I was wasn’t comfortable with as I felt it lacked the objectivity required to give good client counsel.

That world view was baked into the descriptor of the agency, that we provided ‘innovation communications’, that is focused on communications programmes for innovative organisations. For certain people innovation became defined purely in terms of what Microsoft was doing at that time. For instance, winning a client that had a new business model would challenge mainstream ‘gourmet’ food brands like Kettle brand crisps (chips in US parlance) – saw colleagues berated over e-mail by senior leadership for bringing the wrong kind of innovation into their consumer brands part of the business.

Businesses change, no more so than the technology sector and agencies with anchored positions are left behind in spite of their loyalty as clients need fresh ideas.

I was thinking about at their dogmatic view of innovation when I read this quote from Steve Ballmer talking about Microsoft’s landmark investment in Apple back in 1997.

They’ve done a great job. They’re a company that’s done a great job. If you go back to 1997, when Steve came back, when they were almost bankrupt, we made an investment in Apple as part of settling a lawsuit. We, Microsoft made an investment. In a way, you could say it might have been the craziest thing we ever did. But, you know, they’ve taken the foundation of great innovation, some cash, and they’ve turned it into the most valuable company in the world.

It probably would have been enough to make a couple of my former colleagues extremely uneasy to say the least, especially given Steve Ballmer’s hard charging reputation. One thing that Ballmer misses is that even though Microsoft couldn’t vote with those shares, it was potentially as well-made a deal as Jerry Yang buying into Alibaba – if Microsoft had held those shares for long enough. Regardless of this, the Office unit of Microsoft more than made up for this investment with the amount of profit they made over the next few years on versions of Mac Office.

More information
Steve Ballmer: Microsoft investing in Apple ‘might have been the craziest thing we ever did’ | BGR

October 28, 2015
MANifeste + other things

Hermès MANifeste is a short motion graphics based video aimed at their menswear collection

Hermès MANifeste has got an Eames or Rand feel to it. It is full of clean mid-century modern imagery with icons that would have been in the library of every letterpress and hot metal print works prior to digitisation. This gives the animation a clean masculine feel, that doesn’t feel too old world or conservative. Which is different to the way many male consumers might see Hermès.

The Project Apollo archive on Flickr gives us access to all the NASA photography from the project. What people don’t appreciate is how comprehensively Project Apollo and the moon landings were documented

The Spirit of Buffalo video by Dazed Digital featuring Jamie Morgan and Neneh Cherry is a documentary about the Buffalo Collective who influenced the way modern streetwear is styled. The centre of the Buffalo Collective was Ray Petri, who pretty much invented the stylist as a modern concept in the fashion industry. Petri partnered with photogaphers Jamie Morgan, Mark Lebon and Cameron McVey. Models included Barry and Nick Kamen, Naomi Campbell and 13 year old Felix Howard in the iconic Killer picture taken by Jamie Morgan. You can blame Buffalo for the whole Pharrell Williams look which borrows from late 1980s London.

More content on the buffalo collective here.

(1) 香港警察 Hong Kong Police | Facebook – acts as lightning rod for the divisions in society made apparent during the Occupy protests, but its also very surreal. Full disclosure: I ran training on social media for the Hong Kong civil service including what they call the disciplined services (this included the police, government flying service, emergency ambulance service, prison service, customs and immigration). The people that I came across were smarter than whoever is managing this page.

A great remix by The Avalanches which has been on heavy rotation during my dipping into Soundcloud

October 23, 2015
Shop OS versus mobile OS

I decided to write this post to reflect on the very different visions of digital retailing that consumers are currently experiencing. I’ve labelled these two visions mobile OS and Shop OS respectively.

The Mobile OS

I went to Wagamama with some colleagues from Racepoint where we were encouraged to all download Qkr!. Qkr! is an application that was developed by MasterCard rather than the restaurant, it isn’t exclusive to Wagamama either. MasterCard has built the application with a view to building a wide eco-system merchants. It is notable that the application is actually card issuer agnostic, so I was able to set up an account with a Visa card. Wagamama bribed us with free desserts to download the application, so they clearly have some skin in the game. We downloaded it, set up our account with at least one mode of payment, our email address and a password. One of us became the host and gave us all a number which was our common bill. We could order straight from the app and food was supposed to arrive. When we wanted to pay we selected our items and paid our share of the bill. A couple of us only had cash, so they paid a friend and the friend paid on the app. If I am absolutely honest with you, it was a lot of work for casual dining and but for everyone around the table working in technology marketing (and so having a modicum of curiosity about things app-related) – it probably wouldn’t have had us all on board. Now that we have the app on our phone, I could see Qkr! hoping that we use it regularly and likely try and steer us to its merchant network though notifications and special offers. From Wagamama’s point-of-view it saves them from building, testing and maintaining a bespoke application. There are also presumably productivity benefits from reducing the order taking staff required. Qkr! didn’t prevent Wagamama from making mistakes with our order and we ended up one chocolate cake down. Contrast this with the approach that McDonalds have rolled out in their new (to me) Cambridge Circus branch. The area between the counter and the entrance is dominated by a series of vertical kiosks.

These kiosks contain an identical touch screen interface

With a basic card reader on the bottom, there is no Apple Pay or NFC facilities, just a chip and PIN reader. The touch screen menu takes you through a smartphone app like experience, if smartphones came with 27 inch screens. Once payment was successfully received, you then received a deli counter style receipt

And collected from a counter when your number appeared on the screen

This is all designed to reduce consumer interaction and improve efficiency in the restaurant, if there was any way to cheapen the McDonalds’ experience making you queue like an Argos seems like the ideal way to go. The logical progression for this would be to move back to the Automat format (presumably this time using some sort of algorithm to optimise production.

The irony of it all is that the rise of fast food restaurants like McDonalds killed off the Automat as a trend in North America and many Automats were converted into Burger King franchises.

Both Wagamama and McDonalds may have had some efficiency gains but lost out in terms of brand experience, they moved a bit further towards commoditised casual dining and fast food respectively – which goes against the brand equity that they have striven hard to build over decades.

Shop OS offers some advantages over Mobile OS, you can standardise on the hardware to reduce coding and testing requirements. It is ideal for tourists who may not want to roam on foreign mobile networks, nor be able to navigate free wi-fi offerings. The flip side is that there isn’t the same opportunity to capture customer data and behaviour, the notification screen on the smartphone is a key place for brands to intercept the customer using geofencing.

October 13, 2015
Fairphone 2 + more things

Fairphone 2 – a pre-production review of the new modular smartphone – Computing – a review of a Project Aria-esque device. The Fairphone 2 is similar to Jolla, which also experimented with their ‘other half’ concept but no eco-system built up around it. It will be interesting to see if Fairphone 2 can be any more successful

16 Deals Feeding Chip Biz’s Merger Fever | EE Times – the flurry of M&A activity is the product of Wall Street’s relentless pressure on chip companies to show revenue growth that cannot be achieved organically

Online IT Project Management Software | LiquidPlanner – interesting project management software

Will digital books ever replace print? – Craig Mod – Aeon – Digital books stagnate in closed, dull systems, while printed books are shareable, lovely and enduring. What comes next? – which is usually the kind of problem digital solves….

No More Coffee Queues, Starbucks Mobile Order and Pay Comes to London | Lifehacker – I hope that it has less friction than Qkr

Samsung refutes claims that its TVs are more energy-efficient in lab tests than real life | VentureBeat – it will be interesting to see how this plays out

Have The World’s TV Makers Been ‘Doing a Volkswagen’? | Time – Samsung accused of cheating on energy consumption tests for TVs

This Is Why Dunkin’ Donuts Is Closing 100 Stores | Time – aggressive market for breakfasts in the US

IBM’s super fast, powerful and tiny carbon computer chips could soon be in all our devices | Quartz – if they don’t mess it up like Josephson Junction chips in the 1980s. More technology related posts here.

Caffeinated Peanut Butter Is Here | Time – putting this on my wishlist from Santa Claus

How Steve Jobs Fleeced Carly Fiorina — Backchannel — Medium – something that Steven Levy doesn’t not but in an added piece of irony of this is that Compaq had one of the first hard disk based MP3 players that no one remembers any more. It was a product licensed to Hango Electronics and sold as the Personal Jukebox

Amazon to Ban Sale of Apple, Google Video-Streaming Devices – Bloomberg Business – so the back of your TV is going to be festooned with boondoggles and black hockey pucks as everyone decides to play nasty

Synaptics Said to Shun $110-a-Share Bid From China Investor – Bloomberg Business – which would help China’s strategic position to be higher up the food chain on chip design

Google, Microsoft Resolve Patent Fight Over Phones, Xbox – Bloomberg Business – war on trolls like Microsoft founder Paul Allen and his business Intellectual Ventures. Will Microsoft still be taxing Android phone makers though?

iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus Preliminary Results | Anandtech – interesting how performance has been improved across the circuit board including memory access and processor performance

Phil Knight sees the finish line as Nike’s leader | US Today – kind of a big deal in the sports industry

Why have marketers stopped putting creativity first? | CampaignLive – I’d also add that performance marketing has created a culture of marketing being about Excel spreadsheets

brandchannel: Reader’s Digest Owner Rebrands to Trusted Media Brands – it makes sense as Readers Digest is actually a stable of magazines

Never not wrong: Saying Apple should ditch its chips | Macworld – but that doesn’t stop it from licencing more Qualcomm technology

October 4, 2015
Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte

Strictly speaking this is a bit different from when I have written about books. This is the second time that I read Being Digital, the first time was during my final year in college.

I was curious to know how the book would hold up in the space of 20 years since it was first published. In twenty years we’ve seen televisions shrink as we moved from cathode ray tubes to plasma and LCD displays. The cost of telephone calls has declined, cellphones are really no longer phones but a type of mobile computer that happens to do voice calls poorly. The dominant form of personal computing is Android rather than Windows. The internet has facilitated a raft of services that used to exist in the real world or didn’t exist previously.

In the subsequent 20 years Negroponte has gone from being one of digital’s poster children with a column in Wired and his leading role at MIT Media Lab to a more obscure position in digital history. His biography over at MIT has him listed as sitting on the board of Motorola Inc.

It is easy to dismiss his showmanship and bluster, but the Negroponte did work that foreshadowed in-car sat navigation devices, Google Street View and the modern stylus-less touch screen.

The book first of all emphasises how far we have come when it talks about 9600 baud connections, I am writing this post sat on the end of an internet connection that provides 50mbps download and 10mbps upload – and that’s slow compared to the speeds that I enjoyed in Hong Kong. Negroponte envisioned that satellites would have a greater role in internet access than it seems to currently have, cellular networks seem to have brought that disruption instead.

It has the tone of boundless optimism that seemed to exemplify technology writing in the mid-to-late 1990s but with not quite the messianic feel of peer George Gilder. Negroponte smartly hedges his bets for where the ‘rubber hits the road’ as society brings some odd effects in on technology usage.

Online media

Negroponte grasped the importance of digital and the internet as a medium for the provision of media content. That sounds like a no brainer but back in the day the record industry didn’t get it. In fact record industry went on to make blockbuster profits for another five years, N’Sync was the best selling artist of the year in 2000 with No Strings Attached selling 9.94 million copies. Over the next decade or so profits halved in the face of determined record label countermeasures including suing their customers.

OTT and cord cutting

Negroponte was dismissive of high definition video and television considering it wasteful of bandwidth. On this I get the sense that he is both right and wrong. We are surrounded by high definition screens (even 4K mobile screens – where their size doesn’t allow you to appreciate the full clarity of the image). But this doesn’t mean that our entertainment has to come in high definition, much YouTube isn’t watched on full screen for instance.

Disruption of publishing

Negroponte grasped that it would also shake up the book industry and Being Digital has been published in a number of e-book reader formats, but at the moment the experience of digital books leaves something to be desired compared to traditional books.

Tablets

Negroponte labours a surprising amount of copy on tablet devices. At the time that he published his book GO was in competition with Microsoft with pen computing devices and software, EO had launched their personal communicator – a phablet sized cellular network connected pen tablet and the first Apple Newton had launched in 1993. Negroponte goes on to insist that the finger is the best stylus. MIT Media Lab had done research on the stylus-less touch experience, but reading the article reminded me of the points Steve Jobs had made about touch on the original iPhone and iPad. It is also mirrored in the Ron Arad concepts I mentioned in an earlier blog post.

Agents

Negroponte considered that we would be supported in our online lives with agents that would provide contextual content and do tasks, which is where Google Now, Siri and Cortana have tried to go. However his writing implies an agent that is less ‘visible’ and in the face of the user.

Negroponte’s critique of virtual reality at the time provides good insight as to how much progress Oculus Rift and other similar products have made. He points out the technical and user experience challenges really well. If anyone is thinking about immersive experiences, it is well worth a read.

Going back and reading the book provided me an opportunity reflect on where we have come to in the past twenty years and Negroponte’s instincts where mostly right.

More information

Nicholas Negroponte – biography | MIT Media Lab

October 3, 2015