Ged Carroll

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.

 

  • Macau gaming revenue + more

    Macau gaming revenue

    Macau Gambling Revenue Continues to Drop – WSJ  – A little over a year ago, in February 2014, Macau gaming revenue rose 40%. Now it is regularly falling by around that much (paywall) – Macau gaming is alleged to be a vehicle for money laundering. Even if that wasn’t the truth about Macau gaming, it still remains a tempting vehicle for capital flight from China. At the moment Macau gaming is even bigger than the gambling mecca of Las Vegas

    FMCG

    P&G; Always Mobile App: BackMeApp – really smart application by P&G to market Always sanitary towels

    Ideas

    Azeem’s Exponential View – Revue – great email newsletter. Azeem has ben involved with a number of start-ups including Peer Index. In his newsletter Azeem covers a mix of deep future gazing with concern about climate change. He has a particular focus on  the carbon economy as a distinct area within his newsletter

    Innovation

    The scientist who designed the fake interfaces in “Minority Report” and “Iron Man” is now building real ones – interesting link on the feedback loop between science fiction and technology

    Ford Redefines Innovation in Aerodynamics, EcoBoost and Light-Weighting with All-New Ford GT Carbon Fiber Supercar | Ford Media Centre – some of the design choices in this is very interesting. More design related content here.

    Media

    Yahoo to Let Brands Fact-Check Its Viewability, Fraud Numbers | Advertising Age – I presume that this is due to pressure from large consumer brands only willing to pay for true views

    WPP’s Bessie Lee: PR Industry Must Embrace Technology In China | The Holmes Report – calling Blue Focus a PR group is like calling WPP a PR group. PR needs to do technology better, but other disciplines already own that part of the client relationship. China has even faster change going on

    Engineering Director Lars Rasmussen Leaving Facebook To Co-Found A Music Startup | TechCrunch – a long time Googler who developed Google Maps and worked in search at Facebook. Interesting move

    Yahoo just threw investors a bone: It’s hiring advisors to figure out what to do with Yahoo Japan (YHOO) – the bigger question is what to do with what’s left surely?

    Google, Microsoft and Amazon pay to get around ad blocking tool – FT.com – as well as Taboola – the annoying content remarketing network

    Online

    David Cameron wants to block porn but the EU won’t let him | Dazed Digital – the UKIP vote will be torn over this one. More online related content here

    Bradley Horowitz Says That Google Photos is Gmail for Your Images. And That Google Plus Is Not Dead… — Backchannel — Medium – Bradley is brilliant, this does feel like trying to reinvent flickr, it would be a shame if this did kill flickr

    Retailing

    Audi to Test Plan to Deliver Amazon Packages to Drivers’ Trunks – NYTimes.com – so thieves will know that there is a master key, which will give them an incentive to find it. More related content here.

    Software

    Above Avalon: The Apple and Google Battle Has Changed – good long read on the dynamics between Apple and Google. Apple and Google cooperate because Apple has richer, more valuable customers than Google based operating system products. 

    Technology

    Russian ‘Uber for Boobs’ Start-Up Tittygram Sees Business Boom | Moscow Times – you could not make this up <holds head in hands in despair at industry>

  • Tech trends myopia in ideas

    Tech trends event at The Churchill Club

    The Churchill Club recently had their annual Top 10 Tech Trends event in Silicon Valley. This was the 17th time that they had their event. It’s a great bit of content to have on in the background. The collective opinions in the panel bought up concerns for me with a consumer behaviour myopia exhibited around tech trends in Silicon Valley.


    Cognitive behavioural therapy

    A classic example was some of the very smart things said about wearables and health monitoring in the session. There was skepticism expressed for some very valid social behavioural reasons – if one looks at Facebook, consumers generally share only the good things in their lives, with the notable exception of life events, such as the death of a family pet. Stephen Waddington even describes his behaviour on Facebook as ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’.

    So people really into fitness are far more likely to employ self tracking than couch-dwellers.

    Quicken problem

    Self tracking was described as a ‘Quicken Problem’. Quicken allows US consumers to easily complete their tax returns – a universal problem, yet is only used by five per cent of the population for various reasons.

    All of this is very valid stuff of its self, but what happens if it isn’t only consumers making the decision?

    Self tracking tech trends

    My reservations about self tracking technologies are well recorded, to quote myself from Stephen Waddington’s Brand Vandals

    Self-tracking adds massive amounts of data to your personal data pool and social graph and raises huge privacy concerns that users need to be cognisant of

    A number of the key points that I made in my conversation with Stephen was not about consumers using their self-tracking data but how the data could be used to recalibrate car insurance, home insurance (based on absence from home) and health insurance based on activity and risky behaviours.

    Let’s look at a specific type of self tracking, the car insurance black box. Aviva (Norwich Union) trialled the use of telematics to set car insurance premiums on a monthly basis as a type of continuous assessment. It looked at factors such as:

    • When the car was used, nighttime driving was considered to be risky behaviour
    • What distance was covered, charges were on a per mile basis
    • Car location (particularly when cross-tabulated with crime statistics)
    • Speed
    • Braking data

    In IBM Research’s case study, Norwich Union envisaged that black boxes would allow it to sell insurance to consumers that drive less often. Norwich Union dropped the pilot in 2008, apparently due to a lack of consumer interest, but resurrected the car insurance black box when the European Union ruled that charging for car insurance on the basis of gender was illegal. Presumably the needed some other form of actuarial data instead of whether the driver was a female or not. This is just one example where consumer behaviour didn’t drive  product innovation that wouldn’t be accounted for in the tech trends discussion.

    Credit ratings were driven by the need for businesses to mitigate risks, direct (rather than operator) dialling on a telephone was developed to help reduce the manpower required to run telecoms networks. Night safes and ATMs (automatic teller machines) were about providing services without staff. The US airline tradition of baggage charges came from shareholder pressure not consumer demand yet is worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

    The point at the end of the day is that opportunities for venture capitalists are broader than meeting consumer needs and wants.

    More information

    Brand Vandals by Stephen Waddington & Steve Earl
    AA launches black box car insurance | Guardian
    Norwich Union heralds new Pay As You Drive insurance – Aviva Media Room Archive
    Norwich Union Insurance Telematics Pilot – Pay As You Drive Telematics trial of usage based motor insurance by Volker Fricker of IBM Research – (PDF)
    Aviva Telematics Insurance Review | Telematics.com – Norwich Union (now Aviva) abandoned telematics insurance a number of years ago and is now reinstating it

    More related content here.

  • Virtual cockpit & things from this week

    Razorfish Berlin’s interactive brochure for Audi to promote the TT coupe’s virtual cockpit. I was reminded of an ad that Mercedes did where the phone became the rear view mirror of a car, emphasising performance. Also McDonald’s had used the mix of print and circuits with phones to create beat making place mats.

    But I find the intersection of print and digital an exciting space, even if the virtual cockpit concept doesn’t appeal to me that much.

    More related content here.

    Leo Burnett Italy created an app for P&G’s Always brand that directly addresses the insecurity women may feel in an unfamiliar area at night time; it connects them with a friend, to protect them on your way home.

    It is a smart play for the brand to maximise how it can be useful to consumers.

    Celebrity music streaming service Tidal faced critics at launch, this was probably the best of them

    I love this old video about Bell Laboratories’ complex in Holmdel, New Jersey that AT&T have put on YouTube as part of their efforts to digitise their archives. This is Silicon Valley before Silicon Valley

    At the other end of the spectrum, Ogilvy Hong Kong for Hong Kong Clean-Up produced a campaign that puts DNA analysis into an Orwellian future.

  • The Amazon Dash button post

    At the beginning of this month Amazon launched an addition to their Dash ordering hardware with the Amazon Dash button. There was a lot of incredulity amongst the media heightened by the unfortunate timing which overlapped with April’s Fool Day.

    Why the incredulity?

    I would break the cynicism down into two broad buckets:

    • The Amazon Dash button has a very singular usage / use case, narrower even the Yo! app which was a bit of a tech fad last year. Critics are at best uncertain that consumers would use them? I generally buy toilet rolls every 4-6 months, do I really need a button for that?
    • The Amazon Dash button implies that the hardware required is ridiculously cheap. How many boxes of washing powder, packets of Mac & Cheese or toilet rolls would be required for a button to break even?
    Business perspective

    Rather than ripping into this into too much depth I thought I would share Benedict Evans’ interesting hypothesis about the Amazon Dash button:

    Amazon is trying to eliminate both vendor and brand decisions, and turning itself into a utility company – get your house connected to power, water, gas and Amazon. And choosing which commodity product you need is just another piece of friction to be removed by Amazon’s kaizen

    There are some interesting directions that come out of this view point. Let’s break Benedict’s analysis down chunk-by-chunk:

    • Eliminating vendor decisions: there are two prongs to this. Firstly, it would reduce the basket size for supermarkets and also reduce impulse purchases. Let’s think about the Walmart ‘beer and diapers’ retail urban legend for a moment – if you weren’t shopping for the diapers, you aren’t likely to have picked up the beer next to it as you would have had no reason to go near those shelves. By implication it is also an attack on some of the categories carried in convenience stores. Given that the button is about ‘just-in-time’ shopping it implies that the users are not likely to have rooms in their lives for big box retailers or CostCo. The buttons are likely to aimed at urban dwellers rather than the suburbs were larger homes and larger vehicles to do the big box store shop are the norm – Sam’s Warehouse is safer than Walmart in this scenario
    • Eliminate brand decisions: since sales are diverted from supermarkets this also affects their private label sales, especially where they are acquired by accident as lookalikes stacked next to well-known brands. Challenger brands find that switching becomes much harder as they can’t intercept the customer at the point-of-intent through shopper marketing and the opportunity cost for the consumer gets raised due to the comparative nature of the friction in purchase.  It also begs a question about how much it affects the share price of WPP and other marketing combines who have spent big on shopper marketing acquisitions over the past few years. Do buttons offer a net gain or loss of value to them? I do know that the button puts Amazon in a much more powerful position versus vendors in terms of discount pricing to retailer and warehousing. The key to understand the power  that Amazon would bring is ‘choosing which commodity product you need…’. The very idea of a product being boiled down to a commodity buy would scare the living daylights of the average brand manager in an FMCG mega-corp
    • Turning itself into a utility: for Amazon this is about locking the consumer in via Prime to the consumer life. At the present time, logistics costs have been an increasing proportion of the cost of sales for Amazon, there must be a hope that the scale of grocery shopping will bring down the price of Prime and drive profits higher?

    There is no reason why the likes of Tesco, Ocado or Iceland couldn’t have done this. The wider Dash technology would make it easier for consumers to do grocery shopping and reduce the friction of online purchases. Instead they seem to have wanted to reduce cashier numbers inshore and focused on self-service tills. Time will tell if they made the right technological choice.

    What about the user?

    This is designed to make the consumers life easier and I can see how it makes purchase of otherwise annoying to shop for items frictionless, but it only works within reason. You can’t have a wall of buttons on the front door of your fridge freezer and just when do you press the button in the bathroom to order up more razor blades or toilet roll? What happens during the run up to Christmas when Amazon has had sub-optimal performance with regards deliveries on occasion? What is the buying frequency required to make the button habit forming, used without thinking about it, without consideration. When does the opportunity cost for the consumer tip in their favour regarding button usage?

    What I don’t have yet is a clear understanding on depth and breadth of the customer problem being solved by the Dash button.

    Product design

    The original Dash device was interesting because it represented a rejection of the broader theme of convergence where functionality is subsumed from dedicated hardware into a software layer running on a computer, via a web browser, tablet or smartphone. Instead Dash is a shopping appliance and wouldn’t look out of place in a cupboard full of Braun kit.

    The Dash button represents a further evolution of specialist hardware, a brand-specific, tactile hardware interface. It mirrors software like IFTTT’s ‘Do’ application, the Yo! messenger app and the Dimple smartphone button project.

    For non-food products like toilet rolls that come in a plastic bale that is quickly discarded, there may not be a barcode to scan in on your Dash device. Instead you would have to ask for a new pack of Charmin’ or more Mach3 razors. Processing each voice message is expensive, which makes the opportunity cost around creating dedicated buttons for certain classes of product much more attractive. Amazon first and foremost is a data-driven company, they will know which product categories that they want to have buttons for. However, what makes on an Excel spreadsheet doesn’t always make sense to the consumer…

    More information

    Amazon Dash button
    Benedict Evans newsletter edition 106
    Investing in smart logistics | Fidelity Worldwide Investments
    Amazon, in Threat to UPS, Tries Its Own Deliveries | WSJ (paywall)
    Supply Chain News: A 360-Degree View of E-Fulfillment Part 1 | Supply Chain Digest
    Amazon joins numerous startups in building delivery networks to disrupt Fedex and UPS. | DataFox
    The Amazon Dash post
    Dimple smartphone button project | Indiegogo
    SpinVox: the shocking allegations in full | The Kernel

  • Apple Spring Forward event

    Apple Spring Forward event

    I started this post a few hours after watching Tim Cook and company launch a number of product revisions  under the title of Apple Spring Forward. The most anticipated of which was the Apple Watch. I was in full Post Traumatic Apple Event Disorder mode. I have collated some of my thoughts about the event below and tried to order them into some sort of cogent narrative.
    Apple TV connections

    AppleTV

    The reduction of cost in Apple TV hardware at the Apple Spring Forward event was an interesting move. Apple has decided to go for market share rather than margin with the device and the incumbent HBO Now service might be just the catalyst to drive adoption. That Apple is leading with a HBO streaming service tends to imply that Apple has likely given up on trying to build its own ‘cable channel over IP’ offering. It does raise another interesting question about how other studios will want to handle their content in iTunes or via a an app similar to BBC iPlayer. Apple is passing on to consumers the cost benefits of using the older silicon design that powers the Apple TV. It also means that the Apple TV is the least powerful computer in Apple’s product range – including phones and tablets. The AppleTV is an egalitarian device rather a luxury brand product and a vote against widespread 4K adoption; unless the price discount is making room for a premium 4K capable device at a later date?

    Social Enterprise

    Apple’s moves at becoming a ‘social enterprise’ were interesting. For an organisation so polished at presenting itself to the outside world, the ResearchKit announcement and the case study with Christy Turlington felt awkward.  ResearchKit was delivered in a flat manner and didn’t explain how the product fitted in with Apple’s position on user privacy. Turlington’s appearance was like a particularly sycophantic Charlie Rose interview. There was a lot to talk about without having to ‘over-reach’ for celebrity endorsement.

    Apple needs to work harder picking the spokespeople to burnish its reputation, the nature of the projects and the deliver to be less cringeworthy. The very nature of the product and design story means that Apple already has a certain amount of implicit moral imperative and the company should be more in-tune with that.


    Apple Watch app
    Apple Watch

    I am deeply conflicted by a lot of the discussions around the Apple Watch, for a number reasons:

    I haven’t used an Apple Watch, but watching others use it in the demos made me think that it is fiddly and dare-I-say-it: hard to use. It could be un-Apple in nature

    Scott Galloway points to the Apple Watch and describes Apple as having transitioned to a luxury brand. The Edition watch maybe a luxury product, but not all of the Apple product range are luxurious – the AppleTV at a new price point of $69 implies ubiquity. This maybe a specific choice to get scale for the media content that other luxury Apple devices need to function. Just in the same way that quality newspapers couldn’t survive solely on sales to luxury consumers. What does this mean for those Apple customers who use the the devices as professional or creative tools?

    Much of the debate revolves around what luxury consumers want by people who can’t afford to buy the Edition version of the watch. Do the kind of luxury shoppers who wouldn’t care about a $13,000+ watch have a smartphone, or a smart person to organise their lives? An astute reader of Popbitch will soon realise that the celebrity accessory to have is a personal assistant, not a bejeweled Vertu. Secondly, not being available is a luxury as privacy and time are the preserve of the reach in an always-on world

    Many of the more positive predictions depend on the Chinese luxury market. The luxury market is changing in China. Luxury goods are used as tools in China; if you look successful, you are more likely to be successful in a culture that relies on high-touch personal relationships to facilitate business. However, consumers are becoming more sophisticated and moving away from at least some of the gaudier products. The Middle East may be a more opportune market for Apple.

    A second use case in the Chinese luxury market is that of a compact storage of value for capital flight or making a payment. The culture of payments for favours is being clamped down on my the Xi administration which has been made visible by a 20%+ drop in luxury watch sales. I don’t know the way plutocrats would likely jump on the gold Apple Watch.

    ‘Apple Watch is just an iPhone remote control‘ Craig Johnson senior analyst at Piper Jaffray – heard on Bloomberg TV. ‘Luxury watches are a store of wealth, an Apple Watch isn’t‘. Which is probably true for many people on Wall Street, but may not true for the truly rich.

    Apple MacBook

    The MacBook carried the biggest dissonance for me and was arguably the biggest disappointment of the Apple Spring Forward event. For long time Apple customers, MacBook means entry level laptop. They used to come white polycarbonate shells that matched the iMac G4 and Apple eMac. Instead the MacBook seems to reflect status:

    • A price point above the MacBook Air, but less powerful and less adaptable
    • Good battery life, but underpowered for many tasks
    • Three finishes including a gold colour that screams status in the iPhone line
    • A single port which made many of geek friends freak out with anger. The morning after one of my friends posted on Facebook about the single port: I am still angry. I use a Retina MacBook Pro at work and suffer from a lack of ports for external drives (including an optical drive), Ethernet, a secondary display and a card reader for multimedia work. The MacBook has a single port which replaces the MagSafe with a USB connection. For business users or creatives the machine is gloriously impractical and destroys their investment in things like the Apple Cinema display. I currently an Apple TV and have tried to screen-cast over Wi-Fi to it for presentations, it doesn’t like video at all. When I travel I usually present, for business users who travel regularly like me the MacBook feels like a pig-in-a-poke. Is the MacBook then decided to be a luxury consumer device?

    The trackpad which is being rolled out across other Apple laptop models looked attractive to me. The next generation of keyboard seems to be less convincing. I suspect its attractiveness will be inversely proportional to your touch typing speed due to the lack of haptic feedback from shorter key travel.  Despite the price point difference, I suspect that the MacBook is actually designed to cannibalise some Apple iPad sales as an executive toy – I don’t know whether it will.

    That’s my take on the Apple Spring Forward event, but I would be interested on your take on it.

    More information

    Post Traumatic Apple Event Disorder
    On Smart Watches, I’ve Decided To Take The Plunge
    The Watch Post
    Size Zero Design | 厌食症设计
    Questions I Have About Apple’s Business | Apple 业务挑战
    CES Trends
    Waking from an Apple Watch hangover « Observatory
    New Apple Stuff and You | The Wirecutter