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.

 

  • In praise of the DSLR camera

    If you still use a DSLR camera nowadays given the usefulness of smartphones, the phrase mirrorless has become de rigueur.

    Photography like most other things in life have become progressively more digital. Technology is increasingly mediating every aspect of our experiences, a screen comes with everything.

    Digital retouching and filters have dramatically changed the reality of modern photography. It has also made photography even more ephemeral. I have an online photo library that holds thousands of pictures, compared to the hundreds of photos that my parents have in an old album and envelopes from film processing labs stuffed in a chest of draws.

    Viewfinder

    I still like ‘mirrored’ or single lens reflex cameras.

    The digital single lens reflex or DSLR camera free the photographer from the tyranny of film; but still allows the photographer to frame up a shot in advance before using the battery life of the camera.

    Looking through the view finder of an SLR gives you a temporary isolation from peripheral visuals allowing you to focus mentally as well as physically on the subject in question.  It allows you to slow down and take your time in the moment. It changes the way you see the world. The experience using a mirrorless camera is rather different. There isn’t the ‘focus’ in the experience and it blends post production with taking the picture in the same time and space.

    Of course, as with most technology experiences, the human experience is viewed in a very one dimension manner. An object to be overcome in the least minimum viable way possible. It’s a very regressive approach to design, cost is put before simplification. The increased focus on software engineering leaves a rough unsatisfactory digital experience.

    The products lack the ability to spark joy as Mari Kondo would say. That makes the whole obsolescence and replacement cycle so much easier. More related content here.

  • China male beauty market + more

    The booming male beauty market in China – Daxue Consulting – Market Research China – finding the latest Asian male beauty market trend – Korean idol flower boy image difficult to square with mainstream male beauty products. I guess this male beauty market trend must be analogous to the new romantics of the early 1980s. In that case the new romantics had a high degree of cultural impact that dwarfed the actual size of the movement.

    Hayden Cox On Becoming An IWC Ambassador, And The Watches We Should Be Wearing – GQ – interesting choice of ambassador aiming at millennials. Hayden Cox shapes surfboards. He started Haydenshapes when he was in high school. In this respects his career mirrors the old school shapers like Shawn Stüssy in 1970s. Cox’s business is still laser focused on shaping boards as a business person.

    It is interesting that IWC focused on an entrepreneur, rather than an athlete, celebrity or adventurer. There is a certain commonality that can be drawn between the craft of shaping and the expertise of the veteran watch maker.

    Leading taxi-hailing app providers in Japan and South Korea to collaborate | The Japan Times – interesting move by Kakao. It shows the rise in Korea – Japan tourism. This goes against the wider policy dynamics prevalent in Korea – Japan government relations. Both vendors need to partner to deal with the South East Asian, Chinese competitors and Uber. In technology spheres, scale matters; innovation doesn’t.

    Doing One Thing, Well: The UNIX Philosophy | Hackaday – great essay on the design philosophy on Unix. The design philosophy was based around simplicity. Specific pieces of software were built to do one thing well. (That approach was mirrored decades later in web 2.0 design ethos as well). These applications were designed to work effortlessly together. This all made computing simpler and more accessible. It is the foundations that the web from network core, to smartphone clients run on. This post is written using Unix powered laptop and hosted on an instance of Linux (an operating system that apes Unix).

    Baidu in Hot Water After Hospital Mix-Up – Caixin Global – not the first time for Baidu

  • Dr Eugenia Cheng & things that made last week

    Dr Eugenia Cheng

    Dr Eugenia Cheng talks about the key themes in her book The Art of Logic: How to Make Sense in a World that Doesn’t

    Outtakes from Dr Eugenia Cheng talk:

    • Pure mathematics is a framework for agreeing on things
    • Pure maths is a framework for how to think
    • Make progress rather than repeat things to make a better logical argument
    • Logic validity doesn’t equal morally valid in analogies
    • Interconnectedness is often erroneously simplified by blaming a single item as a cause
    • Its easier to change actions, than it is to change feelings. Feelings just are
    • Great feedback loops tied into obesity is fascinating
    • Relationships between things – media affects thinking by shoehorning natural geometry into one or two dimensions
    • Intelligence: reasonable – can be reasoned with, powerfully logical – not just using logic but using techniques to move an organisation further and being helpful: emotion

    More ideas related content here.

    Merino wool producers assume that cyber punk is a synthetic dystopia, instead of thinking abut how wool is a technical fabric by its very nature. The ad was done for the Woolmark Company by TBWA Sydney. Do humans dream of technical merino wool?

    Live footage of Talking Heads performing Once in a Lifetime in 1980. The performance encapsulates everyone that I expect Talking Heads to be.

    Zegna’s radical reinvention | How To Spend It – great profile of Gildo and the fashion brand that he manages. The process of reinvention doesn’t seem to create a tension with the heritage – which is a great attributed to a luxury brand. There isn’t that much difference between Zegna and Stone Island in terms of innovation.

    Jori Hulkkonen – Attack Magazine –  he has a great back catalogue, so looking forward to his Simple Music for Complicated People album. Hulkkonen’s work goes from extremely emotive soulful house to minimal techno and everywhere in between.

  • Good strategy inspired by Matt Holt

    A couple of tweets on good strategy by Matt Holt inspired this post. Strategy and planning are considered to be disrupted by changes in the advertising industry. It often boils down to ‘ who needs strategy when you have big data / machine learning’.

    Big data; isn’t good strategy. Instead it tells you retrospectively where you should have zigged rather than zagged. It doesn’t plot an overall direction.  It is usually pretty reductive only focusing on sales now. It doesn’t think about future sales through building a brand and its good standing.

    In marketing automation, it is focused on ‘harvesting’ from the end of the marketing funnel.

    Travelling

      • It is sacrifice. It’s about making choices and saying no
      • It is specific. There is a specific well-defined problem to be solved. 
      • It is simple to explain (even if the subject matter is complex). If you’re setting a direction, the roadmap has to be clear for all stakeholders.
      • it has elegance. Which is a good measure of its simplicity.
      • It steers tactics. It provides a directional lens to the data and helps in deciding KPIs (key performance indicators) and HVAs (high value actions).
      • Good strategy is stubborn in the face of the shiny and new. Strategy is not a fad is a long term roadmap. The shiny and new can be a facilitator at best. At worst its a distraction. 
      • It is saying no to excess. Keep the strategy focused on the objectives that it addresses
      • Good strategy seems self evident in retrospect. It’s not just a way to solve the problem, but has been sweated out to optimise it to the point that it seems self evident in retrospect.
      • It is emergent, but not realtime. A strategy needs to be able to flex as conditions change. Its the direction, not an exhaustive road map.
    • It is not ‘big data’. Big data can be a source of insights that will help develop a strategy, but it’s not a strategy in of itself. For example the inspiration for Compare the Market’s meerkat campaign was misspellings in search data for the word market

    More ideas related posts here.

  • NYPD surveillance + more things

    IBM Used NYPD Surveillance Footage to Develop Technology That Lets Police Search by Skin Color – you might feel a bit squeamish about the application but this is established image recognition that Google (and Yahoo!) search engines used 12 years ago rather than anything new. We shouldn’t be surprised that the NYPD surveillance search system doesn’t use all aspect of physical attributes that might turn up in a witness statement.

    eBay builds its own customized servers to ‘replatform’ its data center infrastructure | SiliconAngle– surprised that they weren’t doing this already

    Luxury Daily | eBay extends authentication program to high-end watches – Paywall

    Immersive art – JWT Intelligence – In China, where fine art isn’t typically part of a school curriculum, art collectors and curators have been working with mall developers and brands for a number of years to create crossover opportunities among Chinese audiences, fueling interest and building a culture around art. Zheng’s approach is to focus on making his visitors the protagonists in his exhibitions to help them “accept art as an element in their lives.”

    WE ARE IN AN EFFICIENCY BUBBLE – BBH – at the expense of effectiveness. Just good enough commotised creative

    The Path Ahead: The 7th Forum on China-Africa Cooperation | China Africa Research Initiative – (PDF)

    Cryptocurrency exchange Changelly admits it can steal users’ Monero (if it wanted to) – I think this is over egging the opportunity and underestimating challenges

    WeChat, Alipay to Block Crypto Transactions on Payment Platforms – CoinDesk – surprised that this is taking so long

    JD CEO’s arrest steps on governance landmine – Breakingviews – (paywall) it shows how tenuous ‘foreign’ shareholding in Chinese entities are. According to The New York Times he has some form for these kind of events

    Manipulation, Chinese style – Nikkei Asian Review – cunning and clever. This should be compulsory reading for anyone doing lobbying or in corporate communications. It mirrors some of the Russian philosophy on information warfare, but the Russians take it in a much more kinetic direction.

    The “experiential advantage” is not universal – the less well-off get equal or more happiness from buying things – Research Digest – really interesting finding on consumer behaviour and retailing