Ged Carroll

Category: innovation | 革新 | 독창성 | 改変

Innovation, alongside disruption are two of the most overused words in business at the moment. Like obscenity, many people have their own idea of what innovation is.

Judy Estrin wrote one of the best books about the subject and describes it in terms of hard and soft innovation.

  • Hard innovation is companies like Intel or Qualcomm at the cutting edge of computer science, materials science and physics
  • Soft innovation would be companies like Facebook or Yahoo!. Companies that might create new software but didn’t really add to the corpus of innovation

Silicon Valley has moved from hard to soft innovation as it moved away from actually making things. Santa Clara country no longer deserves its Silicon Valley appellation any more than it deserved the previous ‘garden of delights’ as the apricot orchards turned into factories, office campus buildings and suburbs. It’s probably no coincidence that that expertise has moved east to Taiwan due to globalisation.

It can also be more process orientated shaking up an industry. Years ago I worked at an agency at the time of writing is now called WE Worldwide. At the time the client base was predominantly in business technology, consumer technology and pharmaceutical clients.

The company was looking to build a dedicated presence in consumer marketing. One of the business executives brings along a new business opportunity. The company made fancy crisps (chips in the American parlance). They did so using a virtual model. Having private label manufacturers make to the snacks to their recipe and specification. This went down badly with one of the agency’s founders saying ‘I don’t see what’s innovative about that’. She’d worked exclusively in the IT space and thought any software widget was an innovation. She couldn’t appreciate how this start-ups approach challenged the likes of P&G or Kraft Foods.

  • Li Ning & more news

    Li Ning

    Can Li Ning Hang Onto Its Investors? – Exchange – WSJ – Li Ning struggles to cross the chasm to become an international sports brand. Li Ning is named after its founder, a former Chinese olympian. The business started in 1989 and came to global prominence ambushing Nike and Adidas at the 2008 Beijing olympics.

    China

    China to Air Pro-China Ad in U.S. During Hu Visit – WSJ – surely the brief should have been placed with an agency that better understands the intended markets and has ‘consumer’ insight?

    Americans See China as No. 1 – China Real Time Report – WSJ – this perception is going to affect US foreign and defence policy

    A Walled Wide Web for Nervous Autocrats – WSJ.com – governments support open source software

    Design

    How TDK Upgraded the Old-School Boombox | Fast Company – interesting blend of insights and product design

    Innovation

    How Microsoft beat Apple to the Mac App Store by four years – and then dumped it | Technology | guardian.co.uk

    Luxury

    2011 Trend Watch: How Far Will Countries Go To Court Chinese Spenders? « Jing Daily – Japan, Korea and the UK going a long way

    Media

    China’s Youku.com Strikes Deal to Stream ‘Inception’ – WSJ.com – much more reasonable price points than are charged in the West. 5 Yuan is about the same price as buying a copy of Inception on DVD at a night market in Shenzhen

    Security

    BBC News – Thousands of stolen iTunes accounts for sale in China – what’s the betting that this is partly due to the Gawker attack before Christmas?

    Software

    Microsoft changes course in pursuit of iPad | FT.com

    Technology

    LG says WP7 hasn’t gone well so far, while Android hurts RIM more than iPhone | Technology | guardian.co.uk – ‘lower consumer visibility‘of WP7 is what they actually talked about

    Southeast Asian Nations Reveal ICT Masterplan, China Is of Little Help | Fast Company – China ramping up on cyber threats due to viruses and phishing attacks

    Telecoms

    Network neutrality: A tangled web | The Economist

    Web of no web

    New Contact Lenses With LED Displays is Must-See TV, Literally – ExtremeTech – awesome Terminator vision ^_^

  • CES 2011

    I have been watching the coverage of CES 2011 in Las Vegas with a greater degree of detachment than usual. Partly because I am not in the office. But also because most of the product announcements at CES 2011 didn’t really felt like news. The only one that did was Microsoft’s move to support Windows on ARM.

    Why the main computing OS haven’t moved to a real-time OS a la WindRiver or QNX (now part of Blackberry) years ago is one of life’s great mysteries, however iOS seems to have brought that to a head now. With non-PC devices the concern is now about computing power versus power consumption, something that real-time OS’ have been doing for decades.

    Otherwise CES 2011 seems to be about lots of companies playing catch-up with Apple and the consumer electronics companies trying to jump-start the big-screen television market. LCD television sales have peaked in developed markets and growth will be driven by emerging markets, which means higher volume of sets sold; but lower revenues as the margins are much smaller. This is what the whole 3D home cinema efforts all about.

    As for the competitors to Apple, it says a lot that one of the big stories at was covers for the forthcoming iPad being shown at CES 2011 by their manufacturer.

    Finally I find the trend for celebrity-endorsed gadgets a bit disturbing. Back in the day I was involved in launching the Palm Vx Claudia Schiffer edition. The key difference was the the fascia was anodised with a powder blue colour. It was also the point at which I started to get a real sense of the imminent decline of Palm as a company and a platform. I am amazed that Dr Dre’s headphones with Monster go for more than a decent pair of Beyerdynamic DT-150 or Sennheiser HD-25s. So my heart sank when I read about Lady Gaga and Polaroid.

  • What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

    What Technology Wants is written by Kevin Kelly. If anyone deserves the term digerati its Kevin Kelly. Kelly worked on the Whole Earth Catalog, a hippy guide to useful stuff, he was involved in The WELL and was a founder of Wired magazine.

    What Technology Wants follows on from previous works that Kelly had written. Out of Control looked at how software created a parallel infrastructure to the real world. At the time ‘software agents’ were a thing and artificial intelligence was here but unevenly distributed. Out of Control was written in 1992, yet forecast ideas like ‘digital twins’ – software simulations that are currently in vogue.

    His book New Rules for the New Economy looked at the economic principles that technology and and web directly impacted. This seemed to build on work done to also write the Encyclopedia of the New Economy, which was published as a three part series in Wired magazine, the same year.

    So it seems appropriate that Kelly took a long term viewpoint and wrote What Technology Wants as a historical, economic and philosophical analysis of technological progress.

    Kelly puts forth the case that technological momentum, what he calls the technium has a momentum of its own and that it is inevitable. The idea that every innovation has its time. This is why innovation can seem lumpy and why innovations like television and the light bulb can claim to have dozens of inventors.

    The technium seems to build momentum with each key development put in place across fields science, technology and information theory.

    Short of societal collapse, it is not something that can be fought or turned back but can be managed to get the best from it. It also isn’t the kind of starry-eyed futurism that the likes of George Gilder had turned out in his book Telecosm. Kelly appreciates the double edged sword that technology represents.

    This then poses questions around a number of areas from economics to ecology.  I would expect this book to be dinner party fodder as a kind of thinking man’s Malcolm Gladwell. More book reviews here.

  • 2010: How did I do?

    About this time last year I wrote my 2010 predictions on technology, media, consumer behaviour and online:

    I see 2010 as a time when more people start thinking about how we deal with the trust-based issues that social media throws up… We need to think about the implications for etiquette, ethics and what will be the new social norms that we have to deal with.

    This is very much a work in progress (at least in the UK); where the NHS feels that it is acceptable to leak information about an audience’s health concerns with Facebook and politician Nadine Dorries felt it was perfectly acceptable to lie to constituents at least 70 per cent of the time on their social media platform

    From a government perspective all this self-organising power can be dangerous: people getting together and standing up to authority – we’ve seen it before:

    • Climate–change protestors
    • Poll tax riots
    • Illegal raves

    Each time, the government has brought resources and legislation to bear against them. I expect this to be at least considered in the next year.

    Well beyond shilling for the media industry with the Digital Economy Bill and the coalition government’s proposals against net neutrality to favour News Corporation prominent UK media companies, there was the Crown Prosecution Service and police’ increasingly hard stance with everything from jokey Twitter users to websites. More interestingly comes a request for Nominet to provide a mechanism that would allow police to close down sites by taking control of domains at will.

    The UK will still have analogue intellectual property laws for an increasingly digital world, I don’t see a dramatic change to correct this coming anytime soon.

    Jeremy Hunt confirmed that the government was going to leave the Digital Economy Act intact. However TalkTalk and BT’s requested judicial review may temper some of the more draconian parts of the Act.

    Social media will no longer be special but part of the normal mix.

    There was discussions at the open panels I attended at the JUMP conference about dropping the ‘social’ from social media as it is not anything special, but the glue that binds all the marketing communications and business communications processes together.

    Changes in marketing spend will come partly at the expense of search advertising.

    Google’s growth is slowing in search advertising and flattened in some markets. I think that this is why Google’s prediction that mobile is the next big thing and the big investment in Android. For a long time there has been a theoretical ceiling for Google’s earnings that include the following factors:

    • Maximum cost of acquisition that a company is willing to pay for a customer – this varies business-by-business
    • Maximum number of businesses that can benefit from search advertising. Your local 7-Eleven relies on impulse purchases so Google Adwords even on local search or mobile apps may not make a lot of sense. Other businesses maybe regulated out of it, or search may not fit into a brand’s profile
    • Number of markets that Google operates in. Google’s new frontier is barely online continent of Africa

    So it was no surprise that Google has set up a wealth of ventures to try and continue to grow. However the culling of these ventures and relentless focus on earnings indicate that Google is maturing as a business. Part of this is down to the fact that Facebook is now serving 25 per cent of display adverts in North America. Coupon services like GroupOn are probably eating into local search advertising budgets as well.

    The good news for the search engines is that consumers are much more open to a curated web via friends and authorative individuals, many of the concepts of social search will be ready for an early majority audience in 2010.

    What really wrong-footed me on this one is that I thought services like Hunch and Quora would come from the search engine companies, that this maybe the ace-in-the-hole Yahoo! may have had to reinvent search, which is the reason why they gave the algorithmic side of the business away? I didn’t expect Caterina Fake come back and put a new spin on the social search work that was happening at Yahoo! when she was there. It’s early days on this but Gifts.com seems to find Hunch’s work with them is delivering real commercial returns. Quora feels like the kind of product that Yahoo! Answers should have been, it will be interesting to see how they monetise the product in the future.

    I expect there to be an increase in social media rightshoring.

    Rightshoring didn’t take off in the way that I thought it might in 2010, this is maybe because of the recession has made the UK more viable, at least for the time being.

    Social media will be looked at to provide solutions to problems that businesses continue to wrestle with: from knowledge management to customer relationships and workflow.

    Altimeter Group has been doing a lot of work wrestling with the implications of social CRM as part of this process of using social media to solve business problems.

    One of the break out trends for 2009 was ‘the web of no web’ where a mix of QR codes and augmented reality allow consumers to interact with the real world with online information. This has a huge potential, but there are two key challenges, the most dangerous one being that someone comes up with a creative execution so bad that consumers reject the ‘web of no web’ concept.

    The web of no web has broken out in a couple of new directions in 2010. Firstly a much more serious focus on location with this year’s star Foursquare and the hangers on like SCVNGR and Gowalla. This isn’t a new area per se location has been incorporated into Twitter for a while and Yahoo!’s ZoneTag and FireEagle were doing this years ago, but failed to get sufficient traction. From a business perspective this has been partly driven by the coupon market as online and offline businesses discount to get consumers through the door – thank you financial crisis.

    A secondary aspect of these applications is that they are less draining on a battery than the AR stuff getting heat last year. Barcodes rather than QRcodes may make the biggest impact yet as ‘augmented retailing’ takes off, it is no coincidence that the latest eBay and Amazon US iPhone apps include a barcode scanning function to allow real-time real-world price comparison. What did 2010 in tech mean to you?

  • Zero History by William Gibson

    Zero History is an ideal book If you enjoyed William Gibson’s previous two works Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Like the previous two books it dwells in the now, which is appropriate given Gibson’s oft quoted koan:

    ‘The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed’.

    I have written the review in terms of general themes so that I don’t put in any plot spoilers.

    It brings many of the major protagonists from the previous books in the Pattern Recognition series back and ties the plot together quite neatly. There are two ways to look at Zero History, in terms of chronology it arrives at the end of a logical order of Pattern Recognition and Spook Country; but in terms of its themes Zero History sits between Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Like Pattern Recognition it questions the nature of brands, design and art. It borrows elements of locative art from Spook Country and throws private military companies and the military industrial complex into the mix.

    Marketing is portrayed as amoral, understanding the price of everything, yet having the value of nothing outside its grasp. The discussion of brands in Zero History is less about a well-designed logo and more about the brand authenticity – the way it matches the product – how much truth from it is designed into the product.

    There is also a sense that the quality of manufactured goods is in decline and creatives are trying to recapture this quality by going vintage and re-manufacturing old products. This creative effort is then concealed from marketers who would despoil it. Gibson forces the reader to think about how they relate to the brands they like and the marketing that they see around them, he also uses the story to address the rise of the corporation as a military entity a la AEGIS, Xe or Halliburton. More book reviews can be found here.