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.

  • Worrying debt + more things

    WSJ City | Young Chinese Spending Creates Worrying Debt – looks like a credit bubble waiting to happen. Worrying debt in terms of personal credit doesn’t create economic value in the same way that government debt on infrastructure does. Chinese corporates also have worrying debt also has shades of bubble era Japan about it. Since consumer spending is driving China’s 6 percent growth, what would happen if the credit bubble burst?

    Farewell to Those Days of Wrestling With Fate
    Busy Chinese city life

    A European Perspective on Boeing’s 737 MAX Debacle: An “Existential Crisis” for a National Champion | naked capitalism – Boeing’s Crashes Expose Systemic Failings – fascinating Spiegel article of which this pulls out the highlights

    BangBros Acquires, Shuts Down PornWikiLeaks Site | AVN – this is about trying to stem the flood of doxxing that has beset performers in the adult entertainment industry and their families

    Big Brands ‘Acting Like Startups’​ – A Potential Red Flag | LinkedIn – one for companies in FMCG space like Unilever to read. It points out the flaws in ‘disruption porn’ pedalled by McKinsey Digital and Accenture

    WSJ City | Trans-Pacific Tensions Threaten US Data Link to China – also likely to affect Hong Kong as a financial centre and base for cloud network hosting

    YouTube to adjust UK algorithm to cut false and extremist content | Technology | The Guardian – censorship. Interesting that there will be concern about China yet we’ve stepped on a slippery slope

    Big brands turn to big data to rekindle growth | Financial Times – this makes me worry about the internal future state of research in large consumer companies

    bellingcat – Amazon’s Online Bezos Brigade Unleashed On Twitter – If you’ve worked on Amazon social you might want to take it off your CV after reading this…

    Nicolas Roope: “A different design language is taking over” – The challenge is how brands can adapt their propositions. Architecture demonstrates the formality of this new direction: what is now a series of gestures and actions that may or may not be involved in the surface will be critical to the success of the project. How do these buildings respond to the urgent requirements of energy use reduction and waste reduction? How do they perform as stories in hyperconnected environments where reputations are established in social media? Think Instagrammable hotel rooms…

    The Economist | China’s thin-skinned nationalists want to be loved and feared – Zoe hit the jackpot. Over a million netizens responded to her poll, posted on Weibo, the country’s largest microblog platform, asking what followers think of foreign brands that “insult China”. Her timing was impeccable. Her survey surfed waves of patriotic indignation crashing over the Chinese internet, heightened by puffs of windy outrage in the state media. To give you an idea of how ridiculous it can sometimes be:

    Big Blue Open Sources Power Chip Instruction Set – a really interesting opportunity opens up for a fully open source rival to ARM

    Member Research: Away vs. Rimowa – 2PM – I’ve been a long time RIMOWA fan, but the pilot case I like has been discontinued

    Mediatel: Newsline: Millennials finally get to neg someone else – gen-z seen as workshy egotists by gen-y

    Beyond Techno-Orientalism: An Interview with Logic Magazine’s Xiaowei R Wang

  • Carry nothing + more things

    Men Know It’s Better to Carry Nothing – The Cut – Medium – women clean up because fashion allows it. She pointed to the size of women’s bags, which allow us — like sherpas or packhorses — to lug around the tool kits of servitude. A woman is expected to be prepared for every eventuality, and culture has formalized that expectation. Online, lists of necessities proliferate: 12, 14, 17, 19, 30 things a woman should keep in her purse. Almost all include tissues, breath mints, hand sanitizer, and tampons — but also “a condom, because this is her responsibility, too.” (A woman’s responsibility for everyone else’s spills extends to the most primal level.) – I don’t think that this ‘carry nothing’ mentality of men is true any more. One only has to look at the backpacks carried around. Or the whole EDC culture of over-engineered products to optimise the carry experience, making a lie of carry nothing as a concept. For a lot of men, the car is the handbag, but that’s a whole other discussion around the idea of carry nothing. More consumer behaviour related content here

    Gender ad bans set ‘concerning’ precedent, say advertisers | FT – the publishing ban only applies to direct marketing: members of the public, media outlets and sites like YouTube can continue to share banned materials.

    Amazon offered vendors ‘Amazon’s Choice’ labels in return for ad spending and lower prices – Digiday – shit meet fan….

    REON POCKET | First Flight – personal cooling device using Peltier effect to cool behind the neck

    Silicon Valley’s China Paradox | East West Center – the period from 2014 to 2017 as a time of “segmentation and synergy,” two words that on their face are opposites of each other. Their juxtaposition forms the core of what Sheehan labels “Silicon Valley’s China paradox.” While at a corporate level US and Chinese companies were entirely separate, the flow of money, people, and ideas reached an all-time high during this period. “This is when you saw a lot of investors from China showing up in Silicon Valley, some prominent US researchers and engineers joining Chinese companies in positions of leadership, and ideas flowing in two directions,” said Sheehan. He noted that the concept of shared bicycles, now popular in US cities, started in China, and both Chinese and US companies have been active in the development of autonomous vehicles. Even while the relationship between the two national governments was in many ways going sour, “the relationship at the grassroots level, the technology relationship, was still very free-flowing,” he noted. Sheehan suggested that the relationship has now entered a new and uncharted phase, which he termed the new “technology cold war,” with the US government asserting national policies in what was previously considered a private arena. This new phase has three dimensions, he said. The first is an effort to disentangle the interconnected technology com- munities that bind the two countries together. In 2018, the US Congress passed the Foreign Investment Risk Review and Modernization Act (FIRRMA). This new legislation increases US government oversight and supervision of Chinese investment in Silicon Valley, Sheehan pointed out. The US State Department also began restricting visas for Chinese graduate students working in sensitive fields of science and technology. The second dimension is height- ened competition between US and Chinese companies in other countries. In general, “American companies know they can’t win in China, and Chinese companies know they can’t make a dent in the US market,” according to Sheehan. So US and Chinese companies are competing in markets such as India, Brazil, and Southeast Asia. (PDF)

    Why Consumers Aren’t Buying Electric Cars | naked capitalism – no great surprise

    US smart speaker update – (PDF)

    Fake news and cyberwarfare from China in Hong Kong protests | Slate – really good analysis of some of the online events happening in Hong Kong

    The big scoop: what a day with an ice-cream man taught me about modern Britain | Food | The Guardian – “Since Brexit, people have less money, and less confidence in spending money. They haven’t got the money in their pockets they had a few years ago.”

    Apple and Samsung phone sales are down, and $1,000+ prices are one reason why – BGR – less convinced by this explanation – BlackBerry could have fitted into this format as well in its decline

    In-house marketing ‘costing firms lost productivity and creativity’ | Netimperative – but is the pay-off worth it should be the question

    US and China investors battle over Indian digital payments boom | Financial Times – so I think that Payments in India will turn out to be a White Elephant but the FT thinks that its a growth market

    Revealed: Johnson ally’s firm secretly ran Facebook propaganda network | Lynton Crosby | The Guardian – a lot positive advocacy campaigns can learn from this

    Are Companies About to Have a Gen X Retention Problem? HBR – or why are gen-y self entitled snowflakes part 43

    Taiwan primaries highlight fears over China’s political influence | Financial Times – Want Want China Times and Cti TV deny they take instructions from China’s Taiwan Affairs Office like good little United Front puppets. Who would you trust them or the FT?

    TikTok creator ByteDance to enter smartphone market, following deal with Smartisan | SCMP – not convinced by this move

    Boris Johnson to unveil biggest ad campaign since Second World War to prepare for ‘no deal’  – 100 million that realistically would need to be spent in 9 or so weeks. That’s a lot of gaslighting….

    Filling hospitals with art reduces patient stress, anxiety and pain – imagine seeing those tiles whilst well medicated

    Websites are (probably) making less money because of GDPR – MIT Technology Review – the caveats read so wide its hard to conclude anything from this really

  • Web services I use

    Web services I use everyday has evolved over time. I thought I’d explore what I use now, compared to my essential services nine years ago.

    Bloglines –  I have an eclectic and wide range of online reading material that I like to keep up with. Whilst I have a Google Reader account, it is set up as insurance against IAC shutting down Bloglines. I find Google Reader intrusive and not as productive as Bloglines. In addition, Bloglines works better on a mobile phone and power my blogroll

    Delicious – is my memory. I am a web pack rat and it comes in handy for research or pulling together case studies for presentations. I keep a minimal amount of bookmarks on my computer, mostly bookmarklets to take advantage of Google Translate, subscribe to a blog and pull up the local weather

    Google – as well as it being my default search engine, Google is also my currency converter, calculator, spell checker and timezone checker. The site has a surprising amount of shortcuts that make my life a lot easier. They don’t require any technical skill, more details here

    Teoma – one of the best kept secrets of the web, Teoma is my back-up search engine if Google isn’t giving me the kind of results that I want. If anything Teoma is more relevant than Google is on its search responses. It naturally doesn’t trawl as much of the web as Google and it isn’t as good for real-time or semi real-time content like the latest blog posts. But it does have a clean interface reminiscent of Google previously. If you hit the ‘Google found approximately 150,000 results’ and you can’t find what you are looking for in the first page (which you should have set to 100 results per page) then give Teoma a go

    Email – my primary personal email account is an Apple IMAP account (now sold as MobileMe), but I’m old school so I have a .mac address. I also have a couple of other IMAP accounts with a more limited circulation. IMAP is great as it allows you to sync your account across multiple devices and not pay a fortune for Microsoft Exchange

    iDisk – I know lots of people swear that Dropbox is the best, but I still like to use iDisk for large file transfers like presentations. Apple has progressively improved the product and I know it inside out

    Flickr – if Delicious is my memory of facts and figures then Flickr is my visual memory I use it as an aide memoire, image storage for my blog and as a kind of photo scrapbook

    Twitter – is the new IM. Instant messaging on my iPhone and on corporate networks can be a bit haphazard. Twitter gives you the direct message capability of IM but also allows for broadcast messages and syndication of content

    Skype – whilst all the fuss is happening in the iPhone world about Facetime I am more interested in Skype. Its combination of reasonably-priced VoIP calls and free Skype calling together with robust file transfer and chat messaging has made it ideal for business communications and keeping in touch with friends in far flung places

    LinkedIn – I’ve got business out of LinkedIn, polled opinions on the best content management system for a particular purpose and received recommendations on a web hosting company in Hong Kong. LinkedIn is an invaluable business tool

    Ten Web Services I Can’t Do Without | renaissance chambara

    Lets have a look this in terms of numbers. In the space of nine years:

    • 3/10 services no longer exist in a meaningful way
    • 4/10 services I no longer use
    • 3/10 services I still use, but are just not important to me anymore

    The key lessons to take away from these are:

    • The importance of data portability. Which is one of the reasons why I am minimally invested in Facebook
    • Always be looking out for new services that serve as a plan B
    • Steady but niche beats aspirational mass services every time. Ok so services like del.icio.us had a mass expectation pushed on them by large corporates post acquisition
    • It’s easier to make a service less useful than more useful – Skype definitely had a tipping point into the second tier for me following a user experience redesign around about the time of the Microsoft acquisition

    What does my list look like now?

    • Newsblur is my RSS reader of choice. Bloglines was shut down by IAC, so I had a choice of moving to Google Reader or FastLadder. FastLadder was an English language version of their iconic Japanese RSS reader. Livedoor got wrapped up in a financial scandal. The English language service was a distraction and eventually got shut down. Thankfully, RSS readers have a standard format to export your list of sites that you want to read called OPML files. The downside is that it has become fashionable for web designers to turn off RSS feeds on websites
    • Pinboard is my social bookmark platform of choice. Yahoo! started stripping the delicious team of its developers and they eventually transitioned their personal accounts to Pinboard. That was enough of a recommendation for me
    • Duck.com is now my first string search engine. Google is bumped to second tier. The key reason for Duck.com is privacy. It’s search quality is good enough, the search engine results page has a clean design rather like Google used to. Google still has handy vertical search options like Google Scholar and Google Translate are still top class.
    • Email – my use of email hasn’t changed at all. It has been a constant in a sea of change.
    • WeTransfer – Apple’s move from iDisk as a file system on the web to more of a tight integration with the company’s productivity apps (Keynote, Numbers, Pages)
    • Flickr is still my visual memory. It’s just an awful lot more web friendly than Instagram or Pinterest. It’s longevity is remarkable given all its been through with Yahoo!
    • Messaging got a lot more fragmented. I work with friends in China so WeChat is needed, as is KakaoTalk, Messages, WhatsApp and Slack. None of which offer a perfect fit
    • Skype has been replaced by a bridging conference call number and some people that I work with use Zoom. Skype still has some uses but my use has declined
    • LinkedIn is still an important business tool. Despite constant fiddling with the format, the spam on the platform and declining candidate functionality

    Listing these web services out it makes depressing reading. Declining functionality, good products (almost) sunk by large corporate shenanigans and corporate investors. In many respects things have stood still rather than moved forward with web services. More related content here.

  • Politics of history + more things

    The Politics of History: Why Anniversaries Matter in China | Macro Polo – great reading

    Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds | The New Yorker – interesting reading material about China and the US. Read this in concert with the Macro Polo article on the politics of history

    On the Mac Pro, the G4 Cube and Their Shared Vent Design – 512 Pixels – interesting breakdown on details. I expect the difference is down to the explosion in CNC capability unleashed by the iPhone

    Why PMI is doubling down on wooing Cannes | Marketing | Campaign Asia – feels like snake oil, disappointed to see Cindy Gallop participating in this, given her role in steering the moral compass of the ad industry

    Report: Chinese spend nearly 5 hours on entertainment apps daily | TechCrunch – Chinese internet users now spend an average of 4.7 hours on their handsets a day just for entertainment purposes, according to new data (in Chinese) collected by research firm QuestMobile. The number is up from the 4.1-hour average from a year ago. By ‘entertainment’, QuestMobile is counting services like e-reading, music streaming, online karaoke, video streaming, mobile gaming, live streaming, and of course, short videos that are taking the world by storm. The total screen time could be much higher given the country now prefers taking QR code payments instead of cash, not to mention eyeball time contributed by children using smartphones to do their homework and housewives searching for the best deals on ecommerce platforms

    Why Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles | Motor Authority – really interesting from a UX perspective, I was surprised car companies hadn’t got to this conclusion faster

    100 Radical Innovation Breakthroughs for the future | European Commission – where the EU is likely to be placing big bets, a good read, better than the latest Mary Meaker analysis (PDF)

    “Six Stories of GORE-TEX Products Vol. 2”: ACRONYM | GORE-TEX Brand – interesting interview tie Errolson Hugh

    Huawei Testing Russia’s Aurora OS As Complete Android Replacement, Report Claims – this makes more sense than Huawei’s home brewed OS

    242 Year Old Birkenstock is Not Interested in Being on Fashion’s “Trendy Punch List” — The Fashion Law – Birkenstock also turned down a collaboration with Supreme, which could very well be the buzziest streetwear brand in the world, with its bouncer-flanked stores and incessantly sold-out wares. “It was never about function for them, just logos,” Klaus Baumann, Birkenstock’s chief sales officer, speaking about Supreme, which regularly draws long lines of consumers outside of its store every week on Thursday when it “drops” new products, including collaborations. “These were not product people.” Birkenstock’s management is seemingly unimpressed by such antics.  Not mincing words Baumann states, “If I put a bouncer outside our doors on Saturday and regulate letting people in, I too could have a queue outside.” – more on luxury here.

    HOW TO PISS OFF A CREATIVE – BBH – epic

  • Bullet time + more things

    Bullet Time – Logic Magazine – Bullet comments, or 弹幕 (“danmu”), are text-based user reactions superimposed onto online videos: a visual commentary track to which anyone can contribute. Started in Japan, but popularised massively in China. When a beloved character dies in a web series, a river of grieving kaomoji (╥﹏╥)—a kind of emoticon first popularized in Japan — washes over whatever happens next. The bullet time interface reminded me of the realtime information one would see in things like trading desks. Its an emotional barometer amongst your people for real time content.

    Mark Ritson: Binet and Field aren’t perfect but it doesn’t make them wrong | Marketing Week – well deserved defence of Les Binet and Peter Field by Mark Ritson. Models are never perfect

    Why Strangers Are AirDropping You Memes and Photos – The Atlantic – everything old is new again as Bluetooth sharing ‘Bluetoothing’ gets a refresh. Taylor Herring used this to share a job advert at the recent PR Week Awards

    Does the UK Benefit From Chinese Investment? – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – short answer no – it’s actually harmed by it as investment is power projection and compromises the UK’s strategic capability

    Mark Read: CMOs have become too much like chief communications officers | PR Week – A lot of CMOs have become too much chief communications officers, not chief marketing officers,” Read said. “Our job is to help to put the ‘market’ back into the word ‘marketing’. “Communications has an important role, but it needs to be “the right element” within the wider marketing mix, according to Read: “Marketing means: what markets are we in? What products do we offer? What prices do we do? How do we understand and anticipate consumers?”

    Despite Fears, Aviation’s Future Will Be More Automated | Time – so why the move towards more automation in cars such a good idea based on what we know about airliners from this article?

    The Hottest Chat App for Teens Is Google Docs – The Atlantic – context specific

    WalktheChat | WeChat Live Streaming Case Study: 48% Sales Conversion Rate! – really interesting read. China’s mix of live-streaming and e-tailing is shopping TV for the 21st century