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.

  • Is Brexit bad for Europe + more

    Judy Asks: Is Brexit Bad for Europe? – Carnegie Europe – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – interesting take on Brexit from a US perspective. Is Brexit bad for Europe focuses on the EUs role on the world stage including regional and global security. According to my reading of Is Brexit bad for Europe there looks to be opportunities to grow in defence research and development and upgrade the economic performance of the EUs smaller nations.

    5G Deployment State of Play in Europe, USA and Asia | European Parliament ITRE Committee – interesting snapshot on 5G adoption across the EU (PDF)

    Microsoft worked with Chinese military university on artificial intelligence | Financial Times – US worried about dual use of the technology (paywall)

    Toyota will put Tundra, Tacoma trucks on a single platform, report says – Roadshow – interesting that Toyota is embracing the Volkswagen Group approach to vehicle engineering. I didn’t realise that Toyota no longer sells the Hilux in the US, apparently its because it isn’t big enough

    Panda TV’s demise makes way for gaming giant Tencent to dominate live streaming too | SCMP – China’s Twitch goes under, leaving Tencent to dominate live streaming too. This reinforces the oligarchy running China’s online sector from financial services and e-tailing to gaming and media

    DJ Craze: “Sync is your friend… embrace technology” – News – Mixmag – wow, controversial. This is the reformation of the DJ world. The problem with these things is that once people know the button is there new DJs will skip the valuable learning process of beat mixing

    Facebook ‘morally bankrupt pathological liars’, says NZ privacy commissioner – AdNews – 5 I’s pattern starting to emerge on Facebook. You take this stance with the UK’s proposal to treat social networks as publishers and Australia’s daft views on crypto. There are lots of reasons to criticise Facebook, but this isn’t one of them. Instead its cynical pandering to the populist political peanut gallery. More related content here.

  • Automata Eve launch

    Automata Eve launched the other week and I got to go along to their headquarters just off the Pentonville Road to find out more.

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    Automata Eve first impressions

    At £5,000, the Automata Eve sits at a weird place in robot manufacture. It’s an expensive hobby device or a lightweight industrial product. Automata freely admitted that they sit somewhere between the £1,500 hobbyist kits and starter industrial models that are £20,000+ excluding arm tools, programmable control units and everything else required.

    Automata Eve human friendly product design reminded me a bit of early Apple Macs. Their very product design sophistication made them look like ‘toys’ in the eyes of IT departments. Automata’s Eve is an equally polished appliance as robot and it might take a bit more effort to have it taken seriously in light industrial roles.

    Eve even has a lopsided Picasso-esque face with two buttons on the top of the arm in a vertical manner.

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    Maybe it needs a different colour palette of heavy plant yellow or yellow and black diagonal stripes better telegraph its industrial credentials.

    The shadow of Brexit

    Brexit afflicted sectors such as food preparation seem to be some of the people who have started to explore using Automata and rivals already. The companies realise that it will hard to get further workers from the likes of Stoke on Trent or Sunderland working on sandwich production lines. Robots are part of their plans to replace labour who decide to leave the UK. Automata assemble their robots in the UK, but their supply chain partners are half way around the world in Asia.

    Pain is the mother of invention

    The founders story reminded me a lot of the way that machine learning projects have historically been sold into clients by creative, digital and advertising agencies.

    They used to work for Zaha Hadid Architects and had used algorithmic design. This gave Hadid’s work abstract yet organic lines. So when they were looking to use a series of interlocking panels, they expected that these could be mass-made and bent by robotics.

    A bit like strategy and client services teams in agencies they over-estimated the capability of technology; in their case industrial robotics.

    That plan didn’t go too well. Which got them interested in why there weren’t light industrial robotics. A good number of years later and the Automata Eve was born.

    Industry robotics industry structure

    What really surprised me was how industrial robots essentially use the same components and innovation tends to happen in the software instead. For instance industrial robots use a compact way of strain wave gearing.

    Only a few companies make the components. This means that the industry is very horizontally structured like the PC or smartphone industries relationship between processor and software manufacturers.

    Robots are already accurate enough to get rid of workers who don’t care

    One of the case studies used in the presentation was about an industrial electronics company who replaced a human work station that did some pretty basic soldering.

    For reasons that one could assume to be a lack of work ethic. By contrast Foxconn, seems to have failed in its efforts of using robots for smartphone assembly. The reason is that they require a high degree of dexterity, rather like a watch maker. Robots still struggle with very accurate placement, but a lot of low volume manufacturing tasks don’t necessarily need the same level of accuracy.

  • UN Huawei + more things

    UN Huawei must be given equal opportunity to bid for 5G business | total telecom – Houlin Zhao, secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union, told reporters from Reuters that 5G security remained of paramount importance but that there was no evidence to suggest that the use of Huawei’s network equipment should be restricted – the hasn’t read the UK government report on Huawei security flaws – the coincidence that Mr Zhao is Chinese is overlooked in the article. This also ignores issues around Huawei software engineering across its product range of network equipment with extensive backdoors built in that Huawei refuses to remove. The UN Huawei statement highlights the declining trust in UN bodies that have undergone state capture by China. More related content here.

    Apple’s Computer Vision Team is working on using Depth-based Touch Detection for Games & Virtual Keyboards – Patently Apple – depth based touch detection is important beyond the Minority Report style virtual keyboard interface. It could allow Apple engineers to design completely new ways of processing locative and contextual information mapped on the real world. It also means that we’re likely to be doing embarrassing gestures in the future. We will be closer to the idea of a web-of-no-web where the boundaries between the real world and the digital world are blurred and in some cases merged.

    Burger King under fire for ‘racist’ Vietnamese chopsticks ad | The Drum – really surprised Burger King made this mistake so close after the Dolce & Gabbana China debacle. One key consideration is that Yum Brands China that owns Burger King and KFC in China is a completely separate business. So Burger King might not be a truly global learning organisation. This happened in one of Burger King’s smallest markets – New Zealand is which is probably why it managed to sail under the radar of global brand vetting until it was too late.

  • China is the big winner + more things

    China is the big winner from Europe’s Brexit chaos – which is probably why the UK will get a shitty deal in phase II. China is the big winner because:

    • It ensures its inbound investment into the UK becomes more important. China can have more influence and spend less money proportionally than they had to do before
    • It weakens the EU a bit, in particular amplifying the power of just two partners in the bloc: France and Germany. It means that the northern bloc including the Netherlands has less of a voice in the union creating opportunity for division
    • European power projection is reduced. As is European soft power
    • China is the big winner, but Russia also has similar benefits on a smaller scale

    More on Brexit here.

    McDonalds acquires Israeli company Dynamic Yield | Silicon Angle – really interesting purchase by McDonalds

    Naspers to Separate Tencent Stake, Web Assets in Dutch Listing – Bloomberg – this is just the kind of listing one would have expected in London

    Michael Avenatti charged for attempted extortion of Nike – Business Insider – interesting how a celebrity level lawyer is on the end of this case

    The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2019 | Fast Company – interesting how APAC companies are at the very top

    LOEWE on Instagram: “When @danielnorris18 is not playing baseball, he loves to climb into his van and hit the open road. Wearing the new #EYELOEWENATURE…” – interesting where Loewe is going with this campaign, crossing the lines between sports marketing, streetwear and luxury

    Materials science is helping to transform China into a high-tech economy – technique-wise very similar to the west. Back over 20 years ago we weren’t using brute force in the labs I worked in but computer-assisted formulations. You did some trials, put the results in. Put in the desired results and then the computer worked to bring you towards an optional formulation using fourier analysis

    Pinterest’s IPO filing, annotated – Digiday – nicely put together if no suprises, worthwhile as a reference / 101

  • Video conferencing + more things

    Holographic-like video conferencing: a killer app for AR? | eeNews Europe – really??? I know the IBM had attempted video conferencing in Second Life, back when that was the metaverse du jour. It still wouldn’t solve a lot of the issues with virtual conferencing a la Zoom or Skype for Business. And then there would be a battery of security issues that continue to plague video conferencing. Finally there is the issue of computer mediated communication exhaustion. There is already issues with normal video conferencing software usage, let alone something like augmented reality.

    Apple’s new iPads cling to old Apple Pencil | The Verge – this looks like a potential mess. Why do the styli need to have technology in them? How long is a styli supposed to last for? Are new styli backwards compatiable with older styli? Its like the move from the 50 pin iPod connector move to lightning connectors on steroids.

    WSJ City – Feds scrutinise development and FAA approval process – interesting how they have gone in this direction focusing on the FAA approval process. I am surprised at the organisation capture that Boeing managed to make happen. It might be a mix of corruption and and incompetence. Dinging the FAA approval process could damage future US aircraft sales and trust in US certifications in general. It would be a boon for Chinese aspirations in the global aircraft market outside the US and EU

    Weber Shandwick’s UK Consumer Lead Quits – it’s interesting that she’s going without a plan. Weber Shandwick don’t seem to be too worried about contacts walking out the door.

    Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures | OneZero – pretty standard. BT were doing this back in the 1970s at their research facility in Ipswich. People like MIT Media Lab have done similar things as well