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.

  • Chinese space program & things that caught my eye this week

    This week saw a huge leap forward for Chinese space exploration and the Chinese space program. China landed a space ship on the far side of the moon and is currently exploring it. The Chang’e 4 space ship is named after a Chinese goddess who reputedly lives on the moon. It carried the Jade Rabbit 2 rover. Chang’e was kept company on the moon by her pet jade rabbit.

    This is a huge achievement. It has been fifty years this August since Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. NASA has plans for its Saturn rockets, but the actual knowledge to build that size of rocket is being relearned through its SLS programme. NASA engineers now marvel how 1960s era welders managed to manually create perfect long welds in the rocket motors with lost craftsmanship.

    Secondly there is the context of the Chang’e project. China builds programmes like the Chinese space program by thinking in terms of decades. It will be doing invaluable research and the space programme may spur Chinese innovation just like what happened in the US during the 1950s and 60s. You couldn’t have had Silicon Valley or many household goods without space programme knowhow. The Chinese would be much more open to harvesting resources from the moon and beyond. In the same way that the Apollo programme was a part of the cold war, Chang’e is part of a wider political context. Premier Xi is focused on China’s rejuvenation that includes

    • Ethnic based national(ist) pride. China’s Han ethnicity makes up over 90 per cent of the population. The Chinese government recognises 50 different ethnicities in the country
    • Pride in Chinese culture and elimination of inferior western culture in China
    • Technological supremacy
    • Social progress
    • Supremacy in hard and soft power

    So it was with a certain amount of irony that the Chinese space program published a post on Weibo quoting Pink Floyd’s Breathe from Dark Side of The Moon album.

    China's space program Weibo account celebrates Chang'e 4 and Jade Rabbit 2 by quoting Pink Floyd

    Pepsi tried to tap into the space age excitement with its early entry into the pantheon of this years adverts celebrating Chinese New Year. This is a seven minute long film that’s part of an integrated marketing campaign around the theme of ‘Bring Happiness Home: Reach for the Stars’

    Talking of Chinese New Year adverts, Singtel is another one who is rolling out their campaign a bit earlier than most other brands this year. It follows on from last years advert that focused on the family reunion dinner. You can see the best of last year’s Chinese New Year adverts here

    This afternoon I have been listening to the this glorious homage to 1980s R&B. Lizzo’s Juice is a great pastiche of TV tropes together with a great song. I discovered it via Matt Muir’s Web Curios. Whilst you’re listening to the song go over and sign up for his weekly newsletter right now. (Don’t worry I’ll here until you come back).

    This week has been CES in Las Vegas, which explains why the magazine type stories in news programmes have been about gizmos or robots. I found the show pretty disappointing this year. The biggest news was more of a business story. Apple has managed to get iTunes movie and TV series store on Samsung TVs. In addition several brands signed up to support Apple’s Air Play standard for video and HomeKit standard for your internet of things. Quite what all this means for Apple TV sales is another thing. What I found far more interesting was exploring the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame – IEEE Spectrum. Going through it is instructive. Zojirushi’s Micom Electric Rice Cooker from 1983 brought early artificial intelligence into the home with its use of fuzzy logic to cook rice to perfection. Fuzzy logic then went into image stabilisation and auto focus on cameras and camcorders. Fuzzy logic sold on the benefits and concealed the technology from western consumers. Machine learning techniques are likely to become common in a similar way rather than the current hype. I still lust after the Wadia Digital 170i Transport. 46 years after launching the Technics SL-1200 turntable, they rolled out the SL-1200 Mk VII. This is particularly interesting as they originally stopped production a decade ago and scrapped the tooling. At the time, there wasn’t considered to be enough interest to keep production going in Osaka.

  • Douyin + more things

    Are Douyin and TikTok the Same? | What’s on Weibo – China’s Netcasting Services Association (中国网络视听节目服务协会), an association directly managed by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, issued new regulations that online short video platforms in China should adhere to. One of the new guidelines requires all online video service providers to carefully examine content before it is published. Tech China reports that the new stipulations require that all online video content, from titles to comments and even the use of emoticons, has to be in accordance with regulations, which prohibit any content that is ‘vulgar,’ is offending to the Chinese political system, puts revolutionary leaders in a negative light, or undermines social stability in any way – interesting dive into the differences between TikTok and Douyin which seem to run off separate systems. We also see some crossovers, for instance similar ad formats on both Douyin and TikTok. Another area of connectivity is the similar level of censorship on TikTok that is rolled out on Douyin. This is creepy, but makes both Douyin and TikTok brand safe, which is particularly attractive to mainstream advertisers. The big question for me is whether TikTok provides direct access to its data to the Chinese government like Douyin would be obliged to do. More related content here.

    Snap Business | Apoposphere – how the apps you use impact your daily life and emotions – usual caveat emptor considerations apply. Sample size is 1,005. Research is sponsored by Snap

    Facebook culture described as ‘cult-like’, review process blamed | CNBC – can’t work out if there is a lot of employee adulting required or if the culture is reminiscent of peak Microsoft circa 1995

    Major WeChat trends brands can’t ignore in 2019 | Digital | Campaign Asia – WeChat and global traveller connection particularly important

    Major WeChat trends brands can’t ignore in 2019 | Digital | Campaign Asia – WeChat and global traveller connection particularly important

    The perfect plan for the couch potato | Trendwatching – Bilibili and Ele.me partner to provide hybrid content streaming and free food delivery

    Brands should give up control to reach Gen Z | Creativepool – this says more about how marketing hasn’t changed over the past 15 years than gen-Z. This tells me that brands and agencies haven’t been listening. It also tells me that I can recycle decade old platitudes and essays with a Ctrl+F gen-Y and Ctrl+V gen-Z

    Samsung’s Supreme Copyright Spat | The Daily | Gartner L2 – Chinese consumers weren’t fooled by the “Supreme” partnership, eviscerating Samsung on social media following the launch. Its Greater China digital marketing manager responded to the uproar by posting on his Weibo account that the decision to work with Supreme Italia was made because it had obtained the authorization to use the brand in China. Samsung later backtracked as he deleted the post and Samsung’s official Weibo account announced it was “re-evaluating” the partnership – gosh I can feel the heat from the burn on this from half way around the world…

    Apple’s China Problem : 12 Reasons – Counterpoint Research – covers more of the points that I would have hit

    Move over, millennials and Gen Z – here comes Generation Alpha | Society | The Guardian – is defining generations useful? “You have to be careful about it,” says Karen Rowlingson, professor of social policy at the University of Birmingham. “But we shouldn’t ignore generational divides. Younger people are, on average, facing many more challenges. And, certainly, inequalities within that generation [millennials] are greater.”

    Apple is putting iTunes on Samsung TVs – The Verge – makes you wonder about the future of the Apple TV?

    Should we think of Big Tech as Big Brother? | Financial Times – That also used to be the view of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google’s founders, who presented a paper in 1998 highlighting the perils of advertising. “We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market,” they wrote.

    When Ad Breaks Get Weird: Branded Content in Chinese TV Dramas Is Ruining It For the Viewers | What’s on Weibo 

    Internet rightists’ strategy of provocation gaining traction in Japan | The Japan Times – Japan starts to see western style internet wars with personal attacks (paywall)

    Chinese coffee startup Luckin: We won’t be the next ofo | HEJ Insight – interesting read that reminded me a lot of the reporting on the original dot com boom in the UK and US

    Amazon says 100m Alexa devices sold – usage figures remain a mystery | The Drum – and in the second part of the headline is the rub

    Masayoshi Son wants Arm’s blueprints to power all tech – Armed with a crystal ball | The Economist – I have a lot of respect for Son-san but this reads like bubble-level BS. There are so many variables such as China 2025 that make this inadvisable. Secondly its not like ARM is the only micro-computer core design that’s low power and available. Thirdly, we’ve hit peak smartphone, other devices won’t offer the same business opportunity

    Opinion | Is This the End of the Age of Apple? – The New York Times – This is a big issue not only for Apple but also for all of tech. There is not a major trend that you can grab onto right now that will carry everyone forward. The last cool set of companies — Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest and, yes, Tinder — were created many years ago, and I cannot think of another group that is even close to as promising

    Understanding the Emerging Era of International Competition: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives | RAND – great read

    Startup founders say age bias is rampant in tech by age 36 – There’s a scourge in tech that apparently runs even deeper than sexism or racism: ageism. In a wide-ranging survey of US startup founders polled by venture-capital firm First Round Capital, 37% said age is the strongest investor bias against founders, while 28% cited gender and 26% cited race.

    The liberating thrill of a slender book | Quartz – Let’s keep this short. We’re busy. We want to read but don’t have time for deep dives, and that applies to books as well as articles

    China says its navy is taking the lead in game-changing electromagnetic railguns – Chinese warships will soon be equipped with electromagnetic railguns that fire projectiles with “incredibly destructive velocity,” and that the underlying technology was based on “fully independent intellectual property,” rather than designs copied from other nations.

    Burberry Zhao Wei and Zhou Dongyu CNY Campaign | HYPEBAE which ended up to be a bit of a mess: Why Burberry’s Chinese New Year campaign doesn’t quite hit the spot | The Drum 

  • Designing the Internet

    David D Clark was involved in the designing the internet as it moved into the commercial sphere. He rose to prominence in the 1980s through to the mid-1990s. In the talk at Google’s Mountain View campus he goes over much of the process. The things he says about network economics and security is particularly interesting.

    Outtakes

    In the 1970s it was about getting the protocols right, they needed to debug both the code and the specification that went alongside.

    1980s made hierarchies to make things scale as everything got bigger.

    1990s brought in the commercial internet, the specific goal of specifications was to shape industry structure. Protocol boundaries define industry structures.

    Quality of service development was compromised because it didn’t work economically for network providers. Specifically by concern about internet telephony. Standards adaptation was affected the internet service providers efforts to get value out of applications that run over the top (like Google).

    His discussions on designing the internet with politicians are particularly intriguing. There are still unanswered questions about societal and political accountability. There is a space for anonymous actions and an accountable internet would fall back to sovereign states including authoritarian regimes.

    Availability as well as integrity and cryptography (disclosure control) are important for security. The internet is insecure by design. Conscious decisions were taken to put risky actions into the internet. This gave us Flash, Acrobat and the Chrome browser.

    Embedding risky actions to provide attractive features for users, versus ensuring that these are only between people who you know. Trustworthiness is key.

    Protocol features affect industry power, adding more features may give power to the wrong people. The prime example of this is the work that the Chinese government have been doing with Huawei to try and define real ID, censorship and cyber sovereignty into next generation standards. More related content here.

  • ICE-ing

    ICE-ing – a method of protest using vehicles with internal combustible engines

    Sometimes writing posts are a matter of serendipity. I was out walking in Stepney Green and came across a series of electric vehicle charging points. I hadn’t paid any attention to them before.

    Right about the time that I noticed them; I saw that the parking bays in front of the charging points were all taken up by petrol or diesel engined vehicles. This being London were parking spaces tend to be a premium, I took a picture of the dissonant scene and quickly moved on.

    Untitled

    I came in and then read a piece of how truck owners in the US were trolling Tesla supercharging points. Car culture is still huge and overwhelmingly celebrating petrol engined vehicles. But in the US there is a definite sub-text to the protests; one of class war. Metropolitan elite Democrats versus middle America truck-owning Republicans hence ice-ing.

    I revisited the photo that I took earlier in Stepney Green. All the vehicles in the photo were mid-range Mercedes cars with the exception of the Nissan pick-up truck. What would the odds have been of a super-mini in the row of parked vehicles if this was just about parking spaces? Was it British ice-ing

    It didn’t seem organised; but more of an organic system. Some first ‘person like me’ committed the transgressive act of parking in a charging bay. This then gave ‘permission’ for others to do it as well and the spaces filled up.

    There are a number of reasons for a consumer to not want to purchase an electric car when looking for a vehicle:

    • Cost
    • Energy density / range
    • Speed of recharging
    • Charging point network
    • Vehicle choice

    A bigger and harder to crack issue for vehicle manufacturers is one of values. Electric cars don’t have a culture behind them. They may have good road performance but they are the wholemeal bread of the automotive world. Something you should so, rather than something you are passionate about driving. Internal combustion engines won’t go quietly into the night.

    BMW going into formula E and launching the i8 using the design language from the M1 was a nod towards making electric sexy. But on its own its like spitting in a hurricane. One Japanese vehicle manufacturer knew how to make electric (and petrol) vehicles exciting through

    • Customisation
    • Tinkering
    • Community
    • Noise
    • Spectacle

    Unfortunately for the automotive industry that vehicle manufacturer is Tamiya. Tamiya is a Shizuoka based manufacturer of remote control cars for hobbyists.

    Maybe the answer isn’t about marketing but about engineering?

    You can change the fuel without changing the excitement, noise or spectacle.

    Hydrogen powered combustion engines offer similar energy density and performance to petrol cars, but with water as the waste product rather than carbon monoxide. Battery technology currently relies on a lithium and most of the world’s supply comes out of a high desert in Chile – we’ve replaced one finite resource (oil) with another (lithium and rare earth metals).

    Toyota is already experimenting with hydrogen in Japan. BMW have done pilot programmes in the past and hydrogen as been trialled in heavy goods vehicles.

    More consumer behaviour related posts here.

  • Tencent annual staff meeting + more

    Notes From Tencent Annual Staff Meeting – China Channel – some interesting insights on how they are looking at the online world

    Key takeouts from the Tencent Annual Staff Meeting:

    • They made a big issue of treating customers honestly, which made me think that might not be in the culture up to now. There was also a call to focus on users rather than competitors
    • More on user focus – WeChat is a tool, not a platform. Only tools are the most friendly and meaningful to users. WeChat has been trying to do one thing, to treat every user as a friend
    • They wanted mini games become a platform for ordinary people to show their creativity. If this goal is not achieved, then they were happy if the mini games on the platform died
    • A recognition of the cognitive dissonance on social platforms where people show their best lives on Douyin and the unhealthy nature of it
    • Tencent launched the most stringent youth anti-addiction system in history. This is a long-term initiative that is very beneficial to the entire industry and a responsibility we must assume as an industry leader

    2018 Year in Review – Pornhub Insights – I wish that I’d this quality of data when I was cranking out press releases for Yahoo! Search. The review is as much about cultural change as it is about trends in smut. More on adult entertainment industry related content here.

    The Last Independent Mobile OS – Motherboard – interesting write-up on Sailfish and yet more reasons why you shouldn’t trust Google at all

    Pioneer’s woes echo those of earlier Japanese audio legends – Nikkei Asian Review – for someone like myself this is heartbreaking

    1967 Mustang meets Tesla: Aviar Motors all-electric muscle car – Electrek – this fits in with Aston Martin’s announcement last week about retro fitting vintage cars with electric automation

    Interesting video that’s as much an illustration of collective delusion that drives VC thinking in a very wasteful manner and where they are likely to be putting their focus moving forwards

    Nobel economist Paul Romer