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.

  • Dieter Rams handbag + more things

    Buy it now: the Dieter Rams handbag – DisneyRollerGirl – the Dieter Rams handbag reminds me of the kind of thing that would appeal to Chinese millennial luxury buyers. They’ve increased their luxury consumption sophistication in leaps and bounds

    Perspectives on Encryption and Surveillance – Lawfare – great set of essays on the interface of cryptography, privacy and the law

    Autonomous Vehicle Navigation in Rural Environments without Detailed Prior Maps by Ort, Paul and Rus – interesting work being done by MIT and Toyota

    Starwood Reservation Database Security Incident – name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, Starwood Preferred Guest (“SPG”) account information, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences. For some, the information also includes payment card numbers and payment card expiration dates, but the payment card numbers were encrypted using Advanced Encryption Standard encryption (AES-128). There are two components needed to decrypt the payment card numbers, and at this point, Marriott has not been able to rule out the possibility that both were taken – oh Lordy!

    Time to step away from the ‘bright, shiny things’? Towards a sustainable model of journalism innovation in an era of perpetual change | Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism – to be fair the same is true across marketing and advertising and client boards that have been seduced by the same management consultancy bullshit about disruption for far too long

    China unveils first satellite that offers free Wi-Fi to entire world | Video | SupChina – Oh really?

    South Korea Charges 11 With Selling Samsung Technology to China – Bloomberg – Samsung spent about 150 billion won over a period of six years to develop the OLED technology that is now considered highly-classified national knowledge (paywall) – US is the least of Chinese worries if they can get other countries China has been stealing stuff from to take action like Germany, France, Italy, Japan and South Korea

    Why is Huawei Out in the Cold? | China Media Project – ignore the mock surprise at Jack Ma being a communist party member and reflect on the  interesting analysis of the Chinese Communist Party’s reform and opening 40th anniversary celebration

    How Amazon Now Shapes What Our Stuff Looks Like | Gizmodo – how e-tailing is affecting FMCG packaging design

    The Next Great (Digital) Extinction | WIRED – how counterculture met digital and failed to meet its full potential

    Jane Wong explains why she uncovers hidden app features that tech giants like Facebook want to keep secret | South China Morning Post – great read, particularly her comments on WeChat

    How Cheap Labor Drives China’s A.I. Ambitions – The New York Times – manually writing rules is more like prior efforts at AI than the kind of machine learning advocated at the moment, but that doesn’t mean that the Chinese won’t have their successes

    Luxury goods group Kering steps up digital strategy with new Apple deals – Reuters – interesting apparent role for Apple in this

    In China’s hinterland, car market growth engine sputters – Reuters – a mix of consumer credit squeeze, move out of legacy industries, healthcare costs and inflation affecting car buyers in lower tier cities

  • Naomi Wu & things from last week

    Naomi Wu on the nascent open source culture developing in China. It isn’t just about China taking anymore but contributing. Ironically, China’s large corporates have now tried to start building intellectual property as a weapon cough, cough Huawei.

    Huawei historically leached off the open source community for software and spent a good deal of time justifying why they didn’t contribute to the open source software projects that they so heavily used. It also had a reputation of intellectual property theft, that was allowed to happen unchecked. Naomi Wu, based in Shenzhen, has been doing a lot of work to educate her peers on open source. More related content here.

    Ari Saal Forman’s Menthol 10s took a swipe at corporate culture and big tobacco. Some background for you. Menthol cigarettes were the only flavoured tobacco products allowed in the US. The government banned other flavours. Menthol cigarettes were disproportionately popular with American people of colour.

    Nike didn’t see the social purpose in the message behind the design. In this interview with Vice, Ari Saal Forman tells

    The ambiguous nature of the male host business in Japan is highlighted in this interview. Hosts can be extremely well paid and the roles are very competitive.

    The needs of their clients are surprisingly modest. The client interview section is insane, an 18 year old having $100,000 to spend on drinks in a nightclub – for some people the bubble economy years of late 1980s Japan has never gone away.

    A people’s history of computing in the US. The presenter talks about the early experiences of personal computing and programming languages like BASIC. It is interesting hearing a programmer talk about their ambiguous relationship with BASIC when they went into a professional career of programming.

    It’s the time of the year when 2019 consumer trends are trotted out.  JWT(WundermanThompson) have 100 trends. Trendwatching thankfully have just five.

  • Nokia N950

    Nokia N950 origins

    The Nokia N950 was designed at a weird time. Nokia’s position as the premier smartphone maker was under siege from Android and iPhone after seeing off the Palm OS and numerous iterations of Windows Phone. Nokia had missed the boat on devices with capacitive touch displays. It was using a smartphone operating system that was starting to show its age, a bit like PalmOS did previously. Like Palm, Nokia wasted far too much time coming up with its next generation OS, which gave Google and Apple the opportunity gap that they needed.

    Part of the problem was that Nokia was wrong for the right reasons:

    • Different consumers do need different types of phones, which is why HMD have managed to resurrect modern versions of classic Nokia feature phone designs
    • Phones are better if they can be operated one-handed. Whereas Google and Apple busied themselves designing computers that happened to be phones
    • Phones needed to be made down to a cost. So the handsets were different on the outside but had common ‘guts’, which meant that premium products could  be underpowered

    Nokia had their own answer to Android and iOS in MeeGo which grew out of work that Intel and Nokia had separately done on mobile Linux. Nokia was partnering with Intel partly because it believed that Intel was the future of mobile.

    The Nokia N950 was a development handset showcasing this operating system in action. It was similar and related to the N9.

    The N9 was released in a limited amount of markets were it was successful. However the N9 success story was overshadowed by the larger business problems Nokia faced in its transition from Symbian and feature phones to Windows Phone.

    There were an estimated 5,000 Nokia N950 handsets made in total, which went to the Nokia global developer community. Technically there are loaned devices rather than given to developers. They occasionally appear on eBay going for 1,000GBP+

    Up close with the Nokia N950

    At first glance the Nokia N950 looked like a chimera of the N9 and the N8 with a slide out keyboard riffing on the Communicator form factor that Nokia pioneered.

    It makes sense to list the differences with the N9 first of all:

    • The Nokia N950 had a TFT LCD screen roughly the same size as a Nokia E90 Communicator, but with a higher resolution. The N9 had an AMOLED screen which is slightly smaller and has a slightly higher resolution
    • The N9 was made from the same machined polycarbonate body that then made its appearance on Nokia Lumia models. The Nokia N950 has a case made from a mix of machined and stamped aluminium parts and came only in black (though I have seen pictures of un-anodised devices as well. These were probably pre-production prototypes)
    • They had different camera modules that performed broadly the same
    • The Nokia N950 had a pop under keyboard similar to  the N8 and E7. More on that a bit later on
    • The Nokia N950 had 8.5GB of usable storage compared to up to 64GB of memory in the N9
    • The N9 has a slightly larger battery than the N950, but the difference wouldn’t have been noticeable due to the difference in screen technology

    What you end up with is a phone that still looks modern (partly due to its anodised black case making the screen edge harder to spot.

    Nokia N950

    The device is slow compared to modern devices but is speedy for its time. The device flipped from landscape to portrait mode, but this wasn’t perfectly implemented.

    Nokia N950

    It had a pop under keyboard which allows the device to have a really shallow design in comparison to Communicator devices. However it does leave the screen exposed to damage. The past decade of Gorilla Glass™ screens on iPhones and Android handsets proves that the Corning wonder material is not invulnerable.

    Nokia N950

    The problem with the design means that you end up with a shallow area for the keyboard. The Nokia N950 like the E7 and N8 don’t have as full a featured keyboard as the Communicator devices.

    10 - E90 keyboard

    Here’s a keyboard from the E90 by comparison. When you were using the Nokia N950 you end up with a virtual keyboard on the screen  providing the tab,  ctrl, esc and alt keys, as well as very commonly used symbols.  Which begs the question of how useful the keyboard would really be for developers?

    Compared to the modern iPhone, the N950 meets the goal of a mobile computing device much better. You can write longer emails and documents on the keyboard than the iPhone. The camera is adequate for most people’s needs and it shows in some respects how little the smartphone concept has moved on over the past seven years.

    Could the Nokia N950 been the future?

    Historically Nokia’s Symbian phones had been built on TI’s OMAP processors; but these didn’t have a roadmap for 4G wireless. Nokia had two choices bet on Qualcomm or Intel. Qualcomm had come out on top in IP related disputes, which probably made Intel seem more attractive. Intel was also championing WiMax as a 4G standard.

    WiMax had limited adoption at best, Nokia was on the wrong side of networking standards and eventually was forced to use Qualcomm processors in Windows Phone reference designs.

    `Nokia could have gone to Snapdragon processors but its joint relationship with Intel on the software side of things would have been tainted. There is also no guarantee that Qualcomm would have been a helpful partner given the history between the two companies and that both Android and iOS devices used Qualcomm products.

    Secondly, Nokia bet all the marketing budget on the Lumia device launch which left nothing for the MeeGo devices.

    Finally, Nokia would not have been able to get out of the legal contract that they had with Microsoft. The only way MeeGo would have stood a chance is if the Nokia board had not approved Stephen Elop’s proposal to go with Windows, rival schemes to go with Android and bet on the home team.

    • At the time the internal Nokia option would have looked high risk. Board members would have been familiar with historic project problems on Meamo and then MeeGo
    • Secondly Nokia had a history of buying in new generation operating systems. It licensed GEOS  for the Nokia Communicator 9000 and 9110. It licensed and then bought into Psion’s OS business unit, which became Symbian
    • Nokia’s feature phones ran on homegrown technology built on Intelligent System Architecture (ISA), also called the Nokia Operating System (NOS)
    More information

    TIMELINE: Qualcomm vs Nokia patents battle | Reuters
    Qualcomm loses GSM patent fight with Nokia in German court | Ars Technica
    Why Qualcomm Folded to Nokia | Bloomberg BusinessWeek (paywall)
    The ‘I Wish I Had Known This’ List about 101 Things Wrong With Windows Phone Smartphones Like Nokia Lumia | Communities Dominate Brands
    How Many Lumia Sales? As Nokia (and Microsoft) ashamed to reveal number, lets count – and compare to N9 MeeGo sales | Communities Dominate Brands
    Nokia N8 review | GSMArena

  • Walter Cronkite & things from last week

    US newsreader Walter Cronkite narrates a 1967 programme on what the future held in the 21st century. The soothing voice of Walter Cronkite makes the future look less scary

    An Unknown Enemy is a Mexican series on Amazon Prime that follows the rise of Fernando Barrientos, Head of the National Security Directorate, Mexico’s Secret Police in the late 1960s

    Panasonic helps workers create their own head space with new crowdfunded device | The Japan Times – the design looks hokey, but it mirrors the transformation of offices with hot desking and always on headphone culture to try and provide distance. More design related content here.

    The People’s Republic of Desire documents China’s online streaming culture that has developed over the past few years. The film financed by the Ford Foundation provides an inside view of the direction interaction between personalities and their audience. Young girls become online personalities funded directly by besotted fans. More interaction happens online than in real life. Of course, all this happens under the ever-seeing eye of the Chinese government.

    https://youtu.be/auHtqCJV4Rw

    Super-excited by an album of Smith & Mighty’s unreleased back catalogue from 1988 – 1994 being released this week. It is available via digital channels, double vinyl album and on compact disc. While the tracks were unreleased, there is no filler tracks in the collection, the quality is all top notch. Here is a taster.

    Have a great weekend.

  • The buzz of an emergent community

    I was chatting with a friend who was evangelic in their description of the emergent community on the AltSpace VR (virtual reality) social network They had met great friends, the kind of meaningful interactions that seldom occurs on your Facebook wall now.

    But was this about the power of VR? My take was that it is a minor factor at best. VR acted as a filter, it brought similar likeminded early adopters together. In many respects this mirrored other technology filters: the early days of dial up bulletin board services (particularly in the US with free local calls on the Bell network carriers),  AOL and CompuServe chat rooms or the Usenet.

    Filipino community gathering under the HSBC building

    The power of connecting likeminded people can be a transformative experience in the minds of participants.

    If I think back before my time on the internet, my friend’s experience in the emergent community of AltSpace sounded like the people I met at the Hacienda. It sounded like the experience of many of the regulars at acid house club Shoom – which was hosted by Danny Rampling out of a small gym in South London.

    These experiences are once lived, often never recaptured experiences rather like being on a school or college sports team. They only exist for a fleeting moment in time.

    It was like being an early member on Flickr, or my friend Ian’s experience on CompuServe chat rooms (where he met his future wife).

    So what makes these communities special?

    • Likeminded people who are likely to share a certain amount of norms and have common grounds to be there
    • A relatively small number of people. This number becomes inexact. In a good nightclub it would be a certain amount of exclusivity because not everyone knew it was there, rather than a strict door policy. The strict door policy is usually a remedial item done once the norms try and break down
    • Agreement to a set of common behaviours, for many years a common etiquette held sway on networks like Flickr. Facebook doesn’t have this except in tightly managed private groups

    So what happens to these communities?

    • A number soldier on, particularly around passion points such as Harry Potter books / films / games
    • A small minority (cough, cough) Facebook for example transcend their community and turn into a utility with pockets of interest hidden in secret
    • Things move on. Think about restaurants or nightclubs that are now sites of investment properties in London or Manchester

    About the photo: I took this on an early trip to Hong Kong. Every Sunday the Filipino and Indonesian communities would gather in different parts of the city to see friends, eat, sing, dance and trade items. This picture is of Filipinos,  taken in the private public space under the HSBC building in the Central district. Some years later this was a site for the Occupy Central protesters.