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.
Mark Anderson of the Strategic News Service; a George Gilderesque subscription newsletter, the likes of which were very popular in the mid to late 1990s. The Strategic News Service process is an interesting ‘anti algorithmic’ analysis in action. A counter point to the world that Google now represents, I don’t buy all that Anderson and the Strategic News Service says, but this is very interesting to watch.
The synthetic voice of synthetic intelligence should sound synthetic. Successful spoofing of any kind destroys trust. When trust is gone, what remains becomes vicious fast.
— Stewart Brand via Simon Willison. It seemed very appropriate when considering the Google Duplex demonstrations from the other week.
Singapore’s utopian clean looking city and high quality Japanese animation are a marriage made in heaven. Makoto Shinkai directed this for the forthcoming Singapore Thomson East Coast Line on behalf of Japanese construction giant Taisei Corporation. More Japan related content here.
This would usually be the part where I would talk about how I am looking forward to Deadpool. But I won’t. I wanted to marvel at the collective hullucination of Deadpool marketing. Deadpool marketing isn’t trying to get you to go and see the film, but instead brings elements of the film to you. Once you are properly tuned in, it then makes perfect sense to see the film. The problem is that there are so many fragments from DVD rewraps to teasers and TV appearances that it would be impossible to capture or choose a favourite.
Instead I am going to share a video of the Korean show King of Masked Singer, where Ryan Reynolds preformed Tomorrow from the musical Annie in a unicorn mask.
Fans in show panel and the audience lost their shit
The debate over privacy on Facebook got me thinking about the internet we envisaged. Reading media commentary on Tim Cook’s recent address at Duke University prodded me into action.
What do I mean by we? I mean the people who:
Wrote about the internet from the mid-1990s onwards
Developed services during web 1.0 and web 2.0 times
I’ve played my own small part in it.
At the time there was a confluence of innovation. Telecoms deregulation and the move to digital had reduced the cost of data and voice calls. Cable and satellite television was starting to change how we viewed the world. CNN led the way in bringing the news into homes. For many at the time interactive TV seemed like the future of media.
Max Headroom
Starship Troopers
The Running Man
Second generation cellular democratised mobile phone ownership. The internet was becoming a useful consumer service. My first email address was a number@site.corning.com format email address back in 1994. I used it for work, apart from an unintended spam email sent to colleagues to offload some vouchers I’d been given.
My college email later that year was on a similar format of address; on a different domain. I ended up using my pager more than my email to stay in touch with other students. Although all students had access to the internet at college, the take-up was still very low. At college I signed up for a Yahoo! web email. I had realised that an address post-University would be useful. Yahoo! was were I saw my first online ads. They reminded me of garish versions of classified ads in newspapers.
After I left college I used to go to Liverpool at least once a week to go to an internet cafe just off James Street and check my email account, with a piece of cake and a cup of coffee. I introduced my friend Andy to the internet (mostly email), since we used to meet up there and then go browsing records, clothes, hi-fi, studio equipment, event flyers and books at the likes of HMV, the Bluecoat Chambers, Quiggins, The Palace and Probe Records.
I found out that I had my first agency job down in London when I was called on my cell phone whilst driving around to Andy’s house to catch up after a week at work.
The internet was as much as an idea as anything else and the future of us netizens came alive for me in the pages of Wired and Byte. Both were American magazines. Byte was a magazine that delved deeper into technology than Ars Technica or Anandtech. Wired probed the outer limits of technology, culture and design. At the time each issue was a work of art. They pushed typography and graphic design to the limits. Neon and metallic inks, discordant fonts and an early attempt at offline to online integration. It seemed to be the perfect accompanyment to the cyberpunk science fiction I had been reading. The future was bright: literally.
Hacking didn’t have consumers as victims but was the province of large (usually bad) mega corps.
I moved down to London just in time to be involved in the telecoms boom that mirrored the dot com boom. I helped telecoms companies market their data networks and VoIP services. I helped technology companies sell to the telecoms companies. The agency I worked for had a dedicated 1Mb line. This was much faster than anything I’d used before. It provided amazing access to information and content. Video was ropey. Silicon.com and Real Media featured glitchy postage stamp sized clips. My company hosted the first live broadcast of Victoria’s Secret fashion show online. It was crap in reality, but a great proof of concept for the future.
I managed to get access to recordings of DJ sets by my Chicago heroes. Most of whom I’d only read about over the years in the likes of Mixmag.
All of this pointed to a bright future, sure there were some dangers along the way. But I never worried too much about the privacy threat (at least from technology companies). If there was any ‘enemy’ it was ‘the man’.
In the cold war and its immediate aftermath governments had gone after:
Organised labour (the UK miners strike)
Cultural movements (Rave culture in the UK)
Socio-political groups (environmentalists and the nuclear disarmament movement)
I had grown up close to the infamous Capenhurst microwave phone tap tower. Whilst it was secret, there were private discussions about its purpose. Phil Zimmerman’s PGP cryptography offered privacy, if you had the technical skills. In 1998, the European Parliament posted a report on ECHELON. A global government owned telecoms surveillance network. ECHELON was a forerunner of the kind of surveillance Edwards Snowden disclosed a decade and a half later.
One may legitimately feel scandalised that this espionage, which has gone on over several years, has not given rise to official protests. For the European Union, essential interests are at stake. On the one hand, it seems to have been established that there have been violations of the fundamental rights of its citizens, on the other, economic espionage may have had disastrous consequences, on employment for example. – Nicole Fontaine, president of the european parliament (2000)
I advised clients on the ‘social’ web since before social media had a ‘name’. And I worked at the company formerly known as Yahoo!. This was during a brief period when it tried to innovate in social and data. At no time did I think that the companies powering the web would:
Rebuild the walled gardens of the early ‘net (AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy)
Build oligopolies, since the web at that time promised a near perfect market due to it increasing access to market information. Disintermediation would have enabled suppliers and consumers to have a direct relationship, instead Amazon has become the equivalent of the Sears Roebuck catalogue
Become a serious privacy issue. Though we did realise by 2001 thanks to X10 wireless cameras that ads could be very annoying. I was naive enough to think of technology and technologists as being a disruptive source of cultural change. The reason for this was the likes of Phil Zimmerman on crypto. Craig Newmark over at Craigslist, the community of The Well and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The likes of Peter Thiel is a comparatively recent phenomenon in Silicon Valley
We had the first inkling about privacy when online ad companies (NebuAd and Phorm) partnered with internet service providers. They used ‘deep packet inspection’ data to analyse a users behaviour, and then serve ‘relevant ads.
Tim Cook fits into the ‘we’ quite neatly. He is a late ‘baby boomer’ who came into adulthood right at the beginning of the PC revolution. He had a front row seat as PCs, nascent data networks and globalisation changed the modern world. He worked at IBM and Compaq during this time.
Cook moved to Apple at an interesting time. Jobs had returned with the NeXT acquisition. The modern macOS was near ready and there was a clear roadmap for developers. The iMac was going into production and would be launched in August.
Many emphasise the move to USB connectors, or the design which brought the Mac Classic format up to date. The key feature was a built in modem and simple way to get online once you turned the machine on. Apple bundled ethernet and a modem in the machine. It also came with everything you needed preloaded to up an account with an ISP. No uploading software, no errant modem drivers, no DLL conflicts. It just worked. Apple took care selecting ISPs that it partnered with, which also helped.
By this time China was well on its way to taking its place in global supply chains. China would later join the World Trade Organisation in 2001.
The start of Tim Cook’s career at Apple coincided with with the internet the way we knew it. And the company benefited from the more counter culture aspects of the technology industry:
Open source software (KDE Conqueror, BSD, Mach)
Open standards (UNIX, SyncML)
Open internet standards (IMAP, WebCAL, WebDav)
By the time that Facebook was founded. Open source and globalisation where facts of life in the technology sector. They do open source because that’s the rules of business now. It is noticeable that Facebook’s businesses don’t help grow the commons like Flickr did.
Businesses like Flickr, delicious and others built in a simple process to export your data. Facebook and similar businesses have a lot less progressive attitudes to user control over data.
Cook is also old enough to value privacy, having grown up in a less connected and less progressive age. It was only in 2014 that Cook became the first publicly gay CEO of a Fortune 100 company. It is understandable why Cook would be reticent about his sexuality.
He is only a generation younger than the participants in the riots at the Stonewall Inn.
By comparison, for Zuckerberg and his peers:
The 1960s and counterculture were a distant memory
The cold war has been won and just a memory of what it was like for Eastern Europeans to live under a surveillance state
Wall Street and Microsoft were their heroes. Being rich was more important than the intrinsic quality of the product
Ayn Rand was more of a guiding star than Ram Dass
They didn’t think about what kind of dark underbelly that platforms could have and older generations of technologists generally thought too well of others to envisage the effects. You have to had a pretty dim view of fellow human beings. More on privacy here.
River Elegy (河殇) is a six-part documentary broadcast on China’s largest TV station CCTV1, in 1988. River Elegy is a landmark documentary, a more innocent naive Chinese viewpoint that emerged as the country opened up. China and its civilisation has existed around the Pearl and Yellow rivers for 1000s of years, rather like the Rhine and the Elba in Germany.
China had started to open up to the world after the cultural revolution and intellectuals started to learn about how different the west was. River Elegy compares the old ways and Chinese gains in civilisation over thousands of years, with the modern world. In retrospect the River Elegy attacks on traditional culture and Confucianism mirror the rejection of tradition in the cultural revolution. The River Elegy series spurred debate and was seen to be criticism of what the creators perceived to be a slow-moving communist party.
At the time, intellectuals in China were avidly reading the works of western thinkers like John Naisbitt and Alvin Toffler who provided a vision of a rollercoaster centrist techno-utopian future. I get the attraction to young intellectuals. In the 1980s, the future looked bright and technocratic.
The thing that I find most interesting about it is the use of music, imagery and editing is almost psychedelic in its effect. It must have been mind blowing for the audience who tuned into it.
A couple of people involved in the production of River Elegy whore about how it was created in Deathsong of the River – which is a great read. It is interesting to reflect how far this series is from the China of today. It overs an interesting contrast to Xi Thought in both content and presentation style.
Maestro – BOILER ROOM – great documentary about DJ/producer Larry Levan and the Paradise Garage. Levan is one of the people who shaped the modern dance sound. The film does a really good job of setting up the context from disco to house and goes on about other New York clubs like The Loft and The Gallery. It has a great soundtrack and some of the interviewees are fierce.
The key underlying belief to deep design is that modern life systems and processes aren’t designed for humans. From industrial design, to administrative processes and algorithms – all could be categorised as ‘inhumane’. If you’ve ever dealt with work visa forms in a foreign country you’ll know what I mean.
Human-centred design was supposed to address this. But it fails to scale or handle complexity. Deep design adds a layer of EQ to human-centred design in its approach. Even basic things like ergonomic datapoints didn’t include female data until relatively recently. There weren’t crash test dummies designed to emulate the effect on female bodies.
Secondly agile processes in software and experience design with attitude of move fast and break things seem to fail as well. Test and learn as an iterative process works well at manipulating people, but is less good at building systems designed for humans.
In the early 1990s, business process reengineering (BPR) sought to do a similar thing in organisations. It focused on the analysis and design of workflows and business processes within an organisation. BPR aimed to help them fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors. However customer service and offerings became inflexible and not really customer centred, let alone employee focused.
The reality was a desire to rollout processes that technology could manage. The field was pioneered by thinking from Michael Hammer formerly of MIT. It didn’t work and its popularity started to wane in the US in the mid-to-late 1990s as the process was abused. SAP consultants looked to reform client companies into one of their industry templates. Building the people round the system rather than deep design.
A ZFS developer’s analysis of the good and bad in Apple’s new APFS file system | Ars Technica – this is a good guide by Adam Levanthal. The thing that puzzles me is this. Apple had a working implementation of ZFS running on early beta versions of OS X and then decided not to implement it. Apple adoption of ZFS would be a major boost (it is already supported on Linux and Solaris). It takes about a decade for a file system to mature sufficiently; ZFS has that maturity and is still bleeding edge tech. Apple has a good relationship with Oracle so that wouldn’t be a problem, Larry Ellison is still the shot-caller over there and he still hates Microsoft and Google. Instead they build their own version, which has nice encryption facilities but lacks the data integrity features that ZFS has. It doesn’t seem to be about squeezing the footprint of ZFS for mobile devices either. Apple just decided to go it alone for reasons that aren’t readily apparent at the moment with APFS.
Huawei sees building alternative to Android as insurance amid US-China trade tensions | SCMP – not a big leap from an OS point of view. The big jump would be the app store since both Google and Amazon’s app stores would be out of reach if Huawei were found guilty. A way around this would be the likes of SailfishOS which would also deal with lingering security concerns about Huawei handsets. More Huawei related content here.
APAC markets exceed global benchmarks for viewability, brand safety | Digital | Campaign Asia – fraud rates for campaigns that optimised against fraud remained relatively flat, showing optimisation efforts are paying off by keeping fraud rates low. Singapore and Hong Kong had higher fraud risk at 20.7% and 14.0% respectively, because ad fraudsters tend to follow where the digital spend goes and where CPMs are higher.
U.S. DoJ probing Huawei for possible Iran sanctions violations: WSJ – interesting that they are getting dinged for similar things to ZTE. Stopping US vendors from selling to Huawei would be a bit less impactful than on ZTE. But it would retarget the Huawei R&D budget away from innovation to replacing American component technology and engineering services currently provided by the likes of Ciena or Qualcomm. This actually fits neatly with Mr Xi’s China 2025 manufacturing initiative that is designed to free the country from relying on international suppliers.
Electric Autos – Long life – I think it’s more complex, depending on vehicle range and driving patterns will factor into demand. Of course the shit is really going to hit the fan when lithium ion technology fails to provide for transport needs like long distance heavy goods vehicles, becomes too expensive and essential materials become too rare. There is likely to be a pivot to hydrogen combustion engines or hydrogen fuel cells due to superior energy density. The economics around risk, infrastructure and other capital costs will change.
