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.

  • Pornographers + more news

    Pornographers and social search

    Can These Pornographers End ‘MILFs,’ ‘Teens,’ and ‘Thugs’? | The Nation – when I was working on social search and folksonomies at Yahoo! a decade ago, yet pornographers are now amongst the most active users of the technology. A few things about how the pornographers worlds have changed. At the centre of this is the change in the market. Back in the day adult media companies and performers had their own sites that they sold their content through. They were found via search and audience aggregation sites that had teaser content.

    Then the tube sites came along and changed the game, the pornographers got pirated and mediated all at the same time. In order to get tube platform search to work for them, they had to embrace tagging, which revolved around the language that customers

    Business

    Haul For One: U-Haul Adapts & Reuses Abandoned Buildings | Urbanist – some of these are stunning for a modernist sucker like me

    DARPA Funds Development of New Type of Processor | EE Times

    Economics

    China’s Operation Australia: payments, power and politicians | Sydney Morning Herald – surely its what you’d expect an intelligence agency to do. Not really surprising, except for the change in tonality from Australia about China

    FMCG

    Chinese consumerism will reshape the world, and maybe even destroy it — Quartz – anything to do with China is the speed at which all this has occurred. What would the outcomes of that speed be? People wouldn’t have as many brand associations. Those brand associations would have built up in relatively short amount of time, as opposed to [being] handed down intergenerationally. Because of that speed, the amount of anxiety about having the right brand would be greater in that environment than in a place where this is unfolding slowly. Interesting also that Gerth talks about the right (communist) brands under Mao when people wanted a bike, a sewing machine and a wrist watch. I would also argue that there was latent knowledge of brands from pre-revolutionary times in older people based in Shanghai or historic brands like Tongrentang (TRT) founded in 1669

    Innovation

    WWII vehicle boneyards were essentially war machine landfills | Mashable  – Americans were so eager to get their hands on cheap surplus Jeeps that auto companies urged the government to leave them overseas, fearing they would cut into new car sales.

    I, Cringely The Robots are Coming! – I, Cringely – interesting read, but one that poses as much challenges as solutions

    Marketing

    What influencer marketing really costs – Digiday – interesting ranges in here

    Apple launches Business Chat for iMessage in developer preview | VentureBeat – looks like they have been taking a lesson or two from WeChat. I had seen Salesforce integration with iMessage and iChat demo-ed at one of the Cloudforce conference

    An aversion to logos could be Essential’s undoing | total telecom – its even more ridiculous that Essential actually have a logo that evokes Paul Rand and Saul Bass

    Media

    The One Big Reason Why BuzzFeed Needs TV – Bloomberg – so much for the online media business…. old media is the new sexy

    Apple’s new anti-tracking system will make Google and Facebook even more powerful – The Verge – a more marginal improvement than you’d think

    The Telegraph to publish daily edition on Snapchat – from 5pm today – I wonder what the monetisation model looks like?

    Entertainment Accounts Closed as Party Emphasizes News Control | China Digital Times – China clamping down on celebrity scandal accounts as well as accounts that would be disruptive to government

    Pathology of a Fake News Story – Thoughts On Journalism – Medium

    Facebook study shows what TV viewers are doing during commercial breaks | silicon beat

    Online

    Pinboard Blog – Pinboard acquires del.icio.us – a certain amount of irony in this which I’ll write about another time

    Security

    Russian malware link hid in a comment on Britney Spears’ Instagram | Engadget – really canny technique

    Software

    Apple is finally serious about artificial intelligence | Quartz – i’d disagree with the headline, but it has a good overview of the AI development pieces from Apple’s keynote

    Apple Just Joined Tech’s Great Race to Democratize AI | WIRED

    Why Apple is struggling to become an artificial-intelligence powerhouse – The Washington Post – Washington Post was bought by Jeff Bezos

    Technology

    Tom Oberheim On The Art Of Synthesizer Design | Synthtopia – amazing interview with Tom Oberheim on how he got into synthesiser design and talks about his products

    Andy Rubin’s new company already got screwed by Apple – BGR – Although Apple didn’t object to the investment, SoftBank didn’t want the conflict to happen

    Car Fact Of The Day | Marginal Revolution – Huge increase in complexity in cars

    Google vs. Uber: How One Engineer Sparked a War – WSJ – interesting write up of Andrew Levandowski’s role in it. I didn’t realise he was Belgian and its interesting how Google Street View helped birth its autonomous car project

    Telecoms

    Network Time Protocol Hardened To Protect Users From Spying, Increase Privacy – Slashdot

    Web of no web

    Japan puts up satellite in step to build homegrown GPS- Nikkei Asian Review – Quasi-zenith devices to allow location data accurate to 6cm

    Listen and create ambient sounds easily – Ambient Mixer – great for sounds to work by

  • WWDC 2017

    WWDC 2017 overview

    WWDC 2017 is the most important Apple event of the year as the software dictates There was a mix of hardware and software updates. Apple put a lot of focus on  virtual reality, augmented reality and prepping their operating systems for handling larger amounts of data.  There was work done to further optimise video and photo usage on device.

    WWDC 2017 had bad news for online advertisers and a number of consumer electronics manufacturers. Online advertising using retargeting or autoplay video is going to be blocked in Safari. The new HomePod speaker took aim at ‘casual hi-fi’ like Sonos, Bowers & Wilkins and Bose.

    Developments that Apple showcased at WWDC 2017 indicated that it is working very hard to try and understand user intent, which is one of the first pieces it needs to put in place to develop the experience of a truly programmable world. What do I mean by a programmable world? A ‘web of no web’ where device intelligence behaves as if it understands user intent like a good valet. It is moving in a stepwise manner towards this.

    What was more surprising is how Apple has gone big on VR and AR creation and consumption. Whilst video post-production houses probably have the most to complain about when it comes to Apple’s Pro equipment, they are not name checked. Apple has started to move to address their concerns. The external graphics support in macOS implies that a furture Mac Pro will have the software to match hardware.

    More details by platform:

    macOS

    The name High Sierra implied an OS update that might seem incremental to consumers, but has major technology changes under the hood.

    • Data – Apple File System as default (many features similar to Sun Microsystems’ ZFS). Faster for file swaps and giving a faster computer experience
    • Video – better quality video algorithms with smaller file sizes and integration with
    • Graphics – upgraded Metal API – Apple had been using it on machine learning applications within the OS. Metal 2 has been used to accelerate system level graphics and provides access to app developers. There is OS support for external graphics accelerators. The external graphics developer kit is based on AMD Radeon card.
    • MacOS supports VR through Metal for VR. Steam, Unity and Unreal supporting VR on the Mac. Apple seems to believe that VR and AR content is the desktop publishing of the 21st century, they have gone hard on making the best creators platform that they can
    Safari
    Focus on being the fastest browser experience, even in comparison to Chrome
    • Autoplay blocking – which will impact advertising network video views
    • Intelligent tracking prevention – positioned to target advertising retargeting and cross-site tracking
    Mail
    Productivity refinements including a split screen view
     
    Photos
    • Uses machine learning to improve searching and photo recognition and integration with photo-editing

    tvOS

    • 50 media partners integrated into TV app
    • Amazon is coming to Apple TV. Interesting move of detente between Apple and Amazon

    iOS

    iOS 11 – focus on underlying technologies:
    • Machine learning APIs – to help adoption of CoreML on device for third party apps
    • ARKit – to aid AR in apps. Clever work done on scaling and ambient light. This about providing a market for the content which which would be created on the Mac
    • Chinese specific features: including support for QRcodes, SMS spam filtering. Chinese users have a particular set of contexts and these innovations could become popular in the west
    • Interface tweaks in control centre and the lock screen.
    Messages
    • Improving discoverability of app stickers and apps – much needed
    • Automatic synchronisation of Messages across devices, delete once, delete across all devices
    ApplePay
    • Person-to-person payments as an iMessage app. Obvious competitor would be WeChat in China and PayPal in the west
    Siri
    • Improved expressive nature of the voice.
    • Follow-up questions, presumably to improve context
    • Provides translation services
    • Siri integration into a wide range of apps including WeChat and OmniFocus They’ve tried to use on-device learning to try and improve context and being helpful. Siri knowledge is synched across devices. Uses web history to improve Apple News and custom dictionary spellings
    Apple Maps
    • Indoor navigation for airports
    Photos
    • Better image compression to save space on device. New depth API that can be accessed by 3rd party apps
    • Video autorotates a la Snapchat / Snap glasses
    App Store
    • Apps now reviewed in less than 24 hours
    • First app redesign in nine years. Tweaks to improve discoverability and merchandising of apps including in-app sales
     watchOS
     
    • The biggest feature in watchOS 4 is the Siri-powered face. The Siri-powered watch face provides contextual information on the ‘home screen’. It takes into account past habits, time, location etc. Apple’s language around this was interesting, they described it as an ‘Intelligent proactive assistant’.

    More details by hardware

    Mac hardware
    • iMac – improved displays, brighter and support for 1 billion colours. Moving to Kaby Lake Intel processors. Up to 64GB of RAM on the iMac and 2TB SSD. Discrete Radeon graphics cards on larger iMacs. – big focus on VR development.
    • MacBook – Kaby Lake processors. Pro machines get updated graphics as well. The MacBook Air gets a processor boost.
    • iMac Pro – single piece machine with workstation specification including 10Gbit Ethernet. Presumably as an interim measure until the Mac Pro arrives next year. How upgradeable would the iMac Pro be, which is a key consideration for workstations
     
    iPad hardware
    • iPad Pro – 20% bigger screen, 120Hz screen refresh rate. Doubling default memory sizes up to 512GB
     
    Apple HomePod
    Apple is going after Sonos and brown goods companies like Bose, Bowers & Wilkins and Bang & Olufsen. The Siri functionality is a hygiene factor rather than a serious competitor to Amazon Echo. There was a big emphasis on the privacy functionality of Siri in HomePod
     
    Further reading

    WWDC 2015: you know the Apple news, but what does it mean?
    48 hours with the Apple Watch
    Eight trends for the future: web-of-no-web
    Eight trends for the future: contextual technology

    More content on WWDC 2017

  • 2017 internet trends + other things

    2017 internet trends report

    Mary Meeker’s 2017 internet trends report: All the slides, plus analysis | Recode – was the big thing to drop in my week.

    The key themes for me from the 2017 internet trends report were:

    • Continued slowing in internet growth showing that the previous years decline in growth wasn’t a one off. In the 2017 internet trends report we also saw a decline in smartphone growth as well
    • All of these trends don’t apply with India where the market is still growing for internet access and smartphone growth. In India the 2017 internet trends isn’t ‘2017’ but 2010
    • Lean forward media is beloved of internet entrepreneurs. Interactive gaming is becoming mainstream around the world, with 2.6 billion gamers in 2017 versus 100 million in 1995. Gaming revenue is estimated to be around $100 billion in 2016, and China is now the largest market for gaming.
    • In the US at least wearables are becoming mainstreamed. 25 percent of Americans owning one, up 12 percent from 2016. Back when I was in Hong Kong, Chinese manufacturers were cranking out low cost health monitors to monitor your exercise activity

    More related content here.

    The Reflex remixes

    The Reflex remixes Gil Scott Heron. Nicolas was one of the few remixers who can make a production that’s better than the original. 

    Ultraman theme tune

    Scatman Ultraman – Ultraman is a famous suited super hero. It is part of the Japanese TV and movie ‘special filming or tokusatsu genre. It is the grandfather of the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers. One of Ultraman’s powers was the ability to grow really large, which spawned other giant hero or Kyodai Hero characters. 

    Surreal and manic

    Surreal and manic

     

    A post shared by DJ STYLEWARZ (@stylewarz) on

    Kouhei Nakama 

    Kouhei Nakama | Design & Motion – really nice 3D animations by Japanese artist / designer Kouhei Nakama

  • Black technology (黑科技)

    Black technology

    An all-compassing phrase that I’ve heard being used by Chinese friends Hēi kējì in Pinyin or black technology. It’s been around for a couple of years but recently gained more currency among people that I know.

    Microsoft Hololens 💥

    It is used as a catchall for disruptive / cool innovative products. What constitutes ‘black technology’ is subjective in nature but generally Chinese would agree on some examples such as:

    • Magic Leap
    • Microsoft Holo Lens
    • Bleeding edge silicon chips with an extraordinary amount of memory or machine learning functionality built in
    • Tesla self-driving cars

    Magical quality

    The key aspect is that the product as ‘magical quality’ in the eyes of the user. Technology companies have tried to use it in marketing to describe the latest smartphone and app features like NFC, gesture sensitive cameras and video filters. Your average Chinese consumer would see this as cynical marketing hype. Xiaomi had been guilty of this over the past couple of years. Chinese netizens aren’t afraid to flay the brands for abusing the term black technology.

    As technology develops, the bar for what represents black technology will be raised higher.

    Manga origins

    According to Baidu Baike (a Quora-like Q&A service / Wikipedia analogue) it is derived from the Japanese manga Full Metal Panic! (フルメタル·パニック! |Furumetaru Panikku!).

    In the manga black technology is technology far more advanced than the real world. An example of this would be ‘Electronic Conceal System’ – active optical camouflage used on military helicopters and planes in the manga. It is created by the ‘Whispered’ – people who are extremely gifted polymaths who each specialise in a particular black technology.

    In the manga they are frequently abducted and have their abilities tested by ‘bad organisations’ who support terrorism. Whispered also have a telepathic ability to communicate with each other. If they stay connected for too long there can be a risk of their personalities coalescing together. Similar content can be found here.

    More information

    黑科技 （动漫中出现的词语）- Baidu Baike
    Full Metal Panic – Amazon

  • Paula’s Loewe collar + more

    Loewe x Paula’s

    Spanish luxury brand Loewe x Paula’s rolled out its collaboration with Ibiza boutique Paula’s. Paula’s reflects a move of Ibiza away from sweaty EDM fans to a more elite stylish visitor more used to Pykes and Hunters. In many respects Loewe x Paula’s is about taking Ibiza back the original Balearic vibes where it was populated by the international jet set, before football casuals and clubland discovered the white isle in the mid-1980s. More related content here.

    Generation Z

    Meet Generation Z in our latest film | JWT Intelligence – downloadable and handy for provoking thoughts on planning in terms of data point. I have broader issues with the concept of generations and find life stages generally much more valuable as a concept. Generations hide data which should have use asking broader questions. Their generalisations aren’t that helpful either.

    Fred Wilson

    Venture capitalist Fred Wilson speaking at MIT Sloan School of Management. Fred Wilson used to run a technology VC operation with Andy Kessler. He then went on to found his own VC business – Union Square Ventures, based out of New York.

    Wilson talks about the VC role in terms of coaching entrepreneurs as much as investing them. In some respects this feels at odds with the usual VC approach of investing in the team. He talks about the demise of the investor letter, but also the importance of writing as ‘thinking out loud’.

    Product design by algorithm

    The Lowly Folding Chair, Reimagined With Algorithms | WIRED – classical material and computer aided design came up with something special. Its a fantastical piece of design. The question of intellectual property with regards the chair is a problem that can be solved another day

    UNISON

    UNISON campaigns to get voters on board with more of a focus on public services as the UK election got under way seems to have failed completely judging by the opinion polls. This disturbing video was made with Claire Sweeney – which breaks the uncomfortable ground between daytime TV programming and satire. At worst, this could be used as an excuse for the government to clamp down on the ‘interference’ of trade unions in parliamentary elections.