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.

  • Evolution of search

    Danny Sullivan did a talk a few years ago on the evolution of search, it’s worthwhile taking 9 minutes out as he plots it:

    Library/librarian – whilst web search has become ubiquitous there are still people graduating from library studies courses. The role of librarian still brings a lot to the table

    The electronic catalogue for library augmented the work of librarians and allowed library users to do at least some searches themselves

    LexisNexis database – proprietary business databases augmented the work of lawyers and financiers

    Yahoo! – created a curated guide to the nascent web. It started off as a list of links and then got categorised over time. It is surprising how long the Yahoo! directory lasted for into the age of search.

    WebCrawler – automated the process of finding websites and exploring their content which then opens up the door for modern search as we know it.

    Modern search engine progress can be seen as the rapid transition between pre-eminent engines in a relatively short time.  You also saw specialist tech companies like Inktomi sell web search hardware upon which media companies built their services. Yes, Google built the pre-eminent search engine, but it wouldn’t have been possible to keep going if others hadn’t come up with the crucial pieces of the online search advertising model. That’s why you see a transition from InfoSeek > AltaVista > Ask Jeeves > Google in the evolution of search. More posts on Google here.

  • Thin film electronics + more things

    Coal redefined for thin film electronics | Electronics EETimes – sounds like a graphene connection. Thin film electronics is going to be key for wearables

    Web Summit 2016 | Approach to marketing – it does beg the question why should a marketer support this and go to their conference?

    The VR idea maze — Benedict Evans – worthwhile read. I think the point made on content is particularly pertinent. We may have the hardware but it could take decades for the craft of content creation to come to full fruition

    China’s government sounds out international PR agencies about how to polish nation’s image overseas, sources say | South China Morning Post – A spokesman for WPP, which owns Hill+Knowlton declined to comment. Ketchum also declined to comment. Fleishman Hillard Inc, Ogilvy Public Relations and Edelman did not respond to messages requesting comment – Weber Shandwick attracted negative attention working for China during the run up to the 2008 Olympics and Ketchum had a similar experience working for Russia

    Microsoft’s Silver Lining Is Shrinking — The Information – not surprisingly moving a cloud model disrupts Microsoft’s margins in comparison to package software (paywall)

    Off the grid – Official site of Stephen Fry – interesting essay on the perils of social media

    China Unicom bets on turnaround as net profit plunges 85pc | SCMP – 4G network capital costs and increased marketing costs

    “Overpaid and underperforming”: An anonymous investors’ letter lashes out at Nikesh Arora — Quartz – there are other shoes to drop on this. Looking that the shareholders hold ADRs rather than SoftBank shares – this is a US led charge. It is also interesting that this happening right before the Yahoo! shoe drops. SoftBank,  and its Yahoo! Japan joint venture are a key part of Yahoo! Inc’s value

    Korean TV Dramas Are the Best Export Since ‘Gangnam Style’ | Digital – AdAge

    Pirate Bay Founder: Streaming Model Could Ignite New Piracy War – TorrentFreak – really interesting essay. I had a similar experience with Apple’s iBooks. I bought James Michener’s Mexico for a long flight and trip, tried to download it a week later and it was no longer available. I now buy mostly paper books

    Brands rip up media plan in the face of disruption – it decided last September, in consultation with MediaCom, to take more radical action. Tesco slashed its media budget for newspapers to practically zero and shifted most of the money into online and social media. TV and other traditional media have also been heavily cut (reg wall)

    Can audio go viral on Facebook? Here’s what happened when NPR ran an experiment for a month » Nieman Journalism Lab – Sharing audio on social media is hard to do. Stan Alcorn documented many of the struggles two years ago in a widely cited Digg story

    Elisabeth Murdoch’s Vertical Networks creating ‘Brother’ Snapchat Discover channel – Business Insider

    IRIN | Spies Sans Frontières? – the ethical conundrums around this are particularly interesting. More security related posts here.

    Is Programmatic Expertise Moving In-House? – EContent Magazine

  • Facebook Live + more things

    Facebook live

    A Facebook live streaming service (a la U-Stream and YouTube) was newly launched this week. You can stream on your page or in-group. There is a map to discover streams going on in realtime. I already  found one seminar by Nu-Skin a multi-level marketer of wellness and beauty products in Hong Kong as an example of where Facebook Live was being used from a commercial perspective.

    The Stanton Warriors embraced the new Facebook live streaming service to promote further fan interaction whilst they were in the studio. It will be interesting to see the best and worst that brands do with this medium. From a piracy point-of-view I would imagine that it is likely to be used for streaming live sports coverage – expect the Premier League to be very unhappy.

    RUN and RUN

    Not exactly the same sound but J-Pop act lyrical school’s debut track RUN and RUN has a really clever smartphone optimised video with amazing breaks of the fourth wall.

    UPDATE: Our James pointed me in the direction of an even better link for the RUN and RUN video on Vimeo that I hope works here

    RUN and RUN / lyrical school 【MV for Smartphone】 from RUNandRUN_lyrisch on Vimeo.

    If you can’t see anything point your browser here.

    Godzilla

    Japan’s king of all monsters, Godzilla returns from chilling out on Monster Island for his 31st outing in the Japanese cinema. This new trailer is interesting as the visuals evoke Fukushima Daiichi  nuclear disaster and the Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011. Check out the Cloverfield-esque shots in the 30 second trailer below. There is a longer trailer where Godzilla appears fully in shot leaving no mystery to how bad ass he is this time. This means that the film is likely to go beyond his usual mayhem and might touch on contemporary issues.

    Vintage CGI

    Last, but not least; a vintage show reel by 1980s CGI shop MAGI Synthavision in its full neon wireframe magnificence and southern country rock soundtrack. More similar visual stuff here.

  • Friendly foxes + more things

    Friendly foxes pull in tourists to give Tohoku region a boost – AJW by The Asahi Shimbun – interesting that Tohoku’s friendly foxes awareness is word-of-mouth driven across so many different cultures. More Japan related posts here.

    Avicii Has Announced His Retirement – Magnetic Magazine – probably makes sense when you look at the current state of SFX. I suspect Avicii will still produce under one alias or another

    HKTB taps influencers to discover hidden gems in Hong Kong | Marketing Interactive – interesting passion-led campaign

    RuTracker to Bypass Web Blockade With IM Delivered Torrents – TorrentFreak – using a bot system to deliver torrents in Telegram messenger

    Mouse Movements Could Identify Tor Users’ Real IP Address | Greycoder – not terribly surprising given that back in WWII, radio operators were identifiable by their morse code key style

    Instagram Users Are Losing It over the Company’s Impending Switch | Vanity Fair – they’ve seen how algorithmic models have nuked influence in favour of brand advertising

    AP Investigation: How con man used China to launder millions – Law enforcement has not globalized as fast as crime, and the legal firewall that surrounds China has added to its appeal as a money-laundering hub. 

    Chinese authorities generally have done little to help Western companies defrauded in Chikli-style scams recover their money, according to European intelligence documents reviewed by the AP. 

    The U.S. State Department, in a report this month, reproached China for lackluster performance on money-laundering investigations. 

    “China has not cooperated sufficiently on financial investigations and does not provide adequate responses to requests for financial investigation information,” the State Department wrote.

    Xiaomi Exec: ‘We’re Playing a Completely Different Game’ | TIME – ‘we’re in the business of getting internet users’ -hmm sounds familar

    The next big thing in phones may not be a phone | VentureBeat  – “Everything in the phone industry now is incremental: slightly faster, slightly bigger, slightly more storage or better resolution,” said Christian Lindholm, inventor of the easy text-messaging keyboards in old Nokia phones that made them the best-selling mobile devices of all time – lumpy innovation

    How to Transfer Your Notes from Evernote to Apple Notes | Lifehacker –  this article and Microsoft’s migration path for Evernote users gives me a good idea of how in trouble Evernote must mean

    Cultural differences in responses to real-life and hypothetical trolley problems by Gold, Colman and Pulford – the trolley problem is whether you allow 5 people to die on a tram or divert it with a switch and only kill one person instead. Ordinary British people will pull a switch between 63 and 91% of the time but Chinese people would do so between 33% and 71% of the time. Chinese decision making seems to be based on belief in fate (PDF)