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.

  • Macau gaming revenue + more

    Macau gaming revenue

    Macau Gambling Revenue Continues to Drop – WSJ  – A little over a year ago, in February 2014, Macau gaming revenue rose 40%. Now it is regularly falling by around that much (paywall) – Macau gaming is alleged to be a vehicle for money laundering. Even if that wasn’t the truth about Macau gaming, it still remains a tempting vehicle for capital flight from China. At the moment Macau gaming is even bigger than the gambling mecca of Las Vegas

    FMCG

    P&G; Always Mobile App: BackMeApp – really smart application by P&G to market Always sanitary towels

    Ideas

    Azeem’s Exponential View – Revue – great email newsletter. Azeem has ben involved with a number of start-ups including Peer Index. In his newsletter Azeem covers a mix of deep future gazing with concern about climate change. He has a particular focus on  the carbon economy as a distinct area within his newsletter

    Innovation

    The scientist who designed the fake interfaces in “Minority Report” and “Iron Man” is now building real ones – interesting link on the feedback loop between science fiction and technology

    Ford Redefines Innovation in Aerodynamics, EcoBoost and Light-Weighting with All-New Ford GT Carbon Fiber Supercar | Ford Media Centre – some of the design choices in this is very interesting. More design related content here.

    Media

    Yahoo to Let Brands Fact-Check Its Viewability, Fraud Numbers | Advertising Age – I presume that this is due to pressure from large consumer brands only willing to pay for true views

    WPP’s Bessie Lee: PR Industry Must Embrace Technology In China | The Holmes Report – calling Blue Focus a PR group is like calling WPP a PR group. PR needs to do technology better, but other disciplines already own that part of the client relationship. China has even faster change going on

    Engineering Director Lars Rasmussen Leaving Facebook To Co-Found A Music Startup | TechCrunch – a long time Googler who developed Google Maps and worked in search at Facebook. Interesting move

    Yahoo just threw investors a bone: It’s hiring advisors to figure out what to do with Yahoo Japan (YHOO) – the bigger question is what to do with what’s left surely?

    Google, Microsoft and Amazon pay to get around ad blocking tool – FT.com – as well as Taboola – the annoying content remarketing network

    Online

    David Cameron wants to block porn but the EU won’t let him | Dazed Digital – the UKIP vote will be torn over this one. More online related content here

    Bradley Horowitz Says That Google Photos is Gmail for Your Images. And That Google Plus Is Not Dead… — Backchannel — Medium – Bradley is brilliant, this does feel like trying to reinvent flickr, it would be a shame if this did kill flickr

    Retailing

    Audi to Test Plan to Deliver Amazon Packages to Drivers’ Trunks – NYTimes.com – so thieves will know that there is a master key, which will give them an incentive to find it. More related content here.

    Software

    Above Avalon: The Apple and Google Battle Has Changed – good long read on the dynamics between Apple and Google. Apple and Google cooperate because Apple has richer, more valuable customers than Google based operating system products. 

    Technology

    Russian ‘Uber for Boobs’ Start-Up Tittygram Sees Business Boom | Moscow Times – you could not make this up <holds head in hands in despair at industry>

  • Tech trends myopia in ideas

    Tech trends event at The Churchill Club

    The Churchill Club recently had their annual Top 10 Tech Trends event in Silicon Valley. This was the 17th time that they had their event. It’s a great bit of content to have on in the background. The collective opinions in the panel bought up concerns for me with a consumer behaviour myopia exhibited around tech trends in Silicon Valley.


    Cognitive behavioural therapy

    A classic example was some of the very smart things said about wearables and health monitoring in the session. There was skepticism expressed for some very valid social behavioural reasons – if one looks at Facebook, consumers generally share only the good things in their lives, with the notable exception of life events, such as the death of a family pet. Stephen Waddington even describes his behaviour on Facebook as ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’.

    So people really into fitness are far more likely to employ self tracking than couch-dwellers.

    Quicken problem

    Self tracking was described as a ‘Quicken Problem’. Quicken allows US consumers to easily complete their tax returns – a universal problem, yet is only used by five per cent of the population for various reasons.

    All of this is very valid stuff of its self, but what happens if it isn’t only consumers making the decision?

    Self tracking tech trends

    My reservations about self tracking technologies are well recorded, to quote myself from Stephen Waddington’s Brand Vandals

    Self-tracking adds massive amounts of data to your personal data pool and social graph and raises huge privacy concerns that users need to be cognisant of

    A number of the key points that I made in my conversation with Stephen was not about consumers using their self-tracking data but how the data could be used to recalibrate car insurance, home insurance (based on absence from home) and health insurance based on activity and risky behaviours.

    Let’s look at a specific type of self tracking, the car insurance black box. Aviva (Norwich Union) trialled the use of telematics to set car insurance premiums on a monthly basis as a type of continuous assessment. It looked at factors such as:

    • When the car was used, nighttime driving was considered to be risky behaviour
    • What distance was covered, charges were on a per mile basis
    • Car location (particularly when cross-tabulated with crime statistics)
    • Speed
    • Braking data

    In IBM Research’s case study, Norwich Union envisaged that black boxes would allow it to sell insurance to consumers that drive less often. Norwich Union dropped the pilot in 2008, apparently due to a lack of consumer interest, but resurrected the car insurance black box when the European Union ruled that charging for car insurance on the basis of gender was illegal. Presumably the needed some other form of actuarial data instead of whether the driver was a female or not. This is just one example where consumer behaviour didn’t drive  product innovation that wouldn’t be accounted for in the tech trends discussion.

    Credit ratings were driven by the need for businesses to mitigate risks, direct (rather than operator) dialling on a telephone was developed to help reduce the manpower required to run telecoms networks. Night safes and ATMs (automatic teller machines) were about providing services without staff. The US airline tradition of baggage charges came from shareholder pressure not consumer demand yet is worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

    The point at the end of the day is that opportunities for venture capitalists are broader than meeting consumer needs and wants.

    More information

    Brand Vandals by Stephen Waddington & Steve Earl
    AA launches black box car insurance | Guardian
    Norwich Union heralds new Pay As You Drive insurance – Aviva Media Room Archive
    Norwich Union Insurance Telematics Pilot – Pay As You Drive Telematics trial of usage based motor insurance by Volker Fricker of IBM Research – (PDF)
    Aviva Telematics Insurance Review | Telematics.com – Norwich Union (now Aviva) abandoned telematics insurance a number of years ago and is now reinstating it

    More related content here.

  • Corporation tax + more things

    Amazon to begin paying corporation tax on UK retail sales | The Guardian – it is good to see that Amazon is paying corporation tax. But the thing no one is asking is how does this affect businesses that might have ‘global accounts’, for instance Ford, Colgate and HSBC’s relationship with WPP? Does this mean that clients will suddenly start getting bills on a per country basis for corporation tax rather than in one place? What happens when different tax authorities have different views on what is earned where?

    Why We Have an Oversupply of Almost Everything (Oil, labor, capital, etc.) | Our Finite World – some interesting economic data in here

    The Savoy opens take-away eatery to provide entry point to dining | Luxury Daily – interesting that The Savoy feels the need to do local ‘sampling’

    Huawei launches ‘internet of things’ operating system – FT.com – Paywall

    [1501.02876] Deep Image: Scaling up Image Recognition – interesting machine learning paper from Baidu

    Interview: How did an ex UX designer get 50k WeChat fans? – interesting article and plan

    What will happen to Silicon Valley when demographics strangle the global economy | VentureBeat – this isn’t necessarily as bad as this article makes out mainly because many VCs are sitting on more money than they can invest anyway

    The Blogging Dead: WeChat’s ‘zombie relationship’ invasion｜WantChinaTimes.com – sounds like a classic dunbar number problem, but it is interesting that they consider it to be WeChat specific

    Integrated Intelligence: IWC Connect – Luxury News – interesting wearable concept, they seem to have deliberately avoided the mistakes made by others (including AndroidWear and Apple Watch. Still not convinced however. More luxury related content here.

    Seymour M. Hersh · The Killing of Osama bin Laden · LRB 21 May 2015 – I am not surprised, but the damage that this does to US is huge, particularly the body politic. I recommend reading this critique of Mr Hersh’s critics – The media’s reaction to Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden scoop has been disgraceful – Columbia Journalism Review

  • Nokia N900

    This throwback gadget the Nokia N900 comes from before Nokia decided to go with Windows Mobile as its smartphone operating system. It had started to develop Maemo as a successor operating system to Symbian Series 60. Meamo was a Linux kernel based mobile operating system which owed its heritage to the Debian Linux distribution.

    The N900 was the first phone which showed Nokia’s ideas in developing an alternative to the Android and iPhone eco-systems. Symbian was a powerful operating system, with true multitasking but there were issues that just tidying up the UI and introducing capacitive touch wouldn’t address.  For a mature operating system, I had to reboot my Nokia phones surprisingly often, basic apps like the address book didn’t work if you had over a thousand contacts – so most sales people out there.

    The predecessor of the Nokia N900 was the 770 internet tablet which was launched back at the end of 2005, which was the iPad before the iPad.
    Nokia N900
    Trying to trial this device is a bit hard as it relied on web services such as an app store that no longer exists. Secondly it offers an experience comparable to an Android or iPhone powered by a processor that is several generations older, so you have to make allowances for the fact that the Nokia N900 can feel slow at times.
    Nokia N900
    Let’s start with the industrial design. The phone is relatively thick, partly due to its keyboard and replaceable battery design feels good to hold.

    The Danger Sidekick-esque slide-out keyboard which would be handy for the world of OTT messaging services like WhatsApp, WeChat and LINE. It isn’t a full keyboard like the Nokia E90 Communicator that I used to own but it is more usable than say a Blackberry Bold. The keyboard feels solid and stable.
    Nokia N900
    The camera surround on the back has a stand that pops out for when you want to use the phone to watch content or as a glorified desk clock.

    The dialler on the phone is easier to use than the iPhone and did what it came on the tin – its slight gradient feels like Apple pre-iOS7. Nokia’s HERE mapping service was responsive, it seems to be the one thing on the phone still supported.
    Nokia N900
    Nokia’s Mozilla-based browser still works and provided an experience similar to modern smartphones, but slower (this is partly due to the processor inside the phone).

    Now the Nokia N900 stands a testament to lost potential, the following Nokia N9 and N950, looked like polished products. Stephen Elop saw things differently and despite the Nokia N9 selling well in the few markets that he allowed it to sell, put the company on its fateful relationship with Microsoft. Presumably Elop and his team felt that they couldn’t sustain the innovation of Maemo, which would have required a move to Qualcomm processors away from Intel. Nokia had backed WiMax rather than LTE with Intel, so the company was on the wrong foot. The decline is now a matter of well recorded history with Microsoft having eventually taken over a much diminished phone business. Some of the N9 team went on to build Jolla – a small phone company that built a smartphone and tablet to showcase their SailfishOS operating system. It remains to be seen if other phone manufacturers will launch products using it. But it does offer consumers outside North America a more secure option to an Android handset. More gadget related content here.

  • Virtual cockpit & things from this week

    Razorfish Berlin’s interactive brochure for Audi to promote the TT coupe’s virtual cockpit. I was reminded of an ad that Mercedes did where the phone became the rear view mirror of a car, emphasising performance. Also McDonald’s had used the mix of print and circuits with phones to create beat making place mats.

    But I find the intersection of print and digital an exciting space, even if the virtual cockpit concept doesn’t appeal to me that much.

    More related content here.

    Leo Burnett Italy created an app for P&G’s Always brand that directly addresses the insecurity women may feel in an unfamiliar area at night time; it connects them with a friend, to protect them on your way home.

    It is a smart play for the brand to maximise how it can be useful to consumers.

    Celebrity music streaming service Tidal faced critics at launch, this was probably the best of them

    I love this old video about Bell Laboratories’ complex in Holmdel, New Jersey that AT&T have put on YouTube as part of their efforts to digitise their archives. This is Silicon Valley before Silicon Valley

    At the other end of the spectrum, Ogilvy Hong Kong for Hong Kong Clean-Up produced a campaign that puts DNA analysis into an Orwellian future.