Ged Carroll

Category: online | 線上 | 온라인으로 | オンライン

The online field has been one of the mainstays since I started writing online in 2003. My act of writing online was partly to understand online as a medium.

Online has changed in nature. It was first a destination and plane of travel. Early netizens saw it as virgin frontier territory, rather like the early American pioneers viewed the open vistas of the western United States. Or later travellers moving west into the newly developing cities and towns from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

America might now be fenced in and the land claimed, but there was a new boundless electronic frontier out there. As the frontier grew more people dialled up to log into it. Then there was the metaphor of web surfing. Surfing the internet as a phrase was popularised by computer programmer Mark McCahill. He saw it as a clear analogue to ‘channel surfing’ changing from station to station on a television set because nothing grabs your attention.

Web surfing tapped into the line of travel and 1990s cool. Surfing like all extreme sport at the time was cool. And the internet grabbed your attention.

Broadband access, wi-fi and mobile data changed the nature of things. It altered what was consumed and where it was consumed. The sitting room TV was connected to the internet to receive content from download and streaming services. Online radio, podcasts and playlists supplanted the transistor radio in the kitchen.

Multi-screening became a thing, tweeting along real time opinions to reality TV and live current affairs programmes. Online became a wrapper that at its worst envelopes us in a media miasma of shrill voices, vacuous content and disinformation.

  • Throwback gadget: SnapperMail

    Thinking about SnapperMail takes me back to end of 2001, I started to prepare for leaving my job at Edelman. This meant upgrading my home IT set up. I picked up an iBook. The iBook was Apple’s consumer-orientated laptop made from 1999 to 2006. Mine was a second generation ‘Snow’ laptop with a G3 processor, dual USB sockets and a combo drive which allowed me to watch DVDs and burn CDs.

    I used the move to go on the first version of OSX. The move also meant that I got a new email account, my default account to date. It had two key attributes:

    • No adverts, so it looked professional in comparison to having a Yahoo! or Hotmail email address and it wasn’t tied to an ISP.
    • IMAP support which allowed me to use my email account across different devices that syncs across the devices. POP3 downloads the  emails from the server to the device, so is ideal only for when you are accessing email from one machine

    My iBook was my only source of email access whilst I left Edelman, freelanced, and then eventually joined Pirate Communications. My first smartphone was a Nokia 6600, which I used alongside a Palm  PDA – l got this sometime around the end of 2003. The 6600 supported IMAP out of the gate, it was slow, but I was connected.

    The 6600 was eclipsed by Palm’s Treo devices which were a better device. I moved from the 6600 and a Palm Tungsten T3 combo to a Treo 600 smartphone in January 2005.

    The process wasn’t smooth. The Treo was sufficiently fragile that I got a translucent silicon jacket that worked surprisingly well with the keyboard and screen protector to look after the touchscreen. Software wise the Treo 600 was a step back from the Tungsten T3 PDA. The screen was smaller and the software felt sluggish in comparison. I had deliberately chosen the 600 over the 650 because I had previously worked agency side on the Palm account and been a long-suffering device owner so knew how crap they were at bug fixes on new devices. The media didn’t call the former Palm CEO ‘Mad’ Bill Maggs for no reason (just sayin’).
    snapperfish limited
    Unfortunately Palm had not been as progressive in comparison to Nokia with its default email client. The software didn’t support IMAP. Fortunately I used to follow Mitch Kapor’s blog and he had recommended SnapperMail: an app from a small New Zealand company SnapperFish.

    SnapperMail was a compact modern email client. It has a number of features that we would expect now:

    • It supported IMAP
    • It supported SSL client to mail box encryption*
    • it was really easy to use
    • You could work with attachments including zipped files**
    • There was no restriction on the file size of attachments, the only restriction was your email account rather than your email client

    This looks like the kind of technology you would have thought Palm should have done. At the this time Palm were competing against Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003, BlackBerry 6200 series, 7100 series and early 8700 series. Yet the default email client was back in the 1990s.

    *The full-fat application cost US$39.99

    **SnapperMail came bundled with HandZipper Lite which handled the compressed files and JPEGWatch Lite image viewer

    I used this alongside MetrO – a public transit directions app and QuickOffice Pro – to read Office documents as part of my modern smartphone experience. It wasn’t just me that loved SnapperMail, it was praised by Walt Mossberg back when he wrote at the Wall Street Journal.

    SnapperMail won two Palm Source (Palm’s software licence business) Powered Up awards in 2003. It was recognised as Best Productivity and Best of the Best Solution. More on Palm here. 

    More information
    SnapperMail Has Solid Software For Savvy Mobile E-Mail Users | WSJ
    QuickOffice
    MetrO – open source mass transit application
    PalmSource Welcomes Developers with Awards, New Tools; Announces New Licensees | PalmSource press room

  • Blockchain deals + other news

    The Dumb Money Is Chasing After Blockchain Deals | CB Insights – true enough. Warning incoming rant on blockchain. Blockchain has a relatively low transaction rate. Traceability is reliant on a reliable database rather than the decentralisation. You have better performing open source databases that aren’t dependent on the weakest link of the decentralised network. For really high translation rates you are better investing in an Oracle database and appropriate hardware support – either through a SaaS or in-house.

    Executive Shuffle at Cyanogen Amid Challenges – can Jolla step up or is it too on the ropes? Jolla has some interesting contracts with the likes of the Russian government for trusted mobile systems. Cyanogen sold purely on improvements in user experience, so Jolla’s security infrastructure has a clear benefit for enterprise users and carriers who don’t want a smartphone botnet.  Jolla also has a strong UX, it pioneered some tactile gestures and leveraged Nokia employees deep experience in mobile experience and understanding of consumer behaviour.  Jolla also has support on some Sony smartphones. The big issue would be the failure of Jolla to turn existing deals with handset manufactured into wide availability of consumer products. It hasn’t been alone in that respect. Both Cyanogen and Firefox OS had similar issues of distribution that would then aid adoption. More on Jolla here.

    Introducing 360 Photos on Facebook – every idea becomes new again. Back before the Internet there was QuickTime VR. This rolled on to the early net but the experiment was very patchy due  to the lack of bandwidth in comparison to today. Content and interaction wise there is clearly no difference from a the consumer experience between Facebook 360 and QuickTime VR. The question is how Facebook 360 goes forward, or if it just becomes a fad like QuickTime VR did before it?

  • Fox + more news

    Fox

    Fox ‘Stole’ a Game Clip, Used It In Family Guy and DMCA’d the Original – Slashdot – either its automated software (likely YouTube’s automated scanning) or exceptionally shady business practices – both of which are plausible scenarios when it comes to Fox. Either way Fox won’t care

    Business

    In China, Uber faces battle to usurp Didi | FT – not surprising. Both companies have large investors behind them. Uber also has ‘non tariff’ barriers against it since it isn’t Chinese. More on Didi here.

    Nest Failure: How things went south once Google became Alphabet | BGR – interesting how the move to a holding group structure meant a big change in management culture. First Boston Dynamics, now Nest. Googlers I know are also complaining about the change in culture. They feel that they are disempowered in comparison to pre-Alphabet

    Design

    The Co-op returns to its clover-leaf logo from 1968 | Creative Review

    Economics

    What’s holding back China’s consumption growth? | South China Morning Post – Consumer sentiment has plunged in recent months, as the consumer sentiment index hit a 28-month low of 100 in March, versus 104.4 in February. Retail sales also increased more slowly than expected in April at 10.1 per cent, versus 10.5 per cent in March. – Government planned slower growth in manufacturing is trickling down to consumer behaviour. Chinese savings are pretty stable due to a poor social safety net. Until China gets a better welfare state you’re going to see China’s consumption growth be low.

    FMCG

    Chinese brands best performers in China: consumer goods survey | China Daily – interesting how Chinese brands have managed to ford the trust gap

    Lynx: can it convince consumers it’s about more than getting laid? | Campaign (UK) – nice summary and analysis of the Lynx/Axe advertising campaigns over the past few years (paywall)

    We know acne, we don’t know teens. – YouTube – nice bit of honest marketing by Clearasil

    US brands dominate through disruption | Kantar Worldwide – latest US BrandZ results

    In China, global brands are losing advantage | Kantar – higher confidence levels in product and their country mean that global brands have work harder

    Ideas

    Uber has pinpointed the moment you‘re most likely to pay for surge pricing — Quartz – feels really invasive but insightful

    Media

    ★ App Store Subscription Uncertainty – From Lauren Goode’s interview with Phil Schiller for The Verge, specifically regarding the new 85/15 revenue split after the first year of a subscription. I wonder how this would work for Netflix et al?

    News UK unveils new in-house agency powered by WPP and The & Partnership | Campaign Live – next move from single client agency to ‘in-house’ agency a la Unilever’s U Studio?

    ComScore Says People Prefer Ads in Podcasts Over Any Other Digital Medium | Adweek – surely these findings are positive for radio and streaming audio as well?

    Apple Music Enlists Designers to Curate Playlists, Starting With Alexander Wang | Racked – why isn’t this being sold as a branding opportunity?

    WTF are ‘dark posts’? | Digiday – surely this is a variant of online PR?

    ANA report alleges widespread ad agency kickback schemes – Business Insider – and this is a surprise because? Programmatic offers even bigger opportunities for fun and profit

    Online

    Why Britain banned mobile apps | GovInsider – cost centric rather than user centric?

    Report: People Are Spending Much Less Time On Social Media | Slashdot – not too sure how much store I put in Similarweb’s data

    Security

    Exclusive: Snowden Tried to Tell NSA About Surveillance Concerns, Documents Reveal | VICE News – there is something quite reassuring about the clod handed nature of the response to this

    Style

    Adidas Relies On Stars Not Soccer Teams To Sell Product | Business of Fashion – I would argue that would be the same for most boot brands, shirt deals are often not that profitable

    Technology

    Shipments of Chromebooks integrated with Google Play set to increase | DigiTimes – not great for Windows 10 consumer sales (paywall)

    Web of no web

    Olympic athletes will sport Visa’s new payment ring in Rio | Engadget – no radical leap forward in NFC

    Project Soli – Wave hello to Soli touchless interactions Soli is a new sensing technology that uses miniature radar to detect touchless gesture interactions.

    A former employee says Google’s smart contact lens is ‘slideware’ that exists only in PowerPoint presentations (GOOG, GOOGL) – not terribly surprising, power is the number one issue facing the device

    Wireless

    The answer to the question you’ve all been asking | Nokia – Nokia’s official announcement

  • Ten most popular posts of H1 2016

    In order of traffic volume, the ten most popular posts of H1 2016  on my blog (up to the beginning of June):

    1. What are the major reasons behind Yahoo!’s drastic decline – a Quora question inspired post. The reasons I highlight are a bit different to the popular media narrative around the Yahoo! business
    2. How the Panama Papers story broke online – a look at how the story broke across social media and traditional news with data
    3. What the IFTTT is going on? – IFTTT changed the way it approached development which left many service users such as me in the lurch. The key outtake is don’t trust services that you don’t pay for.
    4. Inside Virgin Atlantic’s online racism crisis – how the Chinese diaspora teamed up to highlight a racially motivated incident on a Virgin flight.
    5. On Writing – inspired by a similar post that Stephen Waddington did. We had a contrast of approaches and motivations
    6. The Trouble with Twitter – with growth stalled what does it mean for the social media platform?
    7. Yahoo! how did we get here? – similar post in many respects to to the top-ranking post that highlights missed opportunities
    8. Online advertising and technology data points – this is the April edition of a monthly (or as near monthly updates on statistics that I can do)
    9. The Smartphone Market and Huawei – analysis of Huawei’s consumer business. One can see the impact of smartphones on Huawei’s business. Huawei’s feature phone business was more successful than their smartphone business in terms of profit margin for a good while. Whilst Huawei has aspired to become progressively more  I updated it in a separate post when Huawei published its annual results at the beginning of April
    10. Everyday tools that are a part of my process part one – items that I use in my everyday workflow to create, curate content and brand strategy.

  • Google I/O 2016

    Google I/O 2016 happened on May, 18 – 20.  There had been a lot of pieces of coverage about the different products and services released. But I wanted to spend a bit of time reflecting on what Google I/O 2016 told us about their viewpoint on technology.

    Giving apps a second chance

    Google knows as well as anyone that the app moves towards a maturity model where consumers stick with the core apps that they want and then don’t go any further.
    apps
    Data shows that consumers use their top five apps 88 per cent of the time. So why would Google care when it knows that 60 percent of the top apps on the Android platform?

    The reasons for an expanded app usage include:

    • A proportion of Google’s advertising (like Facebook) is derived from the promotion of app downloads
    • Android devices are reaching market maturity in many markets, growth is likely to come from new uses – at least some of which will be derived from third party platforms
    • Google has staked its ambition in the PC sector on its Chrome operating system being able to run apps from the Android eco-system. In order for that to happen there needs to be a healthy community of developers
    • In the same way that DoubleClick’s ad network greatly expanded the inventory of Google’s advertising business, third party applications offer Google an additional source of usage for its own services. If you want to see the future of Google Apps look at the the way the likes of Baidu and Tencent allow third-party integration with their own tools

    Streaming or ‘instant’ apps is part of Google’s efforts to encourage consumer trial of new apps and enhance relationships with developers. Firebase, it’s new analytics platform for mobile developers helps them have a better relationship with their installed user base allowing them to use data to target notifications and campaigns.

    More faith in wider area networks (WANs) than personal area networks (PANs)

    Android Wear’s updates were interesting. Put simply Google has more faith in data being delivered in a timely manner over cellular or wi-fi networks than it does for inter device transfers over variants of Bluetooth. Both the Apple Watch and Android Wear products suffered from performance lags when the watch was a thin client of a phone. Having a cellular radio on board the phone presents challenges with battery life, but speeds up real world performance.

    The original design failure wasn’t down to network performance, but is likely to have implications for personal area network technology like Bluetooth in its different variants or ZigBee. These technologies are all about scale, lose a scale advantage and it poses a problem for future adoption by others. This can happen in a virtuous way. Apple’s adoption of USB benefited the standard greatly and drove interest in peripheral development for both Mac and PC. Apple’s abandonment of FireWire and the 3.5″ diskette marked their decline.

    Lots to be concerned about from a privacy point of view?

    Google Home moved yet another pair of Android powered ears into our environment. It was obvious from Google’s description of services that a paid marketing model to be the ‘car booking’ or equivalent service of Home could be very lucrative for the search giant. How this device could be used for market research, tracking brand mentions or government surveillance also poses some conundrums moving beyond smartphones to brown goods.

    Android N features file based encryption rather than treating the whole device as an encrypted disk. This raises questions around the comparative ease of access from a privacy perspective. Secondly, SafetyNet allows Google to reach into a phone to remove pre-existing applications without user permission. There is no explanation if they also have write privileges to the phone as well. If so, expect law enforcement and intellectual property owner interest. From the way it reads this would affect apps and content that have been side loaded as well as got from an app store.

    Android is giving the high ground to Apple on privacy presumably because it considers its own customers don’t care about it that much.

    Reference designs in VR to drive adoption and commoditisation 

    Google’s Daydream project looks to provide standardisation in hardware. By going down this route, Google hopes to spur on the sensor market required for improved AR experience and drive uptake. These will likely be a very different experience to the computer workstation powered Occulus Rift. Driving this technology into the smartphone market may combat the current stagnation in phone sales growth.

    More information
    Google I/O 2016 event page
    A16hz on Google I/O 2016
    Everything Google just announced at its I/O conference
    Palm, Apple, Google and the whole mobile device thing
    The Limits of Google
    If Google’s right about AI, that’s a problem for Apple – Marco.org
    ISIS’s Mobile App Developers Are in Crisis Mode | Motherboard