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.

  • Agencies in US + more things

    U.K. Marketers Will Use Fewer Agencies by 2020, Report Says | Advertising Age – focused on doing prospecting and CRM in-house. Agencies will shrink because its not that hard to media plan if you’ve decided on Google and Facebook. (Not the smartest play, but one that inhouse marketers are increasingly adopting). More marketing content here.

    Apple iPhone Upgrade Plan May Imperil Carrier Roaming Revenue, Says Morgan Stanley – Tech Trader Daily – Barrons.com – is it affecting carrier business or taking on something carriers wish to abandon?

    U2 on Instagram: We’re not sure if kids and their smartphones are saving or destroying our concerts | VentureBeat | Mobile | by Chris O’Brien – beyond the cliches about aging rock starts its an interesting meditation on the effect of social media

    HTTP is obsolete. It’s time for the distributed, permanent web – interesting model, not sure that it’s ‘permanent’, would bring up some interesting legal implications

    Baidu and CloudFlare Boost Users Over China’s Great Firewall – NYTimes.com – needed as China goes global on web services and e-commerce

    How Ashley Madison Hid Its Fembot Con From Users and Investigators – failed Turing test

    Does Huawei’s Mate S really belong in the top-end bracket? | WantChinaTimes – it is questionable whether the Mate S merits its high price tag, the Chuangshiji report said. Disclaimer: I’ve worked in two agencies promoting Huawei mobile devices. I’ve never wanted to own a Huawei smartphone, phablet like the Mate series, MediaPad tablet or computer. But don’t let that put you off thinking that they’re top-end devices….

    Internet of Things: a game changer for cities? – what remains unclear is how IoT will revolutionize urban life and who should take the lead in this transformation. Should it be government agencies, or will we end up with a Snowcrash like corporatisation of the public sphere? A la public privately owned spaces in Hong Kong and other major cities.

    Is Mobile Advertising in China Doomed? | Social Brand Watch – probably no more so than in the West. Chinese businesses ‘get’ online to offline a lot better and media companies usually go direct to the clients, avoiding the media agencies as gatekeeper. In return the client gets a commission discount. Mobile advertising probably isn’t doomed, but at least some media buying agencies might be

    Nintendo is developing a mobile game to put Pokémon in the real world – it reminds me of Google’s Pokemon Master April’s fool day joke; but it also a neat idea

    Another European brand has crossed the Atlantic to help satiate the American appetite for cheap clothes – interesting that Primark chose to launch in Boston

    The US Marines tested all-male squads against mixed-gender ones, and the results were pretty bleak – it does beg the question why this is so?

    Can Goldman Sachs Really Take On the Bloomberg Terminal’s Total Domination | Vanity Fair – if you where a rival would you want to use a Goldman Sachs terminal??? It would be like Publicis using Xaxis from WPP for programmatic ad buys….

    Sludge Match | Popbitch – interesting legal case between the Daily Mail and Gawker website

    Daring Fireball: Brief Thoughts and Observations Regarding Today’s ‘Hey Siri’ Apple Event – more thoughts on this to follow

    A day in the life of a Chinese app addict | Quartz – really nice examples of Chinese mobile life

    Qatar telecom operator offers free data services for WeChat Myanmar｜WCT – interesting move especially considering the popularity of Facebook there versus other platforms

    Alibaba’s planning a Singles Day TV event by Feng Xiaogang | Techinasia – imagine Amazon doing a Black Friday TV special…

    Europol’s Cybercrime Agency Has Had Some Problems With Truecrypt | Motherboard – the suspect obviously had a sense of humour too

    Baidu’s Xiaodu can search too-BusinessShanghaiDaily Mobile – interesting more empathetic approach than Amazon Echo

    Social network Gaption pays for your content | Techinasia – interesting idea, it changes cues for sharing

    E-Book Sales Fall After New Amazon Contracts – WSJ – pricing strategy issues or something else?

    Google Plans to Bring App Store to China, Without Media Sales (Report) | Variety – good luck with that

    SiliconBeat – BlackBerry buying Good Technology for $425 million – BlackBerry buys the competition

    Walkman to iPod: Business-Model Transformation | Re/code – interesting analysis of Samsung

    Retailers to spend $2.5b on IoT in 2020 | Telecom Asia – integration of existing RFID with consumer electronics

    Researchers say people are choosing public transit so they can stare at their smartphones – really?

    Pando: The truth about Uber in China – oh dear (paywall)

    Net Politics » New Report: China’s Internet Is Pretty Big – despite The Onion type headline some interesting stats

    BBC – The world’s most influential shoppers – interesting thumbnail sketches of Chinese tourists

    With new iPhones around the corner Samsung sweetens the deal for ‘Test Drive’ customers – SamMobile – this makes sense as people will have to replace a number of paid apps

    Why Profit Doesn’t Come Into It For Apple Music | Music Industry Blog – really interesting analysis

    Google helps iOS 9 devs bypass Apple’s encryption because adverts- The Inquirer – don’t be evil – yeah right

    China general manufacturing PMI hits 77-month low | Out-Law – its 47.1. Anything below 50 is contraction

    The perpetual delay of a Line IPO suggests chat apps might not be such a big deal after all – IPOs also aren’t what they used to be

    People are confusing computer-generated music with the works of J.S. Bach | Quartz – interesting given that some of the first electronic music was Switched on to Bach by Walter / Wendy Carlos

    Chinese people want to know “How was China’s economy destroyed?” | Quartz – when you’ve had it so good, for so long; any kind of market correction is going to seem like this

    Former Apple CEO brings low-cost, high-design Android smartphones to emerging markets – yes its John Sculley and with the Chinese manufacturers upping their industrial design game I am not sure this is a long term opportunity, particularly if they don’t get the distribution right

    Life with the Dash button: good design for Amazon, bad for everyone else | Engadget – not really getting the beauty of customer context

    Sony’s new remote adds a boombox to your TV zapper | Stuff – interesting product design for aging Japanese consumers

    The Reason You First Started Shopping at Amazon Is Disappearing | TIME – started off with discounter strategy, now uses loss leader strategy to capture market share from hypermarkets and other stores

    Robots were able to make pancakes and pizza after reading Wikihow articles | Fusion – better than many people can do

    Even the folders have RSS feeds – The NewsBlur Blog – OMG amazing

    How to Add Facebook Author Tag in WordPress | Hongkiat – going to experiment with this

    How This Agency’s Completely Blank 4-Minute YouTube Video Got 100,000 Views | Adweek – interesting experiment about viewability

    Airbnb Will Make You Pay Tourism Taxes in Paris as of October | WSJ – will it become less attractive?

    Daring Fireball: iSight vs. FaceTime Cameras – glad that I wasn’t the only person slightly confused by this

    Tint: Display Any Social Feeds Anywhere – got to wonder about the potential legal issues around this, but could be brilliant for experiential stuff

  • Free WiFi & more things

    Will 5G Kill Free WiFi? | Motherboard – all I am going to point out here is that Intel backed WiMax versus LTE for 4G. Intel has consistently had issues in the wireless space. The use cases between 5G and free WiFi are likely to be very different. The potential low latency of 5G will be attractive in certain use cases. I don’t think it will be a consumer product for a while yet due to network build out issues in comparison to free WiFi (or the paid variety. More wireless related content here.

    EU Deepens Antitrust Investigation Into Google’s Practices | WSJ – its telling that a US commenter claims this is economic warfare and they might have a point…

    Phone numbers may start with ‘unlucky’ 4 and 7 as Hong Kong mobile demand outstrips supply | South China Morning Post – not terribly surprising when you have seen the phones are mounted on the dashboards of taxis by drivers participating in virtual motor pools. Hong Kong has had a reputation for the average consumer being ‘over-phoned’ and this is a consequence of it.

    The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Add-ons Blog – really interesting changes going on Firefox that is going to break popular plug-ins

    Piece Lets Your Phone Dual-Wield SIM Cards | Technabob – interesting idea, a slave phone. Though I could imagine mobile carriers viewing it more like a GSM gateway.

    From The Register:

    GSM gateways were common features of the 1990s and early 2000s telephone landscape. At the time, phone companies charged eye-wateringly high sums for overseas calls. In those dreary pre-Skype and pre-WhatsApp days, if you wanted instant contact with loved ones the phone was your only option. GSM gateways themselves, banks of SIM cards, worked a bit like a modern VPN does for an internet connection: you call the gateway, then once connected you enter the overseas number you want to be connected to. Government officials have claimed they frustrate surveillance by spy agencies and others because identifying caller data is not forwarded through the gateway, making it difficult to eavesdrop on a particular call going overseas.

    Fjord – Living Services Report – interesting report from Fjord on dynamic digital services

    EU Deepens Google Antitrust Investigation | WSJ – (paywall)

  • Google Hangouts + more news

    Google Hangouts

    Google Hangouts breaks out on its own site | TechRadar – dismantling Google+ piece-by-piece literally with the Google Hangouts service. Google+ has been a failure for user adoption; even if they did benefit from the enrichment of search data. Whether Google Hangouts will remain, who knows?

    Consumer behaviour

    China is two-speed consumer market | warc.com – high speed and low speed consumers – These high speed households, consisting mostly of the urban middle-class, currently number 81m people and generate $1.7tr of the $3.2tr in total urban consumption, but their numbers will swell to 142m by 2020 when they will account for $3.8tr of the $5.6bn in total urban consumption. – high speed consumption is crucial to China moving to balance its dependence on exports. More China related posts here.

    Tinder and Hookup-Culture Promotion | Vanity Fair – is this really that different from the traditional meat market approach?

    Culture

    HAVE BRITS ABANDONED RAVE CULTURE? | DJMag – Newsbeat was probably the wrong format to do the report from

    How to

    How Long to Read – find how long it will take to read any book

    Luxury

    Ritz-Carlton, Naples shares a slice of pie on social media | Luxury Daily – being useful, smart social play

    Luxury Hotels Move Into Low-Touch Luxury | L2 Think Tank – thinking carefully about process and the use of digital

    Media

    Channel Mum looks ahead after ITV takes a stake | digiday – ITV investing in YouTube content

    Online

    Is Bing Trolling Google & Alphabet With ABC.WTF Redirect? – looks like some prankster punk’d Alphabet

    Retailing

    China’s Ecommerce Giant JD.Com Expands to Russia | SocialBrandWatch – just because Russia is under western sanctions doesn’t mean that the Chinese won’t go there. Chinese tourists are already driving much of the demand for luxury goods at GUM and other high end shopping destinations in Moscow. I would imagine Logistics across Russia would likely prove to be challenging. More on retailing here.

    Wireless

    Smartphone giants have lost 15,000 jobs to cheap Android phones this year | Quartz – commoditisation belting the life out of the market. Premium smartphones won’t go away but low market handsets and mid-market will likely converge

    Intel Said to Unseat Q’Com in iPhone | EE Times – Qualcomm has the best modem technology in the market and the iPhone 6S is a premium phone. I can’t see Apple settling for second best technology – will Intel have the IP and the staying power to match Qualcomm? If Intel history is anything to go by; Qualcomm is likely to emerge victorious over time

  • The limits of Google

    Earlier I wrote a post on the work blog: Alphabet: what does it all mean? – which I have republished below. One thing that came through to me from this exercise was the growth limits of Google and by extension the growth limits of online advertising. The ceiling on advertising is limited by a number of factors:

    • Cost of acquisition – the most obvious ceiling is tat advertisers generally won’t pay more than their profit margin is wort to acquire customers. Search advertising did see bubbles of a sort around mortgages and insurance, but as performance marketing has improved measurement of attribution in the customer journey buying stratagems have become more efficient. More efficient the purchaser, the less profits for Google
    • Supply – when Google rolled out search advertising there was only really display advertising as competition. Now there is a plethora of social platforms and advertising technology behind display advertising that provides better data and a more nuanced understanding for media agencies
    • Context – ten years ago Morgan Stanley claimed that seven out of ten web journeys start with search. This knocked the guts out of the portals: Yahoo!, Excite and MSN. Now social and mobile advertising platforms via for Google’s lock on context. Google’s stewardship of Android facilitated some of these competitors. Now Google is prevented from even from access to the Chinese marketplace, one of the fastest growing internet markets in absolute terms. Amazon has ended up having such a lock on retail that many consumers don’t go to Google first but instead use the search box on the Amazon store for many of their purchases. Every search on Google is a potential loss of advertising opportunity
    • Screwing the channel – marketing groups such as WPP have facilitated and many cases bought a whole sector of media buying ‘middleware’, or what the industry calls ‘ad tech’ platforms. Google has stopped playing nicely with them and their largest customers publicly view them as co-opertition – behind closed doors the sentiment is likely to be less amiable

    Social media went into overdrive on Monday evening UK time when Google announced a formal restructure of all its businesses, creating a new company called Alphabet. For the man on the street, Google means Search, YouTube, Drive (including Docs, Sheets etc.), email and Android. For the average marketer you can throw various advertising products and Google Analytics into the mix. For business IT managers, it is everything from productivity, software-as-a-service and possibly as a supplier of a search appliance for its internal servers.

    Three different customer types exist and a product set that grows layer-by-layer like an onion. The bulk of Google’s revenue currently comes from advertising due to the clever technology behind it. One can see from Microsoft’s move to the cloud that there is less revenue in cloud computing than in Google’s current business, so when advertising reaches a natural ceiling for growth, services will provide an incremental benefit at best.

    Android was designed as a conduit to Google services and for advertising to venture out into the mobile space. But the world’s most popular mobile operating system is not without its own issues. Despite all phones essentially looking the same, there is a massive amount of fragmentation in the Android marketplace, which makes life harder for developers. Google is also a developer, so building applications that it can build loyalty through and make money from becomes more difficult.

    Secondly, an appreciable amount of Android devices (those sold in China) and many sold in Russia don’t use Google services and provide little to no opportunity for Google advertising.

    This means that Google is forced to make big bets in very different sectors. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, partly because of their entrepreneurial nature to explore new opportunities, built in an ability to scale Google beyond the business lines that I have outlined above. This was apparent from their original IPO share prospectus and accompanying letter. Xerox is famous in Silicon Valley lore for fumbling the future, by inventing lots of products that would be recognisable to us today in the late 1960s and early 1970s, only to see a corporate head office miss the boat. Brin and Page would have had some awareness of this. Microsoft’s inability to leapfrog beyond its core business successfully is probably also a factor for consideration.

    Alphabet formalises the framework that Page and Brin had been working to for a number of years.

    So what does this mean to Google?

    For the foreseeable future it will be more of the same for Google. We’ve the seen the business scale back services; by September last year Google had closed down 30 services. It has cut back the functionality of Google Adplanner as a reference tool, to just focus on sales. Google has continued to prune back services such as Google+ (a challenging task given the tentacles + has across Google’s services). The changes inside Google for staffers also reflect similar moves towards profit optimisation, move away from experimentation and being a ‘mensch’.

    The biggest move was to get rid of the 20% of time engineers could devote to projects that interested them. The truth is since at least 2009, the Google myth of people working there to change the world rather than delivering profit hasn’t held sway for a great deal of their staff.

    On the outside Google will still likely have playful swag and cool offices, but the reality is that it will be more of a ‘normal’ business. That means that we won’t see the next Facebook coming from within Google and that whilst the speed of evolution will continue to run along at the same pace, substantial innovation probably won’t. This kind of business requires a different kind of leader to Page, and by appointing Sundar Pichai, will create a cultural break from the past. Pichai is likely to be able to get more revenue out of the Google ‘cash cow’ to help drive innovation in these other areas.

    Page and Brin are freer to bring their energy to the other businesses in Alphabet. For instance, keeping Nest out of Google allows it to work easier with Google competitors like Apple and Microsoft as part of a wider eco-system.

    Lastly, it could be an effort to ring fence Google’s anti-trust woes within the existing business and prevent restrictions being imposed against its newer businesses because of the past sins of the core business.

    So what does this mean for marketers?

    Google is likely to pursue a steady as she goes approach. The focus will be to optimise revenue, so there will be tension with agencies on advertising practices. We’ve already seen this, with Google restricting methods of buying YouTube advertising. These changes will impact the advertising technology business around programmatic advertising.

    The picture with SEO is more about slow and steady change; Google has evolved its Panda index changes to a rolling change rather than the massive shake-ups of old.

    More information
    Android Fragmentation Report August 2015 – OpenSignal
    2004 Founders’ IPO Letter – Investor Relations – Google
    Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer
    What’s eating Google’s brand | renaissance chambara
    Why Google Employees Quit? | TechCrunch
    Google Tightens How Advertisers Buy YouTube Ads | AdWeek
    Google’s $6 billion miscalculation on the EU | Bloomberg Businessweek

  • Ice Cube and other things that caught my eye this week

    Ice Cube appearing in a video for Vanity Fair, critiquing interpretations of NWA lyrics on Rap Genius. Its great the way Ice Cube handles it with such good humour.