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.

  • The ten most popular posts of 2014

    First of all thank you for having visited my site this year, I thought I would revisit the most popular posts of 2014.

    1. The WhatsApp | Facebook post (part I) – On February 20, I woke up to find out that Facebook had acquired OTT messenger service Whatsapp for an apparently very large sum. I wrote two posts that day which tried to make sense of what was happening. I drafted the posts in a franchise Starbucks on the edge of the A41. If I had to sum up this post in one word it would be gobsmacked. You can read part II here
    2. Throwback gadget: Apple iPod hi-fi – my throwback gadget posts I write seem to do very well on an ongoing basis. I had a new old stock unit in storage which I brought out of storage and pressed into use when I moved back to the UK and wrote about what attracted me to this system. It seems to have a marmite reputation even amongst Apple fan boys
    3. The WhatsApp | Facebook post (part II) – part two of my analysis for the Whatsapp / Facebook acquisition came together later that morning after a Facebook and WeChat conversation with my friend Calvin Wong. I started to think about the why of the purchase in more detail
    4. Throwback gadget: Nokia E90 Communicator – Ironically for someone who maybe perceived for being digitally forward, I miss having a proper keyboard that I can still slip in a (Carhartt) jacket pocket. My ode to the E90 got picked up by Tomi Ahonen and the rest as they say was history
    5. On smart watches, I’ve decided to take the plunge – At the beginning of October I decided to experiment using a smart watch. This was the first of a couple of posts that outlined my thought process and what I found out through using the Casio G-Shock G+ watch
    6. Jargon watch: app constellation – I started off what I thought was a pretty straightforward post and got to be a bit of handful in the end. I went down the rabbit hole looking at the different app constellations rolled out by the worlds major internet companies. The research was manageable, but editing the HTML on the table turned turned out to be more of a handful than I expected
    7. The Apple Watch post – I stayed up to watch Apple’s messy online presentation of the Apple Watch. Whilst I was impressed by the technical expertise, I was unimpressed by the likely customer experience and was struck by the obvious ‘borrowing’ of design elements from Marc Newson’s Ikepod watch range of yore
    8. Garnier’s PS Cream campaign – Garnier’s advertising agency doing a classic PR hijack in China that shows the innovative environment of Chinese platforms and the blurring of lines of what PR actually means now
    9. My digital tool box – I was doing some work at the end of April and was struck by how many tools and hacks that I used to use in my daily work life were no longer available. I thought it would be a good idea to do a snapshot of the stuff I currently used for posterity. I hope to revisit it on a regular basis, we’ll see how it works out
    10. The Amazon Dash post – I am intrigued by new technology that seems to reject the icons-under-glass metaphor that seems to dominate convergence these days. Amazon Dash is a dedicated order-input device for Amazon’s grocery service in the US that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Braun product brochure from the 1970s

    According to the site analytics that was the most popular posts of 2014. What was the favourite thing you read in 2014?

  • Regional news sites + more things

    Yahoo announces plans to kill off some regional news sites, sunsets Yahoo Classic Games, alerts, and profile sites | VentureBeat – this is really big, Yahoo! is abandoning high growth markets in the Middle East and South East Asia. Just this time 12 months ago I was looking at running an ad campaign with Yahoo! Vietnam so this is a shock.  What must have happened to Yahoo!’s ad sale operation in those 12 months is somethingThe closure of regional news sites implies a cutting down of the business to package it for a sale based around its core US customer base. More related content here.

    Huawei Honor 6 Plus Preview – CNET – detailing still slipping on design, otherwise you are getting a reasonably well specified phone that would be adequate for man people. You can see how HTC is getting caught between the hammer and an anvil. Mid-range handsets is a squeeze point.

    The secret to the Uber economy is wealth inequality | Quartz – sharing economy relies on grinding poverty and is almost Victorian in nature. The big expansion of gig economy businesses, combined with their confrontational approach to government regulation means that it will only last for so long.

    Social sellers: A new weapon for brands on WeChat | Campaign Asia – Social sellers (people who are selling through WeChat but not using official WeChat shop interfaces known as ‘weidian’ 微店) could help to bring e-commerce on WeChat to the next level. The Weidian pose a challenge to the dominance of TaoBao.  (paywall).

    McDonald’s Dim Jack to “hijack” HKTV’s drama to promote Chicken nuggets | Marketing Interactive – really interesting execution breaking the advertising / programming wall. The closest I have seen of this was Sega’s pirate TV break into adverts. Washing powder brand Tide also did this on their Super Bowl ad spots one year

  • 2014 crystal ball gazing: how did I do?

    2014 crystal ball gazing

    2014 crystal ball gazing was a culmination of thinking that I have been doing on where digital is going. For the past few years I have been thinking about where digital is going and what it all means. At the end of last year here were my projections. I do realise that putting my 2014 crystal ball gazing out there may make me luck very foolish, I guess you can make up your own mind.

    Drone deliveries

    Amazon won’t do drone delivery in 2014 – Whilst trials of drone deliveries have been ongoing and drones seem to be getting more mainstream thanks to companies like DJI Amazon hasn’t done deliveries yet. In addition, the FAA in the US started to regulate commercial drone usage, which is likely to slow down adoption in the short term, while providing a stable legal framework of operation in the longer term.

    Small data

    Small data – Not so much an explicit interest in smaller data sets for meaningful things, but the Hortonworks IPO had an almost Netscapean quality to it with shaky revenue streams and a healthy share price bounce when it came to market. It also made Silicon Valley nervous as companies were concerned about negative perceptions toward the big data ‘sector.

    O2O

    Offline to online integration – O2O seems to be a bigger thing in China and other east Asian markets with ‘mobile search keywords’ put into adverts and TV programmes for years. The QRcode seems to be a uniquely Asian form of integration largely abandoned by western developers – mainly because they didn’t seem to use them in as imaginative a manner compared to Tencent et al. Lower power Bluetooth beacons are still experimental. Weve the joint company set up by the UK wireless carriers to provide contextual data about consumers to integrate online and offline marketing is running at a loss and has abandoned peripheral business opportunities in mobile wallets/ m-payments.

    Programmatic

    Algorithmic display advertising – there are a number of ways in which greater data is being brought to bear on programmatic ad spend but algorithms weren’t the biggest thing shaping the market this year. Major brands seem to have developed a distrust of the agency trading desks and the lack of transparency into market data. Instead of giving agencies an unfair advantage and allowing them to play both sides of the trade, they are bring the trading desk in-house.

    Mobile ad formats

    Mobile display advertising gets a radical reduction in formats – at the time I wrote this prediction, I had been concerned about clickthrough rates and mistaken clickthroughs, so I considered a reduction in mobile formats to just the ones that worked best like the page takeover. I didn’t forsee a bubble economy driving mobile display revenues around games apps. This may come to a head soon as western consumers seem to be less open to downloading to new apps according to research by Deloittes.

    Content marketing

    Content marketing on OTT platforms – WeChat has evolved in leaps and bounds with some amazing campaigns coming out in China, Burberry has worked with Tencent to push the envelopes on their campaigns and have included live webcasts. We haven’t seen so much of this happening with campaigns aimed at western consumers, but one brand springs to mind Vivienne Tam who ran a super model contest on the platform including a voting function and a special blog covering activity around New York Fashion Week as a separate tab on the account – all in English.

    China going global

    Chinese technology brands will finally be successful outside China – It’s still early days, but we’ve seen Lenovo and other Chinese brands demolish Samsung’s share of the smartphone market in the developing world. WeChat has expanded into India, Spain and South East Asia. OnePlus and Xiaomi have started selling direct in Europe, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Alibaba had a monster IPO and Baidu bought into fast start-ups like Uber.

    Consumer privacy

    Privacy issues won’t change much with consumers – Back at the end of last year I didn’t expect the Snowden story to continue to echo onwards. On the surface things didn’t seem to change with consumers, but there has been sufficient consumer interest that technology vendors are addressing (some) consumer privacy needs much to the chagrin of the law enforcement/military industrial complex. This privacy experience hasn’t been universally enjoyed (depending on country regulations) but things are changing.

    Tech workers

    Technology company workers are the new bankers – the tech worker bus protests that started at the end of December 2013 mushroomed, so by August 2014 Westboro Baptist Church got involved. Uber’s surge pricing and Snapchat’s frat boy CEO were just some of the lightning rods that made the tech sector look like vintage Wall Street.

    Immersion

    The rise of immersion – When I wrote my predictions I felt that I had been cheated out of the cyberpunk future that I had been promised and saw it as a major opportunity. Virtual reality had lost out in the 1990s when cumbersome helmet displays would disorientate you and cause you to throw up as the visuals and movement created dissonance partly due to a lack of computing power. Now we’ve seen cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson the chief futurist at one VR company, Facebook own another and companies like Zeiss and Samsung enter the fray. Together with advances in AR post-Google Glasses we are likely to see major innovations beyond gaming in the web-of-no-web.

    Machine programming

    Machine learning will threaten to disrupt programming – while machine learning is making an increased amount of noise in the tech media it is being seen as a leap forward in artificial intelligence rather than as an alternative strategy to traditional application programming. Skype adopted for their latest language training.

    Hyper-competition

    A race to the bottom will bring out hyper-competition in mobile semiconductor suppliers – the mobile market did race to the bottom which has made a major dent in Samsung and Huawei’s marketshare. Mediatek and Hi-Silicon are producing innovative silicon that has pushed phone performance forward. However rather than being a race to the bottom on pricing, Qualcomm has been taken to task by the Chinese government and Qualcomm admitted in its own financial documents that there at least some partners who weren’t paying them licence fees.

    How do you think I did on 2014 crystal ball gazing?

    More information
    2014: just where is it all going? | renaissance chambara 

  • Patent cliff + more things

    Pharma to lose $69 billion in five years as patents expire | Pharma File – patent cliff kicks in. Pharma has been buoyed historically by a run of blockbuster drugs. These drugs are coming off patent and there is a lack of obvious replacements. Secondly, investment in research is getting more and more expensive for pharma companies to stave off this patent cliff. Expect the pharma industry to try and go for intellectual property right extensions to try and stave off the patent cliff

    Laurence Fink Says Activist Investing Can ‘Destroy Jobs’ | New York Times – not terribly surprising but interesting that Black Rock has come out and said it

    Britain’s autumn statement: Two lost decades? | The Economist – at least since there is no compelling reason for things to improve (like with North Sea oil in the 1980s)

    Intelligence: Nike’s CIO Had to Get the Hell Out of Portland | Racked – surprised that Nike hadn’t managed to build a more urbane environment in Portland. I could see this as being a great case study for Who Is Your City author Richard Florida

    Intelligence: Gucci Cleans House: CEO, Creative Director Are OUT | Racked – not surprising given poor sales performance

    WhatsApp might be working on a web client | VentureBeat – me too feature to catch up with WeChat, expect QRCode hand-off

    Yahoo shuts offices in Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia | Campaign Asia – Malaysia I understand: closeness to Singapore, less of an economic power machine and a marketing sector that needs to work hard to keep up with legislation and local sensibilities. Indonesia and Vietnam are surprises given the high growth and populous markets that they represent

    Sony Lawyers Warn Press to Destroy Documents from Hack | Variety – this is tough one legally Sony as journalists are largely protected by the the US constitution

    Top 10 websites in the US according to Quantcast: A few observations | Chris Dixon – some interesting data points, you can still see the power of the IE installed user base and email looking at this data

    The Cheapest Generation – Atlantic Mobile – it assumes that will have the same amount to invest

    Silk Road subsidies undermine rail link | South China Morning Post – really interesting article about the nitty gritty of rail freight including lack of international common legal standards and requirements for paper work, insurance etc

    The Customer Journey to Online Purchase – Think with Google – really handy for media planning

    Sony hack: Studio Tries to Disrupt Downloads of its Stolen Files | Re/code – ethically dubious at best

    Xiaomi’s Indian expansion could be derailed by a patent tussle with Ericsson | Quartz – this is interesting as IP could put a speed bump on the new smartphone players for the time being, though this may decline in 5G as Huawei and ZTE get a bigger proportion of the IP in comparison to Alcatel-Lucent, Qualcomm, Samsung, Broadcom, Nokia, and Ericsson

    Russia tries again, in vain, to steady its collapsing currency | Quartz – it’s a buffet that the west hasn’t been invited and will end with a stronger China – having got hold of military and strategic industry IP, industrial assets and natural resources to drive further Chinese growth and strength

    Wal-Mart is the latest company to badly overestimate China | Quartz – there is a whole blog post in this story about growth, the nature of growth, management by Excel spreadsheets and a bit about China. Maybe I will have the time to write it one day

    EDMTCC 2014 – The EDM Guide: Technology, Culture, Curation – white paper trying to defend the bastard child of the dance music scene now that the Americans discovered it including Swedish House Mafia alumni (PDF)

  • Sharing economy & more

    Leo Burnett on sharing economy

    Leo Burnett put together this great presentation on the state of the sharing economy (Airbnb, Uber, Lyft etc.) The presentation on the sharing economy is well thought out and handy to keep one side as a reference. More related content here.

    The Sharing Economy: Where We Go From Here from Leo Burnett

    Code Rush

    Code Rush – an amazing documentary on Netscape and its Communicator product: a mix of email client and web browser. Netscape Communicator was the first desktop email client that I used. I remember that we had it at work and then were put through the trauma of moving to Lotus Notes at work. Communicator had been the first email client to support HTML, so going to text only on Lotus Notes as a culture shock.

    At home I switched to Eudora until I eventually moved to mail.app when I set up an Apple services based email account.

    The Hundreds x Reebok

    The Hundreds X Reebok collaboration movie is a great trip back to the early 1990s and some serious sneaker love. The Hundreds may not be the hippest brand, or the one with the most hype. But they don’t just do clothing, instead the publish content that captures the culture of streetwear. Observers as well as originators and creators in the streetwear scene.

    Alan Watts

    The creators of South Park put together some great animation to accompany recordings by the philosopher and buddhist Alan Watts. Don’t worry it isn’t done a South Park style and Alan Watts voice is very soothing. Watts’ work was very influential from the 1950s and again in the 1990s as the interest was rekindled in Zen buddhist philosophy and practice.

    Video game music origins

    Finally, Red Bull put this great documentary together on the origins of video game music. The process that they used to compose the music is amazing. It shows how limitations can enhance creativity.