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.

  • AirBnB + other news

    AirBnB

    AirBnB seems to be the goldilocks of the sharing economy. It has at least as much disruptive negative impact as Uber, yet doesn’t seem to attract the same level of vitriol. On the demand side of things, while I know people who have had negative AirBnB experiences, they still don’t seem to realise its its the platform and solely blame the host. ABC News | tweedier – The Sharing Economy – Mark Pesce on Uber and AirBnB. How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other | Wired – Wired does an in-depth piece on the supply side of the sharing economy. I think its going to be a while before people really wake up to how toxic AirBnB and the sharing economy are.

    Business

    China builds for the future | HSBC – government looks to enhance environment for small business with tax breaks

    Here’s the chart that has Chinese stock markets so depressed – Quartz – good graph of HSBC PMI numbers, it is affected by sampling issues however

    Consumer behaviour

    VOX POPULI: Job security is everything for rookie employees | The Asahi Shimbun – Japanese workers want security

    China’s Young Male Factory Workers Change the Assembly Line – Businessweek – the little emperors on the line are bolshy, harass female colleagues and get bored easily

    Economics

    Alibaba’s IPO may not be as big as everyone is expecting | Quartz – interesting breakdown on IPO values across sectors

    US oil boom checks inflation | HSBC – US oil production has far surpassed expectations in recent years and the country could overtake Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest producer of crude oil and oil products by 2015 – how sustainable is this?

    Cautiously optimistic: Innovation and Chinese FDI | Deloitte

    FMCG

    Is Burger King’s Big Mac Clone Stealing McDonald’s Lunch Money? | BloombergBusinessweek – what will the value promotions do to the McDonald’s brand equity?

    Ideas

    CABINET // Whitewood under Siege – fascinating story of pallets

    Luxury

    A goldmine in retail? | Marketing Interactive – interesting profile of Chow Tai Fook jewellery retail chain

    Louis Vuitton still number one in awareness for Chinese: report | Luxury Daily

    Chinese Tourist Spending In UK To Rise By 84 Percent | Jing Daily – the UK needs to do more to court Chinese consumers

    Coach Responds to Falling Sales By Raising Prices | BloombergBusinessweek – interesting move that didn’t work for Mulberry that well when they tried it

    How a Korean TV Show Sparked a Jimmy Choo Craze in China | WSJ – store staff noted that customers were coming in with pictures on a smartphone. The bit that’s missing is how did they discover that the shoes were Jimmy Choo and hence knew which boutique to walk into?

    Marketing

    The Mystery of Our Social Traffic | Baekdal – really interesting read

    Media

    Thumbnails: French proposal for payment of royalties by search engines | Kluwer Copyright Blog – it reminds me of the tax that used to happen on tape and CD media to compensate for piracy

    Say Goodbye to Paid Search Terms from Google – Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe – this has more of an impact than one would consider

    Baidu Launched Dynamic Search Ads Feature — China Internet Watch – powered by website content RSS?

    The reinvention of MTV, chapter one million | Quartz – interesting alchemy of social media and broadcast media

    Online

    月球车玉兔的微博|微博-随时随地分享身边的新鲜事儿 – Jade Rabbbit lunar rover Weibo account

    Software

    Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis on Consumer Recording, Provocative Branding, & Endangered Gizmos

    What The Heck Is Machine Learning? | BusinessInsider

    Wireless

    China Telcos Propose Base Station JV | Young’s China Business – interesting that Chinese carriers are collaborating on base stations, probably less equipment sales for vendors than they’re expecting. More related content here.

    Web of now web

    Data point: Enthusiasm about wearable tech highest in Latin America, lowest in North America

  • Loose lips sink ships

    During the second world war nations promoted a heightened state of awareness in citizens that they could be overheard through the use of propaganda materials. Including the iconic phrase loose lips sink ships.

    Loose talk can cost lives

    Loose lips sink ships is also a good maxim for modern business lives. We are now in an age when everyone can be a ‘self-facilitating media node’ as Nathan Barley put it. There is no longer any off the record. Jeremy Clarkson’s precarious position highlighted the perils of this with his apparent remarks committed to video tape. In the Financial Times this morning there is a great example of a similar unguarded comment providing rival automakers with a source of embarrassment.

    At the Frankfurt Motor Show in 2011 Volkswagen Chairman Martin Winterkorn was filmed admiring the i30 model on the Hyundai stand. In particular, he noticed the lack of noise on the adjustable steering wheel a feature that neither BMW or Volkswagen Group could match and discussed this with his chief designer.

    Hyundai has used this video clip as a proof point of their own engineering prowess ever since.

    What needs to be done?

    • Educate staff members to act as if anything they do can end up on the front of the Daily Mail
    • Off the record is never off the record
    • Everyone is a journalist
    • Be more circumspect in public discussions that can be overheard, make notes, bring them up at a safer forum back at the office

    More social related content here.

  • Big data issues

    Big data origins

    In the past, what is now included in the envelope of big data resided with just a few organisations. The story of big data started with the US government. The government used a young company called IBM and their punch card technology to help tabulate their census data. Punch card technology started in the textile industry, where industrial revolution-era jacquard looms manufactured complex fabric patterns. Punch cards also controlled fairground organs and related instruments. It was with early tabulating machines made by IBM and others that started to change the world as we know it.
    Computer History Museum
    When the mainframe came along governments used them to manage tax collection and to run the the draft for Vietnam. It came a key part of the US anti-war protesters to destroy machine readable draft cards. (The draft card destruction didn’t affect the draft process. But burning the draft card was still an offence and some people underwent punishment.)

    Credit agencies

    Also around this time, the credit agency was coming into its own in the US. Over a period of 60 years, it had gradually accumulated records on millions of Americans and Canadians. The New York Times in 1970 described the kind of records that were held by Retail Credit (now known as Equifax):

    …may include ‘facts, statistics, inaccuracies and rumors’ … about virtually every phase of a person’s life; his marital troubles, jobs, school history, childhood, sex life, and political activities.

    These records helped to vet people for job applications, bank loans and department store consumer credit. It was like a private sector version of the J. Edgar Hoover files. Equifax moved to computerise its records. One reason was to improve the professionalisation of its business. This also had an implication on the wider availablity of credit information. Computerisation led to the Fair Credit Report Act in the US. This legislation was designed to give consumers a measure of transparency and control over their data.

    Forty years later, mainframe computers are still used to process tens of thousands of credit card transactions every second. New businesses including social networks, search engines and online advertising companies have vast amounts of data; unlike anything a credit agency ever had.

    The social, cultural & ethical dimensions of big data

    The recent The Social, Cultural & Ethical Dimensions of “Big Data” event held at New York University by the Data & Society Research Institute was important. Events like these help society understand what changes to make in the face of rapid technological change.

    Algorithmic accountability

    The Algorithmic Accountability primer from the event highlights the seemingly innocuous examples of how technology like Google’s search engine can have far reaching consequences. What the Data & Society Research Institute called ‘filter bubbles’. Personalisation of search will change that consumers see from individual to individual. This discrimination could also be applied to items like pricing. Staples has produced an algorithm that based pricing on location of the web user; better off customers were provided with better prices. One of the problems of regulating this area is first of all defining what an algorithm actually is from a policy perspective.

    Algorithmic systems are generally not static systems but are continually tweaked and refined, so represent a moving target. During my time at Yahoo! we rolled out a major change to the search algorithm every two weeks on a Wednesday evening US west coast time. I imagine that pace of change at the likes of Google and Facebook has only accelerated.

    The problem with many rules based systems now is that we no longer write the rules or teach the systems; instead we give the system access to large data sets and it starts to teach itself – the results generally work but we don’t know why. This is has been a leap forward for what would be broadly based artificial intelligence, but makes these systems intrinsically hard to regulate.
    concern with data practices
    Given all this it is hardly surprising that research carried out  on behalf of President Obama by The Whitehouse showed a high level of concern amongst US citizens. More related content here.

    More information

    Jacquard Loom – National Museums Scotland
    Separating Equifax from Fiction | Wired (Issue 3.05)
    Data & Society | Algorithmic Accountability primer
    This Landmark Study Could Reveal How The Web Discriminates Against You | Forbes
    Websites Vary Prices, Deals Based on Users’ Information | WSJ
    The 90-day review for Big Data | Whitehouse
    Data & Society | Alogrithmic Accountability Workshop Notes
    Digital Me: Will the next Cringely be from Gmail? | I, Cringely

  • Taxiwise + other news

    Taxiwise

    Cab Ordering Service ‘Taxiwise’ Has Been Acquired By IKKY, a Likeminded Booking Platform – StartupsHK – it does beg the question, are taxi apps a feature of a larger logistics booking service or a wholly fledged offering in their own right? Taxiwise is a mobile and web taxi booking service for business travelers, foreigners, and expats who do not speak the local language. Which makes me wonder about Taxiwise as by definition it has a really small target audience, many of which are more likely to be using Uber.

    Business

    The Uber Wars Are Shaping Up to Be Even More Heated in Europe – The Atlantic Cities – I wonder whether this could provoke free trade concerns?

    Sony slashes profit forecast – again | RTHK – the Greek tragedy that is Sony rolls on

    Consumer behaviour

    Strategy Briefing: Mobile Cocooning: How Growing Reliance on Smart Devices is Influencing Consumer Behaviour – Euromonitor International – time to dust off my five year old post on the phenomena of cocooning 2.0

    Benjamin Netanyahu’s impassioned rant against smartphone users: ‘You are slaves to your gadgets’ | Washington Post – whilst Mr Netanyahu fails to demonstrate the pragmatism of past Israeli statesmen like Moshe Dayan; you can’t fault him on his criticism of the digital life

    Culture

    BBC News – Why some English words are controversial in China – mirrors the handwringing in other countries like France

    Economics

    Asian export growth may have decoupled from western economy | WantChinaTimes – there is also the question of how real western growth actually is…

    Legal

    How to buy Xiaomi products & identify fake ones? (MI3, Redmi, Power bank) – MIUI General – MIUI Official Community – interesting that Xiaomi having to deal with fake smartphones. Where are the fake Huawei or ZTE handsets? Secondly Xiaomi has some interesting things in place to tell fake and real phones apart. Fake phones are a backhanded complement to the Xiaomi brand

    Media

    Why China is censoring ‘The Big Bang Theory’ but not ‘Game of Thrones’ | Quartz – most likely explanation

    Gerry Conway: The ComiXology Outrage | Comicbook.com – pretty much how I feel about it

    Behind The Music (Video): How Important Are Videos to Both Artists and Brands? – with just 5 seconds, product placements in music videos can create 35%+ brand lift—the same 35-60 second placements.

    Online

    A Eulogy for Twitter – The Atlantic – has Twitter behaviour moved towards more like Chinese consumers on Weibo?

    Yahoo’s Default = A Personalized Experience | Yahoo Global Public Policy – Yahoo! fucks over ‘Do Not Track’; screw the consumer we need the cash

    Foxconn focuses on social with deal to invest up to $9.6m in microblogging service Mig33 – interesting move. Mig33 is a social network that is big in Iraq and Pakistan focusing on culturally sensitive definition of fun and has struggled with the move to Android. I didn’t realise that Mig33 own Alivenotdead which is big in Chinese music circles for fan engagement

    Security

    Hacking China’s online games for profit: an interview with a Chinese hacker | Techinasia

    Infamous Hacker ‘Weev’ Went On CNBC To Explain The Fascinating Hedge Fund He’s About To Launch

    Software

    Meet Vhoto: This new iPhone app scans your videos to find amazing still photographs – GeekWire

    Taiwan

    Japanese strategist says Obama’s power is waning in Asia | WantChinaTimes – Taiwan may not benefit much from US president Barack Obama’s rebalancing strategy in the Asia-Pacific as Obama has less than two years left in office, and that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) could be a disaster.

    Telecoms

    UK phones support US drone strikes | Techeye – I am really surprised that the US Department of Defense trusts a telecoms network full of Huawei gear

    Web of no web

    Samsung attempts to preempt Apple’s Healthbook launch with a health-focused event of its own in late May | 9to5Mac – let’s hope it’s better designed and adopted than their current native phone apps

    Wireless

    Share Of iPhone Ownership In The U.S. – Business Insider – Apple seems to have a longer usage of a given handset than other brands

    How Apple crushed Google in the fall of 2015 from my book “The Future History of Technology | Two Thirds Done

  • My digital tool box

    There are new useful sites springing up all the time so this is just a snapshot of the things that I use as my digital tool box:

    Service/category Description
    Digital tool box for analysis / measurement
    Domain Tools Paid for service site with some great free features including DNS look-up and the SEO browser, which allows you to see your web page the way a search crawler, would see it. This is really handy to use with clients who currently have a visual site or to just as part of a website audit.
    Google Trends Google Trends is a cornucopia of data to inspire campaign ideas and provide insight into a brand truth. The best bit about it is that its free and unlike other Google tools like Adplanner it hasn’t been crippled as the company got mean over the past few years.
    Mention A freemium product that augments the reduced service that Google Alerts now provide.
    SocialMention A great free service to grab a snapshot of social activity. The most useful aspect of the service is getting an idea of the aggregated volume of conversations and most active accounts.
    State State is a self-described social opinion network where you can see what consumers think about brands or products often represented by a handy sentiment curve. Ok so the data will be skewed because the audience is self-selecting and tech forward, but it’s also a handy gut check on a brand.
    Sysomos MAP Ok so the agency subscribes to MAP, but it is such a useful part of my life. From new business to PR messaging and everything in between MAP is a major tool in our work. I found it more useful than Radian6 in terms of the quality of the information it provides
    Tfengyun.com Get some basic research and analysis done on a Sina Weibo account. It is all in Chinese so be sure to break out Google Translate as well!
    TwitterCounter Does what it says in the name looks at the change in followers over a 90 day period of an account, which gives you an idea of performance. Handy for benchmarking against competitors or seeing how effective their activity has been.
    Communication
    Buffer Buffer allows you to preload updates for Twitter, a Facebook page or even Google+. It is simpler to use than Hootsuite and allows inputs from IFTTT
    IFTTT IFTTT allows you to build simple workflows based on a web input for instance a post tagged on Pinboard.in with a tag or an article in an RSS feed with a particular word. I have found it invaluable in my Twitter workflow. It is much more robust, but less sophisticated than Yahoo! Pipes
    Jego Jego is a VoIP application brought out by China Mobile. Despite the payment mechanism being very clunky the service is really useful. It is what powers my Hong Kong number and I get a bundle of call minutes with it rather like Skype. The call quality can be very rough, but I suspect that they Chinese will lift their game over time.
    Skype So the user experience of Skype isn’t as good as it used to be. The NSA now listens into all of your calls that don’t get dropped or leave you ending up sounding like a dalek. But Skype’s premium account does allow you to do a WebEx-type webinar on the cheap including multiple callers and sharing a presentation.
    TallTweets Indonesians have a very distinctive Twitter culture. High profile account holders are often paid to tweet a long form message by brands. This is called a kultwit. TallTweets was one of the tools that they used; it slices long form messages down into a series of 140 characters that are transmitted one after the other to produce a continuous stream.
    WeChat I can’t emphasise enough how useful WeChat is. It can be used on both a desktop and a mobile device, you can form groups on there; share content, do video calls. It is much better than the likes of Whatsapp or Viber in terms of functionality and quality of the service.
    Inspiration
    Flickr Flickr is one of the digital services that I have probably used the longest. At first I used it for image hosting for my blogs and I still do use it for that. But it is also so much more. It is a source of visual inspiration for ideas, brainstorms and even visuals for presentations. Flickr Creative Commons is one of the best examples of good stuff about the web.
    Pinterest Apart from the copyright nightmare that Pinterest represents it is really interesting to search a topic and see what comes up as a kind of instant mood board.
    Digital tool box for News
    Hacker News by Y Combinator Not exactly news, but a great set of curated content that taps into the web zeitgeist. It saves time so you don’t have to be trawling Stack Overflow or Reddit.
    Newsblur I am a massive advocate of Newsblur. Since Livedoor closed down it’s English language RSS reader I have been using Newsblur instead. The service has a great iOS client (which is better used on an iPad if I am honest), and has native support of numerous sharing / social bookmarking tools including Pinboard. There is also an Android client and a third party Windows Phone client for those of you who are mobile masochists. Newsblur takes RSS in a number of clever new directions, you can train it to show you only the content that you want to see and provides the content in a number of views including the original website design (for when you want to understand the context of the coverage), or just text (which is handy when you are on the go). Newsblur costs a very reasonable $24/year.
    Techmeme Techmeme is an aggregator that collates the mainstream news; it replaced Google News for me since it was more the zeitgeist than Google managed.
    Twitter lists Twitter is a great tool, but you need to slap a filter on the fire hose. I do this through using lists to give me a pared down view of what I need to know between the links to Buzzfeed articles and yet another cat picture from my friends.
    Productivity digital tool box
    Basecamp Basecamp offers a cost effective way to organise / upwardly manage clients and share content. You just set up a different account for each project stream or discrete client relationship and off you go. It is free for 30 days if you are looking at something short term or $20 / month
    DownForEveryoneOrJustMe A single page site that does what it says in the title, really useful
    Google Drive I am not necessarily a great fan of creating a document within Google; it can sometimes feel unresponsive, particularly over a corporate network or where you are collaborating on a document. It is however great for building surveys, customer service question databases for managing social media accounts or holding a common set of passwords.
    Hemingway Hemingway is like having an extra critical set of eyes go over your copy. I have started to use it for blog posts as a way of forcing me to look more critically at my writing and move away from my previous stream of consciousness approach.
    iCloud Apple’s web services have been a part of my life since 2001. Apple at the time offered the first advertising-free IMAP email account, syncable address book and calendar based on WebDAV and hCard standards/formats. It has become less useful since Apple did away with iDisk
    Mendeley If you’ve ever had to do some serious writing like a book chapter or a bylined article, having an application like Mendeley makes the process a lot easier. It is a mix of an application and cloud service that allows you to store citation materials, share with other writers and automatically build a bibliography within a Word document via a simple plug-in. Pretty much a must for journalists or corporate copywriters. Mendeley has a freemium model and at the top end, for just 11.99GBP/month you can have unlimited storage space
    Noisli Noisli is a text editor designed to free you from distraction and is an essential part of my blogging workflow now. It’s white noise generation is also handy for when you want to get to sleep, I often leave my laptop logged in playing their rainfall noise when I am away and trying to get a good night’s sleep.
    PDFEscape Online editing of PDF files
    Pinboard Back in the day there was a service called del.icio.us that allowed you to store all your bookmarks in the cloud and put labels on them called tags rather than having to put them in folders. This allowed your bookmarks to exist in multiple categories. delicious allowed you to search these categories. Unfortunately del.icio.us became delicious.com and got crippled in a spectacular bout of shareholder value destruction overseen by numerous managers at Yahoo! who understood the price of everything and the value of nothing as Bill Hicks would say. Pinboard was created as a home for del.icio.us refugees like me and works as an augmentation of my memory and as a hopper for me to feed content into IFTTT.
    Ribbet Ribbet is a basic online photo editor that does everything that I need a photo editor to do. Usually I use it for altering images for use in presentations.
    Skip Skip is the app formerly known as ClipPick, it is basically multi-device / multi-screen cut and paste. Simple, easy, instantaneous. Like it or not the current mobile/tablet systems and PC systems aren’t particularly open, they tend not to work together well unless inside a particular vendor walled garden like Samsung, Sony or Apple.Skip breaks down those walls, it’s kind of like Google was in that once you start using it you couldn’t imagine life without it. Some really nice people in South Korea make it; show them some download love.
    WeTransfer The simplest handy way of shipping files around. A lot of people find it hard to grasp the concept of Dropbox so the one-click approach of WeTransfer is really handy.
    Planning / research digital tool box
    AcronymFinder Clients love TLAs and FLAs as professional shorthand, use AcronymFinder to work out what they are actually saying (TLA: three-letter acronym; FLA: four-letter acronym)
    Archive.org Need to understand a former organisation? The Wayback Machine becomes particularly handy in understanding an organisation that has acquired or merged other businesses together.
    CIA World Fact Book Surprisingly useful almanac of economic and infrastructure data from the Central Intelligence Agency. Everything from time zones to what the flag looks like.
    Dogpile Dogpile is a meta search engine. It trawls a number of search engines rather than just Google to present you with potential answers
    Eurostat database The European Commission pulls together a lot of research every year and gives it away to the likes of you and me for free. You can get some real gems that come in handy for campaign planning and ideation.
    Federal Election Committee financial reports and data Handy when you are doing a search on likely reputational risks of clients. See whose campaign they donated to and the kind of issues that these people support.
    Follower Wonk Probably one of the most useful Twitter tools out there which allows you to look at third party Twitter accounts and see which have common followers or not. Really handy for doing influencer mapping incorporating competitor thinking. It is part of the Moz series of products so costs, but is worth it.
    Google search box Baidu talks a lot about the concept of ‘box computing’ where the search box is actually the gateway to other services, but Google has a lot of inbuilt services that people don’t realise. These services came from its competition with the likes of Yahoo! as it grew to be the online oligarchy that it currently is. More information on Google’s hidden features can be found in my Grokking Google series of posts
    Infomine A handy augmentation to searching for research papers on Google Scholar
    IPL2 An old school search engine a la the Yahoo! Directory of old that is curated by US librarians so is full of high quality links.
    Ixquick A surprisingly useful and fast search engine, pull this out of the bag if Google isn’t giving decent results.
    Similarsites Really handy for looking at influencers in a given sector once you have one, Similarsites can then be used to suggest others within a ranked system based on how close they are to the seed site you have used
    The Economist World in Figures This used to be a free to access website and is now bundled up as a free iPhone and iPad application as an ideal counterpart to the CIA World Fact Book
    WordPress.com A surprising recommendation for research, but a quick search of WordPress.com is worthwhile as people will often have an email address on their profile. Either using a domain specific search on Google find someone’s WordPress.com profile or by exploring the tags.
    Travel digital tool box
    Foursquare Foursquare’s explorer function allows you to search an area by category for people driven recommendations. I have found it useful because of the map driven interface. Foursquare replaced Dopplr in my travel folder after Nokia shut it down.
    Open Rice Detailed restaurant recommendations for Hong Kong. Hong Kong locals are some of the most exacting food critics I know which means that the Open Rice database is uncommonly useful. I recommend downloading the Open Rice mobile apps.
    Skyscanner and OnTheFly Booking flights can be a bit of a nightmare Skyscanner and OnTheFly provide background information to help you make the right choice of flight.

    What services do you use that you would recommend for a digital tool box? More related content here.