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.

  • 2012 Chinese social web eco-system

    In many ways the 2012 Chinese social web is richer than our own with a fiercely competitive marketplace and rapid innovation taking place amongst more evenly matched players. Social networks are stratified more along demographic lines which are in flux as developments occur. The brightest star at the moment is Sina’s Weibo service, but its not the only one.

    Weibo has taken off in China in a similar way to Facebook, and has led Twitter in terms of rolling out innovations.

    A second aspect of the 2012 Chinese social web is that these platforms offer segmentation. They vary in terms of the age groups that group on different platforms. Kids up to college age on one platform. Adults on another. Lower tier (less economically developed) cities inhabitants use different social platforms to those in higher tier cities.

    Finally, there is a classic aspect of Chinese business. Once an idea has proven to be successful, lots of competitors will spring up. That is why in places like the UK you will end up with a number of Chinese restaurants open next to each other.

    This happens in the online sphere also. The 2012 Chinese social web represents this business cluster. The next stage will be for intense business competition to thin their ranks out over the next few years. Iceberg
    This infographic came from Sinatechblog.com.cn

  • Innovation starvation + more news

    Innovation starvation

    Innovation Starvation | World Policy Institute – in his article Innovation Starvation author Neal Stephenson talks about the decay of innovation in the west. Innovation starvation is about an inability to get big things done – I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done. My parents and grandparents witnessed the creation of the airplane, the automobile, nuclear energy, and the computer to name only a few. Scientists and engineers who came of age during the first half of the 20th century could look forward to building things that would solve age-old problems, transform the landscape, build the economy, and provide jobs for the burgeoning middle class that was the basis for our stable democracy. Innovation starvation has multiple causes from a research mythical man month type problem due to increasing specialisation, lawyers, search engines, pressure groups and activists have a lot to answer for

    Economics

    More Conflict Seen Between Rich and Poor, Survey Finds – NYTimes.com

    Hong Kong

    China denounces ‘Hong Konger’ trend – The Washington Post

    How to

    Use the Ten Second Rule to Cut Impulse Purchases

    Innovation

    New details surface on the UPU: A next-generation CPU architecture | ExtremeTech

    [CES] Sony Develops Self-luminous ‘Crystal LED Display’ — Tech-On!

    Japan

    What’s happening in Japan right now?: Social Games in Japan – interesting that this is part of mobile gaming

    The Myth of Japan’s Failure – NYTimes.com

    Korea

    Samsung Merging Its Bada OS With Intel-Backed Tizen Project – Forbes

    Luxury

    What Luxury Brands Should Learn From Dolce & Gabbana’s Hong Kong PR Disaster – Forbes

    Media

    Microsoft hits pause on web TV service because shows cost too much – SplatF

    TVShack Admin Fights Extradition To U.S. On Movie Piracy Charges | TorrentFreak

    CES: Survey Finds Traditional TV Viewing Is Collapsing – Forbes – this is more about more personal, less social (within the family) media consumption and also consumers are exhausted by TV innovations that don’t matter. I still rock a Sony Trinitron from the late 1990s

    Online

    Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998 – Paul Graham on what the web used to look like when I first started off in agency life. The site looks curiously mobile friendly!

    Security

    Under voter pressure, members of Congress backpedal (hard) on SOPA

    Cars: The Next Victims of Cyberattacks – IEEE Spectrum – if this doesn’t scare the bejeezus out of you, it should

    Wireless

    Apple Suspends iPhone 4S Sales in Mainland China Stores – NYTimes.com

    CES 2012: Mr. Elop makes bold statements about Nokia in the Windows Phone space | ZDNet – ok what is important here is what Elop isn’t saying. No real reasons around Android and they seem to be having a problem building an on ramp that gets their ecosystem to support them

    Groklaw – Nokia Moves To Quash Barnes & Noble’s Letter of Request the ITC Sent to Finland Re Discovery ~pj – oh dear, sounds like Nokia and Microsoft have been caught looking a bit shady. Even if there is nothing here, it feels like there is which isn’t good from a reputational point-of-view

    Microsoft, Defying Image, Has a Design Gem in Windows Phone – NYTimes.com – this looks like a classic bit of PR-led storytelling – where you give the journalist the bread crumbs that lead him to the story you want to write. The most interesting bit of this is Microsoft  (whom I presume was the client) was willing to throw its other partners such as HTC and Samsung under the reputational bus to big up Nokia. Yet a lot of the hardware issues are due to Microsoft dictating specs to the hardware manufacturers.

  • Zynga and the IPO

    I had held off writing on the ‘failed’ Zynga’s IPO at the end of last year. I am not going to say that Zynga is a great business; in many respects I don’t think it is, without even looking at its numbers I think that Zynga has three big challenges:

    • Facebook owns their customer base
    • Facebook owns their payment system
    • Facebook owns their customer acquisition strategy

    But was the Zynga IPO really a failure? Before I answer that I wanted to talk about another IPO.

    VA Linux IPO case study

    Back in 2000, I had the experience agencyside running the European launch of a company called VA Linux and took its then CEO Larry Augustin around the media. At the time VA Linux’s primary busness was building specialist workstations and servers were optimised for Linux and had Linux pre-installed. This meant that they thought carefully about component choices for instance the ethernet card (network interface card or NIC) in the computer was from Intel rather than 3Com because Intel did a better job in supporting Linux  in terms of the quality of its drivers.

    My experience of Augustin was of someone who was whip smart, with a dry wit and a genuinely nice guy – which made my job a hell of a lot easier to do. Life was good, Augustin gave good copy on the Judge Jackson finding of fact that had happened the previous November, Linux was building momentum in the enterprise and with web servers because it performed better than Windows, required less skill than the BSD distributions and was more of an entry level product than Sun Microsystems, SGI or IBM Unix hardware on specialised RISC architectures. One of the things that audiences wanted to talk about was VA Linux’s at the time record-breaking IPO.

    VA Linux’s underwriters had priced its IPO at US$30 per share, on the first day of trading the price topped US$320 per share. It was described as a stunning success but that success was double-edged. In economic terms, the bank staff working on the IPO had obviously under-priced it because the price had surged so much – depriving the company of a substantial amount of potential capital that it could have raised. Admittedly it was crazy times and VA Linux wasn’t worth the absurdly high valuation in the end, as businesses like Dell started competing with them head-on. But one has to ask what difference would the extra capital have made? How big does the pop have to be to go beyond rewarding initial investors and become negligent underpricing of a company’s stock?

    The Zynga comparison

    Back to Zynga, which had the opposite challenge, the bank staff working on the IPO had optimally priced the stock so that the company got pretty much the full amount that at least some people were prepared to pay. Rather than a pop, a price decline occurred which investors got upset about as late arrivals to the Zynga party made a financial loss. The underwriters for the IPO earned their money on this occasion. If you want to be the first kid on the block in a new set of the latest Nike Air Jordans, the latest gadget or the season’s must-have handbag, you have two choice get in early enough or pay over the odds. Who is to say if you’ve overpaid, once the heat goes those items are then likely to become cheaper again. And so it goes with Zynga, this shouldn’t be your pension fund; it is part of the new hotness, a fashion stock if you will and was priced and paid for as such.

    Disclaimer: this doesn’t constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy stocks. I am not a financial services professional nor do I profess to be. If you want investment advice, pay someone who does this for a living for it.

    More information

    THE TRUTH ABOUT ZYNGA: The Only Reason The IPO ‘Flopped’ Is Because Idiot Investors Paid Too Much

  • Lean web development + more

    This is more of a wish list of what changes I’d like to see in technology and related areas in the next 12 months. This is based around a number of concepts, a few of which are lean web development, security, SSD pricing, better product design and service breakouts.

    Lean Web Development

    Lean web development. This have gotten ridiculous when the average size of a web page is now 1MB. It adversely affects page load times and assumes that bandwidth for the end audience is limitless, which is a fallacy when you have mobile broadband caps and telecoms providers looking to meter broadband use moving forwards. Lean web development recognises that wireless and wired networks don’t provide the kind of limitless low latency broadband technologists assume exists. It might be about turning the approach to web development on its head and developing for mobile devices first and then adding on content or features depending on the device rather than trying to hyper-mile existing web technologies.

    Security

    A more secure web. At the base level an increased awareness of security: why do companies store credit card details or personal information in unencrypted files? At an architectural level:

    • Re-secured DNS and SSL certificates
    • Secure VPNs over IP v.6 networks
    • Effective IP address and system configuration masking to protect from privacy intrusions and badly executed behavioural advertising

    SSD price decrease

    The price of solid state drives (SSDs) to fall so that they can be used on my MacBook Pro as the primary storage drive for my life. At the moment whilst devices like the MacBook Air are attractive. they don’t have enough storage capacity and act as an adjunct or special purpose personal computing device. At the present time that just isn’t possible. Cloud is interesting as an idea, but the reality of networks doesn’t make it as practical as people seem to think.

    Design

    An increased appreciation of ergonomics in device design. In the mid-90s I had an Apple PowerBook which came with legs that flipped around to angle the keyboard at an optimal angle for typing. My current MacBook Pro doesn’t have any kind of similar feature. My iPhone feels too wide in my hand as a phone and my iPad is awkward to hold. And I haven’t even started into a rant over the pictures under class interface and soft keyboard of the device with no haptic feedback.  Part of this is down to a size-zero aesthetic design obsession and interface designers per-occupation with the Tom Cruise film Minority Report – but its making designs that are not particularly human-friendly and leading to poorer product performance.

    A move away from general purpose technology hardware and smartphones to focused designs. Convergence has been a watchword in hardware and software design. A less positive spin on this is bloatware. In hardware that has meant personal computers and smartphones. The personal computer is currently being challenged for dominance by tablet devices which only use a fraction of the computing power available. Why is it that Microsoft Word only allows me to write as fast in the latest version for the Mac as Word 5.1 which was released two decades ago? It is ironic that smartphones like the Apple iPhone can do a range of great and trivial tasks, but are quite poor at being a phone. Dropped calls, poor call-quality and a form factor that still feels a bit too wide in my hand as I hold it to my ear – it is a great example of being a jack-of-all-trades but master of none. Whilst a Swiss army knife or Leatherman tool is useful at a pinch, you are still better off doing the job with the right tools if available. With software or digital services space and weight aren’t an issue, yet we have products that have overloaded awkward functionality that leads to a poor user experience. By all means get different things to talk to each other: iftt provides a great template for how that should look; but don’t try and do all of those things on the one user space. 37Signals ethos to become the norm, rather than the exception.

    Service break out

    One of the Chinese services like Sina.com’s Weibo crossing over and giving Twitter a run for its money. Sina.com have kept innovating with their product getting ahead of Twitter and innovating in terms of the user experience. A side benefit of compliance with Chinese government legislation has meant that they seem to do a good job on spam as well.

    Wireless choice

    A clear idea of what on earth is happening with Research in Motion | Intel | Sony in the mobile space and excellent differentiated products to bring some choice back into the wireless world rather than more of the same. The wireless device industry is starting to exhibit some of the dynamics of the PC industry: with ARM and Android being the Intel X86 and Microsoft Windows of the handset world, with Apple doing their own things. Costs are coming down but innovation only seems to look like what Apple does at the present time. There is a reduction on the types of form factor designs and interaction methods.

    Media

    The return of Geek Monthly. This was a US publication that I came across in Hong Kong. It’s publisher filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, but it got picked up by a new firm looking to get it back on the road. Hopefully they’ll succeed. This Current TV programme should give you an idea of what to expect:

  • STRATFOR breach

    I got an email about 40 minutes ago announcing that STRATFOR were looking into a breach of their servers and email. I’ve always found their analysis on international issues informative and insightful which has helped in my work thinking about international projects with NGOs and in my writing here on this blog. It is one of a a number of media outlets that I pay a subscription to.

    Given that Stratfor position themselves as not only domain experts in territories around the world and geopolitics, but also opsec (operational security); the data breach is a shockingly bad own goal. It will be interesting to see how their brand manages to recover. The hackers have made off with a trove of government, academic, media contacts as well as general people like me who are curious about what’s going on in the world.

    Dear Stratfor Member,

    We have learned that Stratfor’s web site was hacked by an unauthorized party. As a result of this incident the operation of Stratfor’s servers and email have been suspended.

    We have reason to believe that the names of our corporate subscribers have been posted on other web sites. We are diligently investigating the extent to which subscriber information may have been obtained.

    Stratfor and I take this incident very seriously. Stratfor’s relationship with its members and, in particular, the confidentiality of their subscriber information, are very important to Stratfor and me. We are working closely with law enforcement in their investigation and will assist them with the identification of the individual(s) who are responsible.

    Although we are still learning more and the law enforcement investigation is active and ongoing, we wanted to provide you with notice of this incident as quickly as possible. We will keep you updated regarding these matters.

    Sincerely,

    George Friedman

    Cryptonome have more details here: complete with the obligatory Pastebin links. Twitter currently has a lively discussion on the hack.

    Update (February 2023): Stratfor bought all its subscribers an Equifax monitoring package for their credentials and offered discounted subscriptions. It revamped its infrastructure and carried on. Stratfor never completely recovered from the breach. It eventually sold itself to a larger group Rane. As part of Rane the Stratfor work continues and they still sell expert consultancy.

    Rane have since embraced social media to promote its content to prospective customers. The quality is the same high standards as what it used to be under Stratfor before the data breach.