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.

  • Walmart

    Today some of the most successful companies out there are ones that have a key technology platform and Walmart looks like it will be joining them:

    • Retail: Amazon, eBay, Alibaba
    • Office productivity: Google, Microsoft, Zoho
    • Telecommunications: Microsoft (Live Meeting and Skype), Cisco (WebEx)
    • Consumer services: Baidu, Google, Netease
    • Entertainment: Netflix, Amazon, Apple, PPLive

    I think we’ll soon see Walmart added to this list. At the present time the average consumer view of Walmart is likely to be that of a large, malevolent, low-class retailer in the US; the weird Yanks that bought ASDA in the UK and a trusted supermarket in China.

    What these perceptions don’t tell you is that Walmart has innovation in its corporate DNA. In 1987, they set up a satellite network connecting stores with headquarters over voice and data. When I was in college Walmart was associated with the ‘beer and diapers’ urban legend precisely because the company had a reputation for pioneering and pushing supply chain management and data-mining to the edge in order to maximise returns from its stores.

    Walmart like Amazon already has a large logistics footprint; some of the moves it has been making over the past 18 months make me think that the company is going for a big platform play – building a big box retailer online. Bear with me, while I run you through a few selected highlights:

    • Vudu – purchased in February 2010 by Walmart. The company provides stream on demand content that home audiences can pay for. The technology can be integrated into a variety of consumer electronics. It’s a digital content supermarket by another name
    • Kosmix – move forward to April 2011 and Walmart buys a social media platform that organises content by topic. Lots of smarts for social commerce, product reviews, marketing insights, customer services
    • Yihaodian – Walmart buys a minority stake in an e-commerce company with logistics in the high growth coastal areas of China. Due to the nature of the Chinese marketplace, that minority stake is the same level of commitment as acquiring a US business outright. The sale of physical goods in China maybe more attractive than the digital media market because the media industry is disrupted and alternative monetisation models are already well in place
    • Walmart is also starting recruit rock-star web tech talent with a particular focus on improving the mobile experience of their online properties

    More retail sector related content can be found here.

  • iCloud thoughts

    On June 6, Apple announced a number of products at a keynote speech to kick off its worldwide developer conference. Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5 were widely anticipated; but the one that got the most attention was a service called iCloud.

    This service has received a fair bit of coverage and its worthwhile reflecting upon, some of this reflection has to do with all the things that we don’t currently know. I am not  going to focus on the iTunes Connect product that gives you a selection of your music across devices as other people have done that much better than I could.

    First of all a bit of a history lesson

    Apple has actually selling online services since about 1985, so Apple’s history with online services is almost as old as The WELL. AppleLink was an online service set up originally to connect Apple employees and dealers, it had a client software application for both Mac and the later models of the Apple II. It provided assess to remote server folders (kind of like FTP, iDisk, Box.net or Dropbox), bulletin boards for discussion and system-wide email (though interoperability with other email systems came in later).

    This system was a way that Apple distributed systems updates and drivers to dealers (you have to remember that at that time operating systems and the associated software that went along with them took up much less memory than they do today). This was all hosted on time-shared mainframes and connected by a global data network by GE Information Services. GE charged too much for the service and didn’t reflect the technological changes coming down the pipe that made these services cheaper to operate. So Apple eventually worked with Quantum Computer Services (now known as Aol) to develop a version of AppleLink suitable for consumers.

    The first email from space was sent on an Apple Portable via an AppleLink account from the Atlantis space shuttle to the Johnson Space Center in 1991. Back in 1988, AppleLink was also the host for a multi-channel story that played out with weekly episodes and included user identities woven into its plot. The storytelling used chat rooms and email was well as a more traditional narrative format echoing Matt Beaumont’s novel e by about 12 years.

    After a while, Apple, had a falling out with GE Information Services and consolidated their own service renamed eWorld and had it run by AOL.
    eWorld main screen
    Eventually eWorld was closed down as Apple realised that it couldn’t compete with AOL and they had bigger things to worry about as Apple was on the downward trajectory that would result in the return of Steve Jobs. By 1997 both AppleLink and eWorld had been closed down. The content eventually ended up on the Apple website under sub-domains like developer.apple.com and support.apple.com.

    In 2000, Apple came back with iTools which included the .mac email accounts, simple web publishing and iDisk. The email account allowed you to have IMAP4 which was rare at the time and iDisk was based on WebDAV standard to syncing. There were other services including web publishing and iCards: an electronic greeting cards service (prior to Facebook were a low impact way to exchange greetings, with a HTML card sent via email. One of the most prominent providers bluemountain.com was bought in a deal apparently worth 780 million dollars by then internet giant Excite@Home).  By 2002, Apple started charging for these services and briefly threw in a subscription to Virex.

    The service got a rebrand as MobileMe to take account of Apple’s expanded computing portfolio to take in the iOS-powered series of devices. Newcomers got a .me.com email address rather than the .mac.com email address. I myself have been signed up to these services through their evolutions for the past ten years or so, so still have a .mac.com ID.

    iCloud is a development repackaging of these offerings; an evolution rather than an innovation, it also means that Apple’s claim in the sub header of its press release that the service: Free Cloud Services Beyond Anything Offered to Date – are economical with the truth. There is also a question in my mind, for reasons I’ll outline below, about whether this next evolution is positive for end users.

    Device philosophy

    One of the things that stuck out to me when I was listening to Steve Jobs introduce iCloud, he described the Mac as ‘just another device’. On one level it makes sense; as the Mac is one of three sets of computing devices that Apple now sells: the Mac, the iPad and the iPod Touch / iPhone.

    • The second thing that marks it out, is a trust that as Sun Microsystems used to say ‘the network is the computer’.
    • Finally there is the question of primacy. Which device is the ultimate arbiter of the correct data?

    The flawed ‘net

    iCloud is based on the assumption that good quality data connectivity is ubiquitous, this is complete fiction for many people. I live in central London, apparently a world city, a hive of connectivity. Wi-fi that I can access safely is only available in certain coffee shops, and the mobile networks are full of holes like Swiss cheese. I am with Vodafone that seems to be better than most, but the only way to have a near-continuous reception is to roam on a foreign SIM; which is outrageously expensive. This situation isn’t . In the UK, the broadband infrastructure simply isn’t available to support existing streaming video services. I live in Central London within the proverbial stones throw from Silicon Roundabout and get barely 3MBs download and 400KBs upload from my ADSL connection. I live 500 metres from my local exchange.

    Data integrity

    One area I am not convinced that Apple will get right with the iCloud is keeping the integrity of address and calendar data intact. If one device doesn’t have primacy there is no control mechanism. It is easy to accidentally alter a record on an iPhone and that could then ripple through the iCloud to all associated devices based on it being the most recent edit. There is no information on how it will handle duplicate entries and failed syncs. Lots of unanswered yet critical questions.

    Household enterprise systems

    My set-up on MobileMe is relatively simple, I have one iTunes account, one address book, one calendar, one set of bookmarks and system preferences. These are synced across two devices (the MacBook Pro that I am writing this post on, and my iPhone). But increasingly, Apple’s eco-system is found at the centre of family’s IT systems. The analogy of the household CEO is often used to describe the housewife as homemaker.

    The family’s IT system needs to look more like the kind of enterprise technology that a CEO would expect. With massive data storage and policy-based systems designed to keep the right data with the right owners. I haven’t seen any evidence that iCloud would do this which is likely to result in lots of poisoned address books and music collections.

    It just works?

    One of Apple’s key selling points since Steve Jobs returned to Apple was that the company’s products just work. This is why the synergy between hardware and software is so important. When you took one of the original iMacs out of the box, you plugged in the keyboard, the modem cable into the telephone socket, the power socket and turned it one; you were ready to start computing.
    Museum of Information
    It promised elegant simple technological choices to early adopters and the late majority alike and is why products like the iPod, the iPad and the iPhone have become commonplace in many developed marketplaces disrupting incumbent players like Creative and Nokia. The complexity and challenges that the iCloud system needs to overcome could undue this unique selling proposition and tear Apple’s market-making leadership position apart.

    Open standards to Apple standards

    One of the things that has helped Apple to do well has been its adherence to open standards: the iMac benefited from being a USB pioneer. Mac laptops became popular with photographers because of FireWire. The Safari web browser and WebKit build upon W3C standards compliance and it is hard to remember now, but the first iPhone used HTML5 web applications for external developers – something that many people lost sight of.

    Apple’s online services were similar. The email service was based on IMAP4 allowing for easy synchronisation and iDisk works on WebDAV. However in the Apple press release announcing iCloud there is no information on what it supports any standards, but it does talk about iCloud storage APIs. And Apple did promise to make thse APIs available to developers. I am concerned that my social graph may be locked into a storage equivalent of the Hotel California; which is especially dangerous when you think at the amount of iterations and service closures that Apple has exhibited in the online space.

    More online related content can be found here.

    More reading

    Apple Introduces iCloud – Free Cloud Services Beyond Anything Offered to Date

    What the iCloud will cause to happen next | FT.com

    Apple details iCloud’s digital storage and syncing, free 5GB of storage

    Fourth time’s a charm? Why Apple has trouble with cloud computing

    Cloud Poll: Does iCloud Actually Have Anything to Do with Cloud Computing? | ReadWriteWeb

  • The wisdom of mobs

    Old media historically took a pride in its ability to spur the public into action, a classic example would be The Sun’s headline from April 11, 1992 which trumpeted ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’. In this case claiming that The Sun’s readers had turned the tide of an election. There is also a darker side to this: the wisdom of mobs. 

    I have been interested in how mob behaviour or the shifting of public opinion has been changed by social media and affected consumer behaviour with ‘the wisdom of mobs’.  The recent super injunction debate has again brought it to the fore, as has Anonymous and Wikileaks.

    This has all had another subtle effect, as evidenced by this quote from Jamie East, founder of HolyMoly:

    “There are fewer gobshites who aren’t media-trained and surrounded by PRs, so it’s more difficult to find things to write about. And the ‘pap’ agencies aren’t getting the pictures they used to.”

    East is describing in his own colourful way an awareness and responsibility about their own reputation, or as Singaporean blogger Pat Law put it:

    As long as the information is online, even if you’ve placed it on private mode, your privacy is automatically placed on a pedestal for potential abuse. So never publish anything you don’t want people to know online.

    This is one side to a multi-stranded solution to the wisdom of mobs problem:

    • Behavioural – individuals need to take responsibility for their actions and what they say, reputation isn’t managed: reputation is, as reputation does
    • Social – we have yet to develop an appropriate civic society online. Towns on the American frontier appointed sheriffs and town councils to try and bring a modicum of justice and decorum during the pioneering days. These appointments were symptoms of a wider awaking towards thinking less about the individual and more about the kind of society that they were creating on the frontier. We need a similar awakening for online. Secondly a better civic society, should be able to organise lobbying that is as effective as that currently done by vested interests on behalf of disrupted interests like the ABPI and Warner Music; otherwise these groups will continue to enjoy undue succor – what politicians fail to see is that these groups are the British Leyland or the Northern Rock of the digital age
    • Legislative – this is the one that I am most concerned about for a number of reasons. Politicians of all sides are not good at giving up surplus powers and striking down legislation, instead keeping it to one side for a rainy day. The Labour administration of Tony Blair kept the Criminal Justice and Public Order act of 1994 including its controversial part V dealing with criminalising rave culture. The current conservative government has kept the Digital Economy Act in place, despite the fact that it adversely affects their ability to spur digital innovation and inclusion. The threat of legislation allows politicians to adjust behaviour in industries, for instance: self-censorship by UK ISPs by Ed Vaizey. It is virtually impossible to find a legislative body with the suitably sustained light touch required
    • Governance – effective and transparent governance mechanisms for governance in commercial issues would mean that there would be less of a public interest in gossip. Allegations surrounding Fred Goodwin would have been more appropriately investigated as part of his management of the Royal Bank of Scotland
    • Professionalism – the media has a responsibility to lift its own content out of the gutter of sensationalism. They need to man up and take responsibility for the wisdom of mobs, but they won’t. There simply isn’t a desire to do decent investigative journalism or thought-provoking analysis. It is probably not considered commercially viable to do it (though the audience of documentaries at the cinema seems to suggest otherwise), there aren’t the journalists with the right set of skills and mindset: where are the next Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein or Seymour Hersh?

    More ethics related content can be found here.

  • IBM fellows + more news

    IBM fellows

    New IBM Fellows push computing frontiers – IBM fellows are the company’s most prolific innovators. This batch of IBM fellows is interesting because it is a good indication of technology areas which will be hot: question-and-answer systems, a holistic approach to hardware and software design (like Apple), mathematical modelling for environmental risk management, stream computing, network optimised computer operating systems, cloud services, virtualised data centres and semiconductor design verification tools / processes (presumably to deal with increasing complexity and parallel processing at the silicon level)

    Business

    Helen Wang On China’s Opportunities. She’s Not Dreaming. : China Law Blog – luxury, healthcare, education and green tech are foreign companies opportunities. Basically most of the west is screwed

    Design

    Warm Respect for a Scottish Ruin – NYTimes.com – I love the way you have a house within a house on this design, could think of a few places in Ireland where this would work a treat

    Economics

    Revenge of the Invisible Hand – By Bruce Everett | Foreign Policy – this of course also means that much of the FTSE-related portfolios depending on Shell and BP for its value is screwed

    Big Oil In Turnaround – By Edward C. Chow | Foreign Policy – good write-up on the current state of what were the 7 Sisters of the oil industry. I’d be more worried about energy security than the environment now

    What exactly is made in China? | FT.com – rising wages encouraging clothing to move elsewhere in Southeast Asia

    Luxury

    Chanel’s cruise control | Material World | Vanessa Friedman blogs on the fashion and luxury industry for the Financial Times – FT.com

    Media

    U.S. Bill To Criminalize Illicit Movie / Music Streaming | TorrentFreak

    Leaked “ACTA” Lobby Letter Reveals Hollywood Pressure On EU | TorrentFreak – what is of interest is that they want to bypass the judiciary and push this into law

    Online

    Study Says Spam Can Be Cut by Blocking Card Transactions – NYTimes.com – interesting that law enforcement hasn’t been looking at this

    Security

    Why you can’t really anonymize your data – O’Reilly Radar – the ethics of big data need to be thought out and you have to ask questions about the ethics of how healthcare research is executed in the future

    Software

    Android vaults to smartphone lead as Nokia faces ‘ugly’ future | guardian.co.uk

    Did Microsoft pay for the wrong Skype? | asymco – interesting analysis

    Technology

    Zennstrom: private investors take the profits | FT.com – interesting ethical questions brought up

  • Big content + more news

    Big content

    “Big Content” Is Strangling American Innovation – Harvard Business Review – ‘Big content’ is an interesting turn of phrase. It has a lot of negative connatations like ‘big tobacco’, ‘big food’ or ‘big pharma’. While ‘big content’ doesn’t kill people with its actions, it does capture the malignancy on society and on the economy. But big content is also soft power. The article points out how badly big content is in adjusting with technological, societal, social and economic change. Part of the problem seems to have been the ability of big content to use lobbying as a crutch. Secondly, big content does a lot of work oppressing its creators ability to earn and looking after the needs of authoritarian regimes like China – Innovation has emerged as a key means by which the US can pull itself out of this lackluster economy. In the State of the Union, President Obama referred to China and India as new threats to America’s position as the world’s leading innovator. But the threats are not just external. One of the greatest threats to the US’s ability to innovate lies within: specifically, with the music and movie business. These Big Content businesses are attempting to protect themselves from change so aggressively that they risk damaging America’s position as a world leader in innovation. Many in the high technology industry have known this for a long time. Despite making their living relying on it, the Big Content players do not understand technology, and never have. Rather than see it as an opportunity to reach new audiences, technology has always been a threat to them. Example after example abounds of this attitude; whether it was the VCR which was “to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone” as famed movie industry lobbyist Jack Valenti put it at a congressional hearing, or MP3 technology, which they tried to sue out of existence. In fact, it’s possible to go back as far as the gramophone and see the content industries rail against new technology. The reason why? Every shift in technology is difficult for them. Just as they work out how to make money using one technology, it changes.

    Consumer behaviour

    Television Ownership Drops in U.S., Nielsen Reports – NYTimes.com

    Why the Rich Envy the Super-Rich – WSJ – interesting keeping up with the Jones’es phenomena going on

    Gallup: Chinese People See Themselves Struggling – WSJ – I think that the points made about Gallup’s sample size and methodology are interesting

    Schumpeter: The status seekers | The Economist – status moving from goods to virtue-related experiences in developed world

    Culture

    Night Flight (TV series) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – I found Night Flight eerily prescient of a YouTube play list

    Finance

    Domestic disaster, overseas losses put pressure on Nomura’s profits | The Japan Times Online

    Innovation

    New Iron-based Cathode Material Extends Life of Li-ion Batteries — Tech-On!

    Asahi Glass to Roll ‘World’s Thinnest’ Glass Substrate for Touch Sensors — Tech-On!

    Japan

    Convenience store Lawson creates portable convenience store to reach earthquake stricken customers – the convenience store in Japan plays as big a part in people’s retail lives as Tesco or Sainsburys does in the UK. Retailer Lawson has managed to cram a convenience store in a small van to reach quake-stricken areas.

    Groklaw – Prior Art, Anyone? Anyone? Barnes & Noble? Google? Motorola? – Updated – Microsoft and Paul Allen patents in trouble?

    Media

    The BBC Is Struggling to Tighten Its Belt – NYTimes.com

    Online

    Google’s China market share: declining | FT.com – its not just Baidu who is gaining

    Retailing

    Discounters boom in UK: News from Warc.com – makes sense as a way of ducking inflation

    Analysis: Why Did Walmart Buy A Social Media Firm? – I spoke to Arun as he was writing this piece whilst grabbing a hot dog with my old friend David Ingle. I see this as Walmart reclaiming their heritage in innovation: in supply chain management – they drove the move to ‘Made in China’, new retail formats – the big box store that nuked independent retailers and data-mining personified in the ‘beer and nappies’ urban myth

    Security

    Sony suffers another major security breach | BGR

    Wireless

    FT.com / Technology – Instant messaging forecast to hit texting – not terribly surprising however Disco may change this