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.

  • Liberation day + more things

    Liberation day

    Liberation Day was a glorified press conference where the Trump administration revealed their tariff scale on every country around the world. Weirdly enough, Russia wasn’t tariffed. Here’s some of the interesting analysis I saw prior to, and after the event.

    Liberation day social media post.

    The Trump administration leant into an aesthetic influenced by patriotic memes, the steeliness of The Apprentice and generative AI – a look I call Midjourney Modern. Liberation Day was no exception.

    The Economist did a hot take that calls the whole thing a ‘fantasy’.

    America’s Cultural Revolution – by Stephen Roach – Conflict – Stephen Roach was an Asian focused chief economist at Morgan Stanley. The American Cultural Revolution narrative is something I have heard from a few contacts in China and Roach echoes that perspective in this article.

    China says weaponising agriculture in US trade war should be off-limits | South China Morning Post – agricultural price shocks in the past have led to civil disruption in China

    Liberation Day and The New World Order | Fabricated Knowledge

    Opinion | I Just Saw the Future. It Was Not in America. – The New York TimesPresident Trump is focused on what teams American transgender athletes can race on, and China is focused on transforming its factories with A.I. so it can outrace all our factories. Trump’s “Liberation Day” strategy is to double down on tariffs while gutting our national scientific institutions and work force that spur U.S. innovation. China’s liberation strategy is to open more research campuses and double down on A.I.-driven innovation to be permanently liberated from Trump’s tariffs.

    Beijing’s message to America: We’re not afraid of you. You aren’t who you think you are — and we aren’t who you think we are. – Thomas Friedman – Overall, I would agree with the sentiment, BUT, you have to remember what he’s been shown is the best view of what China can do and reality is much more complex. I still think that there is a lot of the future being made in places like France, Finland, Latvia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan – as well as China. What China does best is quantity that has a scale all of its own, something America has historically excelled at.

    Consumer behaviour

    Bachelors Without Bachelor’s: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates by Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, Joseph Winkelmann :: SSRN

    Culture

    Montreal DJs move clubbing from midnight to morning, adding coffee and croissants | Trendwatching – early morning clubbing, reminds of Marky J‘s mornings at the Baa Bar in Liverpool.

    Health

    Is Gen Z more mentally ill, or do they just talk about it more? | Doomscrollers

    Europe Rapidly Falling Behind China in Pharma, Astra Chief Warns – Bloomberg

    Ideas

    I’m Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better | Joan Westenberg

    Innovation

    Samsung Develops Groundbreaking Achromatic Metalens With POSTECH – Samsung Global Newsroom

    Korea

    South Korean movie theater launches monthly knit-while-you-watch screenings | Trend-Watching

    Luxury

    Counterfeit luxury goods: London raids miss the target | Dark Luxury

    Vogue Business Index top 10: Preppy is back and so is Ralph Lauren | Vogue Business

    Polène: The global success of the French handbag made with love | Le Monde

    Marketing

    X-tortion: How Advertisers Are Losing Control Of Media Choice | Forrester – I am surprised how ‘on the nose’ Forrester is in this post.

    Technicolor, Parent Company of The Mill, MPC, and Mikros, Facing Potential Closure | LBBOnline – this hit the creative industries like a lightning bolt.

    Influencer Marketing: The quiet reset in the influencer economy, ET BrandEquity – the total number of influencers has shot up from 9,62,000 in 2020 to 4.06 million influencers in 2024, reflecting a staggering 322% growth.

    Materials

    DIY Birkin? China’s Gen Z 3D print dupes, share on RedNote | Jing Daily – Armed with affordable 3D printers and free design templates, young consumers are crafting their own versions of iconic luxury accessories. – Homage flowerpots or penholders rather than ‘dupes’ but 3D printing feels mainstream

    Online

    Revealed: Google facilitated Russia and China’s censorship requests | Censorship | The Guardian – After requests from the governments of Russia and China, Google has removed content such as YouTube videos of anti-state protesters or content that criticises and alleges corruption among their politicians. Google’s own data reveals that, globally, there are 5.6m items of content it has “named for removal” after government requests. Worldwide requests to Google for content removals have more than doubled since 2020, according to cybersecurity company Surfshark.

    The reason you feel alienated and alone | Madeline Holden – your Dunbar number is filled with para-social relationship rather than social relationships.

    China’s fragile online spaces for debate | Merics

    AI Discoverability: Amazon’s Mistakes NN Group

    Retailing

    Lidl TikTok Shop launch sells out in under 20 minutes | Retail Gazette – I am curious about Lidl fulfilment approach

    Security

    Military delegates lose sway at China’s signature political gathering | FT

    Putin is Unlikely to Demobilize in the Event of a Ceasefire Because He is Afraid of His Veterans | Institute for the Study of War – which poses economic challenges in Russia and a greater incentive to attack outside Ukraine once the conflict winds down

    Exclusive: Secretive Chinese network tries to lure fired federal workers, research shows | Reuters

    FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado – Ars Technica

    Technology

    Google’s Sergey Brin Asks Workers to Spend More Time In the Office – The New York Times – 60 hour weeks are productivity sweet spot according to Sergey Brin. Silicon Valley looks more-and-more like Huangzhou.

    Alibaba exec warns of overheating AI infrastructure market • The Register

    Telecoms

    SoftBank and Ericsson agree to collaborate on next-gen telco tech

    Web-of-no-web

    Meta announces experimental Aria Gen 2 research smart glasses | CNBC

    WeRide to open driverless taxi service in Zurich | EE News – Chinese operator is set to launch a fully unmanned taxi service in Zurich in the next few months. This follows the launch of its latest generation Robotaxi, the GXR, for fully unmanned paid autonomous ride-hailing services in Beijing. The GXR, with a L4-level redundant drive-by-wire chassis architecture, is WeRide’s second Robotaxi model to achieve fully driverless commercial operations in the city following pilot trials.

    Wireless

    London’s poor 5G blamed on spectrum, investment, Huawei ban • The Register – the comments nail it

  • PHNX awards jury interview

    I am fortunate to be an awards juror for the second time. This is for the Adforum PHNX advertising awards which attracts entries from around the world.

    Proud to be a juror again this year for Adforms PHNX awards

    As part of the process I responded to some interview questions. I hope that my old gaffer Tony Gresty appreciated my quoting of him decades later and was surprised that there wasn’t pushback about my assertion of a ‘post-social’ marketing era.

    What motivates you to be part of the PHNX Jury, and what do you hope to bring to the judging process?

    Before I worked in advertising, I served an apprenticeship in plant process engineering. My old gaffer who was responsible for me had a few sayings. One of which was practice sharpens skill. By being a judge, I hope that I am helping people within the industry around the world to sharpen their skill. Seeing great challenging work and asking myself how it fits the customer and client needs in turn, helps further sharpen my skill as a strategist. TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) altruist generosity?

    PHNX has always been about celebrating creativity in all its forms. What new perspectives or disciplines do you think deserve more recognition in award shows today?

    Strategy has the Effies, BUT its focus is larger than creativity with a major focus on efficiency and effectiveness rather the creative process. Strategy always provides the ‘assist’ with single-minded insight and creative JOTBD (job to be done), but is never the ‘goal scorer’ to use an American sports stats metaphor. I think that creativity is not only about the creative, but also the context where the creative is placed – which brings in the disciplines of project management’s orchestration, production’s craft and media planning. I think this is going to become far more important as we go towards a post-social era.

    Which countries or regions do you think are leading the creative field right now? And which emerging markets should we look out for?

    A really interesting question. Leading is probably the wrong phrase to use, but there are markets that are under-estimated. Thailand and the Philippines have well-deserved reputations for emotional storytelling. Year-after-year when I look at lunar new year adverts Malaysia hits well above its weight given the size of the market. 

    Japan has been consistently delighting advertising folk for the past five decades. 

    Probably a better question to ask me after I have been through this year’s award entries.

    What trends or cultural shifts do you think will define the most impactful creative work this year?

    With everything that’s going on, I think we’ll need more humour. Trends within the advertising industry are also leaning towards a better mix of formats. As an industry we over-index on social vs. attention, efficiency and effectiveness for large brands. So we’ve seen a renaissance in OOH amongst other formats.

    There is also a return to basics: creative consistency, fluent objects, the power of storytelling and humour. Finally consumers are more interested in consuming more longer form audio and video content, so what a creative execution might look like I hope is very different.

    If you could give one piece of advice to agencies and creatives submitting their work, what would it be?

    Be single-minded in terms of category consideration. My biggest criticism of last year’s PHNX award entries was not about the quality of the work per se. Many of the entries had a given creative was put in for consideration for the wrong category. And it was the same entries doing it over-and-over again. If it isn’t relevant it’s just going to get ignored or get under the skin of the judges. In the same way that a poorly-placed ad that is slapped all over the place without consideration would have a similar effect in the real world.

    Rant over: I wish everyone the best of luck, finally don’t be disheartened. All of the work was of a high standard, choosing winners is hard.

    Which creative minds are inspiring you the most right now?

    In the widest creative sense I am working my way through veteran Hong Kong film director Johnnie To‘s back catalogue; some of his works like Breaking News feel like exceptionally contemporary given our media environment. A couple of creatives using AI in a really smart way are Omar Karim aka @arthur_chance on instagram and the Dor Brothers. Agency work-wise VCCP’s immersive installation for Transport for London and a small Malaysian shop called Days Studios (whose bread-and-butter work is usually weddings!), yet, did a fantastic job producing a Chinese New Year ad for a cosmetic treatment clinic Aglow Studio – not what you’d call a big client yet it felt like a bigger production than many large brands. Go Google the ad ‘hiss of prosperity’ and watch it on YouTube.

    It’s your last chance to enter for free here.

  • March 2025 newsletter

    March 2025 introduction

    Welcome to my March 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 20th issue. Or one score, as they used to say down the Mecca bingo hall. A score is a common grouping used in everything from selling produce to indicating the scale of an accident in a news headline. In Japan, it signals legal adulthood and is celebrated with personal ceremonies.

    I didn’t know that March was Irish-American Heritage month. I just thought that we had St Patrick’s Day.

    Hopefully April will bring us warmer weather that we should expect of spring. In the meantime to keep my spirits up I have been listening to Confidence Man.

    New reader?

    If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • I curated some of the best analyses on DeepSeek, and more interesting things happening online.
    • Pharmacies are blatantly marketing prescription-only medicines. It’s illegal, there is no GLP-1 permission that allows consumer marketing of prescription-only medicines used for weight loss and weight management.
    • Clutch Cargo – how a 1960s animation managed to transform production and show the power of storytelling.
    • A look back at Skype. I will miss its ring tone when it shuts down in May.
    • Looking at the Majorana 1 chip promising a new generation of quantum computing, generative AI production, refrigeration and an oral history of Wong Kar wai’s In the Mood for Love & 2046.

    Books that I have read.

    • Now and again you come across a book that stuns you. Red Sky Mourning by Jack Carr, is one such book, but not in a good way. Carr is famous because of his service in the American military which he has since parlayed into a successful entrepreneurial career from TV series to podcasts. So he covers all things tactical knowledgeably. Conceptually the book has some interesting ideas that wouldn’t feel that out of place in a Neal Stephenson or William Gibson novel. So Carr had a reasonably solid plan on making a great story. But as the saying goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Carr’s enemy was his own writing style without aggressive editing. The editing process is a force multiplier, breathing the artistic brevity of Ernest Hemingway into a manuscript and protecting the author from their own worst impulses. I found the book hard to read because I would repeatedly run up against small niggly aspects, making it hard to suspend disbelief and get into the story. Carr loves his product brands, in this respect Red Sky Mourning reminded me a lot of early Brett Easton-Ellis. Which got me thinking, who is Carr actually writing for? Part of the answer is Hollywood, Carr’s books have been optioned by Amazon, one of which was adapted as The Terminal List. I imagine that another audience would be young (privileged caucasian male) management consultant types who need a bit of down time as they travel to and from client engagements – after a busy few days of on-site interviews, possibly with a tumbler of Macallan 12 – which was purchased in duty-free. The kind of person who considers their Tumi luggage in a tactical manner. The friend who gave it to me, picked it up for light reading and passed it on with a degree of incredulity. On the plus side, at least it isn’t a self-help book. It pains me to end a review so negatively; so one thing that Jack Carr does get right is the absolute superiority of Toyota Land Cruisers in comparison to Land Rover’s products. If you have it in hard copy, and possess sufficient presence of mind, it could serve you well in improvised self-defence as it comes in at a substantial 562 pages including the glossary and acknowledgements.
    • The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji is a classic murder mystery. A university crime club with each member named after a famous fictional detective gather to investigate a murder on an isolated island. The book slowly unravels the answer to the K-University Mystery Club’s annual trip bringing it to a logical conclusion.
    • She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan was an interesting piece of Chinese historical fiction. It is less fantastic than the wuxia works of Louis Cha that dominated the genre previously. More here.
    • Chinese Communist Espionage – An Intelligence Primer by Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil tells the story of modern China through the story of its intelligence services. From the chaos under Mao purges and the Cultural Revolution to forces let loose by ‘reform and opening up’. More here.
    • In the early 2000s, as we moved towards a social web, we saw a number trends that relied on the knowledge of a group of people. Crowdsourcing channeled tasks in a particular way and became a popular ‘innovation engine’ for a while. The wisdom of crowds captured the power of knowledge within nascent question and answer platforms. Prediction markets flourished online. Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner try and explain who and why these models work, particular where they rely on knowledge or good judgement. The book does a good job at referencing their sources and is readable in a similar way to a Malcolm Gladwell book.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Why does humour in advertising work?

    My Dad is a big fan of the Twix bears advertisement, so much so, that he repeats the script verbatim when it comes on. We know that humour works and that it’s under-used in advertising, but it would be good to have data behind that in order to support it as a suggestion to clients.

    twix bears

    WARC have published What’s Working In Humorous Advertising which goes a good way to providing that support.

    The takeouts from the report include:

    • Humour as a memory hook: Comedy surprises and delights, it makes consumers stop, engage and then remember. Over time it builds into nostalgia.
    • It relies on universal insights – that work across age cohorts, cultures and geographies. Its also intrinsically shareable – and not just on social platforms.
    • Celebrity x humour drives fame: Well-executed humour paired with celebrity endorsements, (Ryan Reynolds being a standout example) boosting brand impact.
    • Well executed humour can supercharge marketing ROI. Ads with humour are 6.1x more likely to drive market share growth than neutral or dull ads.

    Accessible advertising

    The Ad Accessibility Alliance have launched The Ad Accessibility Alliance Hub, which made me reflect on accessibility as a subject. I can recommend the hub as it provides good food for thought when considering mandatories for creative. ISBA’s reframing accessible advertising helps make the business case beyond the social benefits of inclusivity. The ISBA also provides links to useful assets. Finally, I can recommend Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge which provides a broader context to help think about accessible advertising as part of a system.

    Social platform benchmarks

    RealIQ have done great research of engagement rates across thousands of brands in a number of sectors. What we get is an engagement benchmark set across platforms and industries. We can debate the value of engagement, and the different nature of platforms, so you can’t compare across platforms.

    Chart of the month.

    What I could compare in the RealIQ data was the rate in change in engagement rates year-on-year. The clear losers over time were Facebook and Twitter at an aggregate level. This also explains the x-tortion (as Forrester Research described them) tactics being deployed by Twitter. Combining high rates of engagement decline and reduced reach means that Twitter doesn’t look particularly attractive as a platform vis-a-vis competitors.

    Change in platform engagement

    Things I have watched. 

    Hunt Korean spy film

    Hunt (헌트) is a great Korean film. It provides a John Le Carré style spy hunt story in 1980s era South Korea prior to the move towards democracy. It’s a stylish, if brutal film that touches on parts of South Korea’s history which we in the west tend to know very little about. Hunt takes an unflinching look at the legacy of the military government as well as their North Korean rivals.

    Philip Kaufman‘s The Right Stuff is a movie adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s account based on US post-war fighter development through to the height of the Mercury space programme. The film went on to receive eight nominations at the Academy Awards. You have an ensemble cast of great character actors who deal with the highs and lows at the cutting edge of aerospace technology. The Right Stuff is as good as its reputation would have you believe. The film captures the drama and adventure that Wolfe imbued his written account of the journey to space. As a society it is good to be reminded that if we put our mind to it the human race is capable of amazing audacious things.

    Disco’s Revenge – an amazing Canadian documentary which has interviews with people from soul and disco stars including Earl Young, David Mancuso, Joe Bataan, Nicky Siano – all of whom were seminal in the founding of disco.

    It also featured names more familiar to house music fans including DJ Spinna, Frankie Knuckles, Kevin Saunderson and John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez – who was key in proto vocal house productions.

    The documentary also shows hip-hop was influenced by disco mixing.

    Along the way it covers the fight for gay rights in the US and its easy to see the continuum onwards to house music and the current dance music scene. It’s one thing knowing it and having read the right books, but the interviews have a power of their own.

    It takes things through to ‘club quarantine’ during the COVID-19 lockdown.

    I hate that’s its streaming only, rather than Blu-Ray but if you can put that one issue aside and watch it. If you try it and enjoy it, you’ll also love Jed Hallam‘s occasional newsletter Love Will Save The Day.

    I picked up a copy of Contagion on DVD, prior to COVID and watched it with friends in a virtual social manner during lockdown. This probably wasn’t the smartest move and I spent the rest of lockdown building my library of Studio Ghibli films instead. It’s a great ensemble film in its own right. Watching it back again now I was struck by how much Contagion got right from Jude Law’s conspiracy theorist with too much influence and combative congressional hearings.

    The film makers had the advantage of looking back at SARS which had hit Hong Kong and China in 2002 – 2004. Hong Kong had already been hit by Avian flu H5N1 from 1997 to 2002. Both are a foot note in history now, I had a friend who picked up their apartment on the mid-levels for 30 percent below 1997 market rates due to the buffeting the Hong Kong economy took during this time. The only thing that the film didn’t envision was the surfeit of political leadership in some notable western countries during COVID, which would have added even more drama to Contagion, not even Hollywood script writers could have made that up.

    Leslie Cheung photographed while playing

    Hong Kong film star Leslie Cheung was taken from us too early due to depression. But the body of work that he left behind is still widely praised today. Double Tap appeared in 2000. In it Cheung plays a sport shooter of extraordinary skill. The resulting film is a twisting crime thriller with the kind of action that was Hong Kong’s trademark. It represents a very different take on the heroic bloodshed genre. At the time western film critics compared it to The Matrix – since the US film was influenced by Hong Kong cinema. Double Tap has rightly been favourably compared by film critics to A Better Tomorrow – which starred Cheung and Chow Yan Fat.

    Useful tools.

    Knowledge search

    Back when I worked at Yahoo!, one of our key focuses was something called knowledge search. It was searching for opinions: what’s the best dry cleaner in Bloomsbury or where the best everyday carry items for a travelling executive who goes through TSA style inspections a few times a week. Google went on to buy Zagat the restaurant review bible. Yahoo! tried to build its own corpus of information with Yahoo! Answers, that went horribly wrong and Quora isn’t much better. A more promising approach by Gigabrain tries to do knowledge search using Reddit as its data source. I’ve used it to get some quick-and-dirty qualitative insights over the past few months.

    Digital behaviour ‘CliffsNotes’

    Simon Kemp launched this year’s Digital 2025 compendium of global online behaviours. It’s a great starter if you need to understand a particular market.

    Encrypting an external hard drive

    I needed to encrypt an external hard drive to transfer data and hadn’t used FileVault to do it in a while. Thankfully, Apple has a helpful guide buried in its support documents. From memory the process seems to have become more complicated over time. It used to be able to be done by using ‘control’ and click on the drive before scrolling down. Now you need to do it inside Disk Utility.

    The sales pitch.

    now taking bookings

    I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my March 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into spring, and enjoy the Easter break.

    Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.

    Get in touch if there is anything that you’d like to recommend for the newsletter.

  • Skype retrospective

    A Skype retrospective was called for once I read that the service was being closed by April 2025.

    Skype retrospective origins.

    Skype was a thing right from the get-go when it launched in August 2003. There had been voice-over-IP (VoIP) services before Skype. Full disclosure, I worked on Deltathree; an Israeli predecessor of Skype.

    About this time, if you needed to make cheap overseas call, you would dial in to a special service and then dial the overseas number. This would relay your call via VoIP. These calls were also facilitated direct from a PC as well using VoIP.

    Previously, telephone calls were charged per voice minute. The further away the call was, the more expensive it was. VoIP disrupted the telecoms cost model.

    Enabling technologies.

    As broadband networks became more prevalent and Wi-Fi meant that you were no longer tethered to the ethernet connection of your router. At the time homes had an area delegated for internet access. Laptops were much less commonplace.

    Classic iMac in residence at Manchester Digital Development Agency

    The original iMac was a success because it was a plug-in and play solution for internet access. It’s iconic ‘candy design’ helped differentiate it from the competitors beige PC.

    By the time Skype was released I had an Apple iBook, a consumer laptop that pioneered the adoption of Wi-Fi, back in 1999, but my first broadband router at home didn’t support Wi-Fi. Broadband, Wi-Fi and 3G networks facilitated the start of Skype. Those networks provided the always-on connectivity to get the most out of the app.

    Low-key start.

    If there was any ‘thought leader’ on VoIP at the time, it would have been Jeff Pulver. Pulver didn’t bother discussing Skype at the time. Instead he was focused on expected government regulation, Vonage, PC VoIP software X-Lite and Windows Messenger.

    Skype first appeared on Pulver’s radar in December 2003, after Red Herring announced that they had secured a first round of venture funding. Pulver praised their ‘viral marketing’.

    It wasn’t obvious that Skype would be a winner.

    Messaging at the time.

    The primary messaging platform at the time in Europe was SMS. Instant messaging was starting to be used informally in workplaces. It was as much about the community norm as anything else. I started off using ICQ with Israeli clients, then Yahoo! Messenger, AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) and MSN Messenger. It was all a bit messy, so I pulled all my accounts together using Adium.

    Take-off.

    Skype quickly took its place on my laptop when it released its first Mac client in March 2004. By the summer, one of my clients at the time got rid of their desk phones when they moved office and had employees do internal and office-to-office calls via Skype-to-Skype instead. Giving someone your Skype ID became as common as giving out your email.

    At the time Skype offered encrypted voice calls held over a peer-to-peer network. The encryption was contentious as it something of Skype’s own design and wasn’t audited.

    In 2005, Skype was sold to eBay. The synergy between them wasn’t clear.

    Joost

    A year later, the Skype founders left and founded The Venice Project aka Joost – a peer to peer video platform. It was a photo-streaming platform. I liked Joost for its sub-Amazon Prime Video film library including obscure 1970s English language overdubbed martial arts films. But there was also Viacom content available.

    Meanwhile under eBay’s ownership, Skype incorporated video calls into its offering. I ended up in a long distance relationship with a Hong Kong-based fellow Mac user and we ended up talking every day via Skype. It even worked when she visited across the border in Shenzhen.

    Mobile impact

    You can’t write a Skype retrospective without talking about its role on mobile.

    3 Skypephone logo

    Hutchison 3G (known as Three), was a cellular carrier brand put together by CK Hutchison to build a global 3G network in Asia and Europe. In 2007, Three launched Skypephone with Skype. The key part of this as an unremarkable looking candy bar handset.

    3 Skypephone (white and pink)

    The Skype phone allowed you to see the status of your Skype contacts on the phone, allowing for presence on the go, in real time (network permitting) which was revolutionary. But we take it for granted on WhatsApp now. There was a couple of forums that gave out widely copied workarounds for the clunky implementation of Skype.

    For some reason Hong Kong always got the best features. You could have two numbers on your phone there. The first number was your proper mobile phone number that worked like you would expect it to. The second was your ‘SkypeIn’ number – a soft telephone service.

    I had worked on pioneer mobile app Yahoo!Go previously, which only allowed email and no VoIP calls. The Skype phone was a major leap forward because it allowed synchronous communications when connected to a network.

    There would have been no WhatsApp, Viber, WeChat or LINE without Skype leading the way.

    A nerdier fact was that the Skype phone ran on the BREW application development platform by Qualcomm. It allowed Java apps to be downloaded directly from early app stores before the iPhone. At the time I was side loading apps from my Mac on to my Palm and Symbian phones.

    Beginning of the end.

    The peak of my Skype use was keeping in touch with my parents when I was working in Hong Kong. Video calling made the world feel closer and they got to see some of Hong Kong with me because of its higher quality 3G network.

    Soon after I got back, we switched to FaceTime. This was for a couple of reasons. Skype had an increasing number of spam accounts and phishing attacks. Secondly, FaceTime had an easier to use interface.

    This is the point in the Skype retrospective when I think that the rot started to set in.

    From a software point of view a big decline occurred in 2016, Microsoft had settled into their purchase of Skype and decided to re-architect the system. Out went the peer-to-peer connections and the system moved onto Microsoft servers to mediate Skype-to-Skype calls.

    The irony of it all is that the distributed web is now the technology du jour.

    Microsoft messed with the user experience and I distinctly remember moving from one version to another and hated the new layout. From then on, it didn’t improve. Skype’s ability to dial out to international numbers was still something that I put to good use, pretty much up to the time of writing. But like an old cheque book, I came to use it less-and less often; knowing that I could still use the service, allowed Skype to be a back-up to a back-up of a back-up.

    At the time I was also using Skype for Business in the office where I worked. It was shambolic with each call timing out around the 30-minute mark.

    Om Malik had a similar experience.

    Skype, was once a beloved product, one that I loved using every day. It was a product I wrote about long before it was trendy. I sent the team feedback. Like all tiny apps that are good at what they do, it became popular and grew really fast. It was sold to eBay, and then re-sold to Microsoft. And that’s when the magic disappeared. Through series of mergers and managers, Skype became an exact opposite of what I loved about it — independent outsider which was great at — chat, messaging and phone calls. It had just enough features, and its desktop client was minimal in its perfection.  Now, as I tweeted in the past, it is “a turd of the highest quality.”

    The final bow

    A Skype retrospective would be remiss, if we didn’t cover the impact that the service has had. While Skype has struggled with scammers and Microsoft’s sub-optimal operation, its legacy lives on.

    The culture of desktop video calls started with Skype. Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Slack are its spiritual successors. A combination of software capability, hot-desking, hybrid working and COVID resulted in long term business behaviour change.

    As I write this, IAG – owners of British Airways, Aer Lingus and Iberia admitted that “business travel had settled into a ‘new normal’ that involved fewer one-day trips with flights, in part because of video meetings.”

    Skype had some current cultural relevance, particularly on TV where presenters would interview someone from outside the studio, for instance an expert calling in from home, Skype would still be the client used.

    At the time of writing, I am looking at Rakuten Viber to substitute my need for a ‘SkypeOut’ analogue.

  • Clutch Cargo + more things

    Clutch Cargo

    Clutch Cargo was an animated series first broadcast on American television in 1959. Clutch Cargo was created by Cambria Productions – who were a start-up animation studio. Cambria used a number of techniques to radically reduce the cost of producing the animated series.

    clutch cargo

    A key consideration was reducing the amount of movement that needed to be animated. There were some obvious visual motifs used to do this:

    • Characters were animated from waist height up for the majority of the films, this reduced the need to animate legs, walking or running.
    • Much of the movement was moving the camera around, towards or away from a static picture.
    • To show an explosion, they shook the camera, rather than animate the concussive effect of the blast.
    • Fire wasn’t animated, instead smoke would be put in front of the camera. Fake snow was sprinkled so that bad weather didn’t need to be drawn.
    • Cameraman Ted Gillette came up with the idea of Syncro-Vox. The voice actors head would be held steady, they would have a vivid lipstick applied and then say their lines. Gillette then put their mouths on top of the animated figures. Cambria made use of it in all their animations with the exception of The New Three Stooges – an animated series that allowed Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Joe DeRita to be voice actors after their movie contracts finished and they were affected by ill health.

    These choices meant that Clutch Cargo cost about 10 per cent of what it would have cost Disney to animate. The visual hacks to cut costs were also helped in the way the scripts were developed. Clutch Cargo avoided doing comedy, instead focusing on Tin-Tin-like adventures. ‘Physical’ comedy gags create a lot of movement to animate. By focusing on the storytelling of Clutch Cargo. The young audience weren’t bothered by the limited animation, as they were captivated into suspending their beliefs.

    Culture

    jwz: NEUROBLAST: Dispatch From The Cyberpunk City – Contemporary view of San Francisco through the lens of cyberpunk literature

    Energy

    ‘Hydrogen nanoreactors’ can create breakthrough in Green Hydrogen | EE News Europe

    FMCG

    Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back. – The New York TimesLars Fruergaard Jorgensen, the chief executive of Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic and Wegovy, told Bloomberg that food-industry executives had been calling him. “They are scared about it,” he said. Around the same time, Walmart’s chief executive in the United States, John Furner, said that customers on GLP-1s were putting less food into their carts. Sales are down in sweet baked goods and snacks, and the industry is weathering a downturn. By one market-research firm’s estimate, food-and-drink innovation in 2024 reached an all-time nadir, with fewer new products coming to market than ever before.

    Ozempic users like Taylor aren’t just eating less. They’re eating differently. GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite but to rewrite people’s desires. They attack what Amy Bentley, a food historian and professor at New York University, calls the industrial palate: the set of preferences created by our acclimatization, often starting with baby food, to the tastes and textures of artificial flavors and preservatives. Patients on GLP-1 drugs have reported losing interest in ultraprocessed foods, products that are made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in an ordinary kitchen: colorings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners and modified starches. Some users realize that many packaged snacks they once loved now taste repugnant.

    Gadget

    TIM Brasil unveils a wearable pin to combat phone theft at music festivals | Trendwatching – surprised mobile phone companies haven’t implemented something similar for London

    Marketing

    Madison Avenue has a Price Problem — Too Much Work for Meager Fees — Rather than a Cost Problem Requiring Chronic Downsizings – So why are cost reductions the go-to strategies for holding companies, who must surely know better? Downsizings stress and liquidate talent; they do nothing to improve the quality of agency services.

    IPG predicts 1-2% revenue drop for 2025, eyes savings of $250m ahead of Omnicom merger – interesting financial move as Omnicom deal closes.

    Apple resumes advertising on Elon Musk’s X after 15-month pause – 9to5Mac – the negative reaction to this that I have seen from Mac and iPhone users that I know is interesting. It’s the scales have dropped from their eyes about Apple’s performative progressive values. Yet the signs have been out there for years – in particular with regards anything that is even tangentially connected to China.

    Materials

    German startup achieves industrial-scale graphite recovery for lithium ion batteries | EE News Europe

    Media

    Zuckerberg’s rightward policy shift hits Meta staffers, targets Apple | CNBCemployees who might otherwise leave because of their disillusionment with policy changes are concerned about quitting now because of how they will be perceived by future employers given that Meta has said publicly that it’s weeding out “low performers.” Meta, like many of its tech peers, began downsizing in 2022 and has continued to trim around the edges. The company cut 21,000 jobs, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023. Among those who lost their jobs were members of the civic integrity group, which was known to be outspoken in its criticism of Zuckerberg’s leadership.  Some big changes are now taking place that appear to directly follow the lead of Trump at the expense of company employees and users of the platforms, the people familiar with the matter said.

    Security

    Helsing ramps up drone factories across Europe | EE News Europe

    SCAR: Modernizing Satellite Communications at the Speed of War | Soldier Systems Daily Soldier Systems Daily

    Singapore

    Why Asia’s young women are going ‘boy sober’ and swiping left on romance | South China Morning Post – more Singaporean young women are opting out of traditional dating and marriage, prioritising career and personal freedom over societal expectations.

    Software

    The End of Programming as We Know It – O’Reilly

    Web-of-no-web

    Nissan to ship driverless cars in 2027 | EE News Europe