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.
Massive Brazilian Data Breach – Schneier on Security – some 220 million people affected in the Brazilian data breach. So it is one of the biggest data breaches to date. I do wonder why the Brazilian data breach has not a lot of coverage outside of Portuguese language media? More related content here.
Why Ericsson took on its own government to defend rival Huawei | Financial Times – China’s support of Huawei, through cheap funding and much else, is well known, and has led to a commercial advantage that Ericsson and Nokia can find hard to counter on their own. Will Europe, for which 5G is a rare technological sector where it enjoys a clear lead over the US, stand up for its homegrown talent?
Should Universities Try to Capture More Value from Their Research? – Knowledge@Wharton – university research has produced pathbreaking innovations across many disciplines, many of which have been commercialized successfully. Yet, on average, universities capture 16% of the value they help create through licensing revenues or equity stakes in the startups their research spawns. Furthermore, some researchers and universities are much better able to commercialize their discoveries compared to others, even holding constant the discovery itself
How China’s delivery apps are putting riders at risk | Financial Times – in legal disputes, a high level of management by the platform can be taken as evidence that it has a labour relationship with the driver. In 2018, a Shansong courier who had been injured while driving won a court ruling on this basis. One might place some of the responsibility on the engineers who maintain the apps. But they too are victims of labour exploitation, working the infamous “996” shift of 9am-9pm, six days a week. Like delivery drivers, they have decided such an occupation is, so far, their best option. But a country that prides itself on its tech innovation and its booming economy should be able to provide better choices
Apple’s first VR headset will reportedly be powerful and pricey – CNET – its a rumour so take with a pinch of salt, the approach outlined reminded me of being rather similar the way Oculus was in their early model VR headset devices. It is also interesting how they consider a VR headset as a stepping stone to AR glasses. Will Apple be enough to mainstream the VR headset? More related content here.
Next drops bid to buy Topshop after Arcadia’s breakup | Philip Green | The Guardian – The Next consortium was pitted against Shein, a Chinese online fashion retailer and Authentic Brands, the US owner of the Barneys department store, which has been linked to a joint bid with JD Sports. The online retailers Asos and Boohoo are also thought to be involved in the mix. Shein tabled an offer worth in excess of £300m for Topshop and Topman, according to Sky News which first reported the development. It added that a separate process was being run for other Arcadia brands such as Burton and Dorothy Perkins
‘Absolute carnage’: EU hauliers reject UK jobs over Brexit rules | Brexit | The Guardian – data showed that an increasing number of freight groups rejected contracts to move goods from France to Britain in the second week of January. Transporeon, a German software company that works with 100,000 logistics service providers, said freight forwarders had rejected jobs to move goods from Germany, Italy and Poland into Britain. In the second week of January the rejection rate for transport to the UK was up 168% on the third quarter of 2020 and had doubled in the first calendar week of the year
Battle of the Robots Still Favors Japan and Europe—For Now – WSJ – Covid-19 has accelerated automation in factories, especially in manufacturing powerhouse China. Foreign companies have long dominated the market for industrial robots and automation tools there—but there are signs that dominance is fraying around the edges. As the factory for the world, China is unsurprisingly far and away the largest market for industrial robots. Before the pandemic, however, the U.S.-China trade war was slowing growth. New installations of industrial robots amounted to 140,500 in 2019, a 9% decline from the previous year, but still almost three times the number for second-place Japan, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Last year was likely much better: Credit Suisse estimates that China’s industrial-robotics market grew 9.5% in 2020.
Audi and BMW shut down car subscription programs | Engadget – When Mercedes-Benz shuttered Collection, however, it cited mediocre demand and complaints about the hassles of switching personal items between vehicles. While it wasn’t mentioned at the time, the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t helped matters. People are commuting less if at all, and may be more interested in saving money than the flexibility of swapping cars.Subscription ervices like Volvo Care are still going, although it’s not certain how well they’re faring.There may be a slight revival. Automotive News claims Cadillac is testing a resurrected Book service with dealers, although it would arrive a year after the brand’s hoped-for early 2020 revival. However, the overall market appears to be contracting
Majority of Europeans fear Biden unable to fix ‘broken’ US | World news | The Guardian – “Europeans like Biden, but they don’t think America will come back as a global leader,” said the thinktank’s director, Mark Leonard. “When George W Bush was president, they were divided about how America should use its power. With Biden entering the White House, they are divided about whether America has power at all.” The survey of 15,000 people in 11 European countries, conducted at the end of last year, found that the shift in European sentiment towards the US in the wake of the Trump presidency had led to a corresponding unwillingness to support Washington in potential international disputes
Exclusive: City of London Corp boss says ‘not our place’ to criticise China : CityAM – Nathan Law, one of the leaders of the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests in the territory and now in exile in London, told City A.M.’s City View podcast yesterday that UK firms’ “compliance and collusion” with the Chinese Communist Party’s agenda threatened the West’s “democratic values”. The pointed criticism comes after firms including HSBC and Standard Chartered, headquartered in London but who see significant revenues in Asia, backed the imposition of a draconian National Security Law in Hong Kong
Clifford Stott did a call with the Hong Kong Democrat Party on the Hong Kong protests. His responses also cover issues around COVID-19 and how western nations handle crises. Stott believes that China will be a malign authoritarian influence beyond Hong Kong.
Probably one of the darkest aspects of the video is when Stott points out that he visited Hong Kong at the invitation of the Hong Kong Police and wouldn’t be able to go back due to the National Security Law. More security related content here.
Tory rebels seek to block trade deal with China over Uighurs | Financial Times – Boris Johnson faces a rebellion by about 30 Tory MPs on Tuesday who are seeking to block a potential post-Brexit trade deal with China over its human rights record. The amendment to the trade deal — promoting a UK trade policy that upholds human rights — is co-sponsored by one-time Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith and former minister Nusrat Ghani. It would stop ministers from cutting trade deals with countries found guilty of genocide by the High Court. It is backed by all the opposition parties as well as the Muslim Council of Britain and the Board of Deputies of British Jews
As Adobe Flash stops running, so do some railroads in China – Tuesday’s chaos arose after China Railway Shenyang failed to deactivate Flash in time, leading to a complete shutdown of its railroads in Dalian, Liaoning province. Staffers were reportedly unable to view train operation diagrams, formulate train sequencing schedules and arrange shunting plans.Authorities fixed the issue by installing a pirated version of Flash at 4:30 a.m. the following day.
CES 2021 – the Consumer Electronics Show usually sets the tone at the start of the year for consumer-oriented technology. It usually fills up Las Vegas’ hotels and conference facilities.
CES 2021 went online only. Like attending online conferencing the experience was lacking. Networking and informal conversations aren’t something that technology has managed to solve.
Consumer electronics manufacturers didn’t let the virtual nature of CES 2021 put them off though. LG and Samsung went gangbusters rolling out new products. One can understand their enthusiasm based on CTA research for US TV sales in 2020:
Televisions: Households channeled discretionary dollars into upgrading TVs in a record-setting year for shipments in 2020. CTA expects steady demand for displays in 2021 as TVs remain the centerpiece for entertainment in homes. Television shipments will drop 8% to 43 million units in 2021, the second-highest volume on record, while revenues will decline just 1% to $22 billion. Growth areas for TVs in 2021 include sets over 70-inches (3.3 million units, up 6%) and 8K Ultra High-Definition TVs (1.7 million units, up 300%).
U.S. Tech Industry Revenue to Jump 4.3% in 2021 After Record Year in 2020, Says CTA
According Parks Associates, smart TVs were the most popular devices for streaming content. This has been on the rise since 2018. This offers a business opportunity for TV manufacturers and also a potential point of differentiation.
Based on research by Park Associates
TV vendors were looking at differentiating their products from the increasing amount of competition.
Looking at the change in TV design; where there is less distinction from the display technology, cabinet or frame design, even OS (with Android) has become commoditised – new sources of differentiation become important.
LG has been soldiering on with with version 6 of webOS, originally derived from Palm’s attempt to meld HTML 5 web service based apps on top of Linux during the mid to late noughties. (It was also interesting that Samsung didn’t do a similar thing with their Tizen OS; which is derived work done by Intel and Nokia on Linux for mobile and consumer electronics applications.)
Google Duo tried to get a jump on Zoom by having support in smart TVs. TVs were found to be supporting multiple voice assistants which implies that there has been a stalemate amongst the major players. Whether or not that will result in voice service customer us promiscuity in the home is an interesting question.
On the hardware front, Japanese manufacturers Sony & Panasonic were promoting the use of onboard machine learning to optimise image processing in real time.
SWAS – screen with a subscription
LG expanded its support of content streaming services to include streaming games platforms. Looking at the Parks Associates data, one can understand why they think that the games console market is ripe for disruption.
Samsung looked to get into the digital art market, with subscription based imagery available on its Lifestyle TV line, which look like a picture frame when off. This is only three decades after Bill Gates Xanadu 2.0 home was filled with digital art. He patented the e-picture hanging in 2003.
Samsung has gone into coopetition with Peloton with new functionality within the Samsung Health function on its TVs. But also integrating with the fitness training service. The camera and machine learning provides guidance and advice on form for exercisers. This mirrors where Apple has gone with its fitness offerings that are included in the Apple One subscription.
Sony doubled down on its content business with the Bravia CORE streaming service for its top of the range TVs. A few things with this announcement:
CORE uses up to 118Mbits/sec for ‘IMAX enhanced’ content
It is initially only a 2-year project, which implies that it might be a reaction to COVID limited box office numbers rather than an ongoing Netflix killer
It is also interesting that Sony is still hamstrung by its different lines of business and hasn’t launched a streaming games service in its TVs for fear of cannibalising PlayStation sales.
Other revenue streams on screen
LG Shop Time 2.0 built on the Shop Time app launched late last year. ShopTime allows you to buy what you see on screen with 1-click in partnership with the Home Shopping Network. Korea has a large TV shopping culture, with mobile commerce and TV experience integration, so this move seems to be a logical progression.
Picture I took on a trip to Ulsan in 2012, TV home shopping integrated with mobile commerce by scanning QRcode to buy item currently being sold on the show.
However the launch of Shop Time 2.0 is a decade on from the pioneering work by Japanese media house Girlwalker; that mixed live and streamed entertainment with 1-click shopping. Their Tokyo Girls Collection and Shibuya Girls Collection events set the standard in this kind of retail experience.
Samsung TV Plus focused on new targeted advertising capabilities with its own DSP and DMP solution. Ad tracking provides a record of everything that you watch on TV for better ad targeting.
SWAS and the other revenue streams change the game for TV manufacturers at CES 2021. Previously, a TV was once in a decade purchase. Now manufacturers have the opportunity in the upfront purchase and in multiple recurring revenue streams. The increased amount of technology in the devices, implies an expectation of faster upgrade cycles. However device security and data privacy still don’t seem to be issues on the radar of TV manufacturers.
AIoT – artificial intelligence of things
In the same way that fuzzy logic made its way into consumer electronics from rice cookers and cameras to lifts, connected machine learning is now taking a similar path with variable results. Machine learning seemed to feature in CTA Innovation Award Honorees across categories at CES 2021.
The COVID-19 factor
CES 2021 itself went virtual because of the pandemic. And two trends became apparent. Machines replaced service staff with devices like an autonomous shopping trolley that would follow the consumer around a supermarket. The second was disinfection, with UV light used as a the go-to germ-killing technique. LG had a number of robots for aiding in hotel room service functions such as delivering items including food packages. There was also a bot for sterilising empty rooms with UV. Accessories company Targus won an award for its UV-C desktop disinfection lamp.
The fractured tech lobby’s uphill battles – Axios – The fractured tech lobby is a sign of too many firms working at cross purposes. – The Internet Association was founded almost a decade ago to be Silicon Valley’s voice in Washington. But now its biggest members — companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon — increasingly bump heads as they each seek to channel policymakers’ fury away from themselves, and they can have wildly different goals from smaller members. Facebook, for instance, has signaled that it’s open to new federal laws introducing privacy regulations and modest updates to Section 230, tech’s liability shield. Smaller companies worry giants could handle the burden of complying while they’d struggle to survive. – The fractured tech lobby is going to offer a bounty for law firms and K Street lobbyists. It will also open up investigations around the world from the EU to Seoul, Korea. China won’t be involved since it blocks most of the key members of the Internet Association – the fractured tech lobby in question.
The Kremlin’s Anti-Western (and Remarkably Successful) Middle East Media Project | Interpreter magazine – Dr. Naila Hamdy, an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at the American University in Cairo, noted how “RT may have filled up that gap” left in Egypt and the wider region following the Arab Spring, when an increasing number of viewers began to see Al-Jazeera as closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties. This increasing regional polarization erupted in the summer of 2017 with the Saudi-led embargo of Qatar, with Saudi and its Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) partners demanding the closure of Al Jazeera as punishment for Qatar’s alleged support for the Brotherhood, as well as Iran and its regional Shiite proxies
The Radicalization of Kevin Greeson — ProPublica – interesting article and an under-covered subject. The flpside of this article is how the Democrats have lost their base in these communities and it reminds me a lot of how Labour lost its base outside the major cities in that respect. They no longer represent working people, but are instead considered to be playing identity politics, the economics of new-liberalism is largely universal
Ad Aged: Standing up for truth. (Haha.) – For a society or an industry to function it needs to have a set of common facts. It’s really that simple. If you hear an assertion, ask for evidence. Whether or not you agree with it. If you make an assertion, be prepared to back it up with a piece of paper.
WhatsApp fights back as users flee to Signal and Telegram | Financial Times – The encrypted messaging app, which has more than 2bn users globally, and several of its senior executives spent Tuesday trying to clarify forthcoming privacy policy changes covering the data that can be shared between WhatsApp and its parent now that it is deepening its push into ecommerce. Signal was downloaded 8.8m times worldwide in the week after the WhatsApp changes were first announced on January 4, versus 246,000 times the week before, according to data from Sensor Tower. The app also got a boost when Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, tweeted “Use Signal” on January 7. By contrast, WhatsApp recorded 9.7m downloads in the week after the announcement, compared with 11.3m before, a 14 per cent decrease
Detained US lawyer urges Hong Kong to look to Ireland for inspiration | Financial Times – Look at Irish history . . . They were completely hopeless for so long, but eventually they got part of Ireland — they got a republic,” Mr Clancey told the Financial Times. “In a difficult situation we shouldn’t just give up and have no hope for the future.” Mr Clancey was still asleep when police arrived to detain him last Wednesday. After his arrest, police escorted Mr Clancey, a Hong Kong permanent resident, to his office to conduct a search. His firm, headed by veteran lawyer Albert Ho, is known for representing anti-government activists. His arrest has stirred fears authorities will target lawyers in Hong Kong who represent opposition figures in political cases — a tactic common in mainland China
