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.

  • German nuclear plant + more things

    German nuclear plant infected with computer viruses, operator says | Reuters – So Sarbannes Oxley meant that a lot of corporates disabled USB ports. Technology company Huawei used to have ‘dirty machines’ and clean machines. Neither of which were connected by a network. The same was true in many agencies where I worked. Yet a German nuclear plant allows easy access via USB. Secondly, why do the USB chargers on airplane cockpits have any intelligence at all that would store a virus and allow it propagate? I would be very paranoid about using any USB chargers in coffee shops or an aircraft seat moving forwards. This is the problem when everything from light bulbs and doorbells now contain a Linux server. More security related content here.

    Ogilvy’s rebrand reveals an ad industry in confusion | Thomas Barta – an inhouse marketers perspective on things. If you substituted the word advertising for PR in this as a discipline it could be an analysis of all agencies.

    iPhone maker Foxconn is churning out “Foxbots” to replace its human workers — Quartz – I am not convinced that they will be that successful. This is partly down to some of the manual dexterity required being similar to a watchmaker in some parts of the assembly. And that is down to Apple driving an industry race to squeeze phones into tighter factors for the guts. The process is repeatable, but hard to deliver. Back in the day Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers used to use pick-and-place machines for a lot of consumer electronics. It is why Japan went more towards micro-chips faster than players like Philips. Japan did a lot of component standardisation in terms of sizing and connectivity to the board. The boards were relatively simply designed and gave a bit of latitude to allow for a lack of precision from the machines. That meant slightly larger goods. More expensive devices like Sony’s Walkman  Pro, were handmade because they crammed so much technology inside them .

    [Publish] Facebook Profiles can no longer be connected to Buffer Publish – Buffer FAQ – well that’s a bit of a bummer. But you can still publish content via more expensive systems like Percolate. Is this Facebook trying to discourage organic content from anyone but brands (that spend advertising money?)

  • Cyberpunk 2077 & other things

    E3 largely past me by, except for this trailer for forthcoming game Cyberpunk 2077.  Loving the William Gibson’s sprawl trilogy era meets synth-wave vibe to Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk 2077 is being developed by the same studio that adapted The Witcher books to computer games.

    This is a few years old, but Blu e-cigarettes put together a good documentary seven-episode series on dance music and DJ culture that is well worth watching

    Think influencers can be filled with entitlement, who inflate their follower numbers and leech off marketing budgets and want an alternative? You wouldn’t be alone. Virtual personalities have been a thing for a few years in Japan thanks to  Yamaha’s Vocaloid software; you have a purely artificial ‘idol’ (popstar) who appears as a hologram. Virtual YouTube personalities have followed and it was only a matter of time for one of them to start speaking in English to increase their reach.

    I’ll let Sakura Fujima introduce herself. And here’s the kind of content we can look forward to expecting from her

    I’m a big fan of Carhartt and love this advert

    MTV are looking to get hold of some sweet streaming production money by bring back golden oldies including Daria. Expect more dry witticisms and the same monotone delivery that was very gen-X zeitgeist. This time Daria is becoming more woke, by blowing off her bestie Jane and focusing on her black friend Jodie instead.

    While its not likely to affect your post club kebab shop any time soon big food has been showing some interest in automation (like McDonald’s self-service ordering and apps). There will obviously be a trade-off between the likely returns on capital expenditure versus the ready availablility of cheap flexible labour. The number of available products for sale and their relative complexity is another consideration. This Bay Area installation is taking things to their logical conclusion.

    creator burger robot serves this gourmet diner classic for 6 dollars from designboom on Vimeo.

  • H1, 2018 most popular posts

    Happy Back to the Future Day

    I took a little bit of time to reflect on the content that I have been writing, what can I learn from it and how I can reuse these learnings? Specifically what are people finding of interest? This couldn’t happen without people actually reading the content, so thank you for reading; feel free to come back on a regular basis. Over the past six months readers like you have found the following articles of most interest. In reverse order

    Reuse, Re-edit, Remix and Recycle – if you read the industry publications we here about personalised ad creative driven by ad targeting. But often the core creative and is created unnecessarily. Instead, what’s the minimum viable creative tweak that can be used? How do we extend the smart processes of reuse, re-edit, remix and recycling into this world?

    This Wasn’t The Internet We Envisaged – in the word’s of Terry Pratchet:

    “If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.”

    So it was time for reflection in order to get a perspective as the regulators and media discovered Facebook, Google and Amazon where not models of virtuous conduct.

    The Biggest Public Relations Agencies Stuckness and Market Dynamics – The Holmes Report came out with their top 250 (biggest) PR agencies around the world in terms of billings. I decided to delve into the numbers for financial years 2014 – 2017.

    This supports a hypothesis of slowing market growth and solidifying market dynamics at a macro level. Strategic acquisitions start to make less sense compared to improving efficiences and effectiveness.

    Throwback Gadget: Bose Wave System – usually my gadget reviews tend to be some of the better performing content. The Bose Wave review was the only one that appears this time around.

    Social Networks 10 Years Ago – a reflection on what a more diverse social media eco-system looked like.

    The Advertising Industry Post – the macro effects buffeting the world’s largest marketing services conglomerates.

    Mercedes China Syndrome – Chinese netizens are jumping the Great Firewall to vilify western brands who reflect views that ‘offend the Chinese people’ – even when this content is aimed at non-Chinese audiences. Mercedes’ offence was an Instagram image with one of their cars and a quote from the exiled Dalai Lama

    Personal online brand – at a time when we’re seeing social media turning into walled gardens. David Gallagher asked the Twitterverse if he should have his own site?

    Twitterverse: @wadds says I need a proper blog. I say I can do it on LinkedIn or Facebook. What say you? Build my own?

    I weighed in on why he should and how I manage the process.

    Chinese smartphone eco-system for beginners – Winston Sterzel did a good video for the average bystander on the Chinese smartphone eco-system. I thought it was a good film to share with marketers  – with a bit more background information answering some of the ‘why’ in terms of market dynamics.

    App constellations 2018  research – I built on work that I had done in 2014 and 2016, comparing the rate of growth across different companies apps based on Fred Wilson’s definition of app constellations. This was also the post that took me the longest to research!

    SaveSave

  • Advanced engines + more things

    Troublesome advanced engines for Boeing, Airbus jets have disrupted airlines and shaken travelers | The Seattle Times – this isn’t like the new engine in your car. The advanced engines in a jet engine are exposed to more heat and pressure than you can imagine. When you’re working on advanced engines for aircraft; you’re operating at the bleeding edge of materials and engineering. New metal alloys, titanium, engineering ceramics and carbon fibre all started in advanced engines for aircraft.  What’s interesting is the way the problems have assailed multiple engine builders at the the same time. Almost as if there is a roadblock in the technium for advanced engines

    Lost Liverpool #13: The Beat of Bold Street Part 2, the Mardi Gras and G-Love – Getintothis – wow I read this and it brought back a lot of memories. G-Love was the closest thing to the legendary Shoom vibe in Liverpool. It was a different kind of crowd to what you saw at the Quadrant Park or even Garlands. G-Love at the Mardi Gras is what I’ve measured every club experience against since and most of them have been miserable failures by comparison. Early Cream felt austere and corporate with its ‘no jeans’ dress code.  G-Love was part 1960s love-in and part rave. It was Ibiza without even knowing where the Balearic islands were.

    Crown, a new app from Tinder’s parent company, turns dating into a game | TechCrunch – yet another thing for incel subculture to complain about

    Death of the landline? Why we are hanging up on the ‘home phone’ – Independent.ie – in my parents case its cheap calls to Ireland. Though its hard for them to justify the landline because of the amount of spam calls that they receive

    Encrypted Messaging Apps Have Limitations You Should Know | WIRED – these limitations are well known, yet law enforcement continues to want in the clear messaging only. The fig leaf of a magic key just indicates their deliberate techno-ignorance

    Nike scores big in Chinese KOL competition | Campaign Asia – Nike is killing it in China thanks to understanding local culture and global youth culture.

  • Checkout free retail + more things

    Exclusive: Microsoft takes aim at Amazon with push for checkout free retail | Reuters – I hope that checkout free retail works better than self service checkouts. Also will checkout free retail work well in low trust societies? More related content here.

    The Ruggedmen and the End of Free & Easy – but out of the Ashes is born something new

    Are Apple AirPods Any Good? – The Atlantic – interesting observation on the changes on consumer behaviour using AirPods

    Why the Future of Machine Learning is Tiny | Pete Warden’s blog – and not AI – the early 1990s use of fuzzy logic is a better analogue

    Upscaling of Sneaker Brands Threatens Luxury Fashion | Jing Daily – Gildo Zegna, CEO of Italian luxury fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna, attributed the rising price of sportswear sneakers to their rise in emotional value, “If there is one product today that is impulse driven and creates emotions among consumers, it is the sneaker (…) you are talking about people spending $100 to $700 on a single pair.”

    Publicis publicity win was bigger than the bot | Special: Cannes Lions – Ad Age – Publicis campaigns won’t be absent from Cannes after all, because clients and partners stepped up to pay for the entry cost for a few hundred campaigns

    Volkswagen tests quantum computing in battery research | eeNews Power – chemistry makes sense as it works on low qubit machines. Involvement with Google and D-Wave is a blow to IBM

    Monzo’s big smart bank move links your money to Alexa, Twitter and pretty much anything else | WIRED UK – I find this quite scary

    Customer Experience Trends In China, 2018 | Forrester Research – Today, China has become so innovative that businesses in mature Western markets are taking note. The country’s tech giants are blurring the boundaries between digital and physical and expanding the reach of their platform businesses with new value propositions

    Microsoft acquires a whole bunch of game studios | TechCrunch – interesting how Microsoft is going about this. Steam is looking like the future of gaming

    About the Finder… | Ars Technica – the finder is a bug bear since I started as a Mac user and the lack of positive change in Mojave is no different