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.

  • App constellations 2018 research

    I initially looked at app constellations back in 2014, when Fred Wilson put a name to the the phenomena. And every two years or so I have gone back and looked at a number of major internet companies to see how many different types of apps that they had in play.

    I originally selected the companies back in 2014 because I felt that they represented the largest and best of their ilk. It skews Asian because the west can be viewed as one eco-system represented by Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

    China is an enclosed eco-system; though Microsoft is actively engaged in the app eco-system there. I chose Tencent and NetEase as being my Chinese bellwethers. DaumKakao and Naver were representative of the Korean eco-system which blends highly-used domestic services with western platforms. Finally LINE of Japan (a subsidiary of Korean company Naver) provided a similar bellwether of the hybrid Japanese eco-system which mirrors Korea.

    App constellations survey methodology

    For the sake of convenience I have compared the contents of Apple’s mobile app store for each of the companies. While most of the internet companies have some Android-only or iOS-only apps; the iOS app store is still a good indicator of their app activity.

    I stayed true to the definition of app constellations in terms of deciding what kind of app should go in.

    App constellation definition

    I manually assessed each app, rather than relying on the category that the app had been submitted into. Tencent and Netease, had a number of mobile utilities that aided discussion and kept players updated on their favourite game. These didn’t fit within the definition.

    Changes in the environment

    Since 2016, a couple of things have changed:

    • Apple had a purge of apps that didn’t support 64 bit processing
    • They moved away from supporting the app store within iTunes application and on the web; to within the app store on the device

    2018 marks over a decade of mobile apps in the Apple store. Many of the major players have delisted almost as many Android and iOS apps as they currently have in the store. This happens for a number of reasons:

    • The app was serving a purpose for a fixed time
    • It is an application that has fallen so far out of favour that it is no longer worth maintaining
    • The code base no longer meets Apple’s or Google’s minimum standards
    Data analysis

    I started off by looking at the number of apps. In terms of app constellations:  Tencent, Microsoft and Google were clear winners.

    Number of apps

    Both Microsoft and Google’s growth has been driven by ‘experimental’ apps that they have put out in the public for their own reasons and enterprise focused apps.

    compound annual growth in app number

    But it was quickly apparent to me that the number of apps developed were only part of the story. What about the rate of change in numbers of apps developed? This would be indicative of the rate of change in moving to mobile. Here both Facebook and Microsoft’s pivot became immediately apparent. The Asian companies looked less impressive as they had been able to keep steady in their focus on mobile.

    All of this growth in the number of apps developed by major internet companies is all the more remarkable when you consider the following:

    • In mature markets consumers are not really downloading new apps
    • They are sticking with a few in terms of regular usage. Many of the apps on their phones don’t get used
    Notes on a few of the companies in terms of their app constellations
    • Daum Kakao – notable for being the only company who I looked at who had a decline in the number of applications versus 2016. A lot of this seems to be in service consolidation of both Daum and Kakao to remove duplications or non-core services. It is the Daum brand that has taken the biggest impact. This is understandable, since Daum struggled on the move to smartphones and Kakao is a mobile-first brand.
    • Dropbox – the growth in apps has been down to the larger business acquisition strategy at Dropbox. I don’t expect further growth like what we have seen with  Facebook’s pivot to mobile
    • Facebook – Facebook’s pivot to mobile was one of the reason why I decided to look at compound annual growth rate as well as the size of app constellation in terms of app numbers. In terms of raw app ‘SKUs’ Facebook is dwarfed by most of the other companies that I have looked at. It is only by looking at the growth in apps developed where one can really see their move to mobile
    • Netease – was interesting for its focus in a couple of areas. Like other Asian internet companies, education was a big target area, but Netease went into it with major commitment. Both NetEase and Tencent were big in magazine and book apps as well. I think this is down to the fact that ‘traditional’ web surfing is harder to do with (at the moment) when URLs are written in western script and numbers.
    • Tencent – the raw app numbers beggars belief. There are a number of reasons for this. Like NetEase, Tencent has a lot of apps solely optimised for the iPad and a separate iPhone app. There are free and paid-for product variants. Lastly Tencent will have four or five apps competing in a given category like streaming music which seems insane. Only time will tell if Tencent is spreading itself too thin; like when Yahoo! was described Brad Garlinghouse’s Peanut Butter Manifesto
    More information

    Jargon watch: app constellation – back in 2014 when I wrote this post, it still took me the best part of a week to research and describe each of the apps in the main eco-systems. It would take me much longer today due to the growth in apps

    Peanut Buttergate – analysis of Garlinghouse’s original memo about Yahoo! from back in 2006

  • Voice activated coupon + more news

    Voice activated coupon

    Google’s First Voice Activated Coupon – WPP – Google distributed its first voice-activated coupon offering customers $15 off Target purchases placed on Google Express through Google Assistant –through desktop, mobile or Google Assistant enabled devices – I am surprised that Amazon didn’t introduce the voice activated coupon before Google.

    Beauty

    SK-II finds success in selling to younger Chinese: P&G | Advertising | Campaign Asia – luxury brand with an on ramp for college students

    China

    China Bans Online Bible Sales as It Tightens Religious Controls – The New York Times – I am concerned about Vatican appeasement of China. It looks like Neville Chamberlain

    Consumer behaviour

    Headline from China: Purchase Restriction and Red Streetwear | Jing Daily – interesting how streetwear brands are being cleared out of the way by the Chinese government to support Chinese originated brands

    How Americans Self-Sort Themselves by Age and Class – CityLab

    Culture

    The Overwhelming Emotion of Hearing Toto’s “Africa” Remixed to Sound Like It’s Playing in an Empty Mall | The New Yorker

    Molly Ringwald Revisits “The Breakfast Club” in the Age of #MeToo | The New Yorker – good read, what I remember is how those films nailed emotion

    Japan

    Japan to place accident liability on self-driving car owners – Nikkei Asian Review – makers liable only in case of a system flaw

    Online

    China’s Didi Chuxing prepares to launch Mexico operations | HKEJ Insights – China going global

    RSS is undead | Techcrunch – no RSS is alive, but Techcrunch haven’t worked out issues the RSS users have already. Much of the issues are solved by using NewsBlur and finding sources is organic rather than an instant end state. More online related topics here.

    Security

    Could Cambridge Analytica boss be probed for Philippine meddling? | SCMP  – This could get interesting. Putting aside arguments about whether Cambridge Analytica’s technology actually works as promised, Philippines law would still have been broken. It forbids all outside parties from participating in its election process.It is alleged that they were supporting Duterte, which would make the foreign reaction to it interesting as well.

    Technology

    ARM Mac: Piece of Cake Or Gas Refinery? – Monday Note – assumes that there will be a transition, which I am not convinced about

    API and Other Platform Product Changes – Facebook for Developers – reduces information that can be taken out to beef up privacy

    Wireless

    Smartphone shipments fall again in Q1 | Shanghai Daily – China looks saturated in terms of smartphones

    Cell Spotting: Studying the Role of Cellular Networks in the Internet by Rula, Bustamante and Steiner – (PDF)

  • Discussion on voice interfaces and services

    Interesting discussion on the use of voice interfaces and services. There is a certain amount of cheerleading involved in the talk; but that is to be expected with vendors in the room. If found it interesting that one of the panelists; Sam Liang of AISense moved out of where2.0 services and into voice. because location is a great gateway to lots of rich contextual information and voice is desperately in need of context and by extension user intent.

    It is interesting to get a perspective on the organisations involved in the discussion on voice interfaces:

    • SRI International
    • Amazon
    • Microsoft
    • AISense

    All of them seem to be well behind where the telecoms voice services managed to get to like Orange’s Wildfire.

    Key takeouts from this:

    • 50,000,000 voice devices to ship this year (2018). A total installed user base of 100,000,000 (presumably excluding voice interfaces on smartphones)
    • AISense is looking to build in voice biometrics that would prompt you about who a person is. Privacy implications are profound
    • The panel struggled to articulate an answer to privacy concerns beyond ‘services need to build trust’ and transparency
    • Information security and hacking wasn’t a point of discussion; which surprised me a lot
    • Context still seems to be a huge issue, I think that this is a bigger issue than the panelists acknowledge. Google still struggles on user intent, without adding the additional layer of understanding voice. The biggest moves seem to be ‘social engineering’ hacks, rather than improvements in technology
    • Amazon and Microsoft don’t have plans for advertising services on voice (at the moment)
    • We’re very far away from general purpose voice services
    • Work has only started on trying to understand emotion
    More information
    • Orange’s Wildfire and The Register on its shutdown. Wildfire’s problem seemed to be a failure of marketing more than anything else. We haven’t seen anything else like it. Even Siri is only scraping over the ashes of the work done on Wildfire 15 years ago
    • Google’s published research on speech processing. What becomes apparent from looking at the list of research is how basic the current state-of-the-art currently is
    • Stuff that I have written that touch on context dependent services

  • Global Web Index + more news

    Global Web Index data on privacy

    1 in 4 Deeply Concerned About Online Privacy – GlobalWebIndex Blog – ok its Global Web Index so you have to take the data with a pinch of salt. Global Web Index is based on people completing online surveys. That means that the technique Global Web Index uses needs to be considered alongside the data. It isn’t observed behaviour, but reported behaviour. One might do one thing and say another. The extremely high rate of concern in Latin America in the Global Web Index survey could be a sampling error on the survey or it could be quite profound given that it would be a growth market for social media networks like Facebook

    Business

    WPP Appoints Independent Counsel to Investigate Allegations of ‘Personal Misconduct’ Against CEO Martin Sorrell – Adweek – by the sounds of it the share price drop was disproportionate to the size of misuse involved

    Marketing

    ANA finds only 36% of marketers say their influencer marketing is effective | The Drum – research says what people know but won’t talk about

    Not a simple process’: Marketers struggle to recruit in-house media talent – Digiday – what’s depressing about this is not the media side of things but is how screwed brand is with in-house marketers

    Media

    YouTube will now monetize on skipped ads | Digital | Campaign Asia – interesting how a brand marketing metric (CPM) is recharacterised as a ‘vanity measure’

    Online

    The death of the newsfeed — Benedict Evans – or why western social platforms may learn from WeChat’s user experience

    OPPO Digital – giving up making hi-fi and high end Blu-Ray players – a bit sad as OPPO made high-end headphones and arguably the best multi-region Blu-Ray players that money could buy

    Security

    Privacy fears over police spy tools that can break into mobile phones | News | The Times – The technology was first introduced by the Metropolitan Police for the London Olympics in 2012 and has been quietly rolled out. Privacy International’s report says police are operating without any clear legal framework and often break into phones belonging to people who have not been convicted of any crime, including witnesses and victims

    Technology

    Let’s take a moment to appreciate all the lies in Zuckerberg’s truths about Tim Cook and Apple – BGR – interesting tonality in this article which gives you an idea of the temperament vintage Microsoft enjoyed in the technology media. Expect Facebook to start emphasising their innovative nature soon…

    We put Huawei’s P20 triple-lens snapper through its paces • The Register – basically keep your old phone and download VSCO. Interesting a wider phone review wasn’t done. Says a lot about market saturation and performance differences per handset generation. More related content here.

  • Family & other things that made my day this week

    Untitled

    I spent a good deal of the week seeing the family. It was great to have homemade soda bread and finish off my Mum’s Christmas cake. Yes, you haven’t read that wrong, my Mum specialises in making rich fruit cakes for Christmas. They keep for a good few months afterwards.

    A good deal of that was spent watching Homeland and assorted  films with my Dad. This included Accident Man – a pretty accurate remake of the Toxic! comic book character from the early 1990s by Pat Mills (of 2000AD fame) and Tony Skinner. We didn’t watch them as a family for reasons that will become apparent.

    For a brief period from March to October 1991; the UK comic scene had a darker, more anarchic publication than had been previously seen. Toxic! was originally designed to address failings in 2000AD magazine.

    The film is so anachronistic in its nature that its audience will be niche. That doesn’t reflect on the quality of the action in the film. It features Ray Stevenson, Scott Adkins (you’d recognise hime host of Hong Kong and Hollywood movies) and Ray Park (who played Darth Maul). Adkins is a bit lean to play the titular character Mick Fallon, which is a surprise given his Boyka role in the Undisputed franchise. Adkins to his credit manages to make it all work.

    Both the director and the script writer managed to skilfully blend the unreconstructed misogyny of 1991 with with the great ‘unawoke’ attitudes of a post-Brexit Britain.

    Watching Wanted: Dead or Alive with Rutger Hauer shows how much the media portrayal of Islamic terrorism has changed over the past 30 years. The plot itself is a bit odd. Sex tape star Gene Simmons plays an Islamic terrorist looking to cause a Bhopal-type disaster as an act of revenge on the United States – where do you even start with that plot?

    Hauer’s car has an early generation cellular phone and what seems like some sort of satellite navigation equipment with a monochrome CRT display.

    Dated films weren’t the only things that I saw. The family car is still a Polo diesel that I helped them buy. Whilst I heard of a few people who had a Nissan Leaf; Merseyside is still firmly in the petroleum age. Most of the cars were a decade old on average and I didn’t see any obvious charging stations. Importation of secondhand cars from Japan is still a thing. Both J60 and J80 series Toyota Land Cruisers seem to have a loyal following.

    For something more recent and music-related, I can recommend this from Resident Advisor: How did UK garage become dubstep?

    I think that we must be pretty close to peak-vape. I was in a Wilkinsons store and wandered past the cough and cold medicine section. Wilkinsons is a discount retailer that does a mix of food cupboard staple grocers, household cleaning products and over the counter pharmacy products. A good analogue for Hong Kong readers would be 759 Store.

    On the top shelf of the unit above cough and cold remedies was vape fluid and e-cigarettes.

    Douglas Rushkoff | Present Shock Economies – great YouTube video which explains why Amazon is likely to be more trouble over time than Facebook ever will be. Well worth listening to during a lunch hour.

    Finally Asian Boss had some great vox pop interviews with Beijingers about what they thought of Sesame Credit which is a financial and behavioural credit system being rolled out in China.