Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercive change) caused by others, by restraining the freedom of others to act. Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be of persons and social groups, objects and institutions, ecosystems or any other entity or phenomenon vulnerable to unwanted change. Security mostly refers to protection from hostile forces, but it has a wide range of other senses: for example, as the absence of harm (e.g. freedom from want); as the presence of an essential good (e.g. food security); as resilience against potential damage or harm (e.g. secure foundations); as secrecy (e.g. a secure telephone line); as containment (e.g. a secure room or cell); and as a state of mind (e.g. emotional security).
Back when I started writing this blog, hacking was something that was done against ‘the man’, usually as a political statement. Now breaches are part of organised crime’s day to day operations. The Chinese government so thoroughly hacked Nortel that all its intellectual property was stolen along with commercial secrets like bids and client lists. The result was the firm went bankrupt. Russian ransomware shuts down hospitals across Ireland. North Korean government sanctioned hackers robbed 50 million dollars from the central bank of Bangladesh and laundered it in association with Chinese organised crime.
Now it has spilled into the real world with Chinese covert actions, Russian contractors in the developing world and hybrid warfare being waged across central Europe and the middle east.
Evernote is in deep trouble – Business Insider – kind of glad I don’t have data in Evernote, if I did what would be my emergency migration plan? The lack of migration plan is one of the key issues with post-web 2.0 services – that use web 2.0 technologies. But businesses like Evernote lack the open data approach of forebears like flickr or delicious
Tor browser co-creator: Experian breach shows encryption may not be security panacea – “Experian differentiated between personally identifying information that was not stored encrypted, and credit card info which was stored encrypted — both were hacked,” Goldschlag wrote in a note to VentureBeat. “Experian added that it is likely that the hackers were able to decrypt the encrypted information too,” he said. (Experian’s CEO admitted this.) “So storing information in an encrypted form may not be the panacea that people expect.” – did they use a weak algorithm? Was it an inside job? What was the nature of the cryptography attack? More security related content here
SK-II opens SoHo pop-up to change consumers’ destinies – Luxury Daily – interesting campaign, just a few years ago how many beauty campaigns tagline would have been a hashtag? The hashtag came from documenting items in the C programming language, which in turn came out of Bell Labs and their work on the AT&T Unix operating system #unixrunningtheworldnow
Chinese Soccer Prepares to ‘Fly Alone’: Will Success Follow? | WSJ – moving away from government. It will be interesting to see if China can displace the European teams in the world’s sports media markets. I suspect that a key component of that, which hasn’t been addressed yet, would be changes in sports betting
U.K. Marketers Will Use Fewer Agencies by 2020, Report Says | Advertising Age – focused on doing prospecting and CRM in-house. Agencies will shrink because its not that hard to media plan if you’ve decided on Google and Facebook. (Not the smartest play, but one that inhouse marketers are increasingly adopting). More marketing content here.
Does Huawei’s Mate S really belong in the top-end bracket? | WantChinaTimes – it is questionable whether the Mate S merits its high price tag, the Chuangshiji report said. Disclaimer: I’ve worked in two agencies promoting Huawei mobile devices. I’ve never wanted to own a Huawei smartphone, phablet like the Mate series, MediaPad tablet or computer. But don’t let that put you off thinking that they’re top-end devices….
Internet of Things: a game changer for cities? – what remains unclear is how IoT will revolutionize urban life and who should take the lead in this transformation. Should it be government agencies, or will we end up with a Snowcrash like corporatisation of the public sphere? A la public privately owned spaces in Hong Kong and other major cities.
Is Mobile Advertising in China Doomed? | Social Brand Watch – probably no more so than in the West. Chinese businesses ‘get’ online to offline a lot better and media companies usually go direct to the clients, avoiding the media agencies as gatekeeper. In return the client gets a commission discount. Mobile advertising probably isn’t doomed, but at least some media buying agencies might be
Will 5G Kill Free WiFi? | Motherboard – all I am going to point out here is that Intel backed WiMax versus LTE for 4G. Intel has consistently had issues in the wireless space. The use cases between 5G and free WiFi are likely to be very different. The potential low latency of 5G will be attractive in certain use cases. I don’t think it will be a consumer product for a while yet due to network build out issues in comparison to free WiFi (or the paid variety. More wireless related content here.
GSM gateways were common features of the 1990s and early 2000s telephone landscape. At the time, phone companies charged eye-wateringly high sums for overseas calls. In those dreary pre-Skype and pre-WhatsApp days, if you wanted instant contact with loved ones the phone was your only option. GSM gateways themselves, banks of SIM cards, worked a bit like a modern VPN does for an internet connection: you call the gateway, then once connected you enter the overseas number you want to be connected to. Government officials have claimed they frustrate surveillance by spy agencies and others because identifying caller data is not forwarded through the gateway, making it difficult to eavesdrop on a particular call going overseas.
Social media went into overdrive on Monday evening UK time when Google announced a formal restructure of all its businesses, creating a new company called Alphabet. For the man on the street, Google means Search, YouTube, Drive (including Docs, Sheets etc.), email and Android. For the average marketer you can throw various advertising products and Google Analytics into the mix. For business IT managers, it is everything from productivity, software-as-a-service and possibly as a supplier of a search appliance for its internal servers.
Three different customer types exist and a product set that grows layer-by-layer like an onion. The bulk of Google’s revenue currently comes from advertising due to the clever technology behind it. One can see from Microsoft’s move to the cloud that there is less revenue in cloud computing than in Google’s current business, so when advertising reaches a natural ceiling for growth, services will provide an incremental benefit at best.
Android was designed as a conduit to Google services and for advertising to venture out into the mobile space. But the world’s most popular mobile operating system is not without its own issues. Despite all phones essentially looking the same, there is a massive amount of fragmentation in the Android marketplace, which makes life harder for developers. Google is also a developer, so building applications that it can build loyalty through and make money from becomes more difficult.
Secondly, an appreciable amount of Android devices (those sold in China) and many sold in Russia don’t use Google services and provide little to no opportunity for Google advertising.
This means that Google is forced to make big bets in very different sectors. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, partly because of their entrepreneurial nature to explore new opportunities, built in an ability to scale Google beyond the business lines that I have outlined above. This was apparent from their original IPO share prospectus and accompanying letter. Xerox is famous in Silicon Valley lore for fumbling the future, by inventing lots of products that would be recognisable to us today in the late 1960s and early 1970s, only to see a corporate head office miss the boat. Brin and Page would have had some awareness of this. Microsoft’s inability to leapfrog beyond its core business successfully is probably also a factor for consideration.
Alphabet formalises the framework that Page and Brin had been working to for a number of years.
So what does this mean to Google?
For the foreseeable future Alphabet will be more of the same for Google. We’ve the seen the business scale back services. By September last year Google had closed down 30 services. It has cut back the functionality of Google Adplanner as a reference tool, to just focus on sales. Google has continued to prune back services such as Google+ (a challenging task given the tentacles + has across Google’s services). The changes inside Google for staffers also reflect similar moves towards profit optimisation, move away from experimentation and being a ‘mensch’.
The biggest move was to get rid of the 20% of time engineers could devote to projects that interested them. The truth is since at least 2009, the Google myth of people working there to change the world rather than delivering profit hasn’t held sway for a great deal of their staff.
On the outside Google will still likely have playful swag and cool offices, but the reality is that it will be more of a ‘normal’ business. That means that we won’t see the next Facebook coming from within Google and that whilst the speed of evolution will continue to run along at the same pace, substantial innovation probably won’t. This kind of business requires a different kind of leader to Page, and by appointing Sundar Pichai, will create a cultural break from the past. Pichai is likely to be able to get more revenue out of the Google ‘cash cow’ to help drive innovation in these other areas.
Page and Brin are freer to bring their energy to the other businesses in Alphabet. For instance, keeping Nest out of Google allows it to work easier with Google competitors like Apple and Microsoft as part of a wider eco-system.
Lastly, it could be an effort to ring fence Google’s anti-trust woes within the existing business and prevent restrictions being imposed against its newer businesses because of the past sins of the core business.
So what does Alphabet mean for marketers?
Google is likely to pursue a steady as she goes approach. The focus will be to optimise revenue, so there will be tension with agencies on advertising practices. We’ve already seen this, with Google restricting methods of buying YouTube advertising. These changes will impact the advertising technology business around programmatic advertising.
The picture with SEO is more about slow and steady change; Google has evolved its Panda index changes to a rolling change rather than the massive shake-ups of old.
More Google related articles here. Originally written for Racepoint Global’s now defunct CommsTalk blog.
