Category: technology | 技術 | 기술 | テクノロジー

It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.

One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.

My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.

I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.

My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.

Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.

That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.

Consumer Packaged Goods innovation
Consumer packaged goods innovation – CB Insights put together an interesting presentation on the changing landscape of the consumer packaged goods sector.

The key takeouts for me were:
- The similarity to the technology sector in terms of startups developing a brand and selling out to a bigger firm
- A key part of what they are buying is brand building – an activity that the likes of P&G and Unilever have excelled at in the past. Historically new product launches in CPG has a low success rate. Many brands have been going for decades. The startup acquisitions allow the Unilevers of the world to buy successes and change their portfolios faster
- Start-ups and partnerships focused on process improvements across all business functions from supply chain management to the final interface between customer and product prior to purchase. Success and institutional heritage have baked processes and infrastructure in existing businesses that might hold them back looking at new channels. When I worked on an assignment at Unilever there were best practice guides for everything. These guides were smart and well written with lots of good heuristics in them. But you also had to complete an eight page form to get a search run on a social listening platform
- Premium is defined around consumer values towards the environment rather than ‘luxury’. In this respect the CPG market kind of feels like the early 1990s in laundry products. Ecover started to get prominent place in UK supermarkets. You saw a good deal of product innovation from P&G and Unilever. You had liquid laundry dispensers that went in the tub and were supposed to reduce the amount of water used in the wash. However, pragmatism overran environmental concerns during the recession and supermarket’s own washing powder started to take off. Major brands were accused of brand washing
The Changing Landscape of Consumer Packaged Goods from CB Insights
May 26, 2016
Credit card + more things

Satan’s Credit Card: What The Mark Of The Beast Taught Me About The Future Of Money – BuzzFeed News – interesting read on the human factors of credit cards and payments in general. What happens when your credit card sits underneath your skin? In Sweden you can actually do this. Sweden has already gone virtually cashless already. The irony is that the confusion in your wallet becomes an even greater confusion of apps. There is still a place for artefacts. For instance a Centurion card will look more impressive in reality than as part of an Apple wallet.

Microsoft Acquires Leading Web-Based Calendar Company Jump Networks | Microsoft News Center – almost two decades of online PIM (personal information management) and email. I used Jump prior the acquisition and used to have the email address ged@jump.com before Microsoft shut it down. It used to sync with my Palm device through a conduit on my work desktop machine. All of this has become effortless in the smartphone age. Now I take for granted my calendar and other data syncing seamlessly between devices.

Surrey teen charged over Mumsnet hack attack | The Register – not sure how this would go down in terms of bragging rights on dark net forums… On one hand, there is the quality of the data, but then there is the embarrassment of it all. I don’t know who this Surrey teen needs to be more worried about more: the police or a phalanx of middle-class Mums…

Your next server will be a box full of connected stuff, not a server • The Register – Linux is just a poor copy of Unix anyway, Linus Torvalds apparently founded it because he didn’t know about BSD. BSD ran the infrastructure of Hotmail for many years. macOS, tvOS, iOS and iPadOS all run a variant of BSD proving that there is still a place for it. Unix won by becoming so ubiquitous in nature.

May 25, 2016
The New Nokia
The New Nokia can rise from the ashes of the old. Microsoft finally let go of its licence for the Nokia brand license on May 19, 2016.

There is a lot of logic to this move:
- Microsoft has already written down the full value of the business acquisition
- It has got the most valuable technical savvy out of the team and moved it into the Surface business
- It removes problematic factories and legacy products
For the businesses that have acquired the rights to use the Nokia name and the factories the upsides are harder to see.

The factories may be of use, however there is over supply in the Shenzhen eco-system and bottlenecks aren’t usually at final manufacture, but in the component supply chain.

There is still some brand equity left in the Nokia phone brand. I analysed Nokia along with a number of other international Greater China smartphone eco-system brands using Google Trend data.

There has been a decline in brand interest over the past 12 months for Nokia of 37%

Nokia still has comparable brand equity to other legacy mobile brands such as BlackBerry and Motorola

The brand equity is comparable to other value mobile brands. Honor; Huawei’s value brand has had a lot of money and effort pumped into it to achieve its current position.

But it’s brand equity doesn’t stack up well against premium handset brands from Greater China. The reason for this is that smartphone marketing and fast moving consumer goods marketing now have similar dynamics – both are in mature little differentiated markets. Brands need to have deep pockets and invest in regular advertising to remain top-of-mind across as large an audience as possible. Reach and frequency are more important than social media metrics like engagement.

In addition to advertising spend needs to be put into training and incentivising channel partners including carriers.

They are entering a hyper-competitive market and it isn’t clear what their point of advantage will be. Given the lock down that Google puts on Android and commoditised version of handset manufacture, the best option would be to look for manufacturing and supply chain efficiencies – like Dell did in the PC industry. But that’s easier said than done.

Garnering the kind of investment required to seriously support an international phone brand is a hard sell to the finance director or potential external investors.

Growth is tapering out.

The average selling price is in steady decline

This is partly because the emerging markets are making the majority new phone purchases.

Consumers in developed markets are likely holding on to the their phones for longer due to a mix economic conditions and a lack of compelling reason to upgrade.

All of the consumers that likely want and can afford a phone in developed markets have one. Sales are likely to be on a replacement cycle as they wear out. Manufacturers have done a lot to improve quality and reliability of devices.

Even the old household insurance fraud standby of dropping a phone that the consumer was bored with down the toilet doesn’t work on the latest premium Android handsets due to water-proofing.

More information

The answer to the question you’ve all been asking | Nokia – Nokia’s official announcement
Gartner highlights a more challenging smartphone sector for Nokia than when it “quit” in 2013 | TelecomTV
Nokia is coming back to phones and tablets | The Verge
So the Nokia brand returns.. with a Vengeance | Communities Dominate Brands

Supporting data slides in full

1605 new nokia smartphone deck from Ged Carroll
May 23, 2016
Monster internet surveillance + more

Britain to pay billions for monster internet surveillance network | DuncanCampbell.org – lets park the moral dilemma this represents for a moment, would other countries come to the UK for expertise in terms of how to implement this locally? What countries would they be? What would the optics be on it? Who are the contractors that are likely to benefit from this work in the UK? More on security related issues here.

I think it will be pretty hard to make lemonade out of these lemons. The business opportunity probably won’t scale to get a ‘space race’ type benefit, the likely client countries may pose problems in terms of optics. After Snowden, you can count out the EU territories. An obvious contractor to benefit would likely be Huawei (mix of telecoms and enterprise tech, fast growing player in enterprise storage) – who wouldn’t need British expertise to sell this monster internet surveillance solution abroad

Let’s Talk About Amazon Reviews: How We Spot the Fakes | The Wirecutter – Although many reviews on Amazon are legitimate, more and more sketchy companies are turning to compensated Amazon reviews to inflate star ratings and to drum up purchases

jenny odell • living a designed life – interesting essay on the rendered spaces used by developers in their sales pitches

Samsung 837 – JWT Intelligence – really interesting retail space

Italian Crime Series Gomorrah Kills Pornhub Traffic – Pornhub Insights – the power of mainstream media played out online, I am sure there would be a similar dip for something like Game of Thrones or the FA Cup Final in the US and UK respectively

WPP Mobile New technology service from Maxus makes marketing as easy as Pie – gives WPP a bigger arbitrage opportunity but if you were a large client wouldn’t you be demanding similar implementation times?

MSN Ceases Chinese Operations | ChnaTechNews – and that’s the last of the western portals when went there leaving the market

CK Hutchison mulls legal challenge as EC thwarts its UK ambitions | TotalTele.com – not terribly surprising. UK Government’s big mistake was allowing BT to acquire a cellular operator again

Misused English Words and Expressions in EU Publications – European Court of Auditors – Secretariat General Translation Directorate – fascinating document that explains why English speakers may feel exasperated at times with their EU counterparts

Xiaomi faces existential crisis | Techinasia – if it loses the Chinese middle classes, it loses the opportunity to sell its eco-system of smart home products to them

May 15, 2016
Digitas teams with Facebook + more

DigitasLBi Teams With Facebook To Launch Live-Streamed Morning Show 05/09/2016 – interesting agency as brand. I wonder if we’ll see ‘NBC teams with Facebook’ any time soon?

Objective-See – handy ransomware blocker for OSX. The Mac has become a major target for hackers and crackers now.

Japan moves to protect ‘copyrights’ of AI creations | Japan Times – prescient move by Japanese government – it is only a matter of time before other countries have to find ways of dealing with creator / owner issues (paywall)

Amazon launching YouTube competitor Amazon Video Direct – Business Insider – threat to Facebook Video as well. Things are about to get interesting. It contrasts with Facebook’s move into original content with DigitasLBI

(2) Tom Stocky – My team is responsible for Trending Topics, and I… – found no evidence that contractors had affected conservative content. It’s probably true, but that won’t stop the doubt seeded in the minds of conservative supporters

Ten Years — The Year of the Looking Glass — Medium – Reflections on working over the past ten years at Facebook

Free Microsoft Windows 10 upgrade campaign hasn’t been blowout success – Business Insider – it depends how you consider success

The Vintage Watch Boom | Intelligence | BoF – part of this is also down to Swiss watch makers treating the industry like fast fashion rather than heirloom designs

WeChat Campaign Spotlight: Montblanc Gives Chinese Fans a Digital History Lesson | Jing Daily – smaller more discrete items like pens and wallets still do well in gift giving – more on luxury related items here.

Huawei V8 leaked also gets a dual camera design – Gizchina.com – Honor device looks like it would cannibalise sales

Why the Home Wars Aren’t the Phone Wars — The Information – not a zero sum game (paywall)

JD.com sees 47% rise in Q1 revenue | Shanghai Daily – I wonder how much is due to WeChat integration?

May 12, 2016