Ged Carroll

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.

  • Platform utility

    Silicon Valley VC Andreessen Horowitz put togethers slides that cover platform utility and the role of network effects. The  presentation does a good job at providing a taxonomy on different products. It comes in handy when thinking about channel role / platform utility from a media planning perspective and also evaluating start-up ideas. They define platform in terms of development, but for advertisers we can think of it wider as we are likely to be making API calls in terms of data, targeting and ad placement. It is something that we are building demand or brand equity on.

    Key takeouts from the presentation

    • A network effect occurs when a product or service becomes more valuable to users as more people use it

    Network effect benefits

    • Create barriers to exit for existing users
    • Create barriers to entry for new companies
    • Protect from competitors eating away at margins
    • Creates a winner takes all style market

    Communications networks laws that provide indicators likely platform utility

    • Sarnoff’s law – the value of a network is proportional to the number of viewers
    • Metcalfe’s law – the value of a network is proportional to the square of number of connected users
    • Reed’s law – value of a group forming network is proportional to the number and ease with which groups form within it (subgroups grow faster than sheer number of P2P participants

    If it isn’t clear where they fall within these networks, it’s a warning flag for brands on whether to invest in the platform.

    User modes

    • Single ‘player’ mode – the product has immediate utility for a single user. Examples would be Flickr in the early days for photo storage, Foursquare in the early days to bookmark places you’d been to as a locative memory. Social bookmarking sites like Pinboard, or Delicious would have been in here had it not been retired
    • ‘Multiplayer’ mode – the product has no utility for a single user. This is particularly true for communications products. Examples would be Viber, Skype, Slack, Zoom etc.
    • Products can be both single player and multiplayer. So the community that built around Flickr for example.
    • Single player is more powerful when accompanied by an initial tactic to drive early network growth. Instagram photo filters was a way to post pictures on Twitter before there was enough critical mass. They help with adoption in the early days of a product when network effects aren’t sufficiently strong yet.
    • What’s the initial growth lever or tactic that will get it to scale?

    Case studies

    • Facebook found that connecting a new user to 10 friends within 14 days of sign-up was key to improving retention
    • Focus on daily usage (habit building) to help grow network. Focus on engagement rather than just overall number growth
    • Growth usage, even as user numbers grow is a sure sign of network effects at work
    • Facebook took a clustered approach: Harvard, then Stanford and eventually other universities in the US and abroad. Rather than focusing on growth. The immediate ‘single player’ utility they offered was an online school directory
    • WhatsApp had a different network type to Facebook. Each WhatsApp user had about 20 connections compared to approximately 980 friends on Facebook. Fewer connections also meant clustering around family, close friends of interest based WhatsApp groups with more engagement
    • AirBnB had two sides of their network. More hosts attract more guests and even become guests themselves. More guests means more business and money for hosts
    • Medium found that ‘single player mode’ can help get to ‘multiplayer mode’ through building sufficient critical mass.

  • Online advertising targeting

    Ad blocking has become a thing; with a UK government minister likening it to a protection racket kneecapping online advertising targeting. This felt similar to  the the early 2000s and political action against file sharing.

    A cursory glance of publicly available data shows a few  things:

    • Correctly targeted advertising (in terms of content type, context and placement) would have a substantial receptive audience – if consumer opinions are to be believed
    • Current advertising technologies are negatively impacting consumer web experience by driving up page load times dramatically
    • Ad-blocking usage is steadily increasing, so governments have their work cut out regulating it out of existence

    This starts to paint a picture of something being broken in the way advertisers deploy targeting technologies and the way targeting technologies work.

    Government regulation is only likely to delay industry change. If the music industry is an analogue to follow ad blocking would look at legal means to slow things down and then technological means to resolve the issue.

    The bigger question is, is the problem resolvable? The ad industry is being squeezed on multiple fronts:

    • Ad blockers don’t like the detrimental user experience that they get from interception-based advertising and extremely long page load times
    • The economics of ad funded content doesn’t work for a lot of online publications, leading to a flight to subscription based business models. This would negate ad blocking; because there would be less ad inventory to block
    • Power in online advertising is coalescing in the hands of Amazon, Facebook and Google in the West. In China the equivalent companies would be Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba. Ad blocking is probably the least of many online advertising companies worries
    • In general, online advertising is used in an ineffective short-termist way. Marketing campaigns are becoming less efficient. Marketers are starting to pay attention to this, although the change may take a lot of time. Again this represents a bigger worry in the medium to long term for online advertisers than ad blocking

    More information

    IAB Ad Blocking FAQs 2015 (PDF download)
    IAB Believes Ad Blocking Is Wrong
    Adblocking is a ‘modern-day protection racket’, says culture secretary | The Guardian
    Advertising isn’t the problem with ad-blockers – telecoms edition
    Advertising isn’t the problem with ad-blockers

  • Lotte + more news

    Lotte

    Lotte shareholders reject bid to remove Chairman Shin Dong-bin as family feud continues | The Japan Times – particularly interesting Chaebol feud given the unique Japan-Korea structure of Lotte. Lotte in Korea is huge in FMCG, entertainment, hospitality and retailing. Lotte has been driven out of China by the government. More Korea related posts here

    Business

    Changing of the Guard – Edelman – nice bit of shade by Richard Edelman on group margins and independent versus publicly listed holding groups

    Consumer behaviour

    Which Generation is Most Distracted by Their Phones? | Priceonomics

    Economics

    Silicon Valley Has Not Saved Us From a Productivity Slowdown – The New York Times – In mature economies, higher productivity typically is required for sustained increases in living standards, but the productivity numbers in the United States have been mediocre. Labor productivity has been growing at an average of only 1.3 percent annually since the start of 2005, compared with 2.8 percent annually in the preceding 10 years – Silicon Valley failed

    How to

    Tracking story changes with NewsBlur – as if NewsBlur’s learning technology and mobile clients aren’t enough, being able to track changes on stories is a powerful online journalism tool

    Ideas

    The People’s Net – Douglas Rushkoff’s original article on the dot com crash for Yahoo! Internet Life revisited for the current age of unicorns – Time to channel my inner Dave Winer – Joi Ito’s Web and Joichi Ito on the same theme

    The rise of American authoritarianism – Vox – scientific explanation behind Trump but also the pervasive fear of terrorism that has gripped the west

    Korea

    As 4th trial nears, Samsung asks judge: Make Apple stop talking about Korea | Ars Technica – it because perhaps they’ve mentioned the dishonest involvement in political slush funds as background to explain relative brand honesty and trustworthiness?

    Media

    Maxus launches mood-based planning tool | Marketing Interactive – interesting, particularly with political campaigns

    Welcome to the Era of Programmable Marketing – The AppNexus Impressionist – great primer on programmatic

    China’s new television rules ban homosexuality, drinking, and vengeance – Quartz – so that leaves dramas about patriotic war against the Japanese sans Nanking massacre and dramas about Mao sans cultural revolution

    Online

    Apple is Running BitTorrent Trackers in Cupertino – TorrentFreak – Using the file-sharing protocol, we launched a side-project called Murder and after a few days (and especially nights) of nervous full-site tinkering, it turned a 40 minute deploy process into one that lasted just 12 seconds – interesting article that touches on the enterprise use of BitTorrent. I suspect Apple’s use of trackers is IP enforcement related

    Retailing

    It’s Discounted, but Is It a Deal? How List Prices Lost Their Meaning | NYTimes.com – interesting article. I remember being shocked when I was first guided through Shenzhen’s markets where products originally destined for UK markets were sold to local consumers – with price reduction tags already attached.

    No surprise with Powa | Steven Prowse – almost as good as The Kernel’s legendary dissection of SpinVox

    So how much was Powa Technologies really worth? | FT Alphaville – clear gap between claimed value and real value even before administration (paywall)

    Adidas to operate 12,000 shops in China by 2020 in bid to tap growth in leisure wear, sports participation – interesting that they are going to 3,000 additional real-world stores rather than focus on e-tailing (paywall)

    Security

    Swarm of Tiny Pirate Transmitters Gets the Message out in Syria – could also reinvigorate pirate radio…

    The FBI Might Be Apple’s Best Ally In iPhone Encryption Flap | Fast Company – the government messed up and its backfired

    Software

    Microsoft canceled $8 billion Slack bid due to Bill Gates and Satya Nadella pushback – Business Insider – Qi Lu would have known Butterfield from Yahoo! ,both worked in the search business at the some time

    Why I’m breaking up with Slack | Quartz – interesting perspective

    Wireless

    In Search of the Amazingly Elusive Non-Smartphone Owner | Recode – not really surprising. I imagine the privacy aspects might encourage a small set to follow them

  • 6 things learned in a corporate environment

    The idea for 6 things learned  in a corporate environment came from having spent four months working day-in, day-out onsite at a large corporate.

      • The working environment is very different to an agency. My desk had to become much more portable. Since the space was all hot-desking with only team PAs assigned permanent desks.  This meant no reference charts stuck up or post-its around the monitor. Instead I boiled my process down to the laptop, a notebook that acted as my organisation memory and a day book that focused on my tasks. That was it, no further paper work
      • Many of the traditional spaces for memos weren’t available. So the back of a toilet door with its regularly updated notices was a lifeline to what was happening where. The coffee machine, once a traditional networking point was less useful as hot desking meant that your serendipitous meetings are random in nature. They often lack the depth of what you have an agency environment. These aren’t shallow people, its a level of impermanence built into the working space
      • The importance of mobile was brought home to me. Each desk space had a phone. You keyed in your number and a PIN and your direct dial number moved with you. But 20 per cent of these phones were out of action at any given time. This wasn’t a problem as people tended to use their mobile phones a lot. We used to talk a lot, over bridged conference call numbers. You would see people on calls pacing the floor listening and talking on their calls via headsets plugged into their mobile handsets. For the first few minutes it feels slightly weird
      • Sustainability and being environmentally friendly were more than having a prominent recycling bin. There is an application that reminded me any time I printed something just how bad I was for the environment. Being green was thoughtfully built into processes rather than bolted on as an afterthought
      • Admittedly, my time at Yahoo! was in a very different company and culture, but being a client is very much a team sport. You only have a limited amount of control, a lot of work has to be done by consensus and through a process. You feel like a very small cog in that process and every small gain was an appreciable win. Making this happen takes up an inordinate amount of time
      • It seemed to be timely when writing this post that I read this article Silicon Valley Has Not Saved Us From a Productivity Slowdown – The New York Times – new enterprise software like Workday is still as reassuring clunky as their forebears. Many of the same problems of collaboration and information sharing are still being resolved

    What other things learned in a corporate environment have you come across?

  • Oculus + more news

    Oculus Founder: Rift will come to Mac if Apple “ever releases a good computer” | Ars Technica – indicates its basically a very top end gaming machine minimum requirement for Oculus. It also indicates that there will not widespread adoption any time soon. State-of-the-art games consoles don’t cut it either according to Oculus. It means that the bar for content creation will also be very high for Oculus type devices which will have a negative effect on adoption. It will take a while to move Oculus style experience to a wireless device that would allow free movement. Expect at least one VR winter before Oculus type experiences are ready consumer adoption, if there is sufficient volumes of compelling content created

    Marketers Flock to Programmatic Ads Despite Concerns About Fraud and Transparency – WSJ – 79% of advertisers have made programmatic ad buys over the past year. That is up significantly from a similar study that was done in 2014, which found only 35% of the advertisers had used programmatic buying – relatively small sample size of 128 respondents via Forrester Research. Forrester also don’t seem to understand that role that programmatic would play in a media mix and the marketing science for, and against over-personalisation / targeting. It also has implications for businesses in terms of the burden of data that they have to handle (paywall)

    Amazon Quietly Removes Encryption Support from its Gadgets | Motherboard – While Apple is fighting the FBI in court over encryption, Amazon quietly disabled the option to use encryption to protect data on its Android-powered devices. Amazon devices look very similar to Chinese brands in this regards. They’re probably bought by value orientated consumers and it positions privacy as a luxury good. All of which should be a cause of concern for consumers in the medium to long term