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.

  • Speed of trust and the sharing economy

    ‘At the speed of trust’ was part of the title to an article in on SiliconAngle the other day. The language was loaded with symbolism for me. Speed of trust reminded me of the dot.com era. The internet was going to change everything – and it has been changing a lot of things with time. There was also a sense of urgency with its origin in the Netscape funding and IPO that it was important to find an audience first and a profitable business model later. People you meant talked about moving at ‘internet speed’; usually as an excuse for a poor product or lack of business plan.

    Amazon still uses a variant of this principle to use its profits to enter new business areas  and has managed to successfully position itself as a growth stock rather than a value stock – which most of the rest of the tech sector now is according to Wall Street.

    In 2000, I used to interview clients to see whether we wanted to take them on as a business. Online advertising was fine for building awareness at the time, Google hadn’t got into search advertising yet and venture capital partners forced their investments to get a PR agency on board.

    I saw a procession of start-ups and incubators who came in with an idea that they were implementing but not even a fig leaf of a business plan because they were trying to go at ‘internet speed’.

    Things are different now, the average spend by a client hasn’t grown much in the intervening years and digital marketing is easily heading past 20 per cent of advertising spend. Though how much of that spend is actually effective is another matter all together

    Businesses usually have identikit business plans with spread sheets and predicted revenues. But the sense of urgency is very similar to the dot.com days. Uber’s financial data reveals a plan to scale massively to achieve profitability from current losses. The revolution this time isn’t technological per se, but process. Employment is being thrown away, along with associated costs and benefits to the employee.
    Library workers on the first day of their strike picket the Forum, Norwich
    Practices that would have been in the black economy, are now in a mobile application.

    Assets such as homes are in competition are put in competition with regulated services such as hotels.

    The hard edges that these businesses will bump against aren’t slower than desired bandwidth, but legal, regulatory and social disruption. Uber is already finding out the hard way in terms of legal action around the world to curb its business. Other start-ups are fighting against their operators gaining employment status. Homejoy was apparently shut down for this very reason, though there were also rumours of a dotcomesque tale of being unable to recoup the cost of customer acquisition let alone make a profit.

    Mark Twain is widely attributed to have coined the saying ‘history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme’, I am a bit concerned by the kind of poetry we could end up with. More innovation related posts here.

    More information
    The Sharing Economy market is exploding “at the speed of trust” | SiliconANGLE
    What Really Killed Homejoy? It Couldn’t Hold On To Its Customers | Forbes
    Homejoy, on-demand home cleaning startup, shuts down in face of lawsuits | Ars Technica
    Homejoy Shuts Down After Battling Worker Classification Lawsuits | Re/code
    Uber’s numbers seem ugly either way you look at them | Business Insider
    California Court Gets One Step Closer to Deciding Uber’s Fate | TIME – important because California tends to lead legal trends

  • 3 & Wind merger + more things

    Consolidation in Italy as Wind, 3 ink €21.8bn merger | TotalTelecom – I I hope that it won’t affect 3 UK roaming? I wouldn’t be surprised if 3 did similar deals in other mature European markets like the UK. Li Ka Shing is no one’s fool and wireless is mature and capital intensive. More wireless related posts here.

    Fancy 10 Gbps home broadband? Broadcom’s built the guts of it | The Register – fibre dreams?

    Less Money, Mo’ Music & Lots of Problems: A Look at the Music Biz | REDEF – interesting business analysis of the music industry

    Apple denies plan to sell mobile services directly to consumers | Reuters – interesting that they went to the trouble of denying it. It might make sense for them to have a corporate MVNO for their staff

    Nikkei report paints a disturbing picture of Konami | SiliconAngle – PR trainwreck

    The Unemployable Programmer – a nice counterpoint to the ‘get everyone programming’ meme

    Walt Disney Animation Studios | Hyperion technology – interesting write-up of their Hyperion render engine

    Apple is testing a Siri voicemail transcription service – Business Insider – will it work any better than SpinVox?

    brandchannel: Every Product Placement in ‘Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation’ – love the early press release quoted and remember getting to site in college

    FBI Struggling With Cybersecurity Because of Shit Pay and Drug Tests – both of which says a lot about the war on drugs and government getting tech

    Official Google Blog: Everything in its right place – downsizing of Google+. The move to break it up is viewed by many as a defeat, it also makes sense when one thinks of app constellations, though I cannot help think of Brad Garlinghouse’s famous ‘peanut butter manifesto’ at Yahoo! nine years earlier. Though that was a blatant grab for political power, it resonates with some of what seems to be happening at Google in terms of retrenchment

    Why the fear over ubiquitous data encryption is overblown – The Washington Post – interesting op ed by a former head of the NSA, a former secretary of homeland security and a former US defence secretary challenging the intelligence industrial complex demands for weaker encryption and more surveillance legislation

  • Invisible cloaks + other things

    Invisible cloaks

    The possibility of invisible cloaks straight out of a Marvel comic hero’s tool kit or a wizarding wardrobe a la Harry Potter. The underlying technology involves some science that sounds more like science fiction. Could ‘Harry Potter’-like invisible cloaks really exist? – CNET

    On a more serious note invisibility cloaks have applications in the military, law enforcement and even urban design through the power of cutting edge science.

    Foxes on the moon

    Foxes and science fiction what could be more awesome? This reminded me of TinTin for some reason that I can’t put my finger on at the moment. Have a watch and let me know what you think.

    SIN R1

    The SIN R1 looks like the kind of car I would have had as a poster on my wall as a kid, but now it looks too outlandish to be on the road.

    The driver doing doughnuts on the public road reminded me of the young lads who would take their hot hatches down to Blackpool for the lights . Revving their engines and pulling similar stunts. Which makes me wonder, what do they think their customer is going to be like? A yob, the stereotypical young footballer?