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.

  • iPods cultural impact + more things

    On Death and iPods: A Requiem | WIRED – on the cultural impact of iPods. Each medium including iPods, CDs and vinyl before it defined and shaped the public. The design was a media in and off itself that was affected by the heritage that went before. iPods were very much in this mould of media.  I miss the time when we were still defined by our music. When our music was still our music. I miss being younger, with a head full of subversive ideas; white cables snaking down my neck, stolen songs in my pocket. There will never be an app for that. More on consumer behaviour here.

    As Phones Expand, So Does the Word ‘Phablet – WSJ – the etymology of the word phablet – originally from GSMA and first mentioned in print by TelecomTV

    Grandparents Accidentally Tag Themselves As Grandmaster Flash | NPR – genius.

    IBM News room | IBM and Yonyou to Accelerate Big Data and Analytics Adoption – interesting Chinese partner on big data

    Apple Watch ‘too feminine and looks like it was designed by students’, says LVMH executive – Telegraph – ok a bit over-exaggerated coming from the man who heads up TAG Heuer, but beneath the comments lies a deep truth about the watches that I agree with

    Huawei In Bad PR Move With Anti-Corruption Campaign | Young’s China Business Blog – interesting analysis of Huawei’s corruption drive

    China May Be Heading for a Japanese-Style Economic Crisis | TIME – the Chinese have a lot more levers to pull and a stable government (rather than a new prime minister every year like Japan); both of which are in China’s favour. On the downside China has bigger internal security issues than Japan

    阿里美国IPO首场路演的38张PPT（全） – Alibaba IPO deck

    Microsoft is found in contempt of court for refusing to hand over user emails | The Inquirer – Microsoft has to go to the line on this as it is likely to affect future international cloud services businesses

    China Misses Out on First Wave of New iPhone Releases | Re/code – I wouldn’t be surprised if the government is holding it up deliberately rather like the FCC did with H-silicon-powered Huawei phones

    A Watch Guy’s Thoughts On The Apple Watch After Seeing It In The Metal (Tons Of Live Photos) — HODINKEE – some interesting observations, kudos for their industrial design and manufacturing but some really good questions

    For Alibaba’s Small Business Army, a Narrowing Path | Foreign Policy – TaoBao needs to fix its model for smaller merchants

  • First Apple Watch impressions

    I was underwhelmed by the Apple Watch wearable product. It is impressive what they have done, but from a product design point of view the case looks cumbersome rather like a slightly better Samsung Gear. The use of haptics was one of the smarter things that I saw in the demonstration and the use of emoji as an essential ‘social lubricant’ borrows heavily from Asian mobile usage of stickers on the likes of LINE, KakaoTalk and WeChat.

    Looking at the demonstrations, I still think that the use case for a wearable still isn’t there for mainstream consumers. The use cases for haptic communications for instance were downright creepy and I wasn’t convinced by the cloud of spots interface. The fitness app and workout apps were similar to products from the likes of Suunto and Polar or the miCoach app by adidas for a smartphone. There needs to be more general purpose apps, then the Apple fitness option might be able to drive out the fitness sector.

    In terms of the industrial design, I was particularly interested in the strap. Apple has borrowed a distinctive looking catch and strap connector  from one of the strap designs from the now defunct Ikepod Watch company co-founded by Marc Newson who recently joined Apple’s design team.

    Ikepod Megapod strap
    ikepod

    First Apple Watch strap. This probably explains why Marc Newson was brought on board as part of Jonny Ive’s team; as the Ikepod strap was something that he had designed back in the mid to late 1990s. You can see it on the Hemipod watch design here.
    applewatch

    While the case shape looks suspiciously like a homage to H Moser, I think that luxury brands won’t be particularly concerned, at least at this first Apple Watch, lets hope that future iterations prove me wrong. More on design here.

  • Ghost in the Shell

    Masamune Shirow’s Ghost In The Shell is a three-volume manga series (volumes 1, 1.5 and 2) that is based on a Japanese security service team who try and solve cyber-crime related issues.

    The stories deal with a future where technology is embedded into human beings and augment them. It is also based around a world where the internet of things is an everyday occurrence. Shirow’s future is believable. Unlike Star Trek, he recognised that the future is built in layers on the past. So you see this in the architecture in the background of picture cells.

    You also see that layers in terms of everything from clothing and personal effects to vehicles of the protagonists.

    The author obvioiusly goes deeply into the story as a thought experiment with copious side notes explaining either technological developments or why he has made certain decisions. The stuff that he incorporated was cutting edge scientific research at the time. Whilst I love the anime adaptions, this insight into Shirow’s thinking makes the books invaluable.

    The books seem to have been remarkably prescient about hacking and the risks of technology. In previous literature, hackers were generally on the side of good or libertarians. In Ghost In The Shell you have cyber warfare and cyber crime similar to our own reality today. A crumbling healthcare system, organised crime, private military entities and shadowy state actors.

    Unfortunately, the designers of smart televisions and refrigerators didn’t pay much attention to these books, otherwise they would not have left these products so open to being hacked. Come for the sci-fi stay the course of the books for the underlying ideas. More book reviews here.

  • Dual class listings + more things

    Don’t change listing rules until lawyers have to change theirs | South China Morning Post – interesting take on dual class listings. Not viable unless there are other protection measures in place like class-action lawsuits and contingency fees – which makes sense when one thinks about how Facebook, Google and Alibaba have gamed the dual class listing system in the US against shareholders. I am surprised that dual class listings hadn’t come into Hong Kong earlier to support control of local businesses by their oligarch family founders. I can understand why dual class listings would be attractive to the kind of mainland companies now looking to list in Hong Kong (paywall)

    ‘Closest thing China has to a presidential debate’: face-off between two geeks over a mobile phone | South China Morning Post – not too sure how much good this did either brand, but it did seem to provide good entertainment. I would love to see Richard Yu of Huawei do one :-)

    Wakie.com — Social Alarm Clock – I really like the idea of this, plays to the dynamics of sleeping through an alarm whilst becoming wide awake from a call

    Lessons to be learned from Yahoo’s native ads | VentureBeat – interesting op-ed by an OutBrain executive

    Fujifilm just one of several struggling manufacturers jumping into medicine | Japanese Times – it used to be that Japanese companies were pointed in the direction of markets by a government ministry, it is interesting that they are all now flocking towards healthcare

    Charting the rise of Generation Yawn: 20 is the new 40 – Telegraph – I heard a similar thing about gen-x, particularly around apparent apathy for causes. Don’t believe it, generations aren’t amorphous: for every hippy there was a young conservative in the boomer generation

    Fast-moving consumer goods market saturated in China | WantChinaTimes – bad news for Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive in the FMCG space. It is in these kind of circumstances where local brands will break out

    Technohyperbole | The Economist – takes on Gartner’s hype curve

    Apple To Developers: No Selling HealthKit Data To Advertisers – does this mean that marketers can’t use the data for other things? For instance, pre-screening for insurance premiums or weight loss classes?

    Beijing Scientists Replace A Boy’s Vertebra With A 3D-Printed Bone — The First Surgery Of Its Kind – titanium used, so I suspect sintered metal powder rather than a printing process

  • Google services

    When reflecting on Google services, it made me realise how much the internet has changed. Back in 2005 when I started work at Yahoo!, the internet was a very different place.  It was an exciting time, web 2.0 was a technological and philosophical step-change for online services. We had cleared our palates of the bad taste left by the silliness of the dot com implosion.

    Social networks weren’t mainstream in the way we would understand them now – though there were social networks prior to the the then nascent Facebook. Instant messaging was just starting to move on to mobile devices and were more a source of ‘presence’ information – whether someone was free or not than mobile messaging. Instant messaging on the desktop was big and everyone thought that Skype actually worked really well at the time.

    We were conscious of security, but again Skype promised privacy and security (except in China) through secure encryption.  The 800LB gorilla in the room was Google. Yahoo! had managed to survive the dot com bust and subsequent 30+% drop in online advertising revenues because of the Yahoo! Dating business. Even in a recession people still need love. By comparison, Google had been on a tear, Adwords promised marketers greater transparency where they money had gone and what action had been derived from their advertising spend. There were even some nice charts that they could cut-and-paste directly into a PowerPoint presentation.

    Google services impact was much bigger. Yahoo! had pioneered search with Jerry Yang and David Filo’s directory in the mid 1990s. You can still find an iteration of the directory at Yahoo! here. In 1999, the front page of Yahoo! still reflected that directory heritage, as you can see from this screen shot
    Yahoo! early morning of March 3, 1999
    By the time I joined Yahoo! we had a search page that looked much more like the clean design of Google’s search page. The product was comparable in performance to Google as well, it just wasn’t Google; which is what most UK web users wanted.
    Y! search late 2005
    We struggled to get media mentions for Yahoo! in comparison Google services coverage wrote itself: Google spots Jesus in Peruvian sand dune | The Register. Products like Lycos’ IQ service didn’t get the attention they deserved because if it didn’t come from Google the digerati weren’t interested.  At the time Google had 70% or so of the share market, rumours I heard at the time from colleagues were that up to 95% of searches from Yahoo!’s UK office actually used Google – which foreshadowed Google’s European dominance.

    Google’s dominance could be said to have peaked around 2006, social was starting to appear and consumers started to learn the downside of what beta meant as services started to disappear or become amalgamated into other products. Services that they wove into the fabric of their online life disappeared. Tools that helped them work became less useful as functionality was dialled back.

    I have compiled a list of Google services that have been launched and closed. I ignored US-only products. There are some specific omissions:

    • Deja News had been already shutdown by the time Google acquired the company, Google sucked the service’s Usenet archives into Google Groups
    • Google launched ‘Click-To-Call’ twice. It was closed down for the first time in 2007 and was trialled again in April 2010
    • Hello was a Picasa-based picture file transfer app similar to ‘send file’ on your favourite instant messaging platform, it was axed in 2008, but it always felt like a feature to me rather than a product
    •  SearchMash always was a testbed for different search user experiences. It was not a product by any stretch of the imagination
    • Google PowerMeter was a piece of software from Google.org – the charitable foundation set up by Google
    • Google Directory used data pulled from the Open Directory Project, it just ranked them using its algorithm
    • Google Pack was a marketing ploy and possible revenue generator rather than a consumer product per se

    A number of businesses that Google got involved with where acqu-hires:

    • Aardvark
    • BumpTop
    • DocVerse
    • Dodgeball
    • fflick
    • Gizmo5
    • Jaiku,
    • Meebo
    • Picnik
    • Postini
    • Quickoffice
    • Slide
    • Zingku

    Spun-out / rebranded  products

    Product name Date of launch (DD/MM/YYYY) Fate
    Google body 15/10/2010 Google Body was part of Google Labs. It was handed over to Zygote Media Group on October 13, 2011.  It is now called Zygote Body. The source code is available under an open source license
    Google gears 31/05/2007 Removed from Google’s product set, Gears was released under a BSD license. News of Google’s migration away from Gears broke in November 2009

    Discontinued products

    Product name Date of launch (DD/MM/YYYY) Fate
    Google answers 04/2002 Google has taken a number of runs at Q&A services. Google Answers shut down was announced on November 28, 2006
    Google deskbar 06/11/2003 Google Deskbar came out of Google Labs; it put a Google search box inside the chrome of the operating system, allowing consumers to Google not just from inside the browser, but also productivity software.  It was discontinued on May 8, 2006. A similar feature was incorporated into Google Desktop Search.
    Orkut 24/01/2004 Facebook-like social network that used to be popular in India and Brazil.
    Google desktop 14/10/2004 Searched across the computer similar to Spotlight in OS X and a web search box a la Google Deskbar. Desktop also had Konfabulator-like web applets that provided information on weather, news etc. It was announced that it would be discontinued on September 2, 2011
    Google Notifier 2005 I can’t find a specific date in 2005 when Notifier was launched. It let desktop users now when an event was due on their Google calendar or an email available in Gmail
    iGoogle 05/2005 Discontinued on November 1, 2013
    Google talk 24/08/2005 Google’s VoIP client, replaced by Google Hangouts on May 2013
    Google reader 07/10/2005 Google closed down Reader despite the outcry from users. According to Google it had a loyal but declining user base so shut it down on July 1, 2013
    Google page creator 24/02/2006 A simple way of web publishing, which Google replaced with Google Sites in September 2008.
    Google notebook 10/05/2006 Google Notebook was a bit like a proto-Evernote. Content was exported to Google Docs on November 11, 2011 and the service disappeared by July 2012. On March 20, 2013, Google launched a similar service called Google Keep
    Google brower sync 08/06/2006 Rolled out of Google labs as a way of synchronizing settings, passwords and bookmarks across say work and home computers running the Firefox browser. Google’s Chrome browser has a similar function and shutting this function down would have been designed to persuade consumers to jump ship when it was discontinued in June 2008.
    Google image labeler 31/08/2006 Google copied the idea behind Carnegie Mellon’s ESP game to find a better way to teach its search what images were. Since it depended only on common answers from two random players, it prevented foul play so to speak. It was shut down on September 16, 2001
    Google code search 05/10/2006 Vertical search looking at open source code on the web, announced for shutdown on January 15, 2012
    Google website optimiser 10/2006 Free website testing tool to enable site owners to get more value from their site. Discontinued on August 1, 2012
    Google question & answers 28/05/2007 Google’s latest attempt at a Q&A service was ran as localized services in Russia, France, international English and China through a partnership with Tianya. It was closed down on June 23, 2014
    Knol 13/12/2007 Kind of similar to Squidoo in that it allowed experts to develop a sphere of content as user-written articles. It was announced on November 22, 2011 that it would be shut down.
    Google friend connect 12/05/2008 A social media profile that was exportable (possibly as a widget), what Wikipedia called a social networking script. Google signaled it was killing it off on November 23, 2011 to make way for Google+
    Google health 20/05/2008 Centralised personal health record service. It didn’t get to the UK but did influence David Cameron’s thinking on health IT. Discontinued January 1, 2012
    Google lively 08/07/2008 Google Lively was a way of creating a SecondLife-type environment for conference calls – one of the reasons why IBM was so interested in SecondLife in the first place. Lively was discontinued on December 31, 2008
    Google insights for search 05/08/2008 Google Insights for Search was merged with Google Trends on September 27, 2012
    Google latitude 05/02/2009 Location aware social application, similar to Dodgeball that Google had acquired and closed down. Latitude itself was shut down on June 10, 2013
    Google squared 12/05/2009 Google squared provided some of the functionality of Wolfram Alpha, in particular adding structure and relationships to apparently unstructured data sets. It was shut down on 05/09/2011
    Google wave 27/05/2009 Google Wave was a hybrid communications platform that allowed document collaboration and a mix of email and messaging. Google Wave was culled in a batch of ‘spring cleaning’ announced by Google in November 2011. Source code from Google Wave was released under an Apache license.
    Google fast flip 14/09/2009 Provided a flip board type of experience aggregating content from 39 news partners. It was axed on September 5, 2011
    Google building maker 13/10/2009 Allowed users to model existing buildings for inclusion in Google Earth as a 3D model. Shut down announced on March 13, 2013
    Google dictionary 12/2009 Google Dictionary was launched as a standalone product after being a feature in Google Translate. It was shut down without warning on August 5, 2011. Google has a dictionary function build into search using ‘define:”
    Google buzz 9/2/2010 A social network that integrated into Gmail, it was discontinued on December 15, 2011.
    Google cloud connect 24/2/2011 Google Cloud Connect was a Microsoft Office plug-in that allowed you to easily save documents to Google Docs. It was discontinued on April 30, 2013
    Google schemer 18/11/2011 An invite-only clone of 43 Things was shut down on February 7, 2014
    Quickoffice 05/06/2012 (date Google acquired the company) Quickoffice was an established mobile application when Google acquired the company, discontinued on June 29, 2014

    The closure of Google Reader felt to me like a water shed moment. Google Reader had come along and eviserated the current marketplace for RSS readers, though the size and reach of the Google network. Names like Fastladder and Bloglines disappeared. Once the competition was demolished Google then withdrew of the sector and a scramble of cottage industry services sprung up to try and fill the gap; my personal favourite being Newsblur.

    I suspect and have heard others suggest that Google has a problem getting users to use and commit to new services. I don’t think that Google Wave’s issue was consumer commitment, but poor product design, but the lack of adoption for say Google+ screams consumers and early adopters could be indicative of a wider wariness of the general public to invest their data and time in a new Google service. This maybe part of the reason why Google seems to be gradually extracting Google+ from its product matrix; just a few days ago no longer using Google+ author ranking in search.

    If one looks at Google+ versus other services in Google Trends we can see a similar level of interest to say Google Reader, something that Google has already admitted was a non-viable product.

    Google finds itself in a more normal internet brand marketing position: asking consumers for brand permission to innovate so that consumers will engage with their new products and services. Having been on the other side of that fence I realise what a challenge that can be. More Google related content here.

    More information

    Lycos IQ
    Lovely Jubii-ly | renaissance chambara
    IAC | Ask and the social web | renaissance chambara
    Open source intelligence | renaissance chambara

    Google Click To Call
    Google Tests Phone Numbers In AdWords Ads | SearchEngineLand

    Google Reader
    Reader May Have Died To Feed Google+’s APIs | Co.Labs

    Google Answers
    Adieu to Google Answers | Google Official Blog

    Google Deskbar
    Google’s Deskbar; Search Engine Forums Spotlight | Search Engine Watch

    Google Lively
    Be who you want on the web pages you visit | Google Official Blog

    Google Questions and Answers
    Baraza turning read only | Google Help

    Google Groups
    How to Search Today’s Usenet For Programming Information? | Slashdot
    Google’s Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titles (UPDATED) | Wired
    Google Begins Fixing Usenet Archive | Wired

    Google Wave
    More spring cleaning out of season | Google Official Blog

    Google Gears
    Stopping the Gears | Google Gears Blog

    Google+
    It’s Over: The Rise & Fall Of Google Authorship For Search Results | SearchEngineLand