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.

  • The Future of Ideas

    I was curious to read Lawrence Lessig‘s The Future of Ideas because of Google’s recent intervention in the ongoing wireless spectrum auction being held in America. Google sought to get slivers of American wireless spectrum in the 90MHz space with a view to providing an alternative form of broadband access.

    This would be a challenge to the cable TV incumbents. It is unusual to see an online media property look to extend itself into network infrastructure. It indicates a broader desire to get into a rent seeking position. The Future of Ideas is the antithesis of this viewpoint with a view to make data and ideas more fluid in terms of adoption and consumption.

    The Future of Ideas builds on previous writing he has done around creative commons and guides readers through the complex relationship between connectivity supply, media platforms and intellectual property. The story moves from the start of the media and the telecoms industries through the current struggles of the media industry to come to terms with the internet as  a baseline platform of distribution and consumption.

    Lessig highlights some of the current challenges in intellectual property laws throughout old and new media in an articulate and highly readable manner. Some of his ideas make uncomfortable reading for established media / software players. His work as a definite agenda that is broadly in line with the libertarian stance taken by many technology and web pioneers, with regulation only considered warranted to keep platforms open. The move to keep platforms open comes at a critical time when platforms such as LinkedIn are becoming closed in nature and data portability is becoming much more difficult.

    Downsides to book

    My main criticism of the book would be that it does not take enough of an international viewpoint, but focuses almost exclusively on America. More book reviews here.

  • Semantic web + more news

    Semantic web

    Tim Berners-Lee Says the Time for the Semantic Web is Now – The semantic web is designed to be machine readable. The underlying technologies supporting the semantic web are used to formally represent metadata. For example, ontology can describe concepts, relationships between entities, and categories of things. The most interesting thing about Berners-Lee’s interview is that he thinks that the semantic web will be closer to Google’s vision through database manipulation rather than folksonomy. I think you will need a combination of both for a semantic web that works

    China

    Masters of Media, New Media MA Amsterdam » Chinese low-wage workers disloyal for a reason  – Chinese workers sticking it to the man and wanting an independent China to kick multi-national mega corp. bootie

    Consumer behaviour

    Technology Can Be a Blessing for Bored Workers – New York Times

    Americans Trust Online News More Than TV | WebProNews – online trusted more than TV. Does this say more about the rise of online or the pitiful state of TV news journalism? I don’t know

    White working class ‘voiceless’ – A majority of white working class Britons feel nobody speaks for people like them, a BBC survey has suggested. Some 58% said they felt unrepresented compared to 46% of white middle class respondents to a Newsnight poll.

    Design

    Normal Room – home for global homes, wonderful lifestyles and fabulous interior design – Home – for interior design junkies

    Olympus Announces ‘World’s Smallest and Lightest’ DSLR – Consumer-SLR – but you dont want a camera thats too light because then you get issues wtih camera shake

    Ethics

    YouTube – Edison Chen Sex Scandal Apology – Hopefully this will finish once and for all the scandal and allow all the starlets to keep their jobs in the Asian entertainment industry. It would be a shame if Maggie Q had to retire :)

    I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Leadfoot | PBS – interesting post on the false green measure of lead-free solder

    FMCG

    Kit Kat Lucky Little – interesting japanese offline / online integrated marketing idea

    BBC NEWS | UK | Tate & Lyle sugar to be Fairtrade – In terms of size and scale, this is the biggest ever Fairtrade switch by a UK company, will the company get held to a holier than thou status and get beaten up on big food issues the way the post-Prius Toyota got beaten up by environmentalists about the conventionally powered cars that it still sells?

    How to

    7 Food Hacks to Stay Alert Without Caffeine | Zen Habits

    Ideas

    apophenia: Where HCI comes from (and where it might go)

    BIL Conference – Minds Set Free. – TED meets barcamp

    The New Economics of Brands – Harvard Business Online’s Umair Haque – Umair has an interesting article on how Google built their brand

    Innovation

    The World’s Most Innovative Companies | Fast Company – I am surprised that Facebook has scored so highly in this article and we don’t have any of the results of IDEOs commissions described

    Japan

    SMS Text News » Archives » Japan gets new MVNO and starts price war

    Michelin Gives Stars, but Tokyo Turns Up Nose – New York Times – if I go restaurant hunting in Japan, I want to be told by by the Japanese not some French interlopers the best places to go. Also Japan is more wired than most other nations on earth, why the dead tree edition instead of using viaMichelin’s much vaunted mapping on a mobile service?

    Tokyo Taxi Drivers get Ranked | Japan: Stippy – not all taxi drivers who pass The Knowledge are equal now Tokyo is recognising their most highly qualified drivers wtih a star system. Cool idea

    PingMag – Goodbye Madame Butterfly: Sex And Marriage In Japan – interesting author interview about changing society roles in Japan

    Luxury

    Digital World Tokyo | World’s first holographic RFID tag to stop Vuitton knock-offs

    Hoods Hong Kong Previously Opening Exhibition | Hypebeast  – Japanese label Neighbourhood opening their first store in HKG

    Marketing

    Brand persuasion wheel – Ulli Appelbaum – Six most common principles of human persuasion that can be used by marketers reward, threat, expertise, liking, scarcity and social proof

    Media

    Boom times for Chinese film, but what comes next?

    Two takes on essentially the same data set about Google’s clicks Google’s Paid Click Business Slipping – ComScore – Seeking Alpha

    British ISPs to Delve into Behavioral Ads, Too – deal by Phorm, these guys seem to have stepped up a gear. Prospective acquisition material by AOLGoogleIACMicrosoftNewsCorpYahoo?

    Telegraph Opens Tech R&D Lab | paidContent:UK

    Futuretainment: The Asian Media Revolution – O’Reilly Conferences

    Online

    SyncWizard – SyncWizard takes your contacts, appointments, music and documents and zaps them onto the Net. You get a MyStuff page. Using this web site all your personal information is in one password protected place available from any net aware device.

    Digg, Stumbled Upon Is there Room for Yahoo! Buzz

    Delver – Home – Interesting new social search project

    » Social Media in Russia sixtysecondview – David Brain on Russian netizens

    Welcome to Hello Kitty Online! – World of Warcraft puh, this is where online gaming is at. I can see a can of feline whoopass being unleashed on Disney’s Club Penguin

    Yahoo Attracts Younger Users, Google Has Bigger Spenders | WebProNews – interesting data on the demographics of different search engines user base

    New Yahoo tool gathers favorite Web places on mobiles – By Georgina Prodhan, European Technology Correspondent HANOVER, Germany (Reuters) – Yahoo, still fending off a $42 billion takeover bid by Microsoft, unveiled a bookmarking tool on Tuesday that lets users keep track of favorite Web topics on their…

    MediaPost Publications – Yahoo In Control Of Open Search – 03/04/2008 – Trusted web concept gets a bit of a bashing, but the truth is that user intent and context is hard to compute

    Shopnik – experiment in data organisation (thanks to my colleague Nathan for flagging this one)

    Local search in the UK

    Software

    Judge on privacy: Computer code trumps the law | CNET News.com

    Style

    Nike “St. Patrick’s Day” Wildwood 90 Free | Hypebeast – I love these St Pats inspired Nike trainers which are a hybrid of an old school top and the Nike free sole. Top of the morning to ya!

    Technology

    Stegen Electronics – Scandinavian hardware hackers are selling the first multi-region Blu-Ray players from Sony and Pioneer.

    OLPC Review – ICONEYE

    The Technology Chronicles : Apple shareholder meeting Tuesday – hippies try to hijack Apple AGM with green agenda

    The trouble with Steve – Mar. 4, 2008 – Fortune gets tall poppy syndrome and let’s a journalist loose with a scythe on America’s most admired company and its CEO

    Wireless

    400,000 unlocked Apple iPhones turn up on China Mobile – and more are in HKG, Singapore etc

    Hoping to Make Phone Buyers Flip – New York Times – cell phone design and consumer behaviour

    Ian Wood’s reports from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona: Digital Evangelist: Ist day at MWC, Digital Evangelist: Day Two @ MWC and Digital Evangelist: Final Thoughts on Barcelona

    Europeans may be forced to pay for incoming cell calls – email your MP, email your MEP, email Gordon Brown: nip this in the bud

  • MobileYouth trend workout

    MobileYouth trend workout introduction

    Nokia E90

    Here is the notes that I made mostly from the morning sessions of the mobileYouth trend workout. There will be presentations and videos of the event available from their site next week. I was speaking on a panel later in the afternoon so was able to pay attention to the earlier panels.

    Graham Brown – mobileYouth, the organisers of MobileYouth trend workout

    Event introduction

    • Young people spend about 1.3 trillion USD per year, 130 billion of which is spent on mobile services (or roughly ten per cent of their total income). This impacted the sales of chocolate, music (in the form of CDs) and cigarettes
    • Young people spend an average of 20 – 25 GBP per month
    • Mobile services of young people grow at about 4.5 – 5.0 per cent year-on-year. This growth comes at the expense of, and in competition with television, entertainment and clothing

    Brown asked the audience of mobile operators to think beyond ARPU and instead think about lifetime spend. By the time that consumers are 33, they have already completed half their lifetime spend. Yet this is the age group that is currently most attractive to carriers looking at the ARPU model. It was an interesting counterpoint to marketers viewing the grey market as the next big opportunity.

    Mobile marketers run the particular risk of ending up with an aging or aged brands due to the virtue of a misplaced focus. Brown delivered a case study on Harley Davidson to prove his point. In the 1960s circa Easy Rider, Harley Davidson was a youth brand, now their average customer age is 51 years old.

    If things carry on this way, in a little over twenty years, their customer base will be 70, possibly only ready to ride a zimmer frame. According to Brown the consumer lifecycle begins at 10 years old.

    Geoff Goodwin and Marc Goodchild – BBC

    Children still view as much children’s television as ever, however their consumption of television overall has declined as expected

    The BBC is now looking for integrated media properties and partnerships. No one organisation has it right, hence the need for partnerships. Young audiences churn at an incredible rate so the BBC is constantly having to rework itself to remain relevant, rather than having the brand advantage that most people thought they had.

    Important mobile technologies for young people are FM radio, SMS and Bluetooth. This low-level tech is because most young people get by with found technologies: hand-me-down mobile phones, an old TV from the living room or a discount model picked up at ASDA or Tesco and vintage computers from work or the living room.

    Roundtable: Johan Winbladh mobile channel editor – Danish Broadcasting, James Davis head of mobile – News International, Michiel de Gooijer business development manager – Endemol, Giovanni Maruca director interactive and mobile EMEA – Paramount and Tim Hussain head of mobile monetisation – AOL UK

    Mr Winbladh was the hawk in the discussion: mobile devices weren’t ready to put to the kind of mobile experience that users wanted and the industry thought was appropriate, whereas the other audience members felt that the latest generation of mobile handsets and all you can eat tariffs are readdressing the issue.

    Maruca was excited about the way that advertising could be delivered in a context aware manner. By adding value to the advertising it can become unobtrusive and essentially no longer be advertising, but information.

    Roundtable: Richard Miller general manager for consumer convergence – BT and Derrick Heng director segment marketing and communications – Singapore Telecommunications Limited

    BT’s vision of Wi-Fi as a mobile technology is at odds with the GSM/W-CDMA orthodoxy of the mobile industry.

    SingTel in contrast has complete fixed and mobile integration and pay TV. SingTel segments its customer base and actively manages the customer relationship with a long-term view. They provide email to mobiles on an ad-funded revenue model. In Singapore the killer apps for mobile usage by young people were email and SMS. By comparison audience member Jonathan MacDonald sales director of Blyk pointed out that for UK mobile users the three killer apps are voice, SMS and the phone’s alarm clock.

    The audience debate then raged, the killer application for young people is doing the basic things well, providing decent customer service, having a decent relationship with the clients and not charging them excessively for that relationship. More related content here.

     

  • Bill and Dave by Michael Malone

    Bill and Dave were better known now by their surnames: Hewlett-Packard. It is familiar to consumers as a brand of printer, laptops and digital cameras sold in supermarkets up and down the country. Some may remember that they had a Watergate-type moment recently and a woman CEO who made a dogs dinner of things.

    I visited Boeblingen (near Stuttgart) – the European headquarters of Hewlett-Packard in the late 90s and left deeply unimpressed by a large but seemingly directionless technology behemoth. We were on the cusp of the internet, while they were talking about printing brochures on demand. While this was happening the best internet search engine at the time, Alta Vista, had been built by their long time rival Digital Equipment Corporation.

    Malone in his book Bill and Dave gave me a better appreciation of Hewlett-Packard. He brings into perspective how important Bill Hewlett and David Packard were to the technology sector and modern business practices.

    From a PR perspective, I found facinating the way Bill and David self-consciously built their own personal legends which helped support and extend the HP Way. The company’s culture was built, extended and modified in a deliberate, planned manner unparalleled in any other company. Their culture was what PR people would now call thought leadership – which feels very now given the start of interest around brand purpose.

    Bill and Dave wrote the book on corporate reputation without the help of big name agencies and invented the elements as they went along, combined with a wisdom worthy of Solomon. More book reviews here.

  • jPod

    It was a pleasure to read jPod. I like the writing of Douglas Coupland, he’s like a lightning rod for the zeitgeist for the knowledge economy. I’ve grown up and moved through my career with his works as a kind of literary soundtrack playing in the background. His writing moves from the monotony and empty-sadness of generation x in the 1990s through to the surreal humour of the present day.

    jPod is an updated world-view that builds upon Microserfs and Generation X. It is has a certain amount of recursion to these works and Douglas Coupland also appears in the book as a character. This recursion and self-referencing is fun for loyal readers and mirrors modern culture with its hipsters wearing ironic trucker caps, drain pipe jeans and Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirts and listening to bad mash-ups of 1980s music radio fodder.

    The non-linear, multi-voice, collective approach in writing mirrors modern environments were online predominates. The only downside to this was that I was quite happy to put the book down and not revisit for a fair while because there wasn’t the same sense of suspense or urgency. The book took me four weeks to read, not because it was hard or inaccessible and I did enjoy it – I guess this drifting along is an analogue to the life that Coupland is trying represent.

    The fantastic dark humour of jPod mirrors a society facing world-war three in the Middle East, global warming and the meltdown of the relationship between employer and employee where not even greed can be trusted anymore.

    Deep down there however is the essential truth about the Kafta-esque nature of working in a knowledge economy company, particularly software or web services. The politics aren’t right, but they’re close enough.

    Go out and get it here. The author’s online presence is here. More book reviews here.