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.

  • Stussy soundtrack & other things

    Stussy soundtrack to work to. Stüssy and music have always been a blend. Shawn Stüssy has talked about the soundtrack to his work. Soon after Stussy customers in punk, hip hop and beyond provided a Stussy soundtrack of sorts.

    Stussy stay at home

    The International Stüssy Tribe made up of people who Shawn Stüssy had met as the business grew included Mike Jones of The Clash and Big Audio Dynamite and Alex ‘Baby’ Turnbull of 23Skidoo and Ronin Records. There was also Nigo and Hiroshi Fujiwara in Japan. At the time Fujiwara-san was famous for the Major Force record label. There was even at least one International Stüssy Tribe record.

    1st Vinyl Tribal Gathering of The International Stüssy Tribe
    From my record collection. I suspect that this was done by Alex and John Turnbull of Ronin Records. At least two of their artists at the time (Force & KZEE) feature on the vinyl, and it was pressed in at the same plant that their records were. Lastly, Alex was a member of Shawn Stüssy’s International Stüssy Tribe.

    Now Stüssy has been the soundtrack breaking up a seemingly endless cycle of Zoom calls. You can find all of them here. My personal favourite is Stones Throw records stalwart DāM FUNK.

    Really interesting product design. Russian designers have reached back into technological history to use vacuum tubes (valves) rather than digital or solid state (transistor) electronics that Bob Moog would have used to build his first instruments. You can find out more at APPARATUS Tube Synthesizer by Eternal Engine EMI 

    Interesting presentation on how behavioural science (nudge theory) is used for patient engagement. It is obvious that these techniques could be adapted across product and service design.

    International Jazz Day saw an amazing array of talent performing online.

    A great video about the Barbican complex that was shot in 1969.It is a London that is both familiar and alien to me. The city is now dominated by office tower blocks. The buildings for the Barbican complex of old and new building cheek by jowl. There is some beautiful B-roll shot at different times of the day across the Barbican area. That alone would make this interesting, even before it gets into the history.

  • Demand fall in oil + more things

    Demand fall offers glimpse into oil industry’s future | Financial Times – what this story about fuel demand fall fails to take into account is feedstocks. Feedstocks are precursor chemicals derived from oil and gas that go into materials for pretty much everything we make from medicines, electronics and food packaging to stretchy yoga slacks

    What we Learnt From Accidentally Printing Over a Billion QR codes on Cadbury Chocolate | LinkedIn – market leaders ultimately didn’t see how this potentially large ongoing investment would truly deliver on their biggest challenges (like most brands, driving penetration into relatively light users) and so they pulled the plug on funding what felt like had become a bloated concept. – found via Matt Muir’s Web Curios newsletter. Less a meditation on the woes of QR codes. China and other markets have demonstrated that used in the right way QR codes can be of enormous benefit in bridging the real world / online interface. Instead it highlights the kludgy dodgy business cases in terms of digitalisation of FMCG products.

    Twitter Q1: sales up 3% to $808M as it swings to a loss on COVID-19, mDAUS hit record 166M | TechCrunch – surprised it hasn’t relooked at its direct response offerings like it used to have with cards. There has been a demand fall for brand-based marketing as a brand winter sets in. Personally speaking, the only Twitter ads I have seen recently have been promoting Nokia’s recent financial results

    TikTok tops 2 billion downloads | TechCrunch – but this doesn’t necessarily mean 2 billion users….

    Start Chatting | Reddit Help – back before I joined Yahoo!, the major internet companies (outside of Aol) had moved away from operating chat rooms themselves – allowing Lycos to largely have the business to itself. Lycos even had white labelled offers for some of the other firms, or a transfer of customer base put in place. The reason was the fear that somehow the internet would generate the Pete Townsend effect and make us all ‘curious’ about child porn and bring down the end of the world – or something similar. Yes, I am being a bit sarcastic, but at the time it was a PR issue for these businesses and the gains from chat rooms were marginal. It is interesting that Reddit are expanding into chat rooms, presumably trying to find even meagre veins of revenue with the demand fall in brand advertising both online and offline. It will be interesting to see how things go

    My urge to splurge is over and won’t be returning soon | Financial Times – when he thinks back to his public bout of destruction in 2001, he mentions two things that seem relevant to today’s unsettling times. First, a lot of the thousands of people who came to gawk at him began to talk unprompted about their own possessions, and how they really only cared about photos, gifts or things they had made themselves. I suspect a lot of us have thought about what really matters lately. Second, he says people were unexpectedly kind to him.

    Facebook may lose seal of approval that gives ad buyers confidence they get what they buy in advertising, WSJ reports – The company failed to address advertiser concerns arising from a 2019 audit, concerning how Facebook measures and reports data about video advertisements, the Journal reported, citing a notice from the Media Rating Council (MRC). “These exchanges are part of the audit process. We will continue working with MRC on accreditation, as we have since 2016,” a Facebook spokesperson said. The MRC confirmed that the audit of Facebook is in process but did not provide details, citing its policy.

    HTC’s Cryptocurrency Mining Phone Takes Half a Millennium to Pay for Itself – ExtremeTech – funny as

    Marketers’ strategic responsibilities are eroding away to nothing | Marketing Week – Marketers are becoming more and more responsible for the communication aspects of the marketing mix – with social media, PR, CRM and e-commerce all increasingly under their control as the other tactical and strategic challenges dissipate. By my best estimate, communications should be about 8% of the marketing function’s duties. It increasingly appears to take up almost all of it. I can’t say I am that surprised by this. For all the fetishisation of big data, there is a lot of dodgy decisions being made out there. Brand tracking surveys are not being done, you have major FMCG brands relying on past correlation with Twitter opinions to substitute for more expensive surveys. The marketing communications mix isn’t based on research data but the fear of digital disruption

    Major Malaysian publishing house Blu Inc shuts, 200 staff laid off | Campaign Asia – Malaysian publisher for Harpers Bizarre, Cosmopolitan and Woman’s Weekly. Malaysia hasn’t been hit hard by COVID compared to other Asian markets. This feels like the canary in the coal mine for the media sector in general

    Mediatel News: UK ad market to lose £4bn in spend this year, says AA/Warc – the interesting bit is that the advertising demand fall is both for online and offline channels involved in brand advertising. This doesn’t bode well for brand equity moving forwards

    This Should Be V.R.’s Moment. Why Is It Still So Niche? – The New York Times – The bad news is that V.R. is still not what sci-fi movies taught us to hope for — a fully immersive experience that transports us to another dimension and gives us all kinds of virtual superpowers. Even the leading systems still lack some basic features and, outside of gaming, there isn’t much you can do on a V.R. headset that you can’t do more easily on another device. Is this a technology issue or a lack of a killer application or compelling content?

    Google Meet Is Now Free For Everyone – too little, too late for Google to try and catch up with Zoom on market share and mind share

    UK ad market to contract by £4.2bn this year | WARC – some interesting anomalies in this. In particular the lack of decline of out of home versus TV, direct mail, radio and magazines

    UK agency staff numbers fall for second year despite growth of media shops | Campaign Live – it will be interesting to hear hypotheses on the why there has been a demand fall in the creative sector

    Disney claims media rights to all #MayThe4th replies to one Tweet – SlashGear – this looks like a social media accident waiting to happen

    Zoom is so popular even a Google exec’s child prefers it, report says – Business Insider – but then Hangouts suck

    China, Offline Retail Isn’t Going Back to Normal | Gartner L2 – electronics retailer Gome adopted a common strategy for combating the virus in its more than one thousand stores—all customers must undergo temperature checks, masks are mandatory, and the entire big box store will be periodically disinfected. Local beauty retailer Wow Colour similarly mandated that all employees undergo regular temperature checks and wash hands, and specified the disinfectants that will be used to regularly clean its stores. JD even mandated that only three hundred customers are allowed in a store at a time

    The success of the Macintosh idea – The Mac emboldened a new breed of nonconformists (a composite community of intellectuals, artists, designers, independent developers, mavericks in corporations, etc.) and spurred the creation of powerful Macintosh user groups, such as the BMUG (Berkeley Macintosh User Group), which had a sort of double mission. On the one hand, it was a resurgence of the 60’s counterculture with “roots in The Hacker Ethic and Berkeley Radicalism,” as Stephen Howard and Raines Cohen put it. On the other, it was a pedagogical platform, as Reese Jones explained: “I see two different sets of people in our group: those with computer experience who are just now seeing new avenues to follow in computing, and those with little or no experience who are just now seeing what computing can do. We must provide for the different needs of both, but we have in common that our eyes are just being opened to something new and different.”

    Covid-19 causes a new wave of economic nationalism | Mercator Institute for China Studies – interesting that the bargain hunting by Chinese companies is being led by state owned enterprises – it could be seen as state directed policies and would be relying on a government open cheque book

    Accepting, suffering or resisting: study groups Britons’ response to coronavirus lockdown – Reuters – King’s found 93% of the suffering said they were following lockdown rules completely or nearly all the time, compared to just 49% of the resisting. The latter were around 10 times more likely than the other groups to say they had met up with friends or family outside their home. – The resisting group skewed young.

  • Japanese environmental sounds + more

    The meticulous design of Japanese environmental sounds – ‘kankyō ongaku’ – a strand of Japanese minimalism that emerged in the 1980s to soundtrack the architectural wonders and commercial advancements of the country’s economic boom years. In the west we put up with muzak; but the Japanese environmental sounds are highly engineered minimalistic experiences

    Visualizing the Most Loved Brands, by Generation – you do have to wonder about of the quality of the data

    The Internet Used to Make Us Smarter. Now, Not So Much. | Douglas Rushkoff – we too easily lose sight of what it is that’s truly revolutionary. By focusing on the shiny new toys and ignoring the human empowerment potentiated by these new media — the political and social capabilities they are retrieving — we end up surrendering them to the powers that be – I think this is as much about how is online as the online tools

    macos – How to find cause of high kernel_task cpu usage? – Ask Different – this is quite surreal TL;DR charge your laptop on the right hand side – what on earth is going on here.

    #SafeHandFish – I love this idea of repurposing packaging, but I wonder where they got the blue lids from?

    Amazon makes books, video, music and more available for free – Amazon sees if it can get UK consumers to adopt its services during the COVID lock-in – this is all about habit building

    Imagination Commits to Keeping U.K. HQ – For Now | EE Times – underlying this is very likely to be a worry for Imagination that a move to China could end up with its intellectual property owned by China. And that could worry its major customers, including Apple  — a customer that the now former CEO Ron Black worked hard to win back

    Luckin fraud admission leaves more questions than answers · TechNode – using part of his handsomely-valued Luckin shares as collateral to take out loans, Lu Zhengyao has made away with in excess of $500 million. That amount would have been much, much smaller if Luckin’s numbers were accurately reported. All this makes it hard to believe that COO Liu Jian would commit fraud without the actual or constructive knowledge Chairman Lu Zhengyao, CEO Qian Zhiya and CFO Reinout Hendrik Schakel. My present hypothesis is that Liu, as a long time errand boy for Chairman Lu Zhengyao, has taken the fall to buy time for Luckin’s management to work out their next move – interesting read. It does make you wonder about other Chinese firms

    Booking Holdings to announce lay-offs after securing $4bn loan | Financial Times – (Glenn) Fogel told the 530 employees on the call, which was first reported by the Dutch newspaper NRC, that bookings on the travel company’s platforms had dropped 85 per cent year-on-year in the preceding week and that the loss in revenue because of reduced rates at hotels was even greater. – I’d imagine that’s going to blitz their Google advertising spend reputedly 10 billion dollars a year pre-COVID

    Why China is losing the coronavirus narrative | Financial Times – just wow, it won’t affect public opinion that much, but will affect government and wonks : When Roger Roth received an email from the Chinese government asking him to sponsor a bill in the Wisconsin state legislature praising China’s response to coronavirus, he thought it must be a hoax. The sender had even appended a pre-written resolution full of Communist party talking points and dubious claims for the Wisconsin senate president to put to a vote. “I’ve never heard of a foreign government approaching a state legislature and asking them to pass a piece of legislation,” Sen Roth told me last week. “I thought this couldn’t be real.” Then he discovered it was indeed sent by China’s consul-general in Chicago. “I was astonished . . .[and] wrote a letter back: ‘dear consul general, NUTS’.”

    ‘A level playing field’: digital giants will have to pay for news | Sydney Morning Herald – interesting move ‘Josh Frydenberg will impose a mandatory code on the digital giants after losing faith in their work on a negotiated settlement with Australian media companies to reimburse them for news and other content.’

  • Bush TR 82 – throwback gadget

    Whilst you might not know the Bush TR 82, if you were from western Europe you’ll recognise its style immediately.

    Post-war Britain

    In the post-war era Bush Radio Limited tried to fill consumers demands for entertainment.

    There were radios that would sit on a sideboard and would have the presence of a TV set. Many of these have fitted out with Bluetooth to create a better sounding sound system. It certainly sounds better than an Amazon Echo. My parents inherited one of these, a Bush VHT 61, which served them well for many years.

    There was also radiograms, which is were a cross between a sideboard and a hifi system.

    The secret of their warm sound was valve circuits. Before chips with millions of components, were transistors. And before transistors were delicate lightbulb-like valves.

    Bush TR 82
    Bush TR 82

    David Ogle’s iconic design

    Over time manufacturers like Bush managed to make valves small enough to make portable devices. In 1957 the Bush MB60 was launched. This was a portable valve radio designed by David Ogle of Ogle Design. The MB60 didn’t last as even minature valve radios were power hungry and delicate. But David Ogle’s case design lived on.

    TR 82

    Ogle’s product design was mated to a seven transistor circuit to create the TR 82.The TR 82 was big enough to have a decent sound and small enough to be portable. Alkaline batteries like Duracell were only starting to reach the market about the same same as the TR 82. So a high powered long lasting battery would be a 9 volt lantern style battery. This meant that you got months of use out of one battery, but each battery was expensive. (Similar batteries were still commonly used up until recently in the flashing lanterns used to mark road works currently in progress).

    The TR 82 received long wave and medium wave so didn’t need an external aerial. VHF or FM radio wasn’t popular yet. In common with cars from the 1950s the Bush TR 82 had chrome plated brightwork. This was around the front panel around the edge of the circular reception dial. Despite this ornamentation you ended up with a very intuitive radio design, with a simplicity that Dieter Rams would appreciate. There was a large tuning wheel on the front of the radio.

    On top, there were two rotating controls:

    • Volume
    • A combined tone and on / off switch

    Selection between medium wave and long wave reception was done with two large buttons.

    The handle ran the length of the case and swivelled at the points at which it was secured. This provided even easier access to the top controls of the radio.

    The rear cover was removed by a single central screw. This could be undone with a edge of a coin. Inside the case was a battery compartment at the bottom. The rest of the radio was held on a metal subframe. This rigidity was essential for the tuning mechanism to work seamlessly and for the speaker to provide a good sound.

    My personal memories of the TR 82

    My own personal memories of a well-used and obsolete Bush TR 82 stem from my time on the family farm in Ireland. The radio lived in the kitchen and provided news at lunch and dinner time. It was also turned on to listen to the latest livestock market prices. This would then affect if, or when livestock and wool were sent to market. It provided live music on a Saturday evening. In essence, it filled many of the tasks that an internet enabled PC would do – if my Uncle and Grandmother had been online.

    Radio was the primary media. Ireland had been an early adopter of radio, but a relative latecomer to television. So even into the early 1980s the radio had a pre-eminence in consumer behaviour that was only slowly eroded by the TV.

    Television was something only broadcast from after lunch until late evening, apart from the weekends. When the second TV channel launched it only during the evening. By comparison at the time radio broadcast from before 6am in the morning until shutdown just after midnight.

    TR 82 and the rise of Sony

    The timing of the Bush TR 82 was a high point. The same year Tokyo Tsuskin Kogyo launched the first pocket sized transistor radio – the TR-63. It was the first ‘Sony’ product to be sold in the US. Sony was originally a product line brand for their nascent transistor radio busness. The product was so successful that the founders changed their company name to Sony Corporation. This idea of portable pocket entertainment begat personal stereos, iPods and the smartphone. (You can find more on Sony here.)

    By comparison the TR 82 marked the point for Bush Radio as well. Bush Radio had been acquired by Rank in 1945. In 1962, the company was merged with Murphy Radio as Rank Bush Murphy. This was sold to Great Universal Stores in 1978. In 1986, the Bush name was sold to the Alba Group. In 2008 the former Alba Group sold the name for use outside Australasia on to Home Retail Group. Sainsburys acquired Home Retail Group in 2016.

    But the iconic Bush TR 82 shape lived on, in more modern, yet poorer quality replicas. Most noticeably the Bush TR 82 DAB which had digital radio, FM, medium wave and long wave. Unfortunately the modern radio didn’t feature the same quality of speaker or internal frame. This meant that the sound suffered from lower power and a muddy sound caused by vibrations in the case. A brief feature on the Bush TR82 by the BBC and the British Museum here.

  • Economics of YouTube + more

    lifeintaiwan have gone into the economics of YouTube by looking at their own channel in this video. It makes fascinating viewing and provides more questions than answers about the value of ‘influencer’ fees being paid in travel, beauty and FMCG sectors. It will provide additional grist on the economics of YouTube moving forwards

    Photochromeleon: Creating Color-Changing Objects – YouTube – I thought that this was projection mapping but it seems to be just variable light wavelengths. Really interesting applications from activations to packaging design

    The nth room sex scandal is a mix of dark web fears played out within a private Telegram channel. Some great explanations and vox pops interviews in Korea by Asian Boss. This scandal falls on the back of other sexual exploitation scandals in the Korean media, notably around the Burning Sun club in Seoul. It is also interesting how Telegram had been perceived as a super-safe channel for delivery of services, rather than building a dark web site. More Korea related posts here.

    Asian Boss vox pop interviews with the Korean public on the nth room sex abuse scandal

    Mark Ritson talks about marketing in the midst of a recession. If you do nothing else this week, get a CMO you know to watch it. The big thing to take away is the concept of eSOV. Although Ritson doesn’t mention this explicitly, this is the foundation of Proctor & Gamble’s success during the Great Depression.

    The history of Marriott carpet camouflage. Uniform History do some interesting design story videos and their April’s Fools videos tap into odd but true stories. Apparently this camouflage was for cosplay conventions in the US. The video then goes into a tangled mess of intellectual property, fair use, parody and cultural appropriation of a carpet. The thing has taken a life of its own. When Marriott refreshed its carpet choice the old ones were dumpster dived or bought up by cosplayers so that they could continue the convention tradition that had build up over a few years.