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.

  • Automata Eve launch

    Automata Eve launched the other week and I got to go along to their headquarters just off the Pentonville Road to find out more.

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    Automata Eve first impressions

    At £5,000, the Automata Eve sits at a weird place in robot manufacture. It’s an expensive hobby device or a lightweight industrial product. Automata freely admitted that they sit somewhere between the £1,500 hobbyist kits and starter industrial models that are £20,000+ excluding arm tools, programmable control units and everything else required.

    Automata Eve human friendly product design reminded me a bit of early Apple Macs. Their very product design sophistication made them look like ‘toys’ in the eyes of IT departments. Automata’s Eve is an equally polished appliance as robot and it might take a bit more effort to have it taken seriously in light industrial roles.

    Eve even has a lopsided Picasso-esque face with two buttons on the top of the arm in a vertical manner.

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    Maybe it needs a different colour palette of heavy plant yellow or yellow and black diagonal stripes better telegraph its industrial credentials.

    The shadow of Brexit

    Brexit afflicted sectors such as food preparation seem to be some of the people who have started to explore using Automata and rivals already. The companies realise that it will hard to get further workers from the likes of Stoke on Trent or Sunderland working on sandwich production lines. Robots are part of their plans to replace labour who decide to leave the UK. Automata assemble their robots in the UK, but their supply chain partners are half way around the world in Asia.

    Pain is the mother of invention

    The founders story reminded me a lot of the way that machine learning projects have historically been sold into clients by creative, digital and advertising agencies.

    They used to work for Zaha Hadid Architects and had used algorithmic design. This gave Hadid’s work abstract yet organic lines. So when they were looking to use a series of interlocking panels, they expected that these could be mass-made and bent by robotics.

    A bit like strategy and client services teams in agencies they over-estimated the capability of technology; in their case industrial robotics.

    That plan didn’t go too well. Which got them interested in why there weren’t light industrial robotics. A good number of years later and the Automata Eve was born.

    Industry robotics industry structure

    What really surprised me was how industrial robots essentially use the same components and innovation tends to happen in the software instead. For instance industrial robots use a compact way of strain wave gearing.

    Only a few companies make the components. This means that the industry is very horizontally structured like the PC or smartphone industries relationship between processor and software manufacturers.

    Robots are already accurate enough to get rid of workers who don’t care

    One of the case studies used in the presentation was about an industrial electronics company who replaced a human work station that did some pretty basic soldering.

    For reasons that one could assume to be a lack of work ethic. By contrast Foxconn, seems to have failed in its efforts of using robots for smartphone assembly. The reason is that they require a high degree of dexterity, rather like a watch maker. Robots still struggle with very accurate placement, but a lot of low volume manufacturing tasks don’t necessarily need the same level of accuracy.

  • Qualcomm smart speaker platform + more

    Qualcomm smart speaker platform for AI-enabled devices – Business Insider – will Qualcomm attract the same developer community as Amazon’s Alexa has? The Qualcomm smart speaker platform will find it hard to get audiences wanting high quality audio as Apple found out with the first generation HomePod. It won’t only be Qualcomm chips that boost the cost but the complete component chain

    Google is making antitrust concessions in Europe – Business Insider – reminds me a lot of the European settlement that Microsoft made with the EU that then facilitated the popularity of Firefox (and Chrome)

    The New Zealand shooter finds support in Islamophobic corners of China’s internet — Quartz – many comments reflected the view that the shooting was a by-product of the West’s excessive political correctness, a perspective that has found increasing support on China’s internet in recent years as part of what’s known as the baizuo, or “white left” movement, a derogatory term used to describe Western progressives that is roughly analogous to the term “social justice warrior.”

    Google Stadia is a Net Neutrality Nightmare – Variety – the numerous unknowns and uncertainties of Stadia, from pricing to game library to concerns over internet latency and speed requirements, what’s truly disconcerting is the unspoken assumption that forgoing hardware is a net positive for consumers and creators alike. Ultimately, the adult in all of us is sick of having to repurchase video game boxes just to keep up (at least, I am). But if a PC is like a puppy in how it brings you some kind of joy or entertainment, you have to ask yourself one question. Would you rent a puppy?

    MoviePass co-founder’s new app rewards you with movie tickets for watching ads | BGR – how many ads would you have to watch and what kind of personal information is being used in targeting? Also what kind of incentives does this set up and is that the kind of demographic an advertiser wants to reach?

    APAC accounts for less than 15% of revenue for holding companies, says R3 – really interesting, especially when I remember Sir Martin (Sorrell) saying at Stream Asia a number of years ago that APAC had more WPP employees than Europe in his state of the union type speech

    The 2019 Lincoln Nautilus | Morning Run :60 | Lincoln – YouTube – interesting ad how Ford’s Lincoln brand is trying to associate the in-car information with the utility (in fitness terms at least) with wearable tech

    Why I’m Swapping My iPhone for an Alarm Clock From 1939 – WSJ – focused design rather than convergence (paywall)

    ThoughtfulGiftCards.com – Is It a Scam, or Just Shady Marketing? | JoAnna Wahlund – interesting marketing tactic / social engineering – I respect the thinking, if not the use that it was put to

    Can a Facebook Post Make Your Insurance Cost More? – WSJ – in Wadds book Brand Vandals I warned that this was inevitable. Seven years later and its now an issue

    Swiss Watchmakers Say Slowing Growth in China Won’t Hurt Sales | News & Analysis | BoF – Switzerland’s watch industry is going through a period of profound change, notably in distribution, as brands focus on developing their own boutiques — brick and mortar or online — while reducing their network of third-party retailers

    Amazon Beauty: Who Is Selling What? An Exclusive Analysis of Over 200,000 Beauty and Personal Care Listings on Amazon.com | Coreinsight – interesting read (PDF) particularly in light of Amazon Kicks Off Spring with the Launch of Belei, its First Dedicated Skincare Line | Amazon.com, Inc. – Press Room – 12 products including moisturisers, serums, eye cream, spot treatments and more

    Most Amazon Brands Are Duds, Not Disrupters, Study Finds – Bloomberg – but then most new consumer product launches are duds

    How Baselworld Can Establish its Relevance Once More | Luxury Society – interesting case study from the Digital Luxury Group. More luxury-related posts here.

    Why “Drop” Retail Is the Future of Luxury Sales in China – “Drops have been popular in China because consumers want to feel that brands are making an effort to design or offer product specifically for them and drop retailing gives brands the opportunity to show that they are focused on doing something special specifically for China”

    Luxury Marketers Can no Longer View Chinese Consumers as a Monolith | Luxury Society – they shouldn’t have ever viewed Chinese consumers as a monolith in the first place

    Walmart Builds a Secret Weapon to Battle Amazon for Retail’s Future – WSJ – (paywall)

    US Army applying new areas of math | John D Cook – expect homotopy type theory (HoTT) to be the new machine learning in a few years

    China’s middle class stress over debt payments as unemployment hits two-year high | SCMP – only a matter of time before this happened due to overheated property market and slowing economic growth

  • Robot launch + more things

    Automata Eve robot launch

    I went along to the Automata Eve robot launch. More about the robot launch in more detail once I get around to write the post. Eve is a robotic arm aimed for light industrial usage.

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    Everything else

    Moleskine Now Offers Retreats for People Who Work Remotely – Condé Nast Traveler – I get why they may be focusing on freelancers as the creative industries sees agencies using an increasing amount of freelancers. But there is also an opportunity for a luxury experience offering.

    Japanese porn company Soft on Demand wants to use virgin power to create electricity for romantic Tokyo event – Japanese marketers never fail to surprise me with these odd campaigns. The power comes from stationary exercise bikes. I couldn’t do any better than Sora News 24 at explaining how this campaign all comes together, so go and read it all there. Soft on Demand is the Japan’s largest adult entertainment media company and are putting a lot of money into marketing VR content

    Why Canon is helping users rent their kit to each other | Marketing | Campaign Asia – interesting idea but I could foresee a lot of problems with an AirBnB for camera bodies and lens, or maybe I am just a low trust individual. More marketing related content here.

    I hadn’t realised that population ageing and decline is a bigger issue in Bulgaria than it is in western European countries like Germany or the Nordics. In terms of population decline it even outstrips Korea and Japan.

    This seems to have been driven by the economic hardship caused in the immediate aftermath of the economic collapse of the Comintern (Communist International) group members and break up of the Soviet Union into Russia and members of the CIS.

    Very interesting documentary on the day-to-day impact by showing the lives of villagers that have been hit hard through this decline.

  • Video conferencing + more things

    Holographic-like video conferencing: a killer app for AR? | eeNews Europe – really??? I know the IBM had attempted video conferencing in Second Life, back when that was the metaverse du jour. It still wouldn’t solve a lot of the issues with virtual conferencing a la Zoom or Skype for Business. And then there would be a battery of security issues that continue to plague video conferencing. Finally there is the issue of computer mediated communication exhaustion. There is already issues with normal video conferencing software usage, let alone something like augmented reality.

    Apple’s new iPads cling to old Apple Pencil | The Verge – this looks like a potential mess. Why do the styli need to have technology in them? How long is a styli supposed to last for? Are new styli backwards compatiable with older styli? Its like the move from the 50 pin iPod connector move to lightning connectors on steroids.

    WSJ City – Feds scrutinise development and FAA approval process – interesting how they have gone in this direction focusing on the FAA approval process. I am surprised at the organisation capture that Boeing managed to make happen. It might be a mix of corruption and and incompetence. Dinging the FAA approval process could damage future US aircraft sales and trust in US certifications in general. It would be a boon for Chinese aspirations in the global aircraft market outside the US and EU

    Weber Shandwick’s UK Consumer Lead Quits – it’s interesting that she’s going without a plan. Weber Shandwick don’t seem to be too worried about contacts walking out the door.

    Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures | OneZero – pretty standard. BT were doing this back in the 1970s at their research facility in Ipswich. People like MIT Media Lab have done similar things as well

  • Ken Kocienda on software

    Interesting talk with Ken Kocienda, covering his experience on product management and software design at Apple. Kocienda was a software engineer at Apple during Steve Jobs second time as CEO. Kocienda has since written a book – Creative Selection about his experiences.

    Interesting bits include:

    • Apple’s approach to open source in 2001. Apple looked at licensing and building their own software, but felt that open source was the right thing to do. Especially when it was the responsibility of a team of two to build a browser. Netscape was built for 20 different platforms, in that respect the Apple team had an easier time. KDE Conqueror had to only be moved from Linux to the Mac.
    • The role of demos in Apple’s development process. Safari was built with a stop watch because the brief was to deliver the best experience to customers. Speed was the differentiator that Ken Kocienda and the team locked on to very quickly. Dial up usage at the start of the development made page load time critical. A page load test was used on builds to ensure that there was no speed regression, build on build. At launch Safari was three times faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer for the Mac. Demos were done on a regular basis to demonstrate strength and potential of a project as its built.
    • Importance of focus. Apple doesn’t ship a lot of products (compared to rivals). Essentially the Mac line-up is four products laptop and desktop, consumer and professional. Because of the focus, it allowed the management to keep tabs on how the software doing.
    • The concept of a “Directly Responsible Individual”. Team formation and building was important part of culture. Top down leadership and bottom up contributions. The vision was very clearly communicated.
    • The role of whimsy and playfulness in designing software

    More on Apple here.