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 Facebook pivots to WeChat post

    Wonks clearly saw parallels. Hence the short form ‘Facebook pivots to WeChat’. The first thing I’d advise you to do is read Mark Zuckerberg’s notes on how he is planning to move Facebook as a business. There’s a link at the bottom of this post to it, I’ll still be here when you come back.

    Mark Zuckerberg f8 Keynote

    The reactions were:

    • Facebook is trying to ‘kill’ Apple
    • Advertisers need to be concerned about Facebook’s moves
    • Facebook’s pivot is a diversion or play to get out from under future regulation
    • It’s fake, or variants of that
    • It’s about asserting market dominance
    • It’s a move against Snap
    • It’s a ‘China’ type move, trying to corner the free internet

    These takes are mirrors of our own views and concerns as about Facebook. I am not a Facebook apologist, by any means. But I could see a clear parallel between Facebook and concerns about television, the communist threat or big oil. And to a large extent Facebook is highly deserving of our skepticism.

    So let’s start breaking them off one by one:

    Facebook is trying to ‘kill’ Apple

    Apple has managed to differentiate from Google and other web giants by its privacy focus. This is because advertising isn’t that important to Apple’s business model. Where Apple have tried advertising, they haven’t been that successful at it.

    Facebook’s messaging focus ‘doing a WeChat’ has caused others to draw clear parallels with China. In particular, Apple’s problems in China and WeChat. The simple answer is that its complicated:

    • Apple’s problems in China aren’t just about WeChat. WeChat creates a level playing field between Chinese Android-based and iOS user experience. Because consumers spend so much time inside the application, rather than the OS
    • Both Apple and Chinese manufacturers lose services revenue to WeChat. On a per device basis, this particularly penalises manufacturers like Xiaomi who break even on the handset at best
    • Apple has tested the price elasticity of the premium phone market in China (and elsewhere). Channel discounting has been shown to drive a massive uptake in sales

    Facebook’s messaging strategy poses a challenge to mobile operators, Google’s Android messaging offering and Apple Messages equally.

    Mobile phone operators saw messaging traffic drop precipitously over the past decade. China Mobile were one of the first operators of video and SMS over the internet with its Fetion texting service. This was shut down three years ago in the face competition from Youku, QQ Video and WeChat.

    The GSM Association has tried to fight back against the decline in SMS and MMS messaging with Rich Communications Services (RCS). It is supported on Android Messages app and Google has looked as wider implementation.

    RCS is currently supported by 11 smartphone manufacturers and 55 mobile network operators across Asia, the Americas, Africa and Europe. Facebook may support it, but is likely to compete against it. Apple hasn’t announced support for RCS (yet).

    Here’s what Mark said, nothing particularly controversial but a nice analysis of current development options.

    You can already send and receive SMS texts through Messenger on Android today, and we’d like to extend this further in the future, perhaps including the new telecom RCS standard. However, there are several issues we’ll need to work through before this will be possible. First, Apple doesn’t allow apps to interoperate with SMS on their devices, so we’d only be able to do this on Android. Second, we’d need to make sure interoperability doesn’t compromise the expectation of encryption that people already have using WhatsApp. Finally, it would create safety and spam vulnerabilities in an encrypted system to let people send messages from unknown apps where our safety and security systems couldn’t see the patterns of activity.

    A privacy-focused vision for social networking – Mark Zuckerberg March 6, 2019

    What its most likely to do is strip value added services away from carriers, Google and Apple; rather than Apple on it’s own. Encryption alone doesn’t mean security or privacy; but Apple needs to provide that level of nuance to premium consumers. Given the Google Android services there is still blue water between the eco-systems.

    Advertisers need to be concerned about Facebook’s moves

    Advertisers on Facebook always need to be concerned about Facebook’s moves. The people with most to worry are people who build their businesses on Facebook’s platform. But that isn’t a new issue, its been a mistake that marketers have made over-and-over again in the digital realm. And they’ll still keep making the mistake.

    In many respects, Facebook advertising has had to change. The reason why Facebook has been putting out features like stories and carousels is because of ‘context collapse‘. Back in 2015, the Information wrote about how Facebook users were sharing less. Sharing less means less room for ad inventory in the news feed and less reasons for the audience to remain engaged with the newsfeed.

    However, Facebook won’t fully give up on the town hall type environment that the news feed provides to advertisers, don’t take Mark’s word for it: follow the money.

    Public social networks will continue to be very important in people’s lives — for connecting with everyone you know, discovering new people, ideas and content, and giving people a voice more broadly. People find these valuable every day, and there are still a lot of useful services to build on top of them. But now, with all the ways people also want to interact privately, there’s also an opportunity to build a simpler platform that’s focused on privacy first.

    A privacy-focused vision for social networking – Mark Zuckerberg March 6, 2019

    Zuckerberg needed to do something to combat context collapse, even if the regulatory environment hadn’t got a lot worse for him. It also means the declining amount of information available to advertisers will continue to go that way.

    On the plus side if you look at WeChat, you can see the kind of directions Facebook is likely to take:

    • Advertising / promoted content
    • On-platform services and retail
    • E-commerce
    • Mini-applications
    • Payments
    • Ticketing
    • Electronic real ID

    And the one thing that we can be sure about with Mark Zuckerberg is that he doesn’t like leaving money at the table. Expect change, (continue) to be concerned about advertising efficiency and effectiveness, but don’t worry about not having Facebook as a channel in the future.

    Facebook’s pivot is a diversion or play to get out from under future regulation

    There are a few angles to this which I am going to break down into two parts:

    Facebook’s interest

    • The more entrenched across services, the harder Facebook will be to take action against. Facebook would be harder to break apart in any future anti-trust court decision
    • The move towards messaging could reduce the issues that Facebook faces in terms of moderating speech and preventing bad behaviour 
    • Pushes Facebook’s PR / repetitional issues under the rug

    Consumer interest

    • From a consumer interest point of view Facebook is showing a willingness to go beyond encryption by carefully choosing where its data centres go for maximum regulatory protection. (Though one would still fall under the extra-territorial laws of the five Is countries in particular the US, UK and Australia at the moment)
    • Consumer convenience due to focus on interoperability, so one might not need to have both WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger on a device – in theory at least

    It’s fake, or variants of that

    We won’t know the true level of sincerity and commitment of Facebook to make a positive impact through this pivot. Facebook’s brand is so low, it is very easy to believe the very worst in them. I can’t say that I am surprised this came out in the commentary but I am prepared to hold fire on judgement just yet.

    It’s about asserting market dominance

    Some commentators saw a clear link between Facebook’s pivot and Microsoft’s push into web browsers. Both companies were threatened by disruption and utilised their existing market dominance in their markets in current products to extend their dominance into future eras. Businesses by their very nature try to maintain and grow themselves. It would be a natural outcome of Facebook’s pivot.

    Microsoft’s move eventually led to the Judge Jackson ruling against Microsoft. Something that Facebook would be very keen to avoid.

    Part of the reason why Facebook bought WhatsApp originally was partly put down to Mark Zuckerberg’s concern about only having one great idea. He wanted to bulk up the Facebook brain trust with WhatsApp’s management. We know that didn’t end well with the management team eventually departing. This pivot could be seen as an antidote to Zuckerberg’s creative bankruptcy.

    It’s a move against Snap

    The competition posed to one-to-one messaging was perceived by analyst Richard Greenfield of BTIG as a threat to Snap. Facebook is very competitive, but Facebook has bigger markets to focus on with this move. Effects on Snap would be a welcome bonus rather than a key focus. Snap has bigger issues at the moment:

    • User growth is moribund. Instagram has already ‘outsnapped’ Snap with its fast follower copying of Snap’s features
    • Snap needs to do better in generating advertising revenue

    In essence it’s like sleeping with a hippo. It could roll over and crush you without even realising what it managed to do in its sleep. Its a move that is likely to adversely affect Snap, but its by no means all about Snap.

    It’s a China type move trying to corner the free internet

    This particular trope came from Fox Business. What’s interesting is that one would expect the outlet to be pro-free markets. The commentary by Kurt Knutsson talks about the inescapability of Facebook and conflates the similarities with WeChat to argue Facebook is sinister in a similar manner to ‘China’. The thing I took away from it is the cross-party skepticism on Facebook, privacy and market power.

    If you would have told me a decade ago that a right wing business publication would have been concerned about free markets and market dominance I wouldn’t have believed you.

    Facebook’s assumptions

    Facebook’s pivot requires some major changes in the companies technical ability:

    • Currently Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp use encryption from the Open Whisper Systems project that gave us Signal Messenger. Signal is an open source product funded by donations to the Signal Foundation. It isn’t a core strength of Facebook
    • A lot of WeChat’s secret sauce is how they managed to build so much functionality into its mobile app without taking away from the user experience. This is in sharp contrast to the plethora of apps currently used for Facebook. It poses a major UX design challenge for Facebook
    • Facebook can expand to new areas successfully such as payments – again not an area where Facebook has previously known to be successful

    There is an assumption that Facebook’s communications team can give it enough space to allow the pivot to be put in place. Facebook’s management team won’t drop the ball between now and the pivot.

    More information

    A privacy-focused vision for social networking by Mark Zuckerberg – shared on his facebook page.

    Facebook’s pivot must be viewed with scepticism | Financial Times

    Facebook’s former chief of security says its privacy pivot is ‘punting’ on its hardest issues | The Verge

    Facebook’s Biggest Bull Sees Privacy Pivot as Move Against Snap | Bloomberg

    Facebook’s Awkward Pivot to Privacy | Slate

    Facebook’s pivot is bigger than privacy | Axios

    Facebook’s Fake Pivot To Privacy | Forbes – As a social network, Facebook, has 15 million fewer users today than in 2017. During October – December of 2018, 23% of Facebook users in the U.S. showed signs of activity, e.g. updated their status or posted a comment, as compared to 32% at the same time in 2017. In 2016, Facebook accounted for more than half of time spent on social networks, but that figure is anticipated to be 44.6% in 2019, while, for the first time, from 2018 on, it was expected that Facebook usage among the 11-24 demographic – highly coveted by advertisers – would decline.

    Facebook privacy pivot a China-type move, trying to corner the free world: Cyber Guy | Fox Business

    Building your business in Mark’s house | renaissance chambara – on the perils of over-reliance on platforms.

    Facebook and advertising or why Facebook is a dead man walking part III? | renaissance chambara

    Why Facebook is a dead man walking part II? | renaissance chambara

    Why Facebook is a dead man walking | renaissance chambara

    Jargon Watch: context collapse | renaissance chambara

  • Stone Island morphing print + more

    Stone Island morphing, evolving print for its new collection | Dazed – why Stone Island isn’t cited more often as innovators is beyond me. It’s more than a football casual brand. Stone Island morphing print is an extension of the approach that the brand has taken in materials development. It changes technical and aesthetic properties, with one eye on tactical garment detailing.

    Elizabeth Warren plan to break up Amazon, Facebook, Google, big tech – Business Insider – this could get interesting. While Elizabeth Warren won’t be president, her views will help shape Democratic party policy. Big tech’s historically cozy relationship with the Democrats will come under pressure.

    How Makimoto’s Wave Explains the Tsunami of Specialized AI Processors Headed for Market – ExtremeTech – great read and analysis on the current trend of specialised processors for machine learning and crypto currency applications. More on Makimoto’s wave here.

    WHY COMPETITION IN THE POLITICS INDUSTRY IS FAILING AMERICA A strategy for reinvigorating our democracy Katherine M. Gehl and Michael E. Porter | Harvard Business Review – it seemed pertinent to read just as the UK spins out of control on Brexit. I can’t work out if it is consumer behaviour or related to the electoral system. In both the UK and US; they have first past the post systems rather than proportional representation. Proportional representation is more popular in many European countries including Ireland and Germany.

    Huawei seen as better value for money than Apple and Samsung by Brits | YouGov – interesting trade off between low trust but good value

    Eight in 10 Britons rely on cash for everyday payments, report finds | Money | The Guardian – there seems to be a discrepancy between cash infrastructure usage and apparent cash usage? I suspect that card usage must be focused in the large cities and cash usage more popular in smaller towns.

  • Geothermal energy + more things

    Swedish technology could make geothermal energy as mainstream as wind and solar | Quartz – interesting because it deals with the lumpy supply issue of wind and solar in the energy mix. Geothermal energy is closer to the steady production of nuclear or coal fired power stations operated in an optimal manner. Although geothermal energy has been well understood for decades, a key problem has been keeping the fissures open that geothermal energy relies on to create steam.

    UK cash system ‘on the verge of collapse’, report finds | Money | The Guardian – putting the Queen on debit cards anyone?

    Rone artist takeover of hotel site | ABC – right strategic approach to build buzz but wrong vision

    Audi hasn’t forgotten about fuel cells – Roadshow – which makes a lot more infrastructure sense than electric charging due to energy density benefits

    Jibo Is Probably Totally Dead Now – IEEE Spectrum – The servers for Jibo the social robot are apparently shutting down. Multiple owners report that Jibo himself has been delivering the news: “Maybe someday when robots are way more advanced than today, and everyone has them in their homes, you can tell yours that I said hello.” – that’s probably the saddest thing I’ve heard in robotics since I learned about Sony Aibo Mk ! device owners having Shinto funerals for them when they gave up the ghost. It also shows the flaw in cloud connected consumer products

    Europe’s AI start-ups often do not use AI, study finds | Financial Times – Two-fifths of Europe’s artificial intelligence start-ups do not use any AI programs in their products, according to a report that highlights the hype around the technology. The research by London-based investment firm MMC Ventures could not find any evidence, based on public information and interviews with executives, of artificial intelligence applications at 40 per cent of 2,830 AI start-ups in Europe (paywall)

    The Aldi effect: how one discount supermarket transformed the way Britain shops | Business | The Guardian – The checkout assistants, who had been trained to memorise the price of every item in the store, were so fast that shoppers experienced what some would come to call “Aldi panic” – the fear that you cannot pack your goods quickly enough.

    Flickr dumps despised Yahoo login system – CNET – gosh when I remember how controversial the move to Yahoo! ID was for flickr users back in March 2007. It was a defining moment in the community and its obvious that grudge has continued to be held by old skool users

    Huawei Said to Be Preparing to Sue the U.S. Government – The New York Times – interesting move to try and get the US government to show its hand, on the other hand the US government can just go over case studies like T-Mobile and the African Union hacking as evidence

    Revealed: Facebook’s global lobbying against data privacy laws | Technology | The Guardian – Shock horror Facebook lobbyists aren’t just bag carriers but actually do their job

    Bollinger Motors: a Refreshingly Traditional 4×4 Company • Gear Patrol – While other manufacturers fetishize connectivity, Bollinger Motors plans to sever the digital connection. The B1 and B2 won’t offer autonomous capability. There are no current plans for a digital cloud infrastructure. The trucks will have manual windows and door locks. Driving a B1 or B2 won’t be a pure ascetic throwback. You’ll be able to connect your phone to the stereo. But, the goal is to offer an escape. That reads to me like a new definition of automotive luxury.

    UK unicorn Revolut is fighting back after its week from hell | Business Insider – I expect to see many more exposes like this

    Read Pornhub Launches Safe for Work Category that Features Videos without Nudity | Pornhub – interesting that PornHub is branching into SFW (suitable for work) content and that this move seems to be inspired by Starbucks putting a porn filter on its free wifi. Unfortunately Pornhub’s ad vendor Traffic Junky keeps showing NSFW material on the page and you have to wonder about brand safety with Pornhub relying on a creator submitted SFW tag which doesn’t police NSFW content within it. More media related content here.

  • Puma + more news

    Puma Poaches Manchester City Kit Deal From Nike | Business of Fashion – big move by Puma in football, especially considering that all the money is boot sales and Puma is currently a distant number four behind Nike and adidas. New Balance is considerably closer for Puma to reach than the top two. Kit sponsorship deals are self liquidating brand marketing.

    A Perfectly Cromulent Cultural Moment – memes as societal discourse

    A Brief History of Computer Vision (and Convolutional Neural Networks) | Hacker Noon – a great read, it reminded me about the work that search engines like Yahoo! and Google were doing around image recognition back in the day and Virage et al did in the mid-1990s onwards

    Know-It-All Robot Shuts Down Dubious Family Texts – WSJ – which begs the question why Facebook wasn’t here, providing a similar kind of service on its platforms? (Paywall)

    Subaru Recalls Cars to Fix Glitch Possibly Caused by Fabric Softener – WSJ – no you haven’t read the headline wrong, it apparently affects a sensor. The investigative process must have driven the engineers crazy

    Musical.ly, now TikTok, to pay fine to settle FTC allegations | Digital – Ad Age – Social video app Musical.ly, now known as TikTok, agreed to pay $5.7 million to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that it illegally stored data from underage children and refused parents’ requests to delete it.Data collected from children under the age of 13 included names, email addresses and, for a period, user locations, the FTC said. The settlement represents a record penalty under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a 1998 law designed to put parents in charge of what information is collected about their children on the internet.

    Creepy AI Tech From China Can Identify You 50 Meters Away With Your Back Turned, Face Covered – interesting how they are using gait analysis for identification. Of course the way around it is to put something in your shoe. More related posts here

    Prada tries to put luxury’s derailing train back on course | Trendwatching – It’s not hard to see the link between this innovation and recent events in the luxury fashion industry. When it comes to diversity and inclusion, iconic fashion brands have lurched from one epic fail to another recently. Gucci perpetuated blackface via a sweater. Prada itself perpetuated blackface via its window displays. Burberry sent a noose down the runway. Philipp Plein fat-shamed a journalist. D&G offended many in one of its key markets when its ad showed Chinese models struggling to eat spaghetti with chopsticks – Prada is also listed in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange so this makes sense from a shareholder perspective as well

    Who needs malware? IBM says most hackers just PowerShell through boxes now, leaving little in the way of footprints • The Register – running in RAM rather than memory

  • Is there a luxury smartphone segment?

    There are luxury smartphones, but is there a meaningful luxury smartphone segment?

    From Apple’s iPhone price inflation to Huawei and Blackberry’s Porsche Design devices, manufacturers have looked to cater to a ‘luxury’ consumer.

    Prior to this is you had the Vertu phone with its concierge service and niche players like Goldvish catering for the the Gulf based clientele and Russian entrepreneurs. TAG Heuer tried launching its own phone.

    Pierre Cardin approach to licensing

    Prada and Bang & Olufsen had collaborations with Korean manufacturers. Even Dolce & Gabbana allowed their names to be used on a gold anodised Motorola RAZR. But these brand licensing deals rather like what Pierre Cardin were famous for in the 1970s and 80s.

    There was little input in the product beyond doing a launch.

    Luxury is an attachment

    Luxury brands have been smart enough to jump on the tech bandwagon in their product accessories. I used to have a Coach-made pouch for my Palm V courtesy of Sun Microsystems that I got given as part of a conference goody bag. (The dot-com era meant that money was thrown around willy-nilly).

    There were a variety slide in pouches from the likes of Louis Vuitton for Blackberry devices and Apple iPhones respectively. This then evolved into cases like Moschino’s famous ‘McDonald’s fries’ box.

    moschino

    Where’s the missing space?

    We know that China has become the workshop of the world. We know that Qualcomm’s reference designs, Google’s Android and Jolla’s Sailfish OS make smartphones easy (relatively speaking) to roll out.

    We also know that luxury firms are not afraid of:

    • Global supply chains and manufacturing in China
    • Attempting to step into complex manufacturing (like Louis Vuitton and Montblanc’s entry into watchmaking) or to do technology

    One only has to look at connected watches from the likes of Breitling or Louis Vuitton. Montblanc’s e-strap was way ahead of Sony’s WENA Wrist Pro Smart Watch Band.

    We know that luxury brands have moved away from the the stereotypical luxury buyer being an older western person of means to a younger Asian person with family money. That’s why we’ve seen the coalescence of streetwear and luxury brands.

    So where is the luxury smartphone? And why aren’t luxury brands embracing the space?

    Price elasticity

    I suspect that the issue is technology isn’t price elastic in the same way that luxury product categories are. Technology products by their nature are ephemeral. The benefits of technology products depends on network effects rather than exclusivity.

    In his blog post, Is the pace of technology adoption really speeding up? Nigel Scott put together evidence to show that price points and technology adoption are intrinsically linked. We are not in a state of constant acceleration of technology adoption, but instead only adopt it when the price is right.

    It would be reasonable to assume from this work that there is an inelasticity in technology pricing that makes luxury smartphones hard to sustain. It also explains why relatively low price accessories make more sense than ‘luxury’ smartphones. This seems to be a conclusion that Apple has some to (at least in China). It has rolled out discounts through third party channel members and made devices cheaper to purchase with zero interest financing.

    This makes the moves by Huawei and Samsung beyond Apple pricing with their latest phone launches a bit odd and a definite move to define a luxury smartphone segment. These must be halo effect handsets with no expectation of real profitable production; rather like Ford’s special cars like the GT-40. More luxury related posts here.