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.

  • Keyboardio + more news

    Keyboardio Blog — December 2018: A startling discovery – one of the worst tales I’ve heard about manufacturing in Shenzhen; this is off-the-hook. Keyboardio have been extraordinarily unlucky. Keyboardio are famous for making custom mechanical keyboards

    Volkswagen ‘readies to write off’ $300m investment in Israeli ride-hailing service Gett – Business – Haaretz.com – digital is a winner takes all environment, or at best an 80-20 duopoly. But I still reckon Uber’s model is BS because they still aren’t profitable. It is an arbitrage play that has failed because it requires public transport to be put out of business.

    Influencers Are Faking Brand Deals – The Atlantic – sounds like a cargo cult, but on social media. Presumably they think some lower tier brands will be impressed and offer them a real deal.

    Ex-Microsoft Intern: Google Deliberately Crippled Edge Browser | ExtremeTech – interesting that Microsoft staff are ascribing behaviour (product bundling) to Google that they did with Microsoft Explorer. Although it also wouldn’t surprise me if they were right on this occasion.

    This Health Startup Won Big Government Deals—But Inside, Doctors Flagged Problems | Forbes – interesting inside tale of Babylon Health. Interesting especially in the light of IBM Watson Health’s failure

    Defiant Xi Jinping Says No One Can Dictate Reforms to China – Bloomberg – depending how you read this statement “No one is in the position to dictate to the Chinese people what should and should not be done.” This could be defending legitimacy of CCP AND OR Chinese firms and people can do what they like abroad with impunity

    Xi Jinping’s Strongman Rule Comes Under Fire as China Celebrates Deng’s Reforms – WSJ – Xi will never be as good as Deng, just like his Dad wasn’t

    Netflix’s Movie Blitz Takes Aim at Hollywood’s Heart – The New York Times – it reminds me a bit of the ‘New Hollywood’ movement of the 1970s (paywall)

  • Dekotora & things that made last week

    Apple’s team in Japan hit it out of the park with this iPhone XS ad that tells the story of a dekotora lorry christened Lady Misaki. Dekotora is a culture of truck modification, turning the humble Hino or Mitsubishi cab into a LED and burnished stainless steel sculpture. Dekotora is a loan word from the English ‘decorated truck’. It came out of a Japanese TV series shown in the 1970s called Truck Rascals that was based on Smokey & The Bandit. Drivers thought that they might appear in future productions, it then became a way of life. More on Japanese life here.

    https://youtu.be/AvTd2FnF2sc

    Sky and Cassetteboy put their opinion over on whether Die Hard is a Christmas film or not… Bruce Willis doesn’t think that its a Christmas movie, but is instead a movie that happens to occur in the run up to the Christmas holidays

    Nvidia shows off a ‘style based generator architecture for generative adversarial networks’ or star power in Hollywood could be disrupted pretty soon….

    Ad for Shopee featuring K-pop band Blackpink pulled off air in Indonesia – Mumbrella Asia – hallyu or Korean culture started to do really well in the Middle East and Indonesia over a decade ago as their dramas lacked the kind of sexual scenes that you saw in Hollywood productions. However as K-pop has stylised itself around modern R&B it has become progressively more sexualised and both Indonesian and Malaysian Islam has started to look more like the Arab interpretation of the religion rather than the historical live-and-let-live attitude. So it was inevitable that something like this was bound to happen.

    Publicis Groupe’s annual holiday message has made a tongue-in-cheek reference to the unpopularity of its artificial intelligence-powered platform Marcel. The claim about it’s timesheet capabilities is interesting. I do wonder if the adoption figures aren’t great, this ad could backfire.

  • New Yorks information for Amazon + more

    New Yorks information for Amazon – crazy number of data points and a must see for any planner looking at campaigns targeting New Yorkers (PDF). From a more sinister point of view about New Yorks information for Amazon – it shows a corporate culture that’s out of control.

    Marriott Data Breach Is Traced to Chinese Hackers as U.S. Readies Crackdown on Beijing – The New York Times – The Trump administration also plans to declassify intelligence reports to reveal Chinese efforts dating to at least 2014 to build a database containing names of executives and American government officials with security clearances – (paywall)

    ‘Agencies are shitting themselves’: SCA dean Marc Lewis on tutoring for today’s ad world | The Drum One of the biggest pitfalls in the industry is “worshipping at the altar of wanky new tech”

    Just who is Huawei listening to? | Business | The Sunday Times – “In the event of an international crisis — say, if the Chinese were to invade Taiwan — if you own a fleet of thousands and thousands of routers, you can launch service-denial attacks on a massive scale,” said Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University. “You can potentially make the internet unavailable for days or weeks.”

    A bunch of millennials explained in a survey why they despise phone calls – BGR – basically poor social skills

    Researchers Found a Way to Shrink a Supercomputer to the Size of a Laptop | Futurism – interesting, though parallelism presents problems for software

    Honda, CalTech and NASA’s JPL might have a real alternative to Li-ion batteries – Roadshow – great opportunity in terms of energy density but copper and more particularly lanthanum are a materials supply chain bottle neck. One can see how China disrupted Japan’s access to rare metals years ago which affected the use of magnets in high-technology products

    The Chinese Social Network – Hacker Noon – the story of Pony Ma

    Jack Poulson, ex Google, says management obsessed with stopping leaks – Business Insider – indicating a crisis in culture and leadership. The way Google is dealing with it is by stopping people knowing about the issues

    More technology related content here.

  • Most popular blog posts of 2018

    It’s that time of year again when I reflect on the things that I’ve done and what I can learn from the year. I wanted to get this out there whilst I still have a bit of respite from the holiday cheer. 

    In reverse order

    Reuse, re-edit and remix – the quality and impact of creative is a key question that is being asked at the moment. Marketers have finally woken up to the power of brand building as well as performance media. Which then begs the question what’s the minimum viable creative tweaks to effective creative that can be used?

    Apple – special event (September 2018) – trying to cut through the formulaic delivery of the company’s new products to understand what where the key salient points. I was surprised that this generated far more interest than a similar keynote at Apple WWDC which was much more interesting. 

    Enron and the net in 2000 – pre-Facebook the net was a much more decentralised place. Enron failed in their vision of a real time market for broadband, so I decided to work out what happened to some of their ‘partners’ at the time.

    Ramblings on consumption – this started off as a collection of disjointed notes I made whilst travelling to see the family in Ireland 

    Recommendations for a marketers bookshelf – you can’t dismiss the power of a good listicle. 

    This wasn’t the internet we envisaged – looking at the media of the 1990s we were promised an immersive visually stimulating interactive experience. Unfortunately we ended up with Instagramers and Facebook

    Throwback gadget: Bose Wave system – I still use a Bose Wave stereo due to the big sound that you get from a compact size. Its modular nature meant that it has weathered the iPod, DAB broadcast radio and internet streaming extremely well

    Jargon watch: zhuang bi (装b) – an exploration into Chinese l33tspeak. 

    Oprah time: Operation Elop – Nokia accounted for 25% of the Finnish economy at one stage and then spectacularly fell from grace, with the iconic phone business being sold to Microsoft. Yet the definitive history of what happened has never been licensed and translated by business publishers. I got to read a crowdsourced translation instead. 

    Things I’d like to see in 2018 – included in this list was innovation in smartphone experience (which we don’t have at the moment), a leaner web and critical thinking around the hype of crypto currencies. 

    My web toolbox – some of the tools that I was using in early July this year. 

    How to use RSS – with so many people now getting algorithmically selected, part of the solution is by going back to RSS and Atom feeds from trusted sites. So I threw together a guide to getting started with Newsblur

    The advertising industry post prompted by WPP’s 2017 financial results – how much of WPP’s difficulties are due to changes in the client and media environment versus WPP’s business?

    Social networks 10 years ago – 2018 will be looked back on in internet history as when the elites finally woke up to the dominance (ex-China) of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. Looking back at 2008, it is hard to believe how much the social network eco-system changed

    Mercedes Benz China Syndrome – Chinese netizens are still jumping the Great Firewall to vilify western brands who reflect views that ‘offend the Chinese people’ – even when this content is aimed at non-Chinese audiences. Mercedes’ offence was an Instagram image with one of their cars and a quote from the exiled Dalai Lama. Dolce & Gabbana didn’t learn from the Mercedes experience. Mercedes and other brands saw the Chinese government get involved in what would be considered to be extra-territorial exceptionism. This mirrors and contrasts with the Chinese reaction to the Canadian arrest of Meng Wanzhou. The Chinese foreign ministry accused the US and Canadian governments of overreach. 

    Oprah time: Directorate S by Steve Coll – book review of Directorate S which discusses the complex relationship between the US war on terror and Pakistan

    Personal online brand – the perennial debate of should you own your own site or build your reputation on someone else’s platform?

    Out and about: Sicario 2: Soldado – I was so looking to this film and felt so disappointed when I got to watch it and was presented with a grand vision at the start that quickly fizzles out to a mediocre homage of the original, with one eye on building a franchise. 

    Dawns Mine Crystal by Yunchul Kim at Korean Cultural Centre – amazing art installation that I was fortunate to see. It moulded art and science as part of the Art @CERN project. 

    The influencers post – a post on the irrational exuberance associated with influencer marketing. I suspect that we’re close to peak influence.

    Chinese smartphone eco-system for beginners – I presume that its very Googleable – this post was inspired and featured a video on smartphones in China by Winston Sterzel earlier in the year. I then put accompanying background information to give it more context for marketers. China is changing a lot, one consequence of this is that Winston is looking to move to the US and visit China occasionally rather than live there, like he has been for the past decade.

    The long and the BBH of it – Binet’s The Long and the Short of it has been a strategists go to reference for a while. BBH pointed out the benefits of expanding the data set. However its easier to snipe from the sidelines rather than doing something meaningful about it.

    App constellations 2018 research – this built on research that I had done in 2014 and 2016. It was the most trafficked post for the first half of the year. It was also the post that took me the longest to research and I managed to lose my archive data file soon afterwards. I will revisit it, but will have to try and pull the data from these images for the basic numbers!

    Innovation: a few thoughts – this post came from the coalescence of many things that were kicking around in August and early September. My friend Nigel Scott had come up with some interesting research on venture capitalists; disabusing any illusion of science in their investment selection. You had ‘struggle porn’ being championed on LinkedIn; which made the wrong correlation between effort and innovation. Finally you have big technology companies with an inflated sense of their manifest destiny a la ‘software is eating the world’ and the hubris of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tesla and Apple. I pulled ideas from across the board, borrowing a lot from Kevin Kelly’s concept of The Technium. 

    What if stories are brain code – storytelling is treated as a science within the creative  sector. The reality is that its based a pretty shaky base. Whilst the formulation of storytelling is suspect; psychological research indicates that stories are even more powerful than we previously realised. 

    Some data points

    30 percent of the top posts from the first half of the year made the cut through the whole of the year, which surprised me as I thought that they would benefit from additional ‘evergreen’ search traffic.  

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    Lessons learned

    • There is still an interest in long form content and research
    • There was less of an interest this year in purely social platform based subject matter materials
    • Evergreen content doesn’t seem to work as well as previously

  • Meng Wenzhou & things from last week

    Meng Wanzhou and China

    I’ve made a conscious decision to ignore Sabrina Meng Wanzhou and her forthcoming extradition to the US. I had met Meng Wenzhou when she was called Cathy. I also decided to ignore Starwood’s database of really private data allegedly being pwnd by Chinese intelligence. Unsurprisingly Brexit – which at the moment looks like an Austin Allegro hitting a brick wall at a moderate speed, collapsing like a crisp packet and killing its union jack clad occupants

    On to things that made up my week:

    Back in the day, consumer products brands used to do a lot of advertising to build brand equity. It is interesting that marketing thinking is starting to sway back to that being a good idea again. Reality check, it never was a bad idea, but marketers focused too much on short term effectiveness in isolation. Agencies were fine with this due to the profits available on digital media sales.

    An example of the power in brand advertising was work by McCann Worldgroup in Hong Kong for Nescafe Black. Which paid homage to a well known hair dye advert from the 1980s. Bigen hair dye went big on reach and repetition during the 1980s; its recall and memorability helps Nescafe’s ad work 30 years later. Actor Kenneth Tsang is probably not disappointed by the ongoing work either.

    This video on Amazon sponsored brands ad format reminds me a lot of the arbitrage opportunities that used to be common in early search advertising. It goes to underscore how much Amazon has taken away from Google et al in terms of product and shopping related searches.

    MIT released a video on how self driving cars can work on country roads (without the complex prebuilt LIDAR maps associated with current driverless cars efforts)

    Neopets was one of them child oriented social environments with games of a similar vintage to Habbo Hotel and Disney’s Club Penguin. It also has an odd startup story behind it. Watch the video and be amazed. More online related stories here.

    Wu-Tang Clan celebrate the 25th anniversary of their break out album 36 Chambers  with an appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk concert.