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.

  • Samsung 5G + more things

    Internesting focus: Samsung 5G, machine learning and other emerging technology – Samsung pledges to invest $22B in AI, 5G and other emerging technologies – SiliconANGLE – plan to invest $22 billion in emerging fields such as artificial intelligence over the next three years. The effort will be driven primarily by the conglomerate’s Samsung Electronics Co Ltd arm, which makes its popular mobile devices. Last quarter, the handset maker saw profits decline for the first time in nearly two years due to stagnating smartphone sales. Investing more in emerging technologies could help Samsung generate new growth on the long term – the Samsung 5G and machine learning problem is the Chinese government and the limitless resources it will put behind Huawei and their peers. More Samsung content here.

    Save Sarah Jeong! And Kevin Williamson, Quinn Norton, and Joy Reid Too | WIRED – my comment: I agree that Ms Jeong has a right to an opinion. She has a right to a bad day. However when she weighed into the Naomi Wu / Vice Media dispute; her contribution damaged some of the feminist and progressive viewpoints that she herself supports. As an international Wired subscriber I find it difficult to support her particularly aggressive form of American privilege. Ms Jeong used her skill in rhetoric to hide her lack of expertise in the legal and online social environment of China.

    ‘Hipster kryptonite’: will CDs ever have a resurgence? | Music | The Guardian – interesting read. I have listened to CDs and have them, but preferred to DJ with vinyl for tactile reasons. The article fails to ask whats next. We’ve got a generation coming through with Spotify with a more passive, casual relationship to music that we haven’t seen before. There has always been people who liked music but bought few if any recordings. We haven’t seen it on the scale that we see with the Spotify generation. Music becomes a utility like water, electricity or mobile data. Since music tends to be about playlists now the artist’s brand becomes less important. Festivals provide the buzz of live music for generation Spotify but they can dip in and out moving from one tent to another. They won’t support live acts in local concert halls, go to local clubs to support local DJs or have eclectic musical libraries

    The UK Top 40 will never be the same | British GQ – For a stream to qualify as a sale, it has to play for at least 30 seconds. Most listeners will abandon anything too jarringly different before then, so there’s an incentive for artists to draw on a small pool of bankable writers, producers and styles. “I call it the shit-click factor,” says Masterton. “If a record is too challenging, then people will say, ‘What’s this? It’s shit,’ and click onto the next one. There used to be room on the charts for something dynamic and exciting such as the Arctic Monkeys. I can’t see the circumstances right now where that could happen.”

    Rock is the new jazz and vinyl’s misleading revival: 5 things I’ve learned as Guardian music editor | The Guardian  – Technology has vastly increased what record companies know about listeners and their listening habits, just as it has increased what newspapers know about their readers and their reading habits. And the results of this – on both parts – can be pernicious. At our end, it’s the reason why we get complaints about endless stories about Adele and Beyoncé and Kanye West. Why do we run them? Because people read them. Whereas very few people read stories about the latest underground band we want to rave about. And in music, that knowledge has resulted in commercial music, more than ever before, being made to a formula

    Tymbals – #edge @growth – interesting online tool

    ITV joins Hollywood giants to back video streaming service for mobiles | The Guardian – ok what am I missing here, streaming services are already on mobile and also offer side loading to deal with network quality issues

    Say Hello to the New Editor | The new Gutenberg editing experience – interesting changes that will make themes less rigid

  • The Internet of Stupid Things

    The internet of stupid things is a more charitable phrase for what many consumers call the Internet of Shit. Yes lots of products can be internet enabled, but should they be? There is a mix of challenges that result in products which fall into the following two categories:

    • Products that are internet enabled but shouldn’t be – the Happy Fork or the Griffin Smart Toaster being classic examples. I found the Griffin Smart Toaster particularly disappointing as the company’s products such as the PowerMate are generally really good. It doesn’t take the greatest imagination to see how a smart toaster could even be hacked; causing a fire – hence the internet of stupid things. Why do household appliances really need to be attached to technology. Teasmades woke you up and made a mug of tea for you to have first thing. This was a product that reached peak popularity in the 1960s and 1970s – well before cloud services.
    • Products that would be benefit from tech, but shouldn’t rely on the the cloud. I’d argue that Nest would fit in this category where cloud outages could have serious impacts on the consumer. American Nest customers have had some hard winter nights when their Nest control system went down due to cloud outages. There was no off-cloud or manual control mode that the Nest devices could take advantage of.

    It is interesting to see that Li & Fung (who are famous for global supply chain management provided to western brands and retailers) are involved in this video. It is also interesting that they are taking such a proactive view on experience design education.

    The qualitative design research Li & Fung did on skiing wearables for a client – made me wonder what value do Li & Fung’s clients bring to the table. More on design here.

  • Kevin King + more things

    Digital Chief Kevin King Quits Edelman After 14 Years – More recently, sources familiar with the situation also point to ongoing questions regarding the agency’s investment priorities. Famously, Edelman has hired more than 600 creatives and planners over the last three years, in a bid to better compete with agencies across the paid and earned media spectrum – I don’t know Kevin King, but I do know that he was a long term fixture at Edelman and helped build their digital capability. Kevin King will likely turn up at one of the new agency groups in the near future – Edelman non-compete clause allowing. More Edelman related content here.

    CSL on Fifa 19: not quite fantasy football but you can see why the China league is joining the EA party | South China Morning Post – unsurprising given the Chinese government’s aspirations for soccer and the domestic league. EA can’t ignore the size of gaming in China either

    Natural Cycles: ASA investigates marketing for contraception app | The Guardian – The Family Planning Association is also concerned about the app. A spokeswoman said: “The use of the word ‘certified’ suggests that there is independent evidence supporting these claims, whereas in fact the only evidence is from the company itself. It has amassed a vast database, which is very interesting, but that is not the same as verified independent evidence. – and there is the challenge of a blind faith in big data. If they get this wrong the individual consequences are huge

    The Troubled Quest for the Superconducting Wind Turbine – IEEE Spectrum – the interesting bit about about this is that in sea turbines aren’t considered instead of wind. Wind’s economics problem is their consistency, turbines are actually only doing work less than half them time – that’s the problem that’s driving size. If you put the the turbines in the water to take advantage of currents instead energy transference, more consistent power and size becomes a civil engineering problem like a dam rather than space programme style construction. How are super conductors supposed to even work?

    Britain’s Fake News Inquiry Says Facebook And Google’s Algorithms Should Be Audited By UK Regulators – if this goes through its the thin end of the wedge. The UK is much more beholden to commercial interests than even the US. The record industry the the English Premier League have managed to bring down the full force of government censorship with the Digital Economy Act. And both Facebook and Alphabet only have themselves to blame. China’s concept of cyber sovereignty starts to look prescient; and we all look as if we might be living in a darker world

  • COSCO Shipping + more things

    COSCO SHIPPING Lines | Customer advisory on network breakdown within America Regions – Customer statement on how their business IT systems were (allegedly hacked and) shut down. COSCO is one of China’s state shipping companies. COSCO is also one of the largest owners of containers in the world. COSCO also owns OCS, the Hong Kong shipping line. More security related content here.

    ITV Self Serve – this could be the equivalent of 1980s era slideshow style cinema ads for your local Indian restaurant. I could see the benefits for estate agent chains, car supermarkets and local hotels. All of which will be reliant on powerful expensive intermediaries (rightmove, autotrader and booking.com respectively)

    Facebook Added Several Creative Tools to Its Ads Manager App – Adweek – reminds me a fair bit of percolate’s editing features

    Hollywood Marketing Firm Ant Farm Is Shuttering | Hollywood Reporter  – Omnicom, an advertising and media holdings conglomerate, is seeking to shed any venture that doesn’t have a substantial return on investment, or a 25 percent margin. “Omnicom is having a tough go, and they didn’t think they [Ant Farm] was core to their strategy,” said one insider.

    Why Monocle shuns social media in favour of going swimming with its readers | The Drum – contrarian strategy in action

    Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone (RACE) – Federal Business Opportunities: Opportunities – interesting project, there is a tension between this and the US law enforcement community’s concern about ‘going dark’

    China economic analysis by Martin Wolff | FT – mix of rising debt, slower growth and lower than needed domestic consumption

    Facebook stock plummets after warning of slower revenue growth – Axios – most of the growth now must be in the developing world

    Apple Is in Danger of Abandoning Creative Pros – ExtremeTech – “You will see us do more in the pro area,” CEO Tim Cook said back in early 2017 at a shareholder meeting, in a response to a question about the Mac Pro. “The pro area is very important to us. The creative area is very important to us in particular.” I still don’t doubt the company’s commitment. But I’m certainly disturbed by its inability to execute lately.

    Molecular clock chip promises improved smartphone navigation | eeNews Europe – huge for navigation and time stamped applications

    The man who invented the self-driving car (in 1986) – POLITICO – interesting reflection on where machine learning has been before

    There is no precedent—a president sides with America’s enemies – interesting if optimistic take on the rise of China. I think that the west’s beliefs have been shown to be malleable over the past couple of decades

    Understanding multimodality: An analysis of early JUMP users – drives overall app use, cannibalises short distance drives

    Before scooter shares, The Sharper Image was selling Razors to tech workers — Quartz – circular innovation in action. I remember the first person I saw with a micro-scooter was a German freelancer that we had in the office. It made him look like a knob as he tried to ride it through Covent Garden during the dot com boom. When working on Genie (a still birth mobile internet product that was extended out of a trial proof of concept) we had lots of them all over the office. The bag that the scooter came in was a solid cotton canvas duffle that I still have. As far as I remember I only took the bag and there was a load of these scooters sitting folded up and unloved in a cupboard in the back of the office when I left a year or so later

    WPP courts Chinese tech giants‎ Alibaba and Tencent over $2.5bn deal – if they wait until Brexit drops, Alibaba and Tencent could push through a tricky purchase easily

    The Chinese Communist party entangles big tech | Financial Times – there’s some antitrust arguments the west can easily make

    Multinational brands predict higher spend on influencer marketing | PR Week – not sure why at the moment, where is the business case?

    Amazon advertising is working directly with brands now, cutting out ad agencies – Digiday – this is similar to what Baidu, Sina and Tencent do in China.

  • The Heat & more stuff

    The heat. At least in Hong Kong I lived with air conditioning, but there is no respite from the heat in London. In my area of London there hasn’t been much of a breeze either, the heat has been inescapable.  At least my music needed to be cool, and I reached back to nu-disco and space disco over the past few years. If there was one tune of the week it was this on

    Watch Kraftwerk Perform a Real-Time Duet with a German Astronaut Living on the International Space Station | Open Culture – literally out of this world. Kraftwerk pushing performance innovation after five decades.

    Carver M-500t power amplifier at the top

    I still lust after Ferris Bueller’s Carver M-500t power amplifier (on the top in the screen shot above), E-mu Systems Emulator II sampler and his l33t maker skills. Check out this blog that collated all the immense taste that went into his bedroom design: TimLybarger.com: Ferris Bueller’s Bedroom

    Scooter is one of those guilty secrets with catchy melodies and nonsensical lyrics that confound comprehension for English speakers. It was unusual to hear ‘How Much Is The Fish ‘ played on the piano and its a pleasant surprise. Scheps is better known as a classical pianist in Germany and has brand sponsorship deals with Audi and Chopard – so a world away from the image of Scooter.

    Here is the original for comparison purposes….

    As a student of Silicon Valley history, I was aware of General Magic. It is now getting a well deserved documentary about it. General Magic tried to build the predecessor of the Palm PDA and modern smartphones, before the the internet wi-fi and very nascent cellular networks. I’d heard of some people using them as a desk phone replacement

    Here’s the trailer

    Here is the documentary’s website

    Here is a guide to their DataRover 840F. Check out the skeuomorphic interface that is reminiscent of Microsoft Bob. Stylistically the fonts, design details and Easter eggs reminded me of the early Macs that I used. This isn’t surprising as it was started by Mac veterans.  Why is General Magic important now? Like the later PayPal mafia the General Magic alumni have been all over Silicon Valley developing some the most successful products and services. More on technology here.