Category: web of no web | 無處不在的技術 | 보급 기술 | 普及したテクノロジー

The web of no web came out of a course that I taught at the La Salle School of Business at the University Ramon Llull in Barcelona on interactive media to a bunch of Spanish executive MBA students. The university wanted an expert from industry and they happened to find me by happenstance. I remember contact was made via LinkedIn.

I spent a couple of weeks putting together a course. But I didn’t find material that covered many of things that I thought were important and happening around us. They had been percolating around the back of my mind at the time as I saw connections between a number of technologies that were fostering a new direction. Terms like web 2.0 and where 2.0 covered contributing factors, but were too silo-ed

So far people’s online experience had been mediated through a web browser or an email client. But that was changing, VR wasn’t successful at the time but it was interesting. More importantly the real world and the online world were coming together. We had:

Mobile connectivity and wi-fi
QRcodes
SMS to Twitter publishing at the time
You could phone up Google to do searches (in the US)
Digital integration in geocaching as a hobby
The Nintendo Wii controller allowed us to interact with media in new ways
Shazam would listen to music and tell you what song it was
Where 2.0: Flickr maps, Nokia maps, Yahoo!’s Fireeagle and Dopplr – integrated location with online
Smartphones seemed to have moved beyond business users

Charlene Li described the future of social networks as ‘being like air’, being all around us. So I wrapped up all in an idea called web of no web. I was heavily influenced by Bruce Lee’s description of jeet kune do – ‘using way as no way’ and ‘having no limitation as limitation’. That’s where the terminology that I used came from. This seemed to chime with the ideas that I was seeing and tried to capture.

Revenge on society + more stuff
Revenge on society

China has had a number of ‘lone wolf’ attacks on the public all of which had a common theme of ‘revenge on society’. It might be that the perpetrator had economic setbacks or a sense of being wronged by a government decision that set them on this direction.

The profiles of the attackers are often middle-aged men. The revenge on society attacks all seem to be driven by people who feel that they have little to lose. While attacks that meet the revenge on society profile have been documented at least as far back as 2004. There seems to have been an acceleration in the occurrence of revenge on society attacks in 2024. Unlike Uighur related incidents of 2013 and 2014, there isn’t a particular group that China can suppress to reduce the incidents easily. Revenge on society attacks are more likely to be dealt with using mass-population surveillance and reporting a la Minority Report’s preventative crime approach and raised security.

Raising security against revenge on society attacks requires a mix of infrastructure investment like bollards

A Suzhou school bus was attacked by a knife-wielding attacker looking to kill and maim Japanese children. He killed the school bus attendant who defended the children from his attack.

September 18th saw a 10-year old Japanese child was stabbed to death by a 44 year-old man. Anti-Japanese sentiment is fanned by Chinese government rhetoric and a constant barrage of content on Chinese media. The attack happened in Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong.

On September 31th, 3 were killed and 15 injured by a revenge on society attacker in a Shanghai branch of Walmart. He had been arrested by police who said that he was angry due to a personal financial dispute.

The following day on October 1st, while most were celebrating China’s national day holiday – Chinese man conducted a revenge on society attack in Zurich, Switzerland. He attacked and injured three children near a daycare centre. He was a postgraduate student who publicly expressed extremist nationalist views.

A 60-year old man convicted of previous attacks stabbed two students and one woman outside a primary school in Guangzhou on October 8th.

On October 28th, a 50 year old man attacked and injured three children and two adults in Beijing in an attack that had all the hallmarks of revenge on society.

A revenge on society attack on November 11th killed 35 people and injured 43 more because the 62-year old attacker was unhappy with his divorce settlement. The Chinese government attempted a news blackout of the incident. The incident happened in Zhuhai, a city just across the border from Macau.

On November 16th, a Wuxi third level education college was the site of an revenge on society incident that killed eight people with a knife attack and 17 others injured. A 21 year old male was detained.

On November 19th, the 39 year-old perpetrator drove into students arriving at a primary school in Changde. He was eventually stopped and beaten by a crowd until being taken into custody by the police.

Words of the Week: “Revenge on Society” Attacks Lead to Government Monitoring of “Individuals With ‘Four Lacks and Five Frustrations’” (四无五失人员, sìwú wǔshī rényuán) | China Digital Times

Consumer behaviour

How many toys is too many? | Vox – One reader told Vox recently that her family was “absolutely drowning in toys.” And while adults have been complaining about kids’ junk for generations (please see my father’s fruitless search for my brother’s one-inch-long toy wrench in Los Angeles International Airport circa 1992), many millennial and Gen X parents have the sense that something is different now — that kids have more toys than in past decades, and that they seem to arrive in ways Randall describes as “unintentional” and Parents Are Stressed About Playtime. Their Anxiety Is a Goldmine. – WSJ – same as it ever was

Could shifting beauty standards have predicted Trump’s win? | Dazed

Economics

Putin’s «Deathonomics» – Riddle Russia – the Kremlin seriously expects a positive economic outcome from the creation of a high-salaried contract army. If we assume that the number of mobilised and contract-based soldiers ranges from 400,000 to 450,000, then their minimum total allowance will amount to approx. 1 trillion roubles a year. The government will have to allocate about the same amount for compensations in case of killed or wounded soldiers, even if there are 50,000 or 100,000 such people in a year. These sums represent nearly 10% of pre-war federal spending, and some people are already predicting the emergence of a social group of «the young rich» and even making plans for how this money will contribute to long-term investment programmes. – Deathonomics is allowing the Russian government to shape its population pyramid to reduce the burden of the aging population on the economy.

The costs of maritime supply chain disruptions: The case of the Suez Canal blockage by the ‘Ever Given’ megaship – ScienceDirect

Endless business closures, through the eyes of a Chinese consumer | Following the Yuan

Ideas

If an alien could speak, could we understand it? – Leeds Trinity University Research Portal

How These Men Left the Manosphere — and Why Some May Never | Teen Vogue – “The more you shame people for what they’re espousing, the more they’re driven underground deeper into online communities who welcome them with open arms and say, ‘this is where you belong. If those people don’t understand you, they’re just a bunch of triggered snowflakes or whatever,’” Miller-Idriss says. Another tactic, she says, is to point out the commercialization of the manosphere in which everything is for sale including courses, supplements, and crypto-currencies. Pointing out the profit motive of these influencers can be effective, Miller-Idriss says.

That’s part of what got Tom out of the manosphere, which he says he fell into when he was 27, after leaving the Army and finding himself “stuck trying to look for work consistently, having basically no social support, having no options other than to just work, pay bills, work, pay bills, in an increasingly difficult world to do that.” He was lonely, he says, and the influencers he followed had some pretty good talking points, he thought: men were more affected by things like incarceration rates, workplace death and injury rates, and mental health and no one was taking it seriously.

“The more you shame people for what they’re espousing, the more they’re driven underground deeper into online communities who welcome them with open arms.” Pasha Dashtgard, an assistant professor at the Polarization & Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, says this is a common entry point. “They start their conversations with, ‘men are in crisis and no one’s talking about it. It’s like, that’s true, men are in crisis and we should be talking about it… [but] that opens up, ideologically, the door for them to be like ‘and now, here are the solutions’ and it’s this horrible, toxic nonsense.” But after after a couple months in the manosphere, Tom realized that, while men’s health is a serious subject, he wouldn’t find the answers he was looking for in the manosphere, which was overrun by what he calls “grifters, frauds, or sort of religious zealots.” Now, Tom says he doesn’t actively use the label ‘feminist’ but “considers it part of my worldview.”

Indonesia

Indonesia rejects Apple’s $100 million investment offer | Techxplore

Luxury

From Edition to Ritz Carlton, how global luxury hotels are localizing their strategies amid expansion | Jing Daily – interesting comment on staff as ‘intelligence agent’

Marketing

Is there a future for personalisation? | WARC – Right person, right place, right time: for over a decade this idea has been an ideal in advertising. But an alternative point of view is that personalisation is self-defeating because advertisers chase a moving target when they are unable to prove return on investment.

Patagonia’s Restructuring Has Led to Employee Fallout – Business Insider – Patagonia’s historic worker commitment is less well known than it’s sustainability credentials which probably explains why recent moves haven’t led to the kind of brand dissonance amongst consumers that the likes of Bud Light or Nike experienced.

Jaguar rebrand

Jaguar’s teaser campaign for its rebrand and new vehicle model prompted immediate feedback. I am not clear on what the ask was by the marketing team, so have kept an open mind. Here offered without comment are some of the related commentary:
Media

Baidu Q3 2024 earnings| CNBC – the interesting bits in here are static online marketing business revenue and increasing AI / cloud services business

AI-Powered Buzzfeed Ads Suggest You Buy Hat of Man Who Died by Suicide

The Rise, Fall, and (Slight) Rise of DVDs. A Statistical Analysis

Online

How a 15-Year-Old Gamer Became the Patron Saint of the Internet | WIRED

The Fantasy of Cozy Tech | The New Yorker – cozy gaming came from COVID and Animal Crossing – gaming and cute

Let’s check in on MrBeast – by Taylor Lorenz – User Mag

Retailing

Ted Baker relaunches website in the UK – Retail Gazette

Security

China’s Surveillance State Is Selling Citizen Data as a Side Hustle | WIRED

Philippines recruits civilian tech talent to fend off cyber attacks – Rest of World

How Silicon Valley is prepping for War – by Michael Spencer

Software

Apple Working on ‘LLM Siri’ for 2026 Launch – MacRumors

HarperCollins Confirms It Has a Deal to Sell Authors’ Work to AI Company

Style

Streetwear Has Lost Its Popularity. Is That a Good Thing? | HighSnobriety – if it kills drop queues I’ll be happy

Technology

Qualcomm – Falling Behind or Laying in Wait? | Digits to Dollars

Telecoms

I Don’t Own a Cellphone. Can This Privacy-Focused Network Change That?

Web-of-no-web

Meta brings certain AI features to Ray-Ban Meta glasses in Europe | TechCrunch

Receiver enables dead reckoning when GPS/GNSS fails | EE News
December 8, 2024
Pagers + more things
Pagers

Pagers went back into the news recently with Hizbollah’s exploding pagers. YouTuber Perun has done a really good run down of what happened.

Based on Google Analytics information about my readership the idea of pagers might need an explanation. You’ve probably used a pager already, but not realised it yet.

A restaurant pager from Korean coffee shop / dessert café A Twosome Place.

For instance if you’ve been at a restaurant and given puck that brings when your table is ready, that’s a pager. The reason why its big it to prevent customers stealing them rather than the technology being bulky.

On a telecoms level, it’s a similar principle but on a bigger scale. A transmitter sends out a signal to a particular device. In early commercial pagers launched in the 1960s such as the ‘Bellboy’ service, the device made a noise and you then got to a telephone, phoned up a service centre to receive a message left for you. Over time, the devices shrunk from something the size of a television remote control to even smaller than a box of matches. The limit to how small the devices got depended on display size and battery size. You also got displays that showed a phone number to call back.

By the time I had a pager, they started to get a little bigger again because they had displays that could send both words and numbers. These tended to be shorter than an SMS message and operators used shortcuts for many words in a similar way to instant messaging and text messaging. The key difference was that most messages weren’t frivolous emotional ‘touchbases’ and didnt use emojis.

A Motorola that was of a similar vintage to the one I owned.

When I was in college, cellphones were expensive, but just starting to get cheaper. The electronic pager was a good half-way house. When I was doing course work, I could be reached via my pager number. Recruiters found it easier to get hold of me, which meant I got better jobs during holiday time as a student.

I moved to cellphone after college when I got a deal at Carphone Warehouse. One Motorola Graphite GSM phone which allowed two lines of SMS text to be displayed. I had an plan that included the handset that cost £130 and got 12 months usage. For which I got a monthly allowance of 15 minutes local talk time a month.

I remember getting a call about winning my first agency job, driving down a country road with the phone tucked under my chin as I pulled over to take the call. By this time mobile phones were revolutionising small businesses with tradesmen being able to take their office with them.

The internet and greater data speeds further enhanced that effect.

Pagers still found their place as communications back-up channel in hospitals and some industrial sites. Satellite communications allowed pagers to be reached in places mobile networks haven’t gone, without the high cost of satellite phones.

That being said, the NHS are in the process of getting rid of their pagers after COVID and prior to COVID many treatment teams had already moved to WhatsApp groups on smartphones. Japan had already closed down their last telecoms pager network by the mid-2010s. Satellite two-way pagers are still a niche application for hikers and other outward bound activities.

Perun goes into the reasons why pagers were attractive to Hesbollah:
- They receive and don’t transmit back. (Although there were 2-way pager networks that begat the likes of the BlackBerry device based on the likes of Ericsson’s Mobitex service.)
- The pager doesn’t know your location. It doesn’t have access to GNSS systems like GPS, Beidou, Gallileo or GLONASS. It doesn’t have access to cellular network triangulation. Messages can’t transmit long messages, but you have to assume that messages are sent ‘in the clear’ that is can be read widely.
Consumer behaviour

Yes, CEOs are moving left, but ‘woke capitalism’ is not the whole story | FT

Culture

‘We were cheeky outlaws getting away with it’: the total euphoria of Liverpool’s 90s club scene | The Guardian – maybe one day I will tell my side of this tale. It’s all a bit more nuanced and I was stone cold sober throughout it all, which is a rare perspective.

Economics

Invest 2035: the UK’s modern industrial strategy – GOV.UK

Corporate Germany is on sale | FT

Health

Ukraine’s pioneering virtual reality PTSD therapy | The Counteroffensive

Korea

The sabukaru Guide to Seoul’s PC Room Culture | Sabukaru

Luxury

How luxury priced itself out of the market | FT – brands have tested the elasticity of pricing and pushed beyond the limits for their middle class customer base

Watch-maker Jaeger-LeCoultre expands into fragrances inspired by its Reverso dress watches: Jaeger-LeCoultre fragrances take form | Luxury Daily

Ozempic is transforming your gym | FT, The Vogue Business Spring/Summer 2025 size inclusivity report | Vogue Business – GLP-1s blamed for stalled progress.

Ferrari, Hermès lead global luxury brand growth in 2024: Interbrand | Luxury Daily

What is Chinese style today? | Vogue Business – street style at Shanghai Fashion Week has been low-key. The bold looks of the past have given way to a softer aesthetic that’s more layered and feminine, with nods to Chinese culture and history. This pared-back vibe was also found on the runways. Part of this might be down to a policy led movement against conspicuous consumption typified by Xi Jinping’s ‘common prosperity‘.

Marketing

Adland’s talent spill: Seniors double blocked as ageism, cost-cutting compounded by ‘threatened’ younger managers | Mi3

Where to start with multisensory marketing | WARC – 61% of consumers looking for brands that can “ignite intense emotions”. Immersive experiences that are holistic tap into people’s emotions and linger in the memory. It’s also an opportunity for using powerful storytelling to communicate a brand story.

Media

Tesco to launch location-based self-scanner adverts in stores – Retail Gazette

Everyone is burning out on the news, including journalists – Baekdal

Online

Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids – Hindenburg Research

How Google Influences Public Opinion | HackerNoon

Software

Apple macOS 15 Sequoia is officially UNIX • The Register

Web-of-no-web

Airbus to cut 2500 staff in Space Systems | EE News Europe – “In recent years, the defence and space sector and, thus, our Division have been impacted by a fast changing and very challenging business context with disrupted supply chains, rapid changes in warfare and increasing cost pressure due to budgetary constraints,” said Mike Schoellhorn, CEO of the Airbus Defence and Space business.

Wireless

Boeing plans quantum satellite | EE News Europe

Elon Musk battles Indian billionaires over satellite internet spectrum | FT
October 24, 2024
Cocaine Cowboys + more things

Cocaine Cowboys

Cocaine Cowboys by Nicola Tallant tells the story of the Kinahan organisation. The Kinahan organisation is a group that wholesales and retails illegal drugs in association with other organised crime groups. Tellant explains how deprivation, geography and economic growth fuelled drug trafficking and abuse in Ireland. Isolated council estates and economic hardship drove a heroin epidemic. The subsequent Asian Tiger economy only uplifted young professionals who then were a ripe market for cocaine. Cocaine added to Ireland’s already difficult relationship with alcohol use and abuse.

Crime journalism such as this is popular in Ireland because it is so concentrated through blood and marriage ties. We don’t have the kind of diversity that the British criminal underworld has. This means that it’s much more ‘relevant’ to Irish society.

But the book title itself is very interesting. There is a clear parallel to the scale of the cross-border drug trade between the US and Mexico.

Irish country music star Daniel O’Donnell courtesy of TG4

But there is also an underlying western theme across Irish culture. The vast majority of us are at most a few generations from the farm. We have had hard times which is why country music appealed and even morphed into a localised genre Country and Irish popular in rural areas and amongst lorry drivers (or in American truck drivers that drive ‘semis’.)

Tallant’s stance is definitely anti-Kinahan; but the book title Cocaine Cowboys gives them the hero status and taps deeply into the mainline that the cowboy and related elements like country music have into Irish culture at home and abroad. Cocaine Cowboys might be the inspiration for the next generation to replace the Kinahans.

If you want to know more beyond the book Nicola Tallant and her colleagues at Irish tabloid the Sunday World host a podcast called Crime World.

Branding

Mozilla’s brand update gives its old T-Rex logo a fresh new look – The Verge

China

China threatens Calvin Klein owner with blacklist over Xinjiang cotton | FT

China’s first industrial leases are expiring. Will their holders renew? | South China Morning Post – it will be interesting to see what the Hong Kong tongs do

Consumer behaviour

Death of the corkscrew? Only 27% of young people in UK own one, report says | The Guardian – Prevalence of screw-top bottles and abstinence among young people blamed for falling popularity of gadget

Understanding Desire in the Age of Ozempic – The Atlantic – fascinating study in how GLP-1 treatments are not only reducing the desire for food, but also other products like alcohol and tobacco.

After peak woke, what next? The Economist – in the past decade, a form of wokeness has arisen on the illiberal left which is characterised by extreme pessimism about America and its capacity to make progress, especially on race. According to this view, all the country’s problems are systemic or structural, and the solutions to them are illiberal, including censorship and positive discrimination by race. This wokeness defines people as members of groups in a rigid hierarchy of victims and oppressors. Like the Puritans of old, adherents focus less on workable ideas for reducing discrimination than on publicly rooting out sinful attitudes in themselves and others (especially others). The Economist has analysed how influential these ideas are today by looking at public opinion, the media, publishing, higher education and the corporate world. Using a host of measures, we found that woke peaked in 2021-22 and has since receded. For example, polling by Gallup found that the share of people who worry a great deal about race relations climbed from 17% in 2014 to 48% in 2021, but has since fallen to 35%. Likewise, the term “white privilege” was used 2.5 times for every 1m words written by the New York Times in 2020. Last year it was used 0.4 times per 1m words. – Of course, woke’s failure could be viewed by proponents as a sign of deep-rooted systemic prejudice

Economics

Why Britain has stagnated? | Foundations – this reads true and hits hard. My parents came to the United Kingdom when the motorway network was being built, power stations were being constructed and the first generation of nuclear submarines were being constructed. In London the Victoria line was constructed. Now the UK struggles to build any infrastructure and its strategic industrial capabilities have been hollowed out or disappeared.

FMCG

Unilever moves on ‘sub-par’ marketing | WARC – That means consistent execution in marketing innovation, marketing quality, proposition sharpness, execution of pricing, execution of distribution. Fernandez suggested that, on a scale of 1-10, the business is currently at around six but needs to get to eight or nine (“ten doesn’t exist”). A&P spending is increasing as a proportion of revenue, from 13% in 2022, to 14.3% in 2023, and 15.1% in H1 2024. “There is an implicit recognition that our level of investment was not in line with our ambition of volume growth,” he said. That increased investment is not there to fund a growing volume of marketing content, he added. “I’m much more concerned about the quality of the stuff that we put in the market than the amount”. And that also means a focus on brand-building. “We see other people putting much more focus on promotional pricing,” he said, “but we always will prefer to invest in long-term, equity-building activities.” – CFO burns marketing teams ‘I believe our marketing was subpar”

Hong Kong

Dinner with strangers? Hongkongers craving real-world connections turn to ‘secret’ meet-ups | South China Morning Post – In a tapas restaurant in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay, about 80 people are chatting away on the packed second floor, clinking glasses and sharing small plates while discussing issues ranging from mental health to childhood dreams.

Innovation

How a Chinese billionaire’s Silicon Valley splurge caught the eye of the FBI | FT

Kyoto company developing autofocus glasses for sufferers of presbyopia and other conditions | SoraNews24 -Japan News-

Luxury

Burberry shares tumble to 15-year low amid questions over its luxury brand status – Retail Gazette contrast with top-tier luxury brand trajectory: Hermès chief eyes haute couture push as Paris house rides out luxury gloom – but has to wonder about Hermès leaning even further into Chinese market.

Marketing

Is marketing entering its ‘era of less’? | WARC – based on Gartner CMO surveys marketers are increasingly being seen as cost centres and are being asked to do more with less which is affecting mar tech spend, staffing and agency spend.

Colgate-Palmolive: ‘The advertising is working’ | WARC

EZ Newswire Signs Exclusive Distribution Deal with Reuters | Reuters – sounds like a PR placement automation?

What’s fueling America’s Zyn obsession? | On Point

Innovative research that literally put people in the driver’s seat | WARC – More than half of strategists (59%) are integrating AI into their strategy development process in a cautiously progressive way. They need to identify the skills that AI can’t replace, such as getting buy-in for a strategy, and double down on them. Speedy access to research and insight (74%) and streamlining repetitive tasks (74%) are the top opportunities strategists see in leveraging AI in the strategy process.

Future of Strategy 2024: Synthetic data – speedy saviour or another example of the industry’s arrogance? | WARC – it’ll be useful when time is of the essence, and you want to ‘speak’ to people and get their thoughts on your hypotheses, ideas or campaigns. In that scenario, I can see how that approach may replace an ad-hoc focus group set up hastily in the agency’s boardroom. But we’re not here purely to understand people. If the role of communications is to move people emotionally, shouldn’t we also be here to feel people? As Richard Huntington, CSO of Saatchi & Saatchi says: “You can’t feel data.” The beauty of humans (and the beauty of ethnography) is that so often it’s not what we say that powers an ‘insight’ or a strategy, a campaign or some NPD… it’s what people don’t say. It’s the nods and winks, the gestures, the objects with meaning they have in their homes and in their lives. That texture isn’t picked up by a typical conversation – be that with synthetic data or in a focus group. These feelings that are elicited from ethnography are the special sauce that can separate the wheat from the chaff.

Break Through: How new and returning brands can grow with TV – System1 Group

The Rise of The Populist Brand – Eavesdrop

Online

The TikTok, Shein, and Temu Conundrum – by Ivy Yang – TikTok’s defence: Shein and Temu have worse privacy profiles than we do

Launch of Social Web Foundation | Social Web Foundation – set up by the great and the good of web 2.0, notably Tom Coates who brings a wealth of product expertise.

AI Training is Copyright Infringement | Initiative Urheberrecht and The Intelligence Age | Sam Altman

Security

The Netherlands will not back EU-wide screening of app messages – DutchNews.nl

The Pig Butchering Invasion Has Begun | WIRED

Technology

Qualcomm has approached Intel over buy-out | EE News Europe – antitrust related issues around the world

OpenAI Is A Bad Business | Ed Zitron – the economics of generative AI are still bad, despite improvements in hardware design.

How AlphaChip transformed computer chip design – Google DeepMind

Tools

How I Replaced Notion with Reminders, Numbers, and Notes | by Joan Westenberg – this is a prime example of what I have been hearing from other people. I have been using Notes app in particular from the get-go.

Home | LibreOffice – Free and private office suite – Based on OpenOffice – Compatible with Microsoft – I have 35 years of content saved, and LibreOffice can open them all. When you’ve been writing for years, your manuscript formats will often be obsolete (though I’ve tried to make decisions that make my poems available platform agnostic, such as using plaintext, but line breaks and stanza breaks don’t always translate well in markdown). LibreOffice is an incredible tool for opening 25 year old wordperfect files when I need them.

Web-of-no-web

Meta’s Orion smart glasses look like the future of AR – The Verge

Apple Knew Where the Puck Was Going, But Meta Skated There – the PAN or personal area network has been talked about for 20+ years. What this misses is that the Orion glasses were possible thanks to silicon carbide lens which are a non-trivial thing to manufacture at scale

October 15, 2024
Apple Watch Ultra 2
I was fortunate to get an Apple Watch Ultra 2. It is the third Apple Watch that I have owned and the sixth wearable. My previous history in wearables were:

A Yamasa Tokei analogue pedometer (I received it around the time I was in primary school. It came in handy for guesstimating walking distances when I was in the scouts). What I didn’t know at the time is that the 1960s-era interest in pedometers that eventually spawned my device was driven by Japanese interest in combating obesity due to modernisation during the post-war economic miracle.

If you are focusing on your 10,000 steps a day you can thank Dr Yoshiro Hatano and manufacturers like Yamasa who eventually sold their ‘Manpo-kei’ (10,000 step measure) in the west as ‘Manpo-meter’ devices from the 1960s through to the late 1990s.

Nike Fuelband – I really enjoyed the simplicity of this device, but it was very fragile and I ended up going through three devices in a matter of months.

Casio G-Shock+ connected device that was let down by its software, but very much a go-anywhere device.

Polar Loop fitness tracker – it was more reliable than Nike’s Fuelband but I didn’t really enjoy it as device.

Apple Watch series 1 and 2 – I lasted about 48 hours wearing the series 1 Apple Watch, but did better with a series 2 device.

Apple Watch Ultra 2

My expectations have been impacted by poor experiences with earlier devices.

How have I found the Apple Watch Ultra 2?

I have worn tool watches all my adult life, a mix of mechanical dive watches and Casio G-Shocks. That meant that I didn’t think about where I took my watches. Into the shower, or the swimming pool – the watches could take it all in their stride. But the Apple Watch couldn’t.

The Apple Watch Ultra 2 is a classic ‘go anywhere’ watch. It is waterproof like a Casio G-Shock. So fine for swimming, in the shower or scuba diving. Titanium means that it’s hypoallergenic, and corrosion resistant; even more so than most grades of stainless steel. However, if you wear it in the sea or at the swimming pool, rinse the watch in clean fresh water afterwards, like you should do with any other dive watch.

I found the default straps sold with the Apple Watch Ultra 2 were excessively clunky. Awkward to wear and got snagged in random situations. Instead I favoured a Nike Sports silicone band which is ideal for the gym or working in the office.

I bought a cheap clear bumper for the Apple Watch Ultra 2. It keeps fingerprints off the screen and gives items like the buttons and digital crown a modicum of protection from being activated by putting on a jacket as we go into a cooler wetter autumn.

Battery life on it seems to be more generous than the older Apple Watch models I have used and based on what I have seen I think you could get a weekend out of it without a charge.

The ubiquity of Apple watches on the wrists of Londoners mean that this doesn’t attract any good or bad attention.

What’s it like?

Compared to previous Apple watch models I have used the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is faster and more sophisticated. I get the sense that the Apple WatchOS is now supported by less non-health related apps than previously. My watch supports alerts for my train ticket bookings, airline flights and my preferred taxi app.

Part of this might be down to watch might make contextual sense in the 10 second app usage time that a consumer would have. And when does it make sense to just pull the phone out of your pocket.

There isn’t the same lag that made the first series Apple Watch unusable, as the device has become more powerful and more processing happens on the watch. Apple’s health app is more tracking than I need, so I haven’t used it with apps like Strava.

What’s good about it?

All of the Apple watch models have been impressive pieces of engineering and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is no exception. In their own way, they challenge Swiss industry for a different type of engineering prowess.

I really like the strap that I landed on. The material is the right texture and unlike other straps I have worn it doesn’t hinder my typing on a laptop. That being said the strap owes a lot to Marc Newson’s prior work in the early 1990s for Ikepod. This all means that you have a device that feels nice on the wrist.

One of the first things that I liked about the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is ‘night mode’ a plain red on black face, rather than the distracting colour complications. It would be great if this could be a universal theme carried through all the watch faces.

Thanks to mobile phone contracts, Apple watches like G-Shocks are surprisingly poor signals of status. In a city like London, that has its benefits.

What could be improved?

The Apple Watch is over nine years old. A number of problems have been there since the first device launch and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is merely the latest in the line to carry them.

You can’t wear your watch on the inside of your wrist. I used to scuba dive without a dive computer, relying on pre-planned dive tables, a depth gauge and air pressure gauge for my tank. I got into the habit of wearing my watch on the inside of my right wrist so I could hold my gauge console in my hand and see my elapsed dive time at the same time. It also means that your watch is less on-show in public settings.

Screens default to being overly busy with Apple trying to cram in as many complications as possible which compromises ‘glanceability’ – the key experience benefit that wearables like the Apple Watch Ultra 2 provide. Apple should also start to think about accessibility on across the Apple Watch range as much as it does on a Mac. I have have worked bleary eyed from deep sleep, looked at the watch and not being able to read it until my focus kicks in. How could the haptics function in the Apple Watch be used better?

Less apps now support the Apple Watch than have done previously. The more apps that support a platform, the more likely you are to get at least some sticky experiences that add to the utility of the device.

It’s not a particularly stylish device to look at, but it also doesn’t lean into function in the same way that a Casio G-Shock does. This means that it could be better protected out of the box than it is.

The battery life is better than previous generations of Apple Watch, but it still creates battery anxiety. Unlike Casio or other manufacturers, there’s no solar top-up option.

I don’t know how precise the data is. It measures blood oxygen level but freely admits its data isn’t good enough to be used in a medical situation. If you move to an Apple device from a Garmin or similar, you may find that your step count and activity measures may vary.

Price-wise, it’s expensive. It does offer value for what it does, but it’s expensive. You can spend as much, if not more money on a G-Shock than an Apple Watch Ultra 2; but the G-Shock won’t be a worry on issues like obsolescence, software support or even battery replacement in the same way that the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is. I have G-Shocks that I have owned for almost 20 years and are perfectly fine. I won’t be able to say the same of any Apple Watch.

What’s its use?

Still a great question. When I had my first Apple Watch, I stopped using it after 48 hours for a few reasons:
- I couldn’t see a good user case coming thorough in the product at the time
- It was slow
- It had poor battery life
At the time Apple had thrown a number of things at the wall. There was a luxury line with a $17,000 version with a gold case and official third-party leather straps by Hermès. Apple still sells a Hermès co-branded range, but the gold models are no longer made.

In the intervening years Apple has committed to a number of areas:
- An extension of your phone, on your wrist.
- Integration with payments
- Integration with identity
- The quantified self
The use cases I have personally favoured included being an extension of my phone, when it rings my watch vibrates. But since I work most of the time at home and the phone sits on a stand in front of me, this tends to be only useful when I am out. Glanceable updates from a few apps, notably weather and my taxi app.

The Apple Watch Ultra 2 can work as a standalone phone attached to your existing number, but that depends on your mobile carrier supporting it. I didn’t opt for this for reasons relating to my current service plan with 3 UK.

Tracking activity and the quality of my sleep. The quantified self is the area where Apple really pushes now, as do third-party developers such as Strava.

Apple also allows integration with Apple wallet, but you have to turn your wrist in an awkward position to work with most ‘tap-and-go’ systems. It is just as easy to do it with your phone or card.

Finally, Apple and some car manufacturers have been looking at using Apple devices as your car key. I live in London and even if I did need a car, I would be going for a pre-owned vehicle.

Is it a watch?

Is the Apple Watch Ultra 2 actually a watch at first glance seems like a ridiculous proposition, if for no other reason than you have the word ‘watch’ twice in close succession.

But on closer examination, it’s a pertinent question. Watch sales actually dropped as cellphones became ubiquitous. You had the time in your pocket or purse and the phone went everywhere with you. If you went abroad on holiday, it even changed time zones unless you specifically set it not to do so.

Watches offered some benefits from using the cellphone as a portable clock.
- Easy to read / glanceable.
- An analogue face allowed you to visually understand elapsed time.
- It sent social signals in work about taking time seriously and likely punctuality.
- More broadly the watch demonstrates signals about style, wealth, taste and even sub-cultures. This can be especially true of luxury brands and the countless collaborations that Casio has done with its G-Shock range over the years.
- Finally, if you have an automatic movement watch or a solar powered quartz one, you don’t need to worry about a dead cellphone battery.
Smartwatches in general, have put a simplified version of your smartphone on your wrist. Depending who your mobile service provider is, your Apple Watch Ultra 2 can become a fallback phone, allowing you to leave it charging at home.

But as a watch it’s trying to do too many other things. Update you on your messages, provide a simplified experience of some apps (airlines and taxi services in particular) and activity tracking. All of which is squeezed into a screen area about an eighth the size of my smartphone’s screen.

This all comes with experience choices and compromises. It’s this lack of functional purity that is a moat between even the most technical G-Shock and an Apple Watch Ultra 2. Your watch will never compromise on telling you the time despite being a really shitty dive recorder or digital compass.

Yes you can spend the price of a Porsche; on a Patek Philippe watch with lots of complications, but realistically it’s an objet d’art that happens to look like a wrist watch. On that measure the Apple Watch Ultra 2 isn’t a watch, despite sitting on your wrist.

More information

On smart watches, I’ve decided to take the plunge | renaissance chambara

Wearable devices | renaissance chambara

Living with the Apple Watch | renaissance chambara
October 9, 2024
September 2024 newsletter
September 2024 newsletter introduction

Welcome to my September 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 14th issue. When I lived in Hong Kong and dealt with Chinese accounts, the number 4 was considered unlucky, rather like 13. 14 is even worse due to it sounding so similar to ‘is dead’ or ‘will be dead’ or ‘will be certain to die’ depending on the variant of the spoken language used. In other cultures the symbolism of 14 is more nebulous at best.

September got off to an odd start, we seem to have had all the seasons, rather than settling gently into the run up to autumn. I managed to avoid traditional mooncake during mid-autumn festival celebrations that I attended. My waistline was thankful for the #ROMO (relief of missing out).

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things I’ve written.
- Being on the ground in Merseyside as the Southport stabbings unfolded gave me a different perspective on things.
- How generative AI features are affecting the Google search experience and much more.
- Not the target demographic – or how marketers and agencies are leaving money on the table.
- The mooncake crisis in China.
Books that I have read.

My reading for September 2024 slacked off a bit as real world obligations kicked in.
- The Old Woman With the Knife worked on a number of levels for me. Firstly, I loved its portrayal of modern Korean society, from the aging population to the Confucian view of seniority that makes everyday interactions more complex than other Asian societies. Without revealing too much, the old woman in question is someone in the twilight of her career and how she is coping with new up-and-coming rivals at work.
- Panic! edited by Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis became famous when he wrote an account of his career in investment banking in Liar’s Poker. His career overlapped with the 1987 financial crash. Since then he has been a writer who has documented key turns in the economy. Because of this background Lewis was the ideal person to curate a history of financial crisis from contemporary accounts at the time. Panic! covers the 1987 financial crash, the 1998 debt crisis, the dot com bubble, and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007/8. I read the book in short bursts mainly due to asks on my time, rather than the nature of the book. Panic! seemed pertinent to read now. The publication of Pegasus Research’s iconic quantitative research on ‘burn rates’ in March 2000 on dot.com company burn rates makes it highly relevant to revisit when we are in hype cycles such as those surrounding health tech, fintech, crypto and more – if for no other reason than pointing out the folly of trying to pick winners in hype-driven public markets with a high degree of opacity.
- Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro moved from my to be read pile to must read pile given everything that has been going on with generative AI over the the past couple of years that it has sat on my bookshelf. Ishiguro uses speculative fiction to explore the different kinds of love and attachment, alongside loss. From a machine learning perspective it poses interesting questions about applying observational learning rather than rules based learning in systems that are supposed to exist in the real world. Klara is an ‘artificial friend’ for a child who is going through ‘levelling up’. Levelling up could be seen as a euphemism for everything from the cramming schools popular in Asian education systems to the challenges humans face in an information heavy environment. Ultimately there is something more human and child-like in Klara’s experiences than the human co-protagonists.
Things I have been inspired by.

AI proficiency.

Section, the education company founded by Professor Scott Galloway has AI proficiency as a key element in its offering. They have put together research to show how low the current level of proficiency is. They consider this research a rallying cry; but the results could also be reflective of a technology adoption curve that isn’t moving at the speed of hype, which is what came through in my examination of public discussions during the summer.

Secondly, research from the Upwork Research Institute implies a higher a higher adoption rate of generative AI, but lower success rate with the outputs generating inefficiencies rather than productivity gains. Part of the problem seems to come from organisational leadership and the way generative AI is being implemented.

WARC have published a report which looks at What’s working in generative AI from a marketing perspective. Some of the ideas like synthetic data in market research are not quite in prime time yet and generative AI’s large carbon footprint can’t be ignored.

Digitalisation and brands

Harvard Business Review published research that indicated a weaker relationship between profit share and brand in certain types of businesses. On the face of it, this supports Scott Galloway’s ‘end of brand‘ hypothesis. WARC covered the research paper in depth pointing out that for each percentage gain in market share highly digitised businesses gain 0.19% increase in profit compared to 0.26% in less digital businesses. This seems to be due to a multitude of factors:
- Efficiency gains due to digitalisation have an effect on the existing profit prior to the market share. Efficiency is the main selling point of much digital automation from CRM systems to performance advertising.
- Market power of larger companies ( a la Google).
- Perceptions of quality – digital-only companies might look more reputable due to the lack of real-world signals to the contrary
Market share (and brand) still matters, but it hits different depending on the business. B2B and growth hacking business approaches gain less than consumer orientated businesses. A larger dataset of Kantar-sourced data analysed by Oxford University researchers found that better brand effects were down to ‘difference’ as in how customers see – and experience the brand – as being different enough from competitors.

FEAST

FEAST is an occasional magazine and curated set of events all about food and its ingredients. If you are a strategist working with a food or beverage client it’s well worth exploring their archive as a source of inspiration for insights given its in-depth and thoughtful arts-based approach.

Streaming plateau

I finally got to dive into Ofcom’s Media Nations research report. I recommend that if you are involved in the advertising-media industrial complex in any way shape or form, spend some time reading it. On the plus side, survey respondents consider accurate balanced news as a key part of the public service mandate of radio and television. Secondly during 2023, broadcast brought many of us together still for key events including the first episodes of tentpole series.

Ofcom

More dispiritingly, I realised that amongst the tentpole TV series was season 23 or I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. TV advertising revenues declined faster than online video revenues grew and subscription based video on demand take-up plateaued. It’s pure speculation on my part, but this might have been reached because COVID accelerated adoption.

Finally, as a film fan who buys Blu-Rays of films that don’t appear on streaming services consistently, the amount of time watching DVDs and and Blu-Rays have a very small usage across all age groups. I don’t think that’s good news for arthouse and cult cinema.

Things I have watched.

The Crow – less of a remake of the iconic Brandon Lee film and more of a reinvention of the franchise. It’s a good if unengaging film, many of the young adult audience I went to see it with won’t have the original or the comic books as a reference point. It has been described on other parts of the net as ‘the worst movie of the year‘. This is probably a bit unfair; there is a lot of ‘straight to Netflix’ dross out there. FKA Twigs character in the film grew on me as I watched it.

The last time I saw The Terminator in a cinema was in a double bill with the then newly launched Terminator 2 at the then new Odeon multiplex in Bromborough. I got to see it again thanks to a 4K restoration. Despite having seen The Terminator several times on tape, DVD and Blu-Ray – this time it hit different. It hit harder and it was all down the way the screen filled my vision and the punch of the sound track. Despite in-home cinema set-ups, you just can’t get at home unless you live in a large industrial unit sized home. The analogue special effects held up surprisingly well and the plot was just as taunt as I remembered it. There was less people in the cinema than for the screening than for The Crow.

As I write this, I have just watched episode one of the latest series of Slow Horses. It has gotten off to the high standard set by the previous series and book. Time to put on my Roddy Ho t-shirt again.

Useful tools.

Table Capture

If you’ve ever tried to cut and paste a table and data from a website into an spreadsheet and then spent the rest of the afternoon parsing it in cell-by-cell you will appreciate the benefit of this browser extension.

Humaniser for GPT created content

If you’re reading this, chances are that you’ve used services like Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini as a starting point for copy, or to summarise documents. UndetectableGPT looks at providing alternatives to ‘tell-tale’ phraseology in generative AI copy.

Data analysis

Groupt will take a CSV file and categorise the data including visualisation, so you only have to focus on wrapping a narrative around it to fit into the wider storytelling of your presentation.

The sales pitch.

I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from January 2025 onwards; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my September 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into October and crispness of a bright autumn morning!

Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!

Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
September 26, 2024