Ged Carroll

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.

  • Checkout free retail + more things

    Exclusive: Microsoft takes aim at Amazon with push for checkout free retail | Reuters – I hope that checkout free retail works better than self service checkouts. Also will checkout free retail work well in low trust societies? More related content here.

    The Ruggedmen and the End of Free & Easy – but out of the Ashes is born something new

    Are Apple AirPods Any Good? – The Atlantic – interesting observation on the changes on consumer behaviour using AirPods

    Why the Future of Machine Learning is Tiny | Pete Warden’s blog – and not AI – the early 1990s use of fuzzy logic is a better analogue

    Upscaling of Sneaker Brands Threatens Luxury Fashion | Jing Daily – Gildo Zegna, CEO of Italian luxury fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna, attributed the rising price of sportswear sneakers to their rise in emotional value, “If there is one product today that is impulse driven and creates emotions among consumers, it is the sneaker (…) you are talking about people spending $100 to $700 on a single pair.”

    Publicis publicity win was bigger than the bot | Special: Cannes Lions – Ad Age – Publicis campaigns won’t be absent from Cannes after all, because clients and partners stepped up to pay for the entry cost for a few hundred campaigns

    Volkswagen tests quantum computing in battery research | eeNews Power – chemistry makes sense as it works on low qubit machines. Involvement with Google and D-Wave is a blow to IBM

    Monzo’s big smart bank move links your money to Alexa, Twitter and pretty much anything else | WIRED UK – I find this quite scary

    Customer Experience Trends In China, 2018 | Forrester Research – Today, China has become so innovative that businesses in mature Western markets are taking note. The country’s tech giants are blurring the boundaries between digital and physical and expanding the reach of their platform businesses with new value propositions

    Microsoft acquires a whole bunch of game studios | TechCrunch – interesting how Microsoft is going about this. Steam is looking like the future of gaming

    About the Finder… | Ars Technica – the finder is a bug bear since I started as a Mac user and the lack of positive change in Mojave is no different

  • Income and wealth inequality + more

    Income and Wealth Inequality in America, 1949-2016 by Kuhn, Schularick and Steins (University of Bonn) – We expose the central importance of portfolio composition and asset prices for wealth dynamics in postwar America. Asset prices shift the wealth distribution because the composition and leverage of household portfolios differ systematically along the wealth distribution. Middle-class portfolios are dominated by housing, while rich households predominantly own equity. An important consequence is that the top and the middle of the distribution are affected differentially by changes in equity and house prices. Housing booms lead to substantial wealth gains for leveraged middle-class households and tend to decrease wealth inequality, all else equal. Stock market booms primarily boost the wealth of households at the top of the distribution. This race between the equity market and the housing market shaped wealth dynamics in postwar America and decoupled the income and wealth distribution over extended periods. The historical data also reveal that no progress has been made in reducing income and wealth inequalities between black and white households over the past 70 years, and that close to half of all American households have less wealth today in real terms than the median household had in 1970. – long read but very worthwhile study on historic US income and wealth inequality. More related content here. (pdf)

    Yahoo Messenger is shutting down on July 17, redirects users to group messaging app Squirrel | TechCrunch – end of an era

    New Ways for Gaming Creators to Get Started and Get Discovered on Facebook | Facebook Newsroom – in app ad bidding

    New Ways to Enjoy Music on Facebook | Facebook Newsroom – rip off of musicia.ly

    Apple Ignores What’s Wrong With the Mac | Sascha Segan | PCMag.com – a pretty fair critique of Mac industrial design

    Apple, where’s the smarter Siri in iOS 12? USA Today – it would be more interesting if one could use the workflows created by others a la IFTTT

    Meet the people who still use Myspace: ‘It’s given me so much joy’ | The Guardian – something to be said for smaller communities

    Facebook Gave Data Access to Chinese Firm Flagged by U.S. Intelligence – The New York Times – it gave access to a number of vendors including the main Chinese players

    The Chinese “gang” manipulating the market — now in EOS?

  • WWDC 2018 outtakes

    Introduction to WWDC 2018

    This summary of the WWDC 2018 keynote has been re-organised to try and provide a bit more coherence as Apple took things in a slightly different order to try and create ‘surprise and delight‘.
    WWDC 2018 highlighted how cross-platform they’ve evolved Continuity and Siri to try and make them more useful (if, not smarter). All fo the changes outlined at WWDC 2018 represent a slow and steady progression to a more programmatic world.
    I’ve made some notes in green that are designed to flag points of interest to marketers and advertising folk. 

    App Store

    • 10 years old (and the app store search is still not where it should be)
    • World’s largest app marketplace
    • 500 million weekly visitors (might be due to moving away from iTunes for app updates)
    • $100,000,000 developer revenues to date

    Swift

    • 350,000 apps coded in it (no measure of the variable quality though)

    iOS 12

    • Focus on system optimisation
    • Faster app and function launches
    • They haven’t dropped any devices previously supported by iOS 11; a nod to longer device lives

    AR Kit – v 2

    • Adobe Creative Cloud support
    • USDZ format support throughout the system including News app
    • Multi-player AR experiences (demoed with Lego). Attribute digital assets to a physical object – interesting execution

    Measure – digital tape measure

    • Facilitated by MEMs, presumably the software technology comes out of AR work. Handy hack, I could have used this when I was eBaying stuff. I could see it being nice for things like home furnishings retailers and clothing e-commerce

    Photos

    Search suggestions – tries to predict what you want
    • Searches EXIF data for locations, events etc
    • For you function is a bit like Facebook memories
    • Photo sharing – recommended what to share and who to share them with. If its going to another iPhone user it prompts the recipient to share photos that they may have taken. Implications for social photo sharing apps
    • Full resolution over Messages

    Siri

    • Shortcuts to any app. It reminds me a little bit of Apple Script. Allows you to build multi-app behaviours – drag-and-drop
    • Suggestions based on app usage, calendar, locations
    • Possible implications for app usage – content opportunities to suggest ‘Shortcut workflows’ to build. Poses a bit of a thread for IFTTT’s smarthome ambitions
    Default iOS apps
    Stocks
    • Better charts
    • Native iPad and Mac version
    • Integration of Apple news in Stocks
    Voice Memos
    • iPad and Mac native version
    • iCloud support
    iBooks renamed to Apple Books
    • Redesigned
    Car Play
    • Supports third party navigation apps presumably to try and reduce iPhone to Android migration
    Efforts to limit mobile distraction
    • Do Not Disturb – improved view without notifications during bed time
    • Can be triggered from calendar or location (meetings, going to the cinema)
    Notifications – huge pain point addressed, particularly with people used to Android devices
    • Notifications ‘tuning’ – so that you can only see the notifications from apps you care about
    • Grouped notifications: app, topic and thread
    Screentime
    • Tracks device usage for the user
    Child app usage
    • Child locks on mobile device usage

    FaceTime

    • Group FaceTime supporting up to 32 participants. Shows the speaker by making their tile bigger. Challenges to Skype, WhatsApp
    • Integration into Messages, so you can go from group message to Group FaceTime

    watchOS 5

    • Walkie Talkie – push-to-talk app – watch-to-watch. Surely it would make sense on iOS and macOS as well?
    • Web content on watchOS via WebKit

    tvOS

    • AppleTV 4K to support Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision certified
    • AppleTV as cable set-top box for (Salt in Switzerland, Canal+ in France, Charter Spectrum). OTT on iPhone and iPad as well. If cable companies move to just being media content aggregators, how will this affect DOCSIS and FTTH roll out?
    • Zero-sign on for content when part of a cable TV offering
    • 3rd party remotes will work with AppleTV

    macOS – Mojave

    • Dark Mode – dark skin of OS. Nice level of integration and easier to work with during the evening, but not exactly ground-breaking
    • Desktop stacks – arrange by date, kind or tag
    • Contextual quick actions in Finder – can include Automator actions
    • Screen capture for video should make presentations a lot easier
    • Dev tools to make it easier to move iOS apps to the Mac framework – used this time on Apple default apps, Apple will roll out to developers in 2019
    • Beefing up security including app permissions to cover your mail database, camera and microphone use
    Safari
    • Shutting down tracking on likes, shares and comments. Strong focus on attacking ‘Fingerprinting’ – making it harder to track – Macs will be harder to distinguish from one and other (its also in iOS 12). Only providing basic web fonts as data, no data on legacy plug-ins and cutting back on app set-ups
    • Favicons in tabs (this annoyed the bejesus out of me, its a small thing but I am glad to see it)

    App Store

    • Revamped App store allows more content to market your app and improve usage / engagements. Opportunities for in-appstore content marketing (demo videos, ongoing articles with tips etc)
    • Ratings and review API (which will likely be a bit annoying). This will provide an incremental benefit for app marketers
    • Microsoft Office and BBEdit will be in the Mac app store – huge boost for the credibility of the Mac App Store
    Machine learning
    • CreateML – trying to make machine learning training easier for apps
    • CoreML 2 – Improved machine learning performance using batch predictions
    More related content here. More details for Apple developers here.

  • Strategic News Service & things this week

    Mark Anderson of the Strategic News Service; a George Gilderesque subscription newsletter, the likes of which were very popular in the mid to late 1990s. The Strategic News Service process is an interesting ‘anti algorithmic’ analysis in action. A counter point to the world that Google now represents, I don’t buy all that Anderson and the Strategic News Service says, but this is very interesting to watch.

    The synthetic voice of synthetic intelligence should sound synthetic. Successful spoofing of any kind destroys trust. When trust is gone, what remains becomes vicious fast.

    — Stewart Brand via Simon Willison. It seemed very appropriate when considering the Google Duplex demonstrations from the other week.

    It’s Nice That | Gucci and Frieze team up on major new video series, The Second Summer of Love – well worth a view

    Singapore’s utopian clean looking city and high quality Japanese animation are a marriage made in heaven. Makoto Shinkai directed this for the forthcoming Singapore Thomson East Coast Line on behalf of Japanese construction giant Taisei Corporation. More Japan related content here.

    This would usually be the part where I would talk about how I am looking forward to Deadpool. But I won’t. I wanted to marvel at the collective hullucination of Deadpool marketing. Deadpool marketing isn’t trying to get you to go and see the film, but instead brings elements of the film to you. Once you are properly tuned in, it then makes perfect sense to see the film. The problem is that there are so many fragments from DVD rewraps to teasers and TV appearances that it would be impossible to capture or choose a favourite.

    Instead I am going to share a video of the Korean show King of Masked Singer, where Ryan Reynolds preformed Tomorrow from the musical Annie in a unicorn mask.

    Fans in show panel and the audience lost their shit

  • Zuckerberg to testify + more news

    UK parliament’s call for Zuckerberg to testify goes next level | TechCrunch – while taking action to get Zuckerberg to testify is a good thing. It is a pity that the UK didn’t show similar gumption when dealing with the Kraft Foods CEO with regards the Cadburys takeover. Would it be that hard for Zuckerberg to just avoid the UK all together?

    Xiaomi to sell smartphones in UK through Three | Technology | The Guardian – Huawei will be getting worried; especially as Xiaomi has a reputation for making high-specification innovative phones at a lower price point. Xiaomi has been providing good quality handsets for a while and this is the kind of springboard that they need into western markets

    ‘Forget the Facebook leak’: China is mining data directly from workers’ brains on an industrial scale | South China Morning Post – Workers outfitted in uniforms staff lines producing sophisticated equipment for telecommunication and other industrial sectors. But there’s one big difference – the workers wear caps to monitor their brainwaves, data that management then uses to adjust the pace of production and redesign workflows, according to the company. The company said it could increase the overall efficiency of the workers by manipulating the frequency and length of break times to reduce mental stress.

    WhatsApp Co-Founder Leaving Facebook’s Board Amid User Data Disputes – The New York Times – The announcement followed disagreements between Mr. Koum and Facebook’s leaders over the use of people’s data and the social network’s attempts to weaken encryption. Officially he just wants to relax and collect vintage Porsche 911’s with air-cooled engines. More related content here.

    McDonald’s admits app adoption rates are ‘pretty low’ but it will keep investing in mobile | The Drum – not terribly surprising when one thinks about macro trends in app usage and adoption

    How China Leapfrogged Ahead of the United States in the Fintech Race | PIIE – poor infrastructure, lack of access for MasterCard, Visa, Amex, Diners Club etc. Low value of Chinese note denominations

    Eavesdropping on the deep | MBARI – I found it very soothing to listen to with all the white noise

    NightWatch | Subscription – gutted that KGS no longer provide this newsletter it has been a great resource