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.

  • Most popular blog posts of 2017

    How did I go to define the most popular blog posts of 2017. I looked at my most trafficked articles from January to June 2017 here.

    What did June to December look like?

    # Title Notes
    1 Is your PR plan good enough? A series of six posts and a work book on developing and assessing how thorough a communications plan is
    2 Thinking about Marcel Reflections on the challenges and opportunities posed by Publicis Groupe’s bid to build machine learning into the core of the business
    3 My decade of the iPhone Reflecting on the impact that the iPhone had on my smartphone usage. Probably not as much as you would have thought
    4 Out and about: Blade Runner 20149 Review of Gosling and Ford’s reboot of the Blade Runner story 30 years after the original
    5 That Trivago poster The meme created by blanket out of home advertising throughout London in September
    6 The Bell Pottinger Post I was a bit surprised to see Bell Pottinger go into administration after I wrote this post. Even the London finances were bearing up, the key challenge seems to have been NO interested from any agency approached in acquiring the London office.
    7 Living with the Apple Watch A reflection live with the Apple Watch 2. My first Apple Watch went on eBay within 48 hours of its arrival and my initial trials with it. How will the Mk II version cope?
    8 Can too much design thinking be a bad thing? There is a lot of mediocre thinking shrouded in design methodologies out there. But this post wasn’t about that. Instead I wanted to consider the process itself. Was there be constraints on the process itself?
    9 Technology is way ahead of interface designs Good user experience, ergonomics and the latest technology don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand
    10 Three takeaways from Cannes and Vidcon Blind trust in influencers as a marketing tool. The unhealthy state of the online advertising eco-system and transfer of value from agencies and media to two platforms

    What did the most popular blog posts  of 2017 look like overall?

    # Title Notes
    1 Living with the Casio GWF -D1000 Frogman watch Casio took their Frogman watch and improved it even further. Some of the technology is interesting mainly because they’ve managed to run it all off a diminutive solar panel. The bigger changes for me was moving world time from the ‘home screen’ and reengineering how the strap is fastened to the case in a much more robust manner
    2 Louis Vuitton, Supreme and the tangled relationship between streetwear and luxury brands Louis Vuitton has been dragged into the 21st century by its creative director. A collaboration with Supreme seems logical in retrospect for so many reasons
    3 Is your PR plan good enough? A series of six posts and a work book on developing and assessing how thorough a communications plan is
    4 Thinking about Marcel Reflections on the challenges and opportunities posed by Publicis Groupe’s bid to build machine learning into the core of the business
    5 Richard Edelman is wrong, PR isn’t at a crossroads… Richard Edelman commented on the trend for large marketing groups to consolidate PR agencies and integrate PR offerings into a larger marketing services stack. This mirrors changes that Edelman’s own company has gone through as multiple disciplines close in on a marketing singularity
    6 It’s time that we talk about micro-influencers Looking past the hype of micro-influencers to work out how it fits with brand planning scenarios
    7 Oprah Time: Blood and Faith – the purging of muslim Spain (1492 – 1614) by Matthew Carr I picked this book up on a trip to Madrid. Carr’s books looked at Spain’s history with the muslim world in an unsympathetic light. The issues of conservative populism and racism also feel very contemporary given political sentiment across Europe
    8 Magic Lantern Festival, Chiswick House Gardens Chiswick hosted a lunar new year oriented lantern festival similar to what you’d seen in Hong Kong and across China
    9 Have we reached peak streetwear? A follow-on post from my jog down memory lane about luxury and streetwear. I started thinking about it in terms of a market in its own right
    10 My decade of the iPhone Reflecting on the impact that the iPhone had on my smartphone usage. Probably not as much as you would have thought

    There is it is; the most popular blog posts of 2017.

  • Block sales on Amazon & other news

    Block sale of luxury goods on Amazon

    Luxury Brands Win Right to Block Sales of Goods on Amazon in Europe – WSJ – in its findings giving the right to block sales on Amazon, the European Court of Justice takes an expansive view of luxury brands  “The quality of luxury goods is not simply the result of their material characteristics, but also of the allure and prestigious image which bestows on them an aura of luxury,” the ECJ said. “That aura is an essential aspect of those goods in that it thus enables consumers to distinguish them from other similar goods.” – essentially luxury brands are experiential as much as they are selling products. That’s one of the key points to block sales and prevent Amazon getting into luxury 

    Media

    Ad Holding Companies to Rapidly Increase Spending With Amazon – WSJ – likely to hurt Google’s product search business hardest rather than Facebook and Istagram’s direct to consumer business.

    2017 was the year digital ad spending finally beat TV – Recode – its about growth of digital rather than death of TV as a medium for advertisers

    Paywall Will Be Wired’s ‘Hedge Against the Future’ – WSJ – I’ve been a Wired subscriber for a long time, not sure how well this move is going to do (paywall)

    Retailing

    Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index Reveals 48 Percent Growth in Parcel Volume since 2014 | Business Wire – the growth in parcel volume is an indicator of increasing online retail sales.

    Technology

    China hopes cold war nuclear energy tech will power warships, drones | South China Morning Post – I’d much prefer a Thorium powered DeLorean to a lithium powered Tesla

    Don’t Buy Anyone an Echo | Gizmodo – interesting to see this sentiment from a gadget blog. Admittedly there is a lot to be concerned about

    OptionPlan | Index Ventures – interesting data across startups in the US and EU

  • Hyphbot + other news

    HyphBot

    How Adform discovered HyphBot – one of the largest botnets to ever hit digital advertising. The full HyphBot impact on all Adform’s platforms was extremely limited, costing less than $1,000 USD per month, the impact of HyphBot may have more extensive on other online advertising platforms  (PDF)

    Consumer behaviour

    Have we reached peak smartphone? – Kantar – ‘Younger mobile users aren’t simply listening to less music or reading fewer books; instead, the way in which they are engaging with entertainment and the devices they are choosing is evolving. For example, we have seen a decline in younger mobile users listening to music on their mobiles, but the purchasing of vinyl and streaming music through home virtual assistants is on the rise. Social networking has held steady, with 87.8% of 16-24-year-olds using their phones for this purpose (87% in 2016), so as new (or retro) technologies come onto the market the role of the mobile device for younger users will continue to change.’ – a certain amount of this is BS

    Ethics

    To predict crime, China’s tracking medical histories, cafe visits, supermarket membership, Human Rights Watch warns — Quartz – Minority Report in action

    Media

    When fake news will be made by pros – Monday Note – opportunity for PR industry? ;-)

    Interviews Come Back — With Cringely’s Answers – Slashdot – Slashdot’s proto-AMA with Robert X Cringely from 2000

    Software

    Sweating bullets: notes about the creation of PowerPoint by Robert Gaskins – (PDF)

    Google – The colour purple. | Radio Free Mobile – interesting support for Swift in the Fuchsia build

    Technology

    Facebook launches collaborative Stories for Groups and Events | TechCrunch – Storify / Moments for Facebook?

    Social Media Is a Denial-of-Service Attack on Your Mind | Nautilus – (paywall)

    Web of no web

    Apple wins one of their First Augmented Reality Patents related to Compositing an AR Scene – reminded of the locative art from William Gibson’s Spook Country. More related content here.

  • Kindle – tenth anniversary

    I was blown away when I realised that it was the tenth anniversary of the the Amazon Kindle. Ten years, think about that for a moment.

    Amazon Kindle & Sony eBook

    If you look at the original Kindle versus the latest model you can see how the design language moved from a ‘BlackBerry’ type product design to a smartphone type design. Along the way it benefited from improvements in e-ink display technology to provide a crisper viewing experience. Sony’s competitor might have looked more modern bit it didn’t manage to get the marketing mix and the hardware / services mix right.

    Sony’s failure indicated while you could be successful in a number of media markets, it didn’t guarantee success in other media.

    Rather like Apple products Kindle is a combination of hardware, software (including content), payment infrastructure and the Whispernet global mobile virtual network.

    Like Apple, Amazon came in and refined an existing business model. Companies like Sony made very nice e-readers, but they didn’t have the publisher relationships and market access that Amazon had.

    Context rather than convergence

    In a time where consumer electronics thinking was all about convergence, from the newly launched iPhone to the Symbian eco-system, Amazon were determined to come up with a single purpose device.

    Amazon resisted the trend and created a dedicated device for reading. That is why you have a black-and-white e-ink screen and an experience exclusively focused on seamless content downloads.

    Yes, they’ve rolled out tablets since, but even the latest range stick to the original Kindle playbook. Some of their decisions were quite prescient. The Kindle was deliberately designed so that it didn’t require content to be side loaded from personal computer like an iPod.

    The Kindle has survived the smartphone and the tablet device as a reading experience. Even if ebooks didn’t conquer the book publishing market in quite the way Amazon had planned.

    Using the U.S. legal system to clear the field

    Amazon was helped out by the US government prosecuting Apple under the Sherman Act. Wikipedia has a good summary of this case. On the face of it Apple was doing a similar structured deal with publishers on book pricing to what it had done previously with record companies for iTunes music.

    This case effectively stalled Apple book store momentum and lumbered Apple with overzealous US government overwatch. The consumer benefit has been minimal – more on that later. The irony of all this is the way Amazon has leveraged its monopolistic position to decimate entire sectors of the retail economy.

    The interesting thing about this case, say compared to the Apple | Qualcomm dispute is that Apple still kept Audible audio book sales in iTunes throughout this dispute and didn’t look at ways to bounce the iPad Kindle app from the app store. Audible is an Amazon-owned company.

    By comparison, Amazon bounced Apple’s TV from its own e-commerce platform and has taken a long time to support the AppleTV app eco-system – long after the likes of Netflix.

    Piracy in China

    Amazon hasn’t had it all its own way. China had a burgeoning e-book market prior to the Kindle and Chinese consumers used to read these books on their laptops.  Depending which store you used; it might have more books at a cheaper price because intellectual property wasn’t ironed out. This has undermined Amazon’s slow entry into the Chinese e-book marketplace.

    A cottage industry sprang up that saw Kindles acquired in the US and Japan shipped back to China and reflashed with software that made them compatible with the local app stores. These Kindles were bought at a subsidised price as Amazon looked to sell devices to sell books.

    The Kindle brain phenomenon

    I moved from the UK to Hong Kong to take up a role and tried to lighten my burden by moving my reading from books to the Kindle. I found that I didn’t retain the content I read. I enjoyed the process of reading less and did it less often. I wasn’t an e-book neophyte I had enjoyed reading vintage pulp fiction novels as ebooks on Palm devices and Nokia phones in the early 2000s as a way of passing them time on my commute.

    Talking to friends their experience was similar. I now read on the Kindle or listen to audio books only for pleasure. I tend to buy my reference books in the dead tree format. There is something more immediate about the process of reading from a ‘real book’ rather than an e-book.

    It seems that digital natives aren’t ready to give up books just yet. Studies about the use of digital technology and e-books in education are mixed and anecdotal evidence suggests that technology industry leaders liked to keep the level of digital content in their children’s lives at a low threshold.

    The Kindle hasn’t replaced the bookshelf and the printing press yet.

    Pricing

    Disposing of the medium didn’t mean that we got cheaper e-books. On Amazon it is worth looking carefully to see what is the cheapest format on a case by case basis. Kindle competes against print books and secondhand books.

    Secondhand books win hands down when you are looking at materials beyond bestsellers. A real-world book is easier to gift and Amazon Prime allows for almost instant gratification. The Kindle starts to look like Amazon covering all the bases rather than the future of publishing. This may change over time, a decade into online news was a more mixed media environment than it is now – but Kindle feels as if it has reached a balance at the moment. More related content here.

    More information

    New study suggests ebooks could negatively affect how we comprehend what we read | USA Today
    Shelve paperbacks in favour of E-books in schools? | BBC
    Study challenges popular beliefs on e-reading | The Educator
    Are Digital Textbooks Finally Taking Hold? | Good eReader – makes the case for a heterogenous book environment of standard textbooks, e-books and used books
    Do ‘Digital Natives’ Prefer Paper Books to E-Books? | Education Week
    Our love affair with digital is over | New York Times (paywall)

  • TV synced online ads & other news

    TV synced online advertising

    TV synced Facebook News Feed ads yield 60% lift | Facebook Marketing Partners – TV synced advertising seems to have a similar effect to TV synced radio campaigns (PDF)

    Culture

    Hip-hop is getting old, man | Quartz – interesting discussion on cultural cycles.

    Soothsayer in the Hills Sees Silicon Valley’s Sinister Side – The New York Times – “If you’re a mark of social media, if you’re being manipulated by it, one of the ways to tell is if there’s a certain kind of personality quality that overtakes you,” he says. “It’s been called the snowflake quality. People criticize liberal college kids who have it, but it’s exactly the same thing you see in Trump. It’s this kind of highly reactive, thin-skinned, outraged single-mindedness. I think one way to think of Trump, even though he is a con man and he is an actor and he’s a master manipulator and all that, in a sense he’s also a victim. I’ve met him a few times over 30 years. And what I think I see is someone who has moved from kind of a New York character who was in on his own joke to somebody who is completely freaked out and outraged and feeling like he is on the verge of a catastrophe every second. And so my theory about that is that he was ruined by social media.”

    Design

    IBM Type – IBM have open sourced their tailor-made corporate font Plex

    Marketing

    Huawei’s new global corporate brand swagger | Analysis | Campaign Asia  – Huawei so closely reflects China’s new ambitions that it would be easy to consider the tech giant as a proxy for Brand China. But Tan bristles at the suggestion. “Huawei is a global company,” she reminds us. “You can see our overseas revenue is larger than China, so we really want to position our brand as a global brand.”

    Online

    Amazon to Sell Part of Its Cloud Business in China – WSJ – something to think about with your China data shards

    Long Live Short Video in China | The Daily | L2 – you also have streaming video, OTT etc

    CompuServe’s forums, which still exist, are finally shutting down | Fast Company – I remember my Landlord in college used CompuServe on dial-up and met his current wife though it

    Software

    Entering the Quantum Era—How Firefox got fast again and where it’s going to get faster – Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog – interesting insight into desktop software development now. Let’s see how this works for Firefox’s market share

    Web of no web

    Review: Jibo Social Robot | WIRED – interesting bits about robot human interaction

    Wireless

    WeChat users send 38 billion messages per day | Techinasia – WhatsApp is on 55 billion messages a day – according to Benedict Evans