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.

  • Macau gaming revenue + more

    Macau gaming revenue

    Macau Gambling Revenue Continues to Drop – WSJ  – A little over a year ago, in February 2014, Macau gaming revenue rose 40%. Now it is regularly falling by around that much (paywall) – Macau gaming is alleged to be a vehicle for money laundering. Even if that wasn’t the truth about Macau gaming, it still remains a tempting vehicle for capital flight from China. At the moment Macau gaming is even bigger than the gambling mecca of Las Vegas

    FMCG

    P&G; Always Mobile App: BackMeApp – really smart application by P&G to market Always sanitary towels

    Ideas

    Azeem’s Exponential View – Revue – great email newsletter. Azeem has ben involved with a number of start-ups including Peer Index. In his newsletter Azeem covers a mix of deep future gazing with concern about climate change. He has a particular focus on  the carbon economy as a distinct area within his newsletter

    Innovation

    The scientist who designed the fake interfaces in “Minority Report” and “Iron Man” is now building real ones – interesting link on the feedback loop between science fiction and technology

    Ford Redefines Innovation in Aerodynamics, EcoBoost and Light-Weighting with All-New Ford GT Carbon Fiber Supercar | Ford Media Centre – some of the design choices in this is very interesting. More design related content here.

    Media

    Yahoo to Let Brands Fact-Check Its Viewability, Fraud Numbers | Advertising Age – I presume that this is due to pressure from large consumer brands only willing to pay for true views

    WPP’s Bessie Lee: PR Industry Must Embrace Technology In China | The Holmes Report – calling Blue Focus a PR group is like calling WPP a PR group. PR needs to do technology better, but other disciplines already own that part of the client relationship. China has even faster change going on

    Engineering Director Lars Rasmussen Leaving Facebook To Co-Found A Music Startup | TechCrunch – a long time Googler who developed Google Maps and worked in search at Facebook. Interesting move

    Yahoo just threw investors a bone: It’s hiring advisors to figure out what to do with Yahoo Japan (YHOO) – the bigger question is what to do with what’s left surely?

    Google, Microsoft and Amazon pay to get around ad blocking tool – FT.com – as well as Taboola – the annoying content remarketing network

    Online

    David Cameron wants to block porn but the EU won’t let him | Dazed Digital – the UKIP vote will be torn over this one. More online related content here

    Bradley Horowitz Says That Google Photos is Gmail for Your Images. And That Google Plus Is Not Dead… — Backchannel — Medium – Bradley is brilliant, this does feel like trying to reinvent flickr, it would be a shame if this did kill flickr

    Retailing

    Audi to Test Plan to Deliver Amazon Packages to Drivers’ Trunks – NYTimes.com – so thieves will know that there is a master key, which will give them an incentive to find it. More related content here.

    Software

    Above Avalon: The Apple and Google Battle Has Changed – good long read on the dynamics between Apple and Google. Apple and Google cooperate because Apple has richer, more valuable customers than Google based operating system products. 

    Technology

    Russian ‘Uber for Boobs’ Start-Up Tittygram Sees Business Boom | Moscow Times – you could not make this up <holds head in hands in despair at industry>

  • Tech trends myopia in ideas

    Tech trends event at The Churchill Club

    The Churchill Club recently had their annual Top 10 Tech Trends event in Silicon Valley. This was the 17th time that they had their event. It’s a great bit of content to have on in the background. The collective opinions in the panel bought up concerns for me with a consumer behaviour myopia exhibited around tech trends in Silicon Valley.


    Cognitive behavioural therapy

    A classic example was some of the very smart things said about wearables and health monitoring in the session. There was skepticism expressed for some very valid social behavioural reasons – if one looks at Facebook, consumers generally share only the good things in their lives, with the notable exception of life events, such as the death of a family pet. Stephen Waddington even describes his behaviour on Facebook as ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’.

    So people really into fitness are far more likely to employ self tracking than couch-dwellers.

    Quicken problem

    Self tracking was described as a ‘Quicken Problem’. Quicken allows US consumers to easily complete their tax returns – a universal problem, yet is only used by five per cent of the population for various reasons.

    All of this is very valid stuff of its self, but what happens if it isn’t only consumers making the decision?

    Self tracking tech trends

    My reservations about self tracking technologies are well recorded, to quote myself from Stephen Waddington’s Brand Vandals

    Self-tracking adds massive amounts of data to your personal data pool and social graph and raises huge privacy concerns that users need to be cognisant of

    A number of the key points that I made in my conversation with Stephen was not about consumers using their self-tracking data but how the data could be used to recalibrate car insurance, home insurance (based on absence from home) and health insurance based on activity and risky behaviours.

    Let’s look at a specific type of self tracking, the car insurance black box. Aviva (Norwich Union) trialled the use of telematics to set car insurance premiums on a monthly basis as a type of continuous assessment. It looked at factors such as:

    • When the car was used, nighttime driving was considered to be risky behaviour
    • What distance was covered, charges were on a per mile basis
    • Car location (particularly when cross-tabulated with crime statistics)
    • Speed
    • Braking data

    In IBM Research’s case study, Norwich Union envisaged that black boxes would allow it to sell insurance to consumers that drive less often. Norwich Union dropped the pilot in 2008, apparently due to a lack of consumer interest, but resurrected the car insurance black box when the European Union ruled that charging for car insurance on the basis of gender was illegal. Presumably the needed some other form of actuarial data instead of whether the driver was a female or not. This is just one example where consumer behaviour didn’t drive  product innovation that wouldn’t be accounted for in the tech trends discussion.

    Credit ratings were driven by the need for businesses to mitigate risks, direct (rather than operator) dialling on a telephone was developed to help reduce the manpower required to run telecoms networks. Night safes and ATMs (automatic teller machines) were about providing services without staff. The US airline tradition of baggage charges came from shareholder pressure not consumer demand yet is worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

    The point at the end of the day is that opportunities for venture capitalists are broader than meeting consumer needs and wants.

    More information

    Brand Vandals by Stephen Waddington & Steve Earl
    AA launches black box car insurance | Guardian
    Norwich Union heralds new Pay As You Drive insurance – Aviva Media Room Archive
    Norwich Union Insurance Telematics Pilot – Pay As You Drive Telematics trial of usage based motor insurance by Volker Fricker of IBM Research – (PDF)
    Aviva Telematics Insurance Review | Telematics.com – Norwich Union (now Aviva) abandoned telematics insurance a number of years ago and is now reinstating it

    More related content here.

  • Corporation tax + more things

    Amazon to begin paying corporation tax on UK retail sales | The Guardian – it is good to see that Amazon is paying corporation tax. But the thing no one is asking is how does this affect businesses that might have ‘global accounts’, for instance Ford, Colgate and HSBC’s relationship with WPP? Does this mean that clients will suddenly start getting bills on a per country basis for corporation tax rather than in one place? What happens when different tax authorities have different views on what is earned where?

    Why We Have an Oversupply of Almost Everything (Oil, labor, capital, etc.) | Our Finite World – some interesting economic data in here

    The Savoy opens take-away eatery to provide entry point to dining | Luxury Daily – interesting that The Savoy feels the need to do local ‘sampling’

    Huawei launches ‘internet of things’ operating system – FT.com – Paywall

    [1501.02876] Deep Image: Scaling up Image Recognition – interesting machine learning paper from Baidu

    Interview: How did an ex UX designer get 50k WeChat fans? – interesting article and plan

    What will happen to Silicon Valley when demographics strangle the global economy | VentureBeat – this isn’t necessarily as bad as this article makes out mainly because many VCs are sitting on more money than they can invest anyway

    The Blogging Dead: WeChat’s ‘zombie relationship’ invasion｜WantChinaTimes.com – sounds like a classic dunbar number problem, but it is interesting that they consider it to be WeChat specific

    Integrated Intelligence: IWC Connect – Luxury News – interesting wearable concept, they seem to have deliberately avoided the mistakes made by others (including AndroidWear and Apple Watch. Still not convinced however. More luxury related content here.

    Seymour M. Hersh · The Killing of Osama bin Laden · LRB 21 May 2015 – I am not surprised, but the damage that this does to US is huge, particularly the body politic. I recommend reading this critique of Mr Hersh’s critics – The media’s reaction to Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden scoop has been disgraceful – Columbia Journalism Review

  • Yakuza Apocalypse + more

    Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War Of The Underworld

    Awesome trailer for Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War Of The Underworld from Takashi Miike

    Yakuza Apocalypse is a visceral shock to the system. It strips away the glamour that surrounds the yakuza in Japanese culture, a bit like like the way the Krays are glamourised in British culture. The reality is rather more squalid, like Tadamasa Goto who is known to have provided information to the FBI. While they didn’t get anything, a grass is still a grass.

    Optical data communications technology

    Really interesting Panasonic technology for data transfer, is it more than a less obvious QRcode in terms of the data that it contains?

    Stüssy x Sophnet

    Stüssy have done a really good collaboration with Japanese brand Sophnet which dropped this week. I managed to pick up a Stüssy x Sophnet t-shirt and hooded top. I was surprised by two things. The quality was more up to the old school Stüssy standard than is usually the case now. Secondly, for a Japanese brand collaboration, they both came in western XXL size. We won’t see the like of this collaboration for a good while again, if ever.

    More luxury related content here.
    stussy

    SoftBank changes tack with adverts

    SoftBank seem to have moved away from their kooky ‘family’ adverts using modern samurai Isao Machii cuts many objects with ”Iaido” sword strokes