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.

  • 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

    Drones in advertising builds on work that has been done since the Beijing olympics on the use of drone swarms for massed visuals that are complementary to fireworks and 3D projections

    Audi advert: Kevin Smith, Jason Meyes. Enough said (oh and some cameos from actors who’ve appeared in Marvel comic film adaptations including pioneer Stan Lee)

    Enterprise storage outfit Box.net have a great interview with Stewart Butterfield of Slack (and Flickr fame). Some interesting comments on how a GUI isn’t always the right interface for people who use keyboards. This is so right. I remember working on terminal screens when I worked in a call centre and the ease with which I could quickly tab around screens, rather than having to reach for a mouse to click a multitude of radio buttons. More design related posts here.

    Scottish National Party member of parliament Mhairi Black gave an interview back in March. I found it interesting as it shows that kind of impact social media will have on future political careers, particularly when it it will provide greater clarity than the 2009 debate around David Cameron’s raving history. Imagine if you were presented at the age of 50 with selected fringe thoughts you had at 19 years old?

    As Black notes:

    My uncle summed it up when he said that, when he was a teenager, he just used to shout at the telly. My generation tweets and there is a record of it.

    What adult doesn’t look back to things they said when they were 16 or 17 and go, ‘Oh my God?’

    The difference is my comments are being dragged out for the whole world to see.

    No trite social media analysis or fantastic technical wizardry just a great idea, client belief and a budget made 3M Korea’s Unforgettable Post-It Proposal

    Finally Helios is a new Hong Kong film gaining traction in the Chinese box office. In the face of a lack of new Hong Kong actors coming through, it was interesting that the new blood came in the form of Korean boy band member Choi Siwon who also performs some of Super Junior’s mandarin repertoire

  • Virtual cockpit & things from this week

    Razorfish Berlin’s interactive brochure for Audi to promote the TT coupe’s virtual cockpit. I was reminded of an ad that Mercedes did where the phone became the rear view mirror of a car, emphasising performance. Also McDonald’s had used the mix of print and circuits with phones to create beat making place mats.

    But I find the intersection of print and digital an exciting space, even if the virtual cockpit concept doesn’t appeal to me that much.

    More related content here.

    Leo Burnett Italy created an app for P&G’s Always brand that directly addresses the insecurity women may feel in an unfamiliar area at night time; it connects them with a friend, to protect them on your way home.

    It is a smart play for the brand to maximise how it can be useful to consumers.

    Celebrity music streaming service Tidal faced critics at launch, this was probably the best of them

    I love this old video about Bell Laboratories’ complex in Holmdel, New Jersey that AT&T have put on YouTube as part of their efforts to digitise their archives. This is Silicon Valley before Silicon Valley

    At the other end of the spectrum, Ogilvy Hong Kong for Hong Kong Clean-Up produced a campaign that puts DNA analysis into an Orwellian future.