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.

  • Yahoo! back to 2005?

    Back to 2005

    Events at Yahoo! this week took me back to 2005 – the halcyon days web 2.0 days before popular social networks. If you are vaguely interested in the online sector, you will have noticed that Summly has been acquired by Yahoo!. The acquisition is interesting for a number of reasons:

    • It is a statement of Yahoo!’s mobile aspirations. Yahoo! has been in mobile for a good while, back to 2005 at least. Yahoo! Go tried to pull all the of the Yahoo! portal properties into an app-like experience and Yahoo! ZoneTag was an early experiment of attributing location to smartphone pictures well before the iPhone. Upload to Flickr was integrated into many SonyEricsson and Nokia phones (notably the bestselling Nokia N73) But none of these pioneering efforts were rewarded with market share
    • Yahoo! is looking to buy cool, like it did back in 2005 and 2006, acquiring web 2.0 businesses. Summly has had about one million downloads, mostly by early adopters of its news reader. It is not the mass-market audience that Yahoo! usually targets. Like Flickr and Delicious before it this is about cool. Whilst most of the focus has been on the media, Yahoo! has historically made these purchases to try and infuse some of the start-up get up and go DNA into the larger organisation
    • Summly makes some interesting technological choices that would appeal to Yahoo!. Firstly, surfacing content that consumers would find of interest; particularly interesting given that Google has abandoned RSS. Secondly, using analytical techniques to create abridged version of content could also be a differentiator in search in terms of both presentation and as a technique to improve relevance (if the abridged rather than full versions were indexed). However, Summly doesn’t own the technology itself, but is a mashup of underlying services
    • The 30 million dollar acquisition figure being bandied around mirrors the rumoured costs of buying both Flickr and Delicious back in 2005 and 2006. One of the key differences between Flickr and Delicious with Summly is the technology benefit that was brought to the table by the web 2.0 pioneers and in Flickr’s case the quality of the business on offer. Prior to being acquired Flickr was pretty close to breaking even with its freemium model
    • Summly is an interesting focus away from the traditional Silicon  and Bay Area stomping grounds of Yahoo!

    More information
    Yahoo! to acquire Summly | Yodel Anecdotal

  • Harlem Shake + more news

    Harlem Shake

    Baauer’s ‘Harlem Shake’ Hits No. 1 With Unlicensed Samples – NYTimes.com – just like the early 1990s again. It reminds me of all the tracks who used vocals from the Accapellas Anonymous series of records on DJ Essentials Inc. Some of the Harlem Shake samples are from Philadelphyinz – T&A Breaks 3: Moombahton Loops & Samples – which in turn sampled at least five other tracks including one by Pitbull. Harlem Shake also sampled Plastic Little’s miller time

    Consumer behaviour

    Your Neighborhood Is Why You’re Fat – urban planning and health. Summary – suburbs and kitchen sink estates without mass transit system links and cycle-friendly roads are bad for you

    Why Koreans Love Tumblr, And Other Social Network Surprises – not so much why but interesting insights none-the-less

    FMCG

    Pepsi Unveiling New Bottle Design – first tune-up since 1997

    Nando’s nation: the chicken that conquered Britain – Telegraph – interesting article on the phenomena of fast casual eating

    Yum Brands Rebounds From Chicken Scare in China – Bloomberg

    How to

    Looking for a Google Alerts Alternative? Try This

    Innovation

    Recharging Japan’s Dominance in Lithium-ion Batteries – PARC blog

    China Is Engineering Genius Babies | VICE United Kingdom – not exactly but interesting take on how China is putting effort into biotechnology

    The 500MW molten salt nuclear reactor: Safe, half the price of light water, and shipped to order | ExtremeTech

    Luxury

    Lane Crawford employs 3D scanning for spring/summer campaign – Campaign Asia

    Media

    Ireland’s newspapers suffer hard times – FT.com

    What If The Google Reader Readers Just Don’t Come Back? | TechCrunch

    Third of digital ads ‘may never be seen’ (Infographic) – Digital Intelligence

    Apple is finally making money on content

    Social media, a blank canvas for your brand | IAB UK

    This Is the Scariest Statistic About the Newspaper Business Today – Derek Thompson – The Atlantic – in 2012, newspapers lost $16 in print ads for every $1 earned in digital ads. And it’s getting worse, according to a new report by Pew. In 2011, the ratio was just 10-to-1

    February 2013 Facebook Report: Electronics Industry | Social Media Statistics & Metrics | Socialbakers

    If Superheroes Were Sponsored By Famous Brands – brilliant. Branding could be a way for the comic book industry to survive the disruption of digitisation

    Did eBay Just Prove That Paid Search Ads Don’t Work? – Harvard Business Review but only if you an have incredibly strong organic search programme going on. What people failed to take away from this is the rather unique nature of eBay’s business. Don’t give up on spending for SEM just yet. Few organisations can boast of having a site with as strong an organic search marketing as eBay.

    Online

    Another Reason Google Reader Died: Increased Concern About Privacy and Compliance – Liz Gannes – News – AllThingsD – boils down to mainstream vs. niche

    Social | Facebook Events Join the Contextual-Computing Party – location data used well

    The man behind Flickr on making the service ‘awesome again’ | The Verge – making the site more responsive would be a good start

    Digg Blog, We’re Building A Reader – Digg going after the Google Reader community

    How Many People Really Use Sina Weibo – WSJ

    The Bing operating system: Microsoft bets on deep search integration to beat Google | The Verge – leveraging desktop presence

    Official Google Blog: A second spring of cleaning – highest profile casualty is Google Reader

    Google Illiterate | MetaFilter – pissed off Google Reader users

    LinkedIn to Buy Pulse Newsreader for More Than $50M – AllThingsD – interesting acquisition

    Retailing

    The week in charts – Economist – interesting data points on Alibaba

    Amazon Optimus Prime – AllThingsD – impressive growth in Amazon Prime, the Kindle Fire looks like the 21st century of the Argos catalogue

    China’s e-tail revolution | McKinsey & Company

    Software

    China Mobile: Let the Market Decide How to Charge Tencent for WeChat

    Why I’m Switching (Back) to Firefox – campaul [dot] net – I never switched away

    Insight: On Facebook, app makers face a treacherous path | Reuters

    Smartest of the Ambient Apps at SXSW 2013 | SiliconANGLE

    Technology

    Apple’s Data Centers Now Running on 100% Renewable Energy, Corporate Facilities at 75% – Mac Rumors

    Web of no web

    Google Glass is Provoking a Backlash Because it’s Rude to Wear a Computer over Your Eye | MIT Technology Review

    Wireless

    NYT: Apple allegedly squeezing EU operators on iPhone contracts, regulators looking into it | The Verge

    Android Owners Aren’t Real Smartphone Owners – Business Insider

    BlackBerry World catalog now boasts 100,000 BlackBerry 10 apps; 30,000 added in last 7 weeks – The Next Web

  • Siberian meteor burst + more

    Siberian meteor burst

    I know that there have been 500 people with minor injuries, but  the Siberian meteor burst felt like I was living in a Jerry Bruckheimer film. The best observation I saw about it was in Vice magazine’s email newsletter which asked why so many drivers in Russia had managed to film the asteroid rather than keeping both hands on the wheel? The reason for the multiple recordings of the Siberian meteor burst is driver cams used to help with car accident disputes. The Siberian meteor burst brought back memories of the Tunguska event in 1908 which levelled large swathes of Siberian forest.

    Business

    “Physically Together”: Here’s the Internal YHOO No-Work-From-Home Memo | AllThingsD – I could see a post coming on from Becky McMichael about the benefits of remote working and flexible hours etc etc

    PrivCo | LIVINGSOCIAL $110M Debt Infusion From Existing Investors With Oppressive Terms – I wonder what implications this will have for GroupOn

    Consumer behaviour

    HBO: The Weight of the Nation interesting site on obesity in the US

    Culture

    So there has been extensive character redesigns and different actors will be voicing some of the main protagonists, but I am super-excited that Production I.G are returning with another installment in the Ghost In the Shell series of anime. Arise looks amazing judging by the trailer footage now available on YouTube. More Japan related content can be found here.