Ged Carroll

Category: wireless | 無線 |무선 네트워크 | 無線

This blog came out of the crater of the dot com bust and wireless growth. Wi-Fi was transforming the way we used the internet at home. I used to have my Mac next to my router on top of a cupboard that contained the house fuse panel and the telephone line. Many people had an internet room and used a desktop computer like a Mac Mini or an all-in-one computer like an iMac. Often this would be in the ‘den’ or the ‘man cave’. Going on the internet to email, send instant messages or surf the internet was something you did with intent.

Wi-Fi arrived alongside broadband connections and the dot com boom. Wi-Fi capable computers came in at a relatively low price point with the first Apple iBook. I had the second generation design at the end of 2001 and using the internet changed. Free Wi-Fi became a way to attract people to use a coffee shop, as a freelancer it affected where I did meetings and how I worked.

I was travelling more for work at the time. While I preferred the reliability of an ethernet connection, Wi-Fi would meet my needs just as well. UMTS or 3G wireless data plans were still relatively expensive and slow. I would eventually send low resolution pictures to Flickr and even write a blog post or two. But most of the time I used it to clear my email box, or use Google Maps if I was desperate.

4G wireless services, started to make mobile data a bit more useful, even if the telephony wasn’t great

 

  • Bullet time + more things

    Bullet Time – Logic Magazine – Bullet comments, or 弹幕 (“danmu”), are text-based user reactions superimposed onto online videos: a visual commentary track to which anyone can contribute. Started in Japan, but popularised massively in China. When a beloved character dies in a web series, a river of grieving kaomoji (╥﹏╥)—a kind of emoticon first popularized in Japan — washes over whatever happens next. The bullet time interface reminded me of the realtime information one would see in things like trading desks. Its an emotional barometer amongst your people for real time content.

    Mark Ritson: Binet and Field aren’t perfect but it doesn’t make them wrong | Marketing Week – well deserved defence of Les Binet and Peter Field by Mark Ritson. Models are never perfect

    Why Strangers Are AirDropping You Memes and Photos – The Atlantic – everything old is new again as Bluetooth sharing ‘Bluetoothing’ gets a refresh. Taylor Herring used this to share a job advert at the recent PR Week Awards

    Does the UK Benefit From Chinese Investment? – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – short answer no – it’s actually harmed by it as investment is power projection and compromises the UK’s strategic capability

    Mark Read: CMOs have become too much like chief communications officers | PR Week – A lot of CMOs have become too much chief communications officers, not chief marketing officers,” Read said. “Our job is to help to put the ‘market’ back into the word ‘marketing’. “Communications has an important role, but it needs to be “the right element” within the wider marketing mix, according to Read: “Marketing means: what markets are we in? What products do we offer? What prices do we do? How do we understand and anticipate consumers?”

    Despite Fears, Aviation’s Future Will Be More Automated | Time – so why the move towards more automation in cars such a good idea based on what we know about airliners from this article?

    The Hottest Chat App for Teens Is Google Docs – The Atlantic – context specific

    WalktheChat | WeChat Live Streaming Case Study: 48% Sales Conversion Rate! – really interesting read. China’s mix of live-streaming and e-tailing is shopping TV for the 21st century

  • Qualcomm licensing + more

    Judge Koh: Qualcomms Licensing Practices Destroyed Competition, Harmed Consumers – Disruptive Competition Project – as best as I can understand this, the analogy of Intel and AMD comes to mind in terms of the kind of case Judge Koh has described her thoughts. But the case is different which is what makes this a bit odd. Especially odd given that there is so much more to criticise on Qualcomms licensing practices. In particular the coercive cross licensing conditions that are part of Qualcomms licensing practices. More on Qualcomm here.

    Blockchain officially confirmed as slower and more expensive | FT Alphaville – Oracle et al should be showing this to clients

    Field Notes: Highlights from Huawei – Andreessen Horowitz – My family uses Apple’s phones; Apple’s ecology is very good. When family members travel abroad, I would gift them an Apple computer. One can’t narrow-mindedly believe that if you love Huawei then you must only use Huawei mobile phones. – Chairman Ren says that when he and his family are looking for premium smartphones they use an Apple

    TV makers to reduce display panel stocks, says IHS Markit | EE Times – expectation of economic contraction

    China’s robot censors crank up as Tiananmen anniversary nears – Reuters – there’s a definite tension between western media fake news and Chinese censorship coverage. Not that there’s moral equivalence, but a lack of awareness about the thread connecting the subject areas

    Dunkin Donuts Refuses to Get Woke: ‘We Are Not Starbucks’ – Sometimes the brand purpose is what it says on the tin

    Uber introduces quiet mode for premium customers | Canvas8 – you need an app to mediate a simple request FFS

    Global Competition and Brexit | American Political Science Review | Cambridge Core – highlights the importance of globalisation in driving populism in post-industrial economies. This is probably why Trump and American politicians are in the trade cold war for the long haul and likely to see similar in the EU – its only a matter of time

    Nigel Farage seeks to establish a viable far right UK party — Quartz – If you don’t read anything else about Brexit and think that the current populism will peak and subside with Brexit ponder “Anyone who is not the governing party is going to benefit from the governing party inflicting food shortages. Medicine shortages will be very immediate. All of which he will be able to blame on Brexit not being done properly, and at least some people will be receptive to that message.”

    China showing signs similar to Japanese housing bubble that led to its ‘lost decades’, expert warns | South China Morning Post – I’ve heard this more than once, though there are two things to consider: 1/ the Bank of Japan was much more hands off than Chinese monetary policy 2/ China has opacity of data and more levers to pull in its favour in property market. Bigger issue is corporate and government debt

    Exclusive: Behind Grindr’s doomed hookup in China, a data misstep and scramble to make up – Reuters – While it is known that data privacy concerns prompted the crackdown on Kunlun, interviews with over a dozen sources with knowledge of Grindr’s operations, including the former employees, for the first time shed light on what the company actually did to draw U.S. ire and how it then tried to save its deal. Reuters found no evidence that the app’s database was misused. Nevertheless, the decision to give its engineers in Beijing access to Grindr’s database proved to be a misstep for Kunlun, one of the largest Chinese mobile gaming companies

    Mediatel: Newsline: Sex sells, right? – So, with that in mind, can sex still have the selling power for advertisers that it once did? 
    “Ultimately? Yes and no,” Jem Fawcus, CEO of brand strategy partner and insight agency Firefish, tells Mediatel. 
    “Every well observed element of human life can sell if used in the right way. But if used just for titillation and as an attention grabber, absolutely not.”

  • Kraft mothers day marketing + more

    Kraft Mothers Day marketing

    Kraft’s marketing has left a lot to be desired in the past couple of years partly due to the way the brand has implemented ZBB, but the Kraft Mothers day campaign running in the US is genius. It is a brave campaign that could fail due to wokeness or social conservatism. And they still went ahead and did it anyway. More FMCG related content here.

    Feedi RSS search engine

    Feedi Search Engine – part of the importance of media literacy is finding quality sources and anything that encourages adoption of RSS readers has the potential to be a good thing. If you need a good RSS reader, I can recommend Newblur which I have been using for a number of years. The reason why I like it is that you can train it to surface content of interest over time. It doesn’t machine learning to guesstimate it, but you have to make active decisions, which I think is a healthier balance.

    Game of Thrones collaboration

    MGM Resorts International – Winter Is Coming – MGM and HBO did a great tie-in to celebrate the start of the final Game of Thrones season. It is well worthwhile clicking on the link and going through their case study to see what MGM Resorts did.

    ZTE’s cyberpunk Nubia Alpha smart watch

    ZTE’s Nubia Alpha smart watch looks like something out of a cyber-punk novel. I love what ZTE have tried to do with the aesthetic. The key challenge is what looks like a shockingly bad user experience based on this video unboxing and preview. Wearables are a relatively new space and fair play to ZTE for attempting something this ambitious.

    WePresent

    WePresent – lovely creative brand building work by wetransfer. It is great the way WeTransfer consistently support fantastic creative. It is also a really amazing 404 error message page.

  • Belkin Audio + Charge Rockstar

    The Belkin Audio + Charge Rockstar is an accessory that allows you to charge and listen via headphones to a modern iPhone at the same time.

    Apple’s move to the Lightning connector leaves a lot to be desired. It was designed primarily for its cosmetic benefits. Apple got rid of headphone sockets just to allow them to make iPhones even slimmer. Lightning is a triumph of form over function. But as an iPhone user; you have to work with what you have. Apple often isn’t great at providing solutions. If they were Apple would have made the Belkin Audio + Charge Rockstar.

    The anonymous white dongle now has a permanent place in my computer bag. It has come in handy listening to voice memos, audio books and miscellany whilst I’ve been working at client offices. It has come in handy when I have been on conference calls, without disturbing people around me. When I moved down to London, I said in a cubicle with an open back which added a certain amount of screening to calls that I made.

    The offices I have been working in are long white featureless bench tables with seating canteen style. Which is barely adequate for working, let alone listening in on a conference call, even with a judicious use of the mute button.

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    I started off by trying an alternative product that I bought on Amazon. It the sound was barely audible, full of noise and clicks. One of Amazon’s challenges is the lack of quality control of products featured in marketplace. This has become stuffed with Chinese vendors whose products vary considerably in quality.

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    It was rather like listening to a numbers station shortwave transmission. Except the static was induced by poor product design. Rather than the distance, frequency jamming and atmospheric conditions between the listener and an anonymous low power shortwave station in the Middle East, Cuba, North Korea or Eastern Europe.

    By comparison, the Belkin Audio + Charge Rockstar, adds nothing. No cracks, no hisses, no white noise that wasn’t there beforehand. And it charges. More related posts here.

  • Agnotology + more things

    Agnotology and Epistemological Fragmentation – Data & Society: Points – well worth a good read. Agnotology (formerly agnatology) is the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. This reminded me a lot of work that was done by large corporates on tobacco health and more recently on peak oil and climate change. More recently it seems to be culture and value related; where the results don’t fit the wider progressive view in academia. That too isn’t healthy. More consumer behaviour related posts here.

    WePresent – lovely creative brand building work by wetransfer and an amazing 404 error message page. Each of the works presented here are very thoughtfully curated for a creative audience. Its all amazing.

    Gigalife by Vodafone | FaceTime families: What 5G means for those who stay in touch by screen – not a lot, wi-fi and 4G is more important and perfectly adequate

    When manipulation is the digital business model – dark patterns as we call it in the trade (paywall)

    Facebook’s off-again, on-again affair with privacy – Axios – less of a pivot and more of a zig-zag. What appears to be apparent is that Facebook’s internal values are at odds with wider society and there won’t be any meeting of minds any time soon.

    Leo Burnett, Lucky Generals and Ogilvy decline to pitch for Audi – Leo Burnett London, Lucky Generals, Ogilvy, Saatchi & Saatchi London and VMLY&R all declined to take part in Audi’s advertising review. Which is a pretty damning critique of either Audi’s pitch process, or their reputation in the UK as a client. Given how toxic Boots or Samsung are as a client, this is a pretty damning indictment of Audi as an organisation in the UK. This is a world away from when Audi’s Vorsprung Durch Technik ads went head to head with BMW in the 1980s and 1990s.