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

 

  • 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.

  • Spy craft disruption + more

    The Spy craft Revolution – Foreign Policy – really interesting to read from a privacy perspective, spy craft affected as much as general public. Intelligence agencies are apparently just like the rest of us and spy craft reflects this. More security related posts here.

    Algocurios – this is what happens when you plug Matt Muir into a machine learning algorithm. I’m just thankful SkyNet didn’t evolve. It doesn’t capture the desperation, profane language and ennui prevalent in Matt’s real posts

    Vodafone Found Hidden Backdoors in Huawei Equipment – Bloomberg – lots of reasons why this might be mostly dilute to poor software engineering practices but it doesn’t help Huawei reputation

    Opinion | Is China the World’s Loan Shark? – The New York Times – academics who have studied China’s practices in detail have found scant evidence of a pattern indicating that Chinese banks, acting at the government’s behest, are deliberately over-lending or funding loss-making projects to secure strategic advantages for China.

    A Conversation With Christopher Wray | Council on Foreign Relations – China poses multi-level threat to US (and the rest of the world if we’re honest about it)

    KaiOS takes on the Apple-Android mobile duopoly – Wizard of OS – given Google’s investment in KaiOS it could still be considered a duopoly of wireless OS’ – also shows what Nokia left on the table

    Brit spy chief: We need trust or we won’t have a ‘licence to operate in cyberspace’ • The Register – “must have the legal, ethical and regulatory regimes to foster public trust, without which we just don’t have a licence to operate in cyberspace”.

    Ralph Lauren Unveils The Super Woke Polo Shirt | Luxury Insider – a debut line of polo shirts made from recycled plastic bottles and dyed using a waterless production process. Besides being environmentally woke, the initiative has the noble aim of eradicating 170 million plastic bottles from landfills and oceans by 2025

    How the Kleiner Perkins Empire Fell | Fortune – just wow

    INTERVIEW: China seeking win with information warfare: professor – Taipei Times – interesting if depressing interview

    UK High Court confirms the way GSM gateways were banned was illegal • The Register – interesting reading

    Spotify Premium Adds 3 Million US Members | Consumer Intelligence Research Partners – keeping churn stable and improving conversion from free to paid (PDF)

    Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund Khazanah closes London office: Report – probably a mix of 1MDB and Brexit

    A Specter Is Haunting Xi’s China: ‘Mr. Democracy’ | The New York Review of Books – interesting if very optimistic reading for the papers quoted

    Baidu is reportedly incubating a music app to defend itself against ByteDance – KrASIA – Tencent already has a number of music apps in China

  • The Apple – Qualcomm deal post

    The Apple and Qualcomm deal ceased legal hostilities and lots of people have kicked around theories. But no one seems to definitively know what happened. And what the implications are for Apple.

    • If Apple was on such a sticky wicket, why didn’t it make a deal with Qualcomm earlier? A judge had asked them to sit down right at the beginning and they got nowhere
    • Did Intel explain to Apple that it wasn’t going to hit its engineering targets on the 5G modem (a la IBM and the PowerPCs that used to power Macs)? Or did Apple cut Intel off at the knees?
    • What does this all mean for Intel processors and components in Macs? From CPUs to USB C connectivity Apple is dependent on Intel. Even if Apple decided to move to an ARM architecture they would still likely need Intel foundries and connectivity processors. Before you talk about the Mac now being a small part of the business. Consider what mobile apps and even the iOS is developed upon. Secondly a Mac user is far more likely to be an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Apple TV customer
    • From a functional handset perspective I am not convinced about the benefit of 5G. But from a marketing perspective it could be very damaging to Apple eventually. How far behind would Apple developing a new 5G solution from scratch be? It would be reasonable to expect for Qualcomm to service other clients first and then only put under performing engineers on Apple as a punishment duty. Given that Qualcomm laid off engineering teams, engineers may only work on Apple grudgingly. Is it even viable for Apple to bother with 5G iPhone? If we look at history, the Qualcomm – Nokia IP deal was the beginning of the end for the Nokia handset business in 2007. Apple might lose money up front, but it would save on the kind of value destruction Nokia went through
    • What is the state of Apple’s relationships with the rest of its supply chain and can it expect a kicking?
    • Whilst mobile carriers wouldn’t be happy to have a single OS eco-system in smartphones, they’ve had zero success in championing other platforms (BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, WebOS and SailfishOS). All of this would make them even more beholden to Google. So would an alternative OS’ spring up to fill the iPhone gap?
    • Can Qualcomm use this to try and smother antitrust investigations outside the US?