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

 

  • Crimson Hexagon + more things

    Facebook Suspends Analytics Firm Crimson Hexagon on Concerns About Sharing of Public User-Data – WSJ – Crimson Hexagon will likely get out of the penalty box soon, the co-founder works at a joint Facebook academic research partnership… Its also not that surprising what Crimson Hexagon did, given how crap Facebook is at providing data to social insights platforms like Crimson Hexagon or Brandwatch

    Congress is wrong to question Huawei’s academic partnerships | FT – op-ed by Eric Xu of Huawei, you could cynically interpret it as a plea for easier espionage and an interesting use of ‘freedom’ (paywall)

    INTERNET: Baidu Sambas Out of Brazil | Young’s China BusinessThere are lots of reasons for the inability of China’s Internet companies to succeed outside their home market. One is simply inexperience. But another is really the direct result of Beijing’s determination to set up what almost amounts to a parallel Internet in China that in some ways is identical to the global Internet but in others is very different. That strategy has helped to keep out most of the major global competitors in any meaningful way, allowing Chinese companies to thrive on their home turf thanks to their booming local economy. But that approach has also made these companies quite unprepared to compete globally, since they engage in many practices that are either unacceptable outside or simply undermine trust of local people. – China’s Galapagos syndrome: WeChat has NO end-to-end encryption, is censored worldwide for instance. Will only succeed in low risk categories – photo altering apps or casual games

    Why Hong Kong’s property bubble won’t burst anytime soon | HKEJ Insights – Hong Kong’s property market no longer serves only the city’s seven million people. We now must also serve a country of 1.3 billion with a growing number of rich people anxious to get their wealth out. Hong Kong’s red-hot property sector is a perfect place for rich mainlanders and international investors to park their money. Their hot money, combined with the local psyche that prices will continue to climb means the bubble will never burst. – You could substitute most of the world’s major cities as hot money from fast developing economy entrepreneurs and rent seek oligarchs park their hot money in property safe havens. Hong Kong isn’t going to see a tailing off of house prices until China deals with corruption.

    Amazon’s new Part Finder helps you shop for those odd nuts and bolts | TechCrunch – so cool,  I am just really scared that if I showed this to my Dad this ‘tinkerer’ element of his character would go into overdrive

    Publicis Groupe: First Half 2018 Results | Publicis Groupe – poor job done at controlling market expectations

    Android has created more choice, not less | Google Blog – yeah right. Basically we can’t get paid in data so pay us a licence fee. I wonder how much Google will have to pay to keep Google Search in the device if they do that. It could also create an opportunity for Oxygen, Yandex app store, Jolla and home grown distributions by the likes of Huawei instead

    Mark Penn on his update to MicroTrends

    Media – Twitter’s guide to getting the most out of the platform

    MEDIA Protocol – WTF

    Looking Through the Eyes of China’s Surveillance State – The New York Times  – I tried the glasses out on a group standing about 20 feet away. For a moment, the glasses got a lock on a man’s face. But then the group noticed me, and the man blocked his face with his hand. The minicomputer failed to register a match before he moved. Seconds later, the people scattered. Their reaction was somewhat surprising. Chinese people often report that they’re comfortable with government surveillance, and train stations are known to be closely watched

    Amazon crashes just minutes into Prime Day | The Drum – makes you wonder about AWS availability and uptime…

  • Fall of Nokia & other things this week

    BBC 4 ran a great hour long documentary film: The Rise and Fall of Nokia is an oral history on the fall of Nokia from Nokia veterans. You can’t give a good comprehensive telling on the rise and fall of Nokia story in just one hour, but you can get a sense of what Nokia was. Some of the culture change that came with success  was really, really  dark. More on Nokia here.

    Danny Dyer nailed the zeitgeist on Brexit last week. Which led some the B3ta community to put together the Danny Dyer Presents: “Pwopa Nawty Noises!” (B3ta.com) – livens up conference calls no end.

    I was a big fan of HBO’s The Newsroom drama; it was more of the intelligent dramas over the past few years. The intro to the first episode seems even more prescient now

    I am very late to this but Techcrunch’s Bubbleproof drama from last year neatly skewers the current state of technology start-up culture (in the west at least).

    I’ll leave you with this amazing animated film from Hong Kong. It’s on KickStarter for funding and looks amazing with hints of traditional martial arts films, science fiction and psychedelia. More information on the film website.

  • China technology transfer + more

    China’s Technology Transfer Strategy: How Chinese Investments in Emerging Technology Enable A Strategic Competitor to Access the Crown Jewels of U.S. Innovation Michael Brown and Pavneet Singh – China is executing a multi-decade plan to transfer technology to increase the size and value-add of its economy from its base as the world’s 2nd largest economy. By 2050, China will be 150% the size of the U.S.2​ (with the goal of being double the US economy by that time and decrease U.S.’ relevance globally)​.  This technology transfer to China occurs in part through increasing levels of investment and acquisitions of U.S. companies which are at record levels today. ​China participated in about 10% of all venture deals in 2015 up from a 5% average participation rate during 2010-2016. China is investing in the critical future technologies that will be foundational for future innovations across technology both for commercial and military applications: artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles, augmented and virtual reality, financial technology and gene editing. ​The line demarcating products designed for commercial vs. military purposes is blurring in these new technologies. Investments are only one means of technology transfer which also occurs through the following licit and illicit vehicles ​where the cost of stolen intellectual property has been estimated at $300 billion per year. (PDF) – China technology transfer is like the piracy or opium trading of past centuries. China technology transfer is war by other means. More related content here.

    PwC hangs up on landlines in shift to ‘mobile first’ culture | Business | The Guardian – makes sense given the amount of under-used IP telephones that lie around in offices now

    WhatsApp groups can now be restricted so only admins can send messages | VentureBeat – which could take out a lot of SMS gateway offerings for marketers, enterprises etc

    M&C Saatchi beefs up presence in ‘influencer marketing’ | Financial Times – The rise of influencer marketing, which Mr Kershaw calls “performance marketing” because recommendations can have a direct and measurable impact on scales, complements traditional advertising (paywall)

    Luxury Car Buys Want to Declutter & Human-Centric Design | auto connected car news – This online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no esti­mate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.

  • H1, 2018 most popular posts

    Happy Back to the Future Day

    I took a little bit of time to reflect on the content that I have been writing, what can I learn from it and how I can reuse these learnings? Specifically what are people finding of interest? This couldn’t happen without people actually reading the content, so thank you for reading; feel free to come back on a regular basis. Over the past six months readers like you have found the following articles of most interest. In reverse order

    Reuse, Re-edit, Remix and Recycle – if you read the industry publications we here about personalised ad creative driven by ad targeting. But often the core creative and is created unnecessarily. Instead, what’s the minimum viable creative tweak that can be used? How do we extend the smart processes of reuse, re-edit, remix and recycling into this world?

    This Wasn’t The Internet We Envisaged – in the word’s of Terry Pratchet:

    “If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.”

    So it was time for reflection in order to get a perspective as the regulators and media discovered Facebook, Google and Amazon where not models of virtuous conduct.

    The Biggest Public Relations Agencies Stuckness and Market Dynamics – The Holmes Report came out with their top 250 (biggest) PR agencies around the world in terms of billings. I decided to delve into the numbers for financial years 2014 – 2017.

    This supports a hypothesis of slowing market growth and solidifying market dynamics at a macro level. Strategic acquisitions start to make less sense compared to improving efficiences and effectiveness.

    Throwback Gadget: Bose Wave System – usually my gadget reviews tend to be some of the better performing content. The Bose Wave review was the only one that appears this time around.

    Social Networks 10 Years Ago – a reflection on what a more diverse social media eco-system looked like.

    The Advertising Industry Post – the macro effects buffeting the world’s largest marketing services conglomerates.

    Mercedes China Syndrome – Chinese netizens are jumping the Great Firewall to vilify western brands who reflect views that ‘offend the Chinese people’ – even when this content is aimed at non-Chinese audiences. Mercedes’ offence was an Instagram image with one of their cars and a quote from the exiled Dalai Lama

    Personal online brand – at a time when we’re seeing social media turning into walled gardens. David Gallagher asked the Twitterverse if he should have his own site?

    Twitterverse: @wadds says I need a proper blog. I say I can do it on LinkedIn or Facebook. What say you? Build my own?

    I weighed in on why he should and how I manage the process.

    Chinese smartphone eco-system for beginners – Winston Sterzel did a good video for the average bystander on the Chinese smartphone eco-system. I thought it was a good film to share with marketers  – with a bit more background information answering some of the ‘why’ in terms of market dynamics.

    App constellations 2018  research – I built on work that I had done in 2014 and 2016, comparing the rate of growth across different companies apps based on Fred Wilson’s definition of app constellations. This was also the post that took me the longest to research!

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  • Income and wealth inequality + more

    Income and Wealth Inequality in America, 1949-2016 by Kuhn, Schularick and Steins (University of Bonn) – We expose the central importance of portfolio composition and asset prices for wealth dynamics in postwar America. Asset prices shift the wealth distribution because the composition and leverage of household portfolios differ systematically along the wealth distribution. Middle-class portfolios are dominated by housing, while rich households predominantly own equity. An important consequence is that the top and the middle of the distribution are affected differentially by changes in equity and house prices. Housing booms lead to substantial wealth gains for leveraged middle-class households and tend to decrease wealth inequality, all else equal. Stock market booms primarily boost the wealth of households at the top of the distribution. This race between the equity market and the housing market shaped wealth dynamics in postwar America and decoupled the income and wealth distribution over extended periods. The historical data also reveal that no progress has been made in reducing income and wealth inequalities between black and white households over the past 70 years, and that close to half of all American households have less wealth today in real terms than the median household had in 1970. – long read but very worthwhile study on historic US income and wealth inequality. More related content here. (pdf)

    Yahoo Messenger is shutting down on July 17, redirects users to group messaging app Squirrel | TechCrunch – end of an era

    New Ways for Gaming Creators to Get Started and Get Discovered on Facebook | Facebook Newsroom – in app ad bidding

    New Ways to Enjoy Music on Facebook | Facebook Newsroom – rip off of musicia.ly

    Apple Ignores What’s Wrong With the Mac | Sascha Segan | PCMag.com – a pretty fair critique of Mac industrial design

    Apple, where’s the smarter Siri in iOS 12? USA Today – it would be more interesting if one could use the workflows created by others a la IFTTT

    Meet the people who still use Myspace: ‘It’s given me so much joy’ | The Guardian – something to be said for smaller communities

    Facebook Gave Data Access to Chinese Firm Flagged by U.S. Intelligence – The New York Times – it gave access to a number of vendors including the main Chinese players

    The Chinese “gang” manipulating the market — now in EOS?