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

 

  • Facebook eroding & other news

    Facebook eroding

    The tweet about Facebook eroding is part of a greater issue of what Facebook is calling internally ‘context collapse‘. Facebook recognised the issue back in 2015. There are several likely reasons for Facebook eroding:

    • Negative network effects
    • Societal norming on social media content
    • Lack of trust in the facebook brand
    • People just don’t like Facebook as a platform that much

    Business

    After Anbang Takeover, China’s Deal Money, Already Ebbing, Could Slow Further – The New York Times

    Hello, mobile operators? This is your age of disruption calling | McKinsey & Company – lots of buzz words, diagnosis but not a glimpse of a way forward

    Edelman Revenue Up 2.1% In 2018 To $894m | Holmes Report – given that all the global PR groups have had exceptionally low growth or even declines

    How Douyin became China’s top short-video App in 500 days – WalktheChat

    Wireless

    Nokia on 5G at MWC, what struck me is the sales pitch was more like an enterprise software company like IBM or Oracle than a telecoms vendor. There is lots of tech in the networks but there isn’t a recognisable killer app. His warnings about 5G upgradeable products ring true though.

    Consumer behaviour

    Asian Boss do some really nice street interviews in different Asian cities and this one about Apple iPhones in Korea is particularly instructive. Samsung is seen as the default phone as they assemble phones (mostly for Asian markets) in Korea. Whereas in Europe all of the are made in China. When I lived in Hong Kong, both Samsung and LG emphasised that they made their phones in Korea with an implicit quality guarantee. 

    The iPhone seems to have won out on product design amongst younger people. but one shouldn’t ignore the desire to support the national brand. 

  • Chinese devices in Asia + more news

    Why the iPhone Is Losing Out to Chinese Devices in Asia – WSJ  – Xiaomi has an edge in many markets because it can customize for each country while Apple creates the same products for everyone, said Jai Mani, Xiaomi’s product manager for India. – the rise of Chinese devices in Asia are picking up the kind of clients that Apple doesn’t want. More related content here.

    In an Era of ‘Smart’ Things, Sometimes Dumb Stuff Is Better – The New York Times – nails the need for divergent design and use cases

    How This Guy Lied His Way Into MSNBC, ABC News, The New York Times and More – old news, many PRs have been case studies in newspapers and magazine articles – Janet or Jim who worked in marketing and had a medical condition or an embarrassing thing happen to them – chances are they’re a PR

    Secret HSBC memo turns heat on Topshop boss Philip Green | News | The Sunday Times – this makes a lot of sense, even more so than when Green started discussions two years ago. From a historic point of view HSBC helped KS Li and his counterparts buy out many of the then British owned conglomerates in colonial Hong Kong of the 1970s. It seems natural to have them help find Chinese buyers for his British interests. Hong Kong’s Hutchison owns mobile network (including shops) 3. It also owns Super Drug through its Watson’s subsidiary. House of Fraser also has a Chinese owner. Topshop trades on the UK being cool and trendy a la Rimmel’s iconic “Get the London look” – Brexit diminishes it with its xenophobic inward look. Domestic sales still outweigh overseas sales, I can understand why he wants out, especially if the business is leveraged

    China’s cutthroat smartphone market is coming down to a handful of major brands | South China Morning Post  – Huawei Technologies, Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi and Apple – with a 77 per cent share of the market, up from 67 per cent in 2016, according to Counterpoint. – Quite why Oppo and Vivo aren’t viewed in aggregate rather like Huawei and Honor is beyond me due to their close ties to BBK

    Instagram is killing the way we experience art | Quartz – fine art gets the kind of screen intermediation problem that live music has had for years

    Dropbox saved almost $75 million over two years by building its own tech infrastructure – GeekWire – this makes total sense when you get that to that size and scale

    Assembly of ‘Aibo’ Robot Dog (1) | NIKKEI XTECH – Nikkei have a unique take on the teardown; working with a Sony engineer to document the process of assembling the latest generation of Aibo robotic dog. It quickly comes across where your money goes as it is fiendishly complicated to build

    Young Japanese are surprisingly content – Seventh heaven at 7-Eleven | Economist – but concerned about the future

    From the Name to the Box Logo: The War Over Supreme — The Fashion Law

    Why Chengdu Spends More on Luxury Than Wealthier Cities | Jing Daily

  • Operaatio Elop

    Nokia

    Operaatio Elop covers one of the most dramatic events in Finland since the Winter War. At the time of Nokia’s high point it accounted for over 25% of the Finnish economy. There has seldom been a fall so drastic as Nokia’s fall in the mobile phone market from leading player to disaster. With that fall came the humbling of an entire country.

    Given the scale of the fall and the size of Nokia as a brand around the world, I was surprised the the Operaatio Elop hadn’t been translated and published in different language editions. Instead it was up to numerous Finns to crowdsource a translation into English for free and provide it on an as is basis.

    Has Nokia’s fall had been so complete that it literally fell out of interest for non-Finns?

    What becomes apparent is that a story more nuanced than the press coverage would allow. Elop comes out of it a flawed tragic figure – a one-trick pony; rather than a skilful trojan horse.

    Nokia’s feature phone line up where surprisingly a hero of the piece contributing positively to the business for longer than I would have expected and slowing down the business collapse precipitated in the smartphone business.

    Nokia’s board of directors and former management come out of it much worse.

    Fatal flaws

    Nokia’s strengths had become its weakness.

    • Smartphone manufacturing processes weren’t ready for mass adoption
    • MeeGo had been unfairly assessed
    • It blew its marketing budget on a bet on the North American market, ignoring other countries
    • The marketing budget was spent too early and all at once. What resulted was an ineffective and inefficient marketing campaign. By my reckoning it was roughly $100 per phone sold during the launch of the Lumia range in the US
    • Poor quality Windows Phone software, small Windows Phone application ecosystem and cheap Android phones were key issues
    • Chip technology partner issues from its relationship with Qualcomm to Intel’s failure in 4G as it focused on WiMax rather than LTE

    The more pertinent question would be is there any circumstances where Nokia stood a chance of staying on top in the mobile phone marketplace? Operaatio Elop is a compelling but balanced read and I can’t recommend it highly enough. More book reviews here.

  • Authenticity is changing porn + more

    How social media and our obsession with authenticity is changing porn | Dazed – “Authenticity and amateur (fall) into traps about not acknowledging porn performance as craft, labour, and work”, Sullivan says, referencing a piece in the SF Weekly in 2014 by performer Siouxsie Q. In the article, the pornstar argues that, although authenticity is “one of feminist porn’s favourite words”, striving for an “authentic” sex scene undermines the labour that goes into creating a porn film. It erases the fact that performing is work, and not a hobby, which in turn justifies people watching free porn on the basis that it’s not worth paying for, says Sullivan. She thinks authenticity needs to be separated from the idea of actuality and redefined to mean the craft of the performance, in order to show people it is work and not fun and games. – Interesting the way it echoes wider media concerns from photographers, to journalists and influencers. The championing of authenticity in language is very now. It will we interesting to see how authenticity is changing porn continues.

    Apple’s iPhone X is the Instant Scapegoat for Samsung’s Failure to Win OLED Orders from Chinese Vendors – Patently Apple – “Other smartphone makers, who Samsung had hoped would incorporate OLED panels, have been slow to make the transition due to their expense and are sticking to liquid crystal displays.”

    I, Cringely Prediction #7 — 2018 will see the first Alexa virus – I, Cringely – There are presently more than 15,000 Alexa skills that have been officially approved by Amazon and are available for download. These skills do everything from launching programs to gathering data to setting reminders. Though relatively simple, each is still a cloud app that can connect tens of millions of Echo products to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

    Facebook plans to thwart election ad fraud with postcards | The Next Web – guessing that they haven’t heard of mail forwarding services? Also according the Mueller report Russia had operatives in-country

    News UK to advertisers: Run your Facebook ads on our sites | Digiday – and so the other shoe drops. The Murdoch family newspapers have led the way in mainstream media pointing out the flaws in Google and Facebook advertising in what looked to me like a sustained campaign. I am not saying that anything they’ve said is wrong, but now we get to see a ‘possible’ motivation

    EU-South Korean project to demonstrate 5G system at 2018 winter games | eeNews Europe – an overlooked part of the Winter Olympics. More Korea related content here.

  • Traffic experiments + more things

    Fascinating Traffic Experiments by Publishers (by @baekdal) #analysis  – Presence is often a very big part of the effect that you can have, in that, if you can be present in people’s minds, you often experience a kind of spillover effect on your business as a whole. This is not just true for content, but also everything else … like advertising. We know that creating an ad campaign where you show up in front of people continually over time is far more effective than just having one good ad. – a great delve into online with these traffic experiments. The practice of digital advertising tries to move away from ‘traditional’ advertising thinking a la branded recall. But it ends up validating it. The comment particularly resonates the findings of people like Byron Sharp. More related posts here.

    Great video essay on the Yamaha DX-7 synthesiser. After you listen to the bits on percussion you’ll never listen to your iPhone ringtones in quite the same way again.

    Systems Confrontation and System Destruction Warfare: How the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Seeks to Wage Modern Warfare | RAND – interesting to read. The concept of system destruction warfare [体系破击战] is also a good analogy for the way Amazon in particular has acted the in the commercial sphere (PDF)

    Android Wear is getting killed, and it’s all Qualcomm’s fault | Ars Technica – this assumes that the problem with Android Wear is a supply side issue with silicon, it doesn’t ask if Qualcomm sees it as a demand side issue and has moved on?

    The Shift: His 2020 Campaign Message: The Robots Are Coming | NYTimes.com – interesting how the debate about automation has been internalised and weaponised by politicians (paywall)

    Useful video, well worth a watch about applying Bayes Theorem to everyday life

    Key takeouts:

    • Remember your priors – what do you know about the context in advance of making an assumption
    • Imagine that your hypothesis is wrong? Would the world look different? – it forces you to check your presumptive assumptions
    • Update incrementally – all yourself to gradually change your mind based on updated information (flexible stance rather than dogmatic belief, as body of proof builds over time)