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

 

  • Kindle – tenth anniversary

    I was blown away when I realised that it was the tenth anniversary of the the Amazon Kindle. Ten years, think about that for a moment.

    Amazon Kindle & Sony eBook

    If you look at the original Kindle versus the latest model you can see how the design language moved from a ‘BlackBerry’ type product design to a smartphone type design. Along the way it benefited from improvements in e-ink display technology to provide a crisper viewing experience. Sony’s competitor might have looked more modern bit it didn’t manage to get the marketing mix and the hardware / services mix right.

    Sony’s failure indicated while you could be successful in a number of media markets, it didn’t guarantee success in other media.

    Rather like Apple products Kindle is a combination of hardware, software (including content), payment infrastructure and the Whispernet global mobile virtual network.

    Like Apple, Amazon came in and refined an existing business model. Companies like Sony made very nice e-readers, but they didn’t have the publisher relationships and market access that Amazon had.

    Context rather than convergence

    In a time where consumer electronics thinking was all about convergence, from the newly launched iPhone to the Symbian eco-system, Amazon were determined to come up with a single purpose device.

    Amazon resisted the trend and created a dedicated device for reading. That is why you have a black-and-white e-ink screen and an experience exclusively focused on seamless content downloads.

    Yes, they’ve rolled out tablets since, but even the latest range stick to the original Kindle playbook. Some of their decisions were quite prescient. The Kindle was deliberately designed so that it didn’t require content to be side loaded from personal computer like an iPod.

    The Kindle has survived the smartphone and the tablet device as a reading experience. Even if ebooks didn’t conquer the book publishing market in quite the way Amazon had planned.

    Using the U.S. legal system to clear the field

    Amazon was helped out by the US government prosecuting Apple under the Sherman Act. Wikipedia has a good summary of this case. On the face of it Apple was doing a similar structured deal with publishers on book pricing to what it had done previously with record companies for iTunes music.

    This case effectively stalled Apple book store momentum and lumbered Apple with overzealous US government overwatch. The consumer benefit has been minimal – more on that later. The irony of all this is the way Amazon has leveraged its monopolistic position to decimate entire sectors of the retail economy.

    The interesting thing about this case, say compared to the Apple | Qualcomm dispute is that Apple still kept Audible audio book sales in iTunes throughout this dispute and didn’t look at ways to bounce the iPad Kindle app from the app store. Audible is an Amazon-owned company.

    By comparison, Amazon bounced Apple’s TV from its own e-commerce platform and has taken a long time to support the AppleTV app eco-system – long after the likes of Netflix.

    Piracy in China

    Amazon hasn’t had it all its own way. China had a burgeoning e-book market prior to the Kindle and Chinese consumers used to read these books on their laptops.  Depending which store you used; it might have more books at a cheaper price because intellectual property wasn’t ironed out. This has undermined Amazon’s slow entry into the Chinese e-book marketplace.

    A cottage industry sprang up that saw Kindles acquired in the US and Japan shipped back to China and reflashed with software that made them compatible with the local app stores. These Kindles were bought at a subsidised price as Amazon looked to sell devices to sell books.

    The Kindle brain phenomenon

    I moved from the UK to Hong Kong to take up a role and tried to lighten my burden by moving my reading from books to the Kindle. I found that I didn’t retain the content I read. I enjoyed the process of reading less and did it less often. I wasn’t an e-book neophyte I had enjoyed reading vintage pulp fiction novels as ebooks on Palm devices and Nokia phones in the early 2000s as a way of passing them time on my commute.

    Talking to friends their experience was similar. I now read on the Kindle or listen to audio books only for pleasure. I tend to buy my reference books in the dead tree format. There is something more immediate about the process of reading from a ‘real book’ rather than an e-book.

    It seems that digital natives aren’t ready to give up books just yet. Studies about the use of digital technology and e-books in education are mixed and anecdotal evidence suggests that technology industry leaders liked to keep the level of digital content in their children’s lives at a low threshold.

    The Kindle hasn’t replaced the bookshelf and the printing press yet.

    Pricing

    Disposing of the medium didn’t mean that we got cheaper e-books. On Amazon it is worth looking carefully to see what is the cheapest format on a case by case basis. Kindle competes against print books and secondhand books.

    Secondhand books win hands down when you are looking at materials beyond bestsellers. A real-world book is easier to gift and Amazon Prime allows for almost instant gratification. The Kindle starts to look like Amazon covering all the bases rather than the future of publishing. This may change over time, a decade into online news was a more mixed media environment than it is now – but Kindle feels as if it has reached a balance at the moment. More related content here.

    More information

    New study suggests ebooks could negatively affect how we comprehend what we read | USA Today
    Shelve paperbacks in favour of E-books in schools? | BBC
    Study challenges popular beliefs on e-reading | The Educator
    Are Digital Textbooks Finally Taking Hold? | Good eReader – makes the case for a heterogenous book environment of standard textbooks, e-books and used books
    Do ‘Digital Natives’ Prefer Paper Books to E-Books? | Education Week
    Our love affair with digital is over | New York Times (paywall)

  • TV synced online ads & other news

    TV synced online advertising

    TV synced Facebook News Feed ads yield 60% lift | Facebook Marketing Partners – TV synced advertising seems to have a similar effect to TV synced radio campaigns (PDF)

    Culture

    Hip-hop is getting old, man | Quartz – interesting discussion on cultural cycles.

    Soothsayer in the Hills Sees Silicon Valley’s Sinister Side – The New York Times – “If you’re a mark of social media, if you’re being manipulated by it, one of the ways to tell is if there’s a certain kind of personality quality that overtakes you,” he says. “It’s been called the snowflake quality. People criticize liberal college kids who have it, but it’s exactly the same thing you see in Trump. It’s this kind of highly reactive, thin-skinned, outraged single-mindedness. I think one way to think of Trump, even though he is a con man and he is an actor and he’s a master manipulator and all that, in a sense he’s also a victim. I’ve met him a few times over 30 years. And what I think I see is someone who has moved from kind of a New York character who was in on his own joke to somebody who is completely freaked out and outraged and feeling like he is on the verge of a catastrophe every second. And so my theory about that is that he was ruined by social media.”

    Design

    IBM Type – IBM have open sourced their tailor-made corporate font Plex

    Marketing

    Huawei’s new global corporate brand swagger | Analysis | Campaign Asia  – Huawei so closely reflects China’s new ambitions that it would be easy to consider the tech giant as a proxy for Brand China. But Tan bristles at the suggestion. “Huawei is a global company,” she reminds us. “You can see our overseas revenue is larger than China, so we really want to position our brand as a global brand.”

    Online

    Amazon to Sell Part of Its Cloud Business in China – WSJ – something to think about with your China data shards

    Long Live Short Video in China | The Daily | L2 – you also have streaming video, OTT etc

    CompuServe’s forums, which still exist, are finally shutting down | Fast Company – I remember my Landlord in college used CompuServe on dial-up and met his current wife though it

    Software

    Entering the Quantum Era—How Firefox got fast again and where it’s going to get faster – Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog – interesting insight into desktop software development now. Let’s see how this works for Firefox’s market share

    Web of no web

    Review: Jibo Social Robot | WIRED – interesting bits about robot human interaction

    Wireless

    WeChat users send 38 billion messages per day | Techinasia – WhatsApp is on 55 billion messages a day – according to Benedict Evans

  • Small business + other news

    Small business

    What does small business really contribute to economic growth? | Aeon Essays – not as much as politicians etc would have you believe. Probably the most emblematic example of ‘small business’ contributing to economic growth was Margaret Thatcher. Small business and financial services were supposed to replace the manufacturing sector which had been devastated.

    Business

    Will.i.am’s startup raises $117 million, enters enterprise market | Reuters – don’t hold your breath

    Poor PR Performance Puts Publicly-Held Agencies On Back Foot | Holmes Report – great analysis by Arun

    Consumer behaviour

    Majority Of White Americans Say They Believe Whites Face Discrimination : NPR – where to start with this?

    Online eco-system maps | Coventry University – students self-identify their web habits looking at it you can see how the public focuses on just a few sites

    Ethics

    No, of that I’m innocent. – Scobleizer – I was reading this and had my fingers covering my eyes. I am just thankful not to be counselling Scoble as a PR person or a lawyer

    Marketing

    Trump Data Guru: I Tried to Team Up With Julian Assange  – A Republican digital strategist who worked with Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 campaign told The Daily Beast that Nix should not be viewed as a reliable narrator.
    “Alexander Nix is not credible at all,” the strategist said. “He is a consummate salesman, and there are numerous instances already out in the public record where he made claims that were not just factually wrong—they were total fabrications.” – we’re still no closer to the truth

    PRCA Study: ROI Concerns Slow Digital Marketing Spend For UK PR firms – I suspect that this is a problem of strategy rather than measurement. Influencer programmes are very much a random bet in comparison to paid media

    Uniqlo’s Four Secrets for Building a Global Brand | Fortune – ‘truth telling’ rather than storytelling

    Media

    Taylor Swift is going to save the CD | Quartz – one of the few things I can agree with Taylor Swift on

    Clarifying Recent Tests | Facebook Media – interesting move given the panic caused by falling page engagement rates

    Retailing

    Alibaba revenues up 61% to US$8.3T, annual active consumers grew to 488M in Q3 2017 | China Internet Watch – the scale of the numbers are huge

    Ikea returns to Aichi after 1970s department store presence proved hard fit | The Japan Times – interesting reflections on when the flat pack giant was sold in a Japanese department store. There was an expectation that products came fully assembled

    Technology

    Harmony Link EOS or EOL? Logitech – looks like Logitech is going to need a crisis comms agency in March next year

    China’s Technology Ambitions Could Upset the Global Trade Order – The New York Times – AMD unpatriotic

    Wireless

    The Unprecedented Explosion of Smartphones in Myanmar – Bloomberg – this is insane. When I was working on Myanmar programmes some 3 years ago the internet penetration was in single figures

    Web of no web

    iPhone supplier Catcher Tech to make augmented-reality parts- Nikkei Asian Review – but this doesn’t mean that they are for Apple

  • Older iPhones + more news

    Apple CEO Cook breathes new life into old iPhones | Reuters – how Apple’s lower models contribute in markets like India. Older iPhones resold also drive services sales on an ongoing basis, whether the older iPhones are based on to children or sold on

    Culture

    Funko CEO reacts to stock’s 40% plunge on figurine maker’s first day as a public company | Geekwire – surprising given the prominence of geekdom in popular culture

    Gadgets

    aibo | Sony Japan – Matt’s commentary on this from his Web Curios newsletter ‘When I was about 20 I was obsessed with the idea of Sony’s Aibo, the robot dog that was JUST LIKE A REAL PUPPY  but with no hair or faeces or propensity to maul people.; now Sony have announced a rebooted version which is slightly less robotic and slightly more cute, and doubtless far more sophisticated in its ability to dance and caper and charmingly present to demand tickles that will never feel. The weird thing is, though, that now I am older I look at this and feel nothing but a deep and abiding sadness at the thought of the sort of people for whom this actually designed – not rich twats who want a toy, but the terminally lonely for whom a small robotic dog and stroking its plastic, unfeeling case in lieu of actual biological contact. Imagine that being your only interaction with another ‘thing’ for days and days and days on end. I don’t want to grow old.’ Not too sure if this a manifestation of his realisation of mortality that usually kicks in with the start of middle age. It does reflect the resurgence of Sony and how it thinks about consumer products for a greying market.

    Marketing

    See the cool kids lined up outside that new restaurant? This app pays them to stand there. – The Washington Post  – “They hire promoters and marketers and PR agencies to connect, but it’s a one-sided interaction that involves blasting out a message to get people engaged, but they don’t necessarily know if that message is being received.”

    WPP’s PR Units Slip as Sorrell Warns on ‘New Normal’ – O’Dwyer PR  – “It does seem that in new normal of a low growth, low inflation, limited pricing power world, there is an increasing focus on cost reduction, exacerbated by a management consultant emphasis on cost reduction and the close to zero cost of capital funding of activist investors and zero-based budgeters,” wrote Sorrell in WPP’s trading update.

    Online

    Damning stat Facebook tried to bury | News.com.au – 270 million accounts are duplicate or fake

    Software

    This app is like Shazam for fonts | The Next Web – genius, more design related content here.

    Berlin’s Ada Health raises $47M to become the Alexa of healthcare | TechCrunch – would the money be better spent on building skills into Alexa or Google Home?

    Wireless

    Q’comm Profits Dive Amid Patent Disputes | EE Times – ingredient brand most hated by its partners….

  • The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

    I bought The One Device when it came out in July and have gone back and forth reading it. I’d read books on Silicon Valley before; the Apple eulogy  Insanely Great by Steven Levy which told of the graft and hard work that went into the original Macintosh or Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner & Lyon which discussed engineers working really long works. My favourite one is still Robert X Cringely’s Accidental Empires that portrays Gates as a coupon-clipping megalomaniac and Steve Jobs as a sociopath cut from the same cloth as Josef Stalin.

    Merchant’s The One Device is different. It doesn’t eulogise in the same way, but it also lacks immediacy as it feels detached from its subject matter. Unlike Levy’s work, Apple didn’t cooperate with Merchant at all. The book is broad in scope and sometimes loses its way, each one of the chapters could have been an interesting short book in their own right and this leaves it being faintly unsatisfactory.  I guess this is one of the reasons why it took me so long to read it.

    In the meantime the book stirred controversy over quotes attributed to Tony Fadell about then colleague Phil Schiller.  This made me cast a critical eye over some of Merchant’s adventures in the book. In particular inside the Foxconn industrial complex.

    On a more positive note, Merchant’s vision is grander than previous authors. One man’s mission to pull all the intellectual threads together on what made up the iPhone. The iPhone moves from becoming the child of an over-worked and under-appreciated Apple engineering team to being the totem of a global village.

    If you’ve read a quality newspaper you know what he’s going to say about the global supply chain. He also touches on the decades of software and technology development that led up to the iPhone.  How its multi-touch interface came out of a 1990s doctoral thesis. Ultimately the value of Merchant’s book many not be his writing, but instead becoming a new template for journalists writing on Silicon Valley to look beyond the David & Goliath mono-myth and instead dig into the tangled history of innovation. More book reviews here.