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

 

  • WWDC 2016 – what did it all mean?

    I watched the few hours of keynotes at Apple’s WWDC 2016 (Worldwide Developers Conference). I also read some of the resulting analysis and wondered if we’d been watching the same event.
    Cómo ver la WWDC 2016 en vivo en iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV
    So thought I would think about the event carefully and come up on my take of what it all meant. This is a bit later than I originally planned to publish it.

    Firstly, there was no change in direction for Apple from a strategic point-of-view. Apple has been clear about its direction, it is the ‘how’ which is the mystery. WWDC 2016 was a major unveiling of ‘the how’.

    Over the past few years, Apple has focused on the integration of its devices. The reason why there isn’t one OS*, a la Windows 10, is that the different form factors have different contexts. Cross-pollination of services only takes place where it makes sense, which is why Siri has taken a while to roll out.

    The first big thing is APFS – a new file system for all of Apple’s devices. This builds on upon the feature set of ZFS which was a file system developed by Sun Microsystems for its Solaris UNIX operating system. Apple had experimented with implementing ZFS in OSX Leopard, but then didn’t follow through. Solaris runs on large enterprise computers where the prevention of data corruption and handling a large amount of file changes simultaneously is very important. Like ZFS, APFS supports encryption, granular time stamping, fast file management and has improvements in data integrity. When it’s fully finished it should make encryption on devices easier to manage and provide the user with more control. It should also help with syncing data across devices and the cloud.

    The interesting thing is how this technology will scale over time handling multiple devices and form factors working seamlessly from a common database. Like many of there other technologies this is an extension of Apple’s Continuity offering and future integration with a wider IoT offering.

    When Steve Jobs launched Mac OSX 10.0 in 2001 he described it as being the OS for the next 15 years. At the time the original MacOS was showing its limits. The UI was colour but hadn’t really moved on that much since System 7.5. The operating system wasn’t multi-tasking. The internet felt kludgy even though it performed well on the hardware at that time. Looking at OSX / macOS now, the operating system it feels fresh. The tweaks and changes under the hood keep the performance hub and the features comparable with the rest of the Continuity eco-system. macOS also doesn’t seem to be seriously threatened by iOS ‘pro’ devices.

    iOS 10 was important to me for its embrace of messenger-as-a-platform. Apple innovates within its own Messages apps with some UI gimmicks. More importantly, notification real estate that was once the exclusive preserve of the Apple dialer. This allows you to accept calls from the likes of Skype, WeChat or Slack from the lock screen. This follows Apple’s model of using it’s own apps to work things out and then open up the function once it is mature. Apple’s own Messages app includes a number of features including:

    • Simple chat bot-like functionality
    • Swipe to read on messages to prevent shoulder surfers from reading messages
    • Messages app takeover emotions
    • More emoji / sticker like icons

    Apple Pay roll-out – continued geographic roll-out makes sense. Apple Pay isn’t about building a rival payment system a la PayPal. Instead, Apple is trying to build more touch points with the user. The level of usage doesn’t matter too much from that perspective. Geographic roll-out to Hong Kong and more European countries makes sense. The more exciting development is two-factor authentication for e-commerce payments on compatible sites using the Apple Pay infrastructure. This is big for shopping on both Mac and iOS-powered devices.

    Thinking differently about intelligence. Unless you have been living under tech industry equivalent of a stone, you’ll be aware of cloud companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google or Baidu using artificial intelligence techniques to drive device function. Apple hadn’t been as visible in this space up to WWDC. The reason for this is due their rigorous approach to user and device privacy.  There were two approaches to this:

    Having the mobile devices GPU to perform relatively simple neural-network computing. This can learn user preferences or intent over time and be more helpful

    Making Siri more intelligent by looking at the behaviour of users encrypted, salted with false data and aggregated up. Differential Security is the process of acquiring this data. In the second world war, the Allies cracked the cryptography derived from the Enigma machine. But that was only the first part of the challenge. In order for it to be useful the Enigma team used statistics to hide any usage of the intelligence hiding reactive activity in the midsts of statistically expected ‘normal’ behaviour.

    Differential security is kind of similar to this. All the data is encrypted, the phone sends a mix of false data and real data. When Apple looks at aggregated data they can see the false data as being false, but can’t tell which users data is false at a given time.

    Apple’s WatchOS 3 is interesting because of the performance boost it gives the wearable. The difference is really noticeable. The boost in performance is due to Apple having more memory to use than it had originally allowed for. This provides a more refined experience. Much of the UX enhancements were focused on fitness.

    From a developer perspective there were a few things missing:

    • Apple had no new pro-level hardware announcements
    • Apple later walked away from Thunderbolt displays, saying that 3rd parties were now making great displays. This reminded me of when Apple stopped making printers, it felt permanent, though there is a lot of speculation about a forthcoming Apple 5K display – we’ll see
    • Apple still needs to do more work on integrating its Swift programming language throughout its OS’
    • Given Twitter’s peak in growth, Apple didn’t show how Siri would cope in a post-Twitter world

    Finally the two-hour keynote was a love letter to China. At every opportunity Tim Cook mentioned the Chinese market, support for China-specific items like language and called out Chinese apps like WeChat.

    * From a technical point-of-view; tvOS, iOS, and macOS all share underpinnings based on NetBSD and a Mach micro-kernel.

    More information
    Apple Pay supporting banks | Apple Support Documents
    Apple finally opens Siri to third-party developers | TechCrunch
    Apple rolls out privacy-sensitive artificial intelligence | MIT Technology Review
    What is Differential Privacy? A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering
    Digging into the dev documentation for APFS, Apple’s new file system | Ars Technica
    Apple File System Guide | Apple Developer documentation
    Mac & iOS Continuity | Apple

    More articles on Apple WWDC through the years here.

  • Divorce talks + more

    Britain, EU at odds over timing of divorce talks – The Boston Globe – The markers of European decline are not hard to find. For the first time in modern history, Asia has more private wealth than Europe, the Boston Consulting Group said last year. And China will account for 70 percent of Asia’s growth between now and 2019, the group said. – It is of course more complex than ‘because China’. Rampant deindustrialisation, a loss of pride, crushing austerity. Intractable economic problems. A loss of identity and loss of empire. A collective hallucination all contributed to the non-binding vote that has resulted in divorce talks. Just wait until these divorce talks get on to fishery issues, free trade and state aid.

    How a Former Apple Designer is Updating Huawei’s Look — The Information – trying to crawl out of the commoditisation trap. More on Huawei here

    How ‘Deleted’ Yahoo Emails Led to a 20-Year Drug Trafficking Conviction | Motherboard – this has interesting privacy implications, i.e. you don’t have any with Yahoo! or probably most other email services

    Earned Brand 2016 – Edelman – interesting research into consumer brand relationships across a range of brand categories

    Chinese Company in Patent Dispute With Apple Barely Exists – WSJ

    Something doesn’t add up in Nikesh Arora’s sudden exit from SoftBank | Techinasia – it’s rather cast a shadow on Nikesh

    Universities and startup factories are fuelling a rise in UK startups like Magic Pony, the AI business Twitter bought for $150 million – While the Magic Pony exit is likely to be seen as a positive step for the UK AI scene, it does raise questions about whether the UK will ever be able to produce a really big AI company if Silicon Valley keeps preying on the country’s most promising startups. – This rather reminded me of the role that lower division clubs like Tranmere Rovers used to play for top sides. Feeding talent through and not profiting by the talent development themselves.

    Taking the headphone jack off phones is user-hostile and stupid | The Verge – you could argue the same about removing floppy disks on the original iMac, though I am inclined to agree with this

    BNNS – Apple Developer Documentation – Apple’s API that allows the GPU to run a simple neural network that helps the iPhone be smarter about preferences

    Jack Ma’s Counterfeit Comments Shed Light on Taobao’s ‘Legal’ Fakes | Jing Daily – Alibaba throws a grenade at the luxury industry

    Y Combinator’s Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer – amazing when you think about how long ago it was and how little forward we have come from it by comparison in subsequent years

    RIMOWA – Electronic Tag – interesting, but looks like tech, for tech’s sake

    Social influencers now more popular for brand campaigns than traditional celebs | PR Week – so the survey data is self serving but it also might say something about client budgets

    Survival on the Wirral | Culture | The Independent – if you want to know why the poor are voted for Brexit, its because scenes like this haven’t changed

    Brexit and Trust – Edelman – this has been a long train running in the UK for decades not years, but otherwise an interesting read

    RA: Real estate, gentrification and nightlife in New York – pretty much the same story as London

  • TAG Heuer + more things

    TAG Heuer Pushing Brand in China, as Rivals Scale Back | Business of Fashion – it makes sense given the lower price point of TAG Heuer watches. TAG Heuer is in an interesting place. Due to the government clampdown on corruption, the market for ostentatious watches has been curtailed for the time being.

    You could dispute whether TAG Heuer is even in the luxury space. Its range competes with the likes of Tissot on the bottom end and touches on Omega at the top end. The positioning that gives it a (temporary) tactical advantage in the Chinese market, leaves it vulnerable to the Apple Watch, which seems to have devoured the mid-market aside from rugged models. More on luxury here.

    iPhone Future — Monday Note – great piece of analysis

    Death to the Mass — Whither news? — Medium – the article proposes that content no longer king, and neither is distribution. Obviously if true, it would have major implications for the media sector. Jeff talks about conversation being more important now, which is an interesting framing of the challenge. I’d look at the opportunity as filtering or curation, and possibly social. Though in these times trust has declined alongside distribution.

    This Company Might Make Apple and Google Irrelevant — NewCo Shift — Medium – dramatic title but interesting write up on Viv. Viv seems to be a ‘Wildfire’ type personal assistant proof of concept. The idea is that it would displace the intelligence of Siri or Google on the devices. Viv hopes to upend the current platform model. Just because it’s good technology doesn’t guarantee success. It is interesting to reflect again on how mobile carriers went from having the platform business in their hands to poorly compensated dumb pipes for the likes of Facebook, Google and Tencent. And why they are now starting to retreat from the nascent global empires that they built in a fit of hubris.

  • Throwback gadget: SnapperMail

    Thinking about SnapperMail takes me back to end of 2001, I started to prepare for leaving my job at Edelman. This meant upgrading my home IT set up. I picked up an iBook. The iBook was Apple’s consumer-orientated laptop made from 1999 to 2006. Mine was a second generation ‘Snow’ laptop with a G3 processor, dual USB sockets and a combo drive which allowed me to watch DVDs and burn CDs.

    I used the move to go on the first version of OSX. The move also meant that I got a new email account, my default account to date. It had two key attributes:

    • No adverts, so it looked professional in comparison to having a Yahoo! or Hotmail email address and it wasn’t tied to an ISP.
    • IMAP support which allowed me to use my email account across different devices that syncs across the devices. POP3 downloads the  emails from the server to the device, so is ideal only for when you are accessing email from one machine

    My iBook was my only source of email access whilst I left Edelman, freelanced, and then eventually joined Pirate Communications. My first smartphone was a Nokia 6600, which I used alongside a Palm  PDA – l got this sometime around the end of 2003. The 6600 supported IMAP out of the gate, it was slow, but I was connected.

    The 6600 was eclipsed by Palm’s Treo devices which were a better device. I moved from the 6600 and a Palm Tungsten T3 combo to a Treo 600 smartphone in January 2005.

    The process wasn’t smooth. The Treo was sufficiently fragile that I got a translucent silicon jacket that worked surprisingly well with the keyboard and screen protector to look after the touchscreen. Software wise the Treo 600 was a step back from the Tungsten T3 PDA. The screen was smaller and the software felt sluggish in comparison. I had deliberately chosen the 600 over the 650 because I had previously worked agency side on the Palm account and been a long-suffering device owner so knew how crap they were at bug fixes on new devices. The media didn’t call the former Palm CEO ‘Mad’ Bill Maggs for no reason (just sayin’).
    snapperfish limited
    Unfortunately Palm had not been as progressive in comparison to Nokia with its default email client. The software didn’t support IMAP. Fortunately I used to follow Mitch Kapor’s blog and he had recommended SnapperMail: an app from a small New Zealand company SnapperFish.

    SnapperMail was a compact modern email client. It has a number of features that we would expect now:

    • It supported IMAP
    • It supported SSL client to mail box encryption*
    • it was really easy to use
    • You could work with attachments including zipped files**
    • There was no restriction on the file size of attachments, the only restriction was your email account rather than your email client

    This looks like the kind of technology you would have thought Palm should have done. At the this time Palm were competing against Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003, BlackBerry 6200 series, 7100 series and early 8700 series. Yet the default email client was back in the 1990s.

    *The full-fat application cost US$39.99

    **SnapperMail came bundled with HandZipper Lite which handled the compressed files and JPEGWatch Lite image viewer

    I used this alongside MetrO – a public transit directions app and QuickOffice Pro – to read Office documents as part of my modern smartphone experience. It wasn’t just me that loved SnapperMail, it was praised by Walt Mossberg back when he wrote at the Wall Street Journal.

    SnapperMail won two Palm Source (Palm’s software licence business) Powered Up awards in 2003. It was recognised as Best Productivity and Best of the Best Solution. More on Palm here. 

    More information
    SnapperMail Has Solid Software For Savvy Mobile E-Mail Users | WSJ
    QuickOffice
    MetrO – open source mass transit application
    PalmSource Welcomes Developers with Awards, New Tools; Announces New Licensees | PalmSource press room

  • Fox + more news

    Fox

    Fox ‘Stole’ a Game Clip, Used It In Family Guy and DMCA’d the Original – Slashdot – either its automated software (likely YouTube’s automated scanning) or exceptionally shady business practices – both of which are plausible scenarios when it comes to Fox. Either way Fox won’t care

    Business

    In China, Uber faces battle to usurp Didi | FT – not surprising. Both companies have large investors behind them. Uber also has ‘non tariff’ barriers against it since it isn’t Chinese. More on Didi here.

    Nest Failure: How things went south once Google became Alphabet | BGR – interesting how the move to a holding group structure meant a big change in management culture. First Boston Dynamics, now Nest. Googlers I know are also complaining about the change in culture. They feel that they are disempowered in comparison to pre-Alphabet

    Design

    The Co-op returns to its clover-leaf logo from 1968 | Creative Review

    Economics

    What’s holding back China’s consumption growth? | South China Morning Post – Consumer sentiment has plunged in recent months, as the consumer sentiment index hit a 28-month low of 100 in March, versus 104.4 in February. Retail sales also increased more slowly than expected in April at 10.1 per cent, versus 10.5 per cent in March. – Government planned slower growth in manufacturing is trickling down to consumer behaviour. Chinese savings are pretty stable due to a poor social safety net. Until China gets a better welfare state you’re going to see China’s consumption growth be low.

    FMCG

    Chinese brands best performers in China: consumer goods survey | China Daily – interesting how Chinese brands have managed to ford the trust gap

    Lynx: can it convince consumers it’s about more than getting laid? | Campaign (UK) – nice summary and analysis of the Lynx/Axe advertising campaigns over the past few years (paywall)

    We know acne, we don’t know teens. – YouTube – nice bit of honest marketing by Clearasil

    US brands dominate through disruption | Kantar Worldwide – latest US BrandZ results

    In China, global brands are losing advantage | Kantar – higher confidence levels in product and their country mean that global brands have work harder

    Ideas

    Uber has pinpointed the moment you‘re most likely to pay for surge pricing — Quartz – feels really invasive but insightful

    Media

    ★ App Store Subscription Uncertainty – From Lauren Goode’s interview with Phil Schiller for The Verge, specifically regarding the new 85/15 revenue split after the first year of a subscription. I wonder how this would work for Netflix et al?

    News UK unveils new in-house agency powered by WPP and The & Partnership | Campaign Live – next move from single client agency to ‘in-house’ agency a la Unilever’s U Studio?

    ComScore Says People Prefer Ads in Podcasts Over Any Other Digital Medium | Adweek – surely these findings are positive for radio and streaming audio as well?

    Apple Music Enlists Designers to Curate Playlists, Starting With Alexander Wang | Racked – why isn’t this being sold as a branding opportunity?

    WTF are ‘dark posts’? | Digiday – surely this is a variant of online PR?

    ANA report alleges widespread ad agency kickback schemes – Business Insider – and this is a surprise because? Programmatic offers even bigger opportunities for fun and profit

    Online

    Why Britain banned mobile apps | GovInsider – cost centric rather than user centric?

    Report: People Are Spending Much Less Time On Social Media | Slashdot – not too sure how much store I put in Similarweb’s data

    Security

    Exclusive: Snowden Tried to Tell NSA About Surveillance Concerns, Documents Reveal | VICE News – there is something quite reassuring about the clod handed nature of the response to this

    Style

    Adidas Relies On Stars Not Soccer Teams To Sell Product | Business of Fashion – I would argue that would be the same for most boot brands, shirt deals are often not that profitable

    Technology

    Shipments of Chromebooks integrated with Google Play set to increase | DigiTimes – not great for Windows 10 consumer sales (paywall)

    Web of no web

    Olympic athletes will sport Visa’s new payment ring in Rio | Engadget – no radical leap forward in NFC

    Project Soli – Wave hello to Soli touchless interactions Soli is a new sensing technology that uses miniature radar to detect touchless gesture interactions.

    A former employee says Google’s smart contact lens is ‘slideware’ that exists only in PowerPoint presentations (GOOG, GOOGL) – not terribly surprising, power is the number one issue facing the device

    Wireless

    The answer to the question you’ve all been asking | Nokia – Nokia’s official announcement