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

 

  • WeChat Life Report

    Chinese consumers literally live a WeChat life as shown by this great  collection of consumer behaviour data on WeChat. Over the past year WeChat has expanded the services that it provides to include Skype like conference calls, which changes and expands the behaviour in this report. (Presentation on Slideshare)

     

    Key takeouts

    • The ubiquity of WeChat can’t be over stated with over 93% usage in tier one cities. It will grow over time in lower tier cities for a couple of reasons. There will be a network effect that will reach out of the tier one cities and into the lower tiers and countryside. Secondly, WeChat services will start to permeate out of the tier one cities and into the lower tiers. You will then have a virtual cycle due to network effects and ever-increasing ubiquity
    • Call and message data shows how it binds the diaspora back to friends and loved ones in China. The Chinese talk about ‘near and far networks’. But WeChat closes the gap, meals can be shared with photos and videos. Voice messages popular with older users also helps with asynchronous communications over difficult time zones
    • Chinese people tend to exercise during the week, rather than at the weekend according to WeChat fitness data. The idea being for rest is an insight and an opportunity for fitness and sports apparel companies
    • Male shoppers spending 30% more than female shoppers  was an interesting statistic emblematic of WeChat life. Generally men are not as enthusiastic a shopper as women are. They have to save for a home, a car and marriage. My take was that women offer WeChat a growth opportunity in payments; if it can address the underlying cause of this disparity
    • The average social circle on WeChat at 128 is very close to the Dunbar number

    More on WeChat here.

  • Nudges + more things

    The Power of Nudges, for Good and Bad – NYTimes.com – how loss aversion and other behavioural traits  (or nudges) can be used as methods for social change and political change. These elements have already been used in UK government projects and the advertising world. They are the reason why games are addictive and so is swiping on Tinder. (paywall) – more on consumer behaviour including the impact of nudges here.

    Chat App Firm Line Focuses On Services After Adding Just 1M MAUs In 3 Months | TechCrunch – I don’t think that this is as bad as the TechCrunch seems to think. US focused services and China focused services are about the advertising eco-system and scale.  LINE hasn’t really tried to blow out the market penetration beyond Asian markets yet. It does really well in places like Thailand, Taiwan and Japan. It is also a media franchise rather like Sanrio, given the licenceable nature of its sticker characters like Brown. Also ARPU (average revenue per user) is as important as numbers – profit share vs. market share. This has been demonstrated in other sectors such as the smartphone market, where Apple has historically earned 70 to 90 percent of smartphone profits from just 15 percent market share.

    U.S. Technology Device Ownership 2015 | Pew Research Center – good data points on device usage by US consumers.

    Hong Kong pupils at risk of ‘becoming like Foxconn workers’ in education system, says former principal – it is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, that kids will be put in such a high stress position by the Hong Kong education system. The second reason is that Foxconn as become a verb for stressful conditions. That is damaging for both Hon Hai Electronics and their customer base. The idea of damaging stressful conditions being so tightly linked with the company name is damaging. It’s like a really bad version of ‘Hoover’ and vacuum cleaner linkage.  (paywall)

  • Beehives + more news

    Melixa | Innovative smart beehives for remote monitoring – beehives as smart cities for bees. I wonder if this is will do anything for colony collapse disorder (CCD) ravaging beehives around the world.

    Google combining Android and Chrome is bad for developers – Business Insider – my problem with tablets is their ‘lugablity’. I found the original iPad too big

    Microsoft has trapped its biggest partners between a rock and a hard place (MSFT) | BusinessInsider – “The Surface Book will have a harder time stealing away MacBook users,” says Linn Huang, an analyst for IDC. “The Apple brand has been sticky, and I don’t have much cause to think it won’t continue to be in the immediate future.” – whilst it might appeal to enterprise customers, it is also a big threat to existing Microsoft OEMs. There is a larger question about whether the touch interface is the right context for a lot of laptop work, which is one of the reasons why Apple has kept iOS and OSX separate despite their Darwin / BSD / Mach microkernel guts

    Why Windows XP Won’t Be Going Away Anytime Soon | Makeuseof – interesting challenge that Microsoft has in that its greatest competitor is is older products

    ‘Can’t hide it forever’: The model who became a meme – BBC News – I can’t see JWT coming out of this well

    Carrier DT Targets Startups After Europe Agrees Net Neutrality Rules | TechCrunch – inevitable based on the recent EU regulatory changes

    Nexus 6P Teardown – iFixit – interesting teardown, appalling repairability. More gadget related content here.

    Mead Johnson dives into parenting issues using WeChat | Marketing Interactive – influential parent campaign on WeChat

    BuzzFeed Press Blog – A cross-platform global network – interesting vision piece on the future of Buzzfeed by Jonah Peretti

    WeChat Still Way Ahead of Facebook | L2: The Daily – really good slideware on messaging platform

  • Black Friday Sale + more things

    REI to Close Stores During Black Friday Sale and Encourages Customers to Go Outside | Time – this is a smart more by REI on its Black Friday sale for a number of reasons. It is in keeping things on brand. It focuses purchases to their online channels. It also reels in Patagonia’s differentiator during the Black Friday sale of the Thanksgiving holiday season

    Oxford Professor Schools CalPERS: Contrary to Board Presentation, Private Equity is “Most Expensive Asset Class, By Far” – not terribly surprising results. CalPERS seems to be a basket case at the moment

    Google Reveals Its New “RankBrain” Artificial Intelligence System – interesting focus on complex queries by Google, presumably because there will be more clues in user context. But where will this leave experienced netizens who use Boolean search terms to refine their searches? Is Google enough of a utility to ignore early adopters, and could early adopters go elsewhere?

    IBM Opens the Door for Carbon Film NV Memory | EE Times – This latest work may well have solved the problems that have so far inhibited the development of carbon-based memory and opened the door to the possible use of oxygenated amorphous carbon

    SMARTPHONES: Smartphone Price Wars Claim More Suppliers ~ Young’s Business China – consolidation at component level likely to affect smaller phone manufacturers, but will it cause more sensible component pricing? More wireless industry related posts here.

    WPP reports 3.3% hike in net sales for Q3 but UK revenue growth slows – WPP attributed to a “softening” in advertising, media investment management (media buying), data investment management (market research and CRM) and healthcare – interesting that this vertical in particular is soft. Healthcare is usually much more resilient as a vertical market.  (paywall)

    Advertisers often don’t know what they are buying when talking mobile | Campaign – lack of context, intrusive formats and taking the piss on data connections (paywall)

  • The Google search post

    the Charles Arthur wrote an an interesting analysis piece on Google search business which I have linked to in the more information section called Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches per day on mobile.

    According to Fortune, Google search and display advertising counted for 90 per cent of Google’s revenue stream in 2014. By comparison Tencent makes just 17 per cent of its revenue from advertising; its revenue instead comes from payments  a la PayPal, premium accounts (brands pay for specialist facilities on WeChat for instance) virtual goods including gaming and stickers. Whilst Google has tried to diversify beyond advertising (payments, paid for content on YouTube, enterprise product sales), it has failed to change the balance of revenue. Any disruption of their Google search advertising unit represents an existential threat to their business.

    The key points in Charles Arthur’s article:

    • Consumers are using apps on smartphones rather than searching for a given services (which puts to rest the app versus mobile web argument mobile developers have)
    • This will have a more pronounced effect as the world internet population starts to level out next year
    • New internet users in the developing world may not be worth having (from a commercial perspective ‘An ad click from the US/Germany/Japan/Taiwan can be worth from 5 cents to $1 depending on the day/season, but clicks from China/India/Brazil/Vietnam are worth fractions of a penny to maybe 1 penny’

    Arthur’s assertions represent a huge change in consumer behaviour. Working for Yahoo! in the mid-naughties, we used to cite a Morgan Stanley quoted statistic that seven out of ten web journeys started with search. Search Engine Journal cites Forrester as the source of a claim that 93% of online experiences started with search.
    Mobile application is just one part of a wider change:

    • Google started to see a decline in the growth rate of search volumes to about 10 per cent a year, yet the amount content to be indexed continues to rise on a non-linear scale
    • Whilst the internet usage has been expanded by cheaper broadband with wi-fi and the rise mobile devices (both feature phones and smartphones) there hasn’t been a universal adoption of the open web. Yes smartphones have apps which disrupts the open web, but in places like Indonesia a lot of new feature phone surfing netizens don’t realise they are online and only go as far as Facebook
    • Amazon has risen as a wide ranging threat to Google. If you want to buy a book, many people’s evoked set is to go on Amazon. Amazon is not only an e-tailer but a vertical search engine across an increasing number of retail categories. Eric Schmidt claimed that about 30 per cent of purchase web journeys started on Amazon, that represents a significant lost opportunity for Google

    More information
    Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches per day on mobile | The Overspill
    10 Stats to Justify SEO | Search Engine Journal
    Is Tencent leading the way or lagging behind Facebook? | Walk The Chat
    In online search war, it’s Google vs. Amazon | Fortune
    Google’s Eric Schmidt: “Really, Our Biggest Search Competitor Is Amazon” | Search Engine Land
    Amazon Vs. Google: Understanding the buyer’s search engine | Wordtracker
    Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet | Quartz
    Google Search Stats | Internet Live Stats