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

 

  • Keybase + more news

    Keybase – ‘Keybase is a website, but it’s also an open source command line program’ – outlines one of the key problems with encryption right there for widespread consumer adoption. (Note:  Keybase ended up being acquired by Zoom in 2020). More security related content here.

    FMCG

    What Chinese brands know that MNCs don’t – Campaign Asia – marketers targeting too small a segment of Chinese middle class. Don’t really get Chinese middle class dynamics (paywall)

    Hong Kong

    One in five Hongkongers may emigrate over political reform ruling | SCMP – no they won’t and the people who feel the most strongly about this are in the least good position to leave

    Ideas

    LOOK Google gamifies search with Google Mo Lang | Marketing Interactive – interesting Google tactic to increase usage

    Luxury

    Luxury brands in a quandary as China’s wealthy young develop resistance to bling | The Observer – picking Wendi Deng as an ambassador won’t do anything for their appeal to a Chinese market and they could have got more contemporary than Gong Li (gorgeous as she is)

    Media

    Facebook Earns 10% of Digital Ad Dollars, More Than Any Other Online Platform | Adweek – a third of global social spend is in APAC

    VML China acquires Teein, fills hole in social media capability – Campaign Asia – really interesting that IM2.0 didn’t already have social and used to outsource it. VML in China is formidable

    Online

    Line temporarily cancels its IPO | Techinasia – avoiding the kerfuffle around Alibaba

    Quality

    iPhone 6 Is the Most Durable iPhone Yet, Says Insurer – WSJ – you would need to do a larger sample of phones for statistically significant sampling

    Security

    MIT Students Battle State’s Demand for Their Bitcoin Miner’s Source Code | WIRED – it’s all a bit weird

    The free wifi war’s security edge in China | WantChinaTimes – interesting that Chinese internet companies are rolling out free wi-fi. Where does this leave the likes of China Mobile?

    The Athens Affair – IEEE Spectrum – anatomy of the Vodafone Greece hack. Very Snowden-esque

    Microsoft no longer Trustworthy | The Register – interesting that it is getting shut down, I suspect integrated is a better way of looking at it

    Wireless

    Apple – Press Info – First Weekend iPhone Sales Top 10 Million, Set New Record – take this with a pinch of salt may have something to do with not all markets being address which has driven demand and scarcity

  • Flightdecks & things from last week

    Virgin Atlantic’s forthcoming Flightdecks on board a plane being managed by Cake rather reminded me of the KLM Fly2Miami campaign done some three years ago. Both were about turning the cabin into an inpromptu night club with live DJ sets. 

    Apparently Virgin will be live streaming their event. The line up includes Gorgon City and Rudimental. It just goes to show that an idea like Flightdecks can run and run. 

    The World Economic Forum held another event in China this year and there was a rare opportunity to hear Chinese policy makers talk about the web. In short, the libertarian values of the web that we all know and love which came from the 1960s counterculture movement is likely to be reined in globally because the one thing governments can agree on is that more regulation and power is something they rather like.

    It included Lu Wei the minister of cyberspace administration from the Chinese government. It is impressive that they take it so seriously when the internet was largely seen as a joke by UK politicians prior to Edward Snowden’s embarrassing disclosures. But then China spends three times as much on internal security as it does on defence. Internet companies like Alibaba have broadened the marketplace into rural ‘TaoBao villages’ as rural enterprises.

    The only technology vendor / service provider represented was Qualcomm which felt unbalanced.

    SmartInsights had a great set of examples of digital experiential marketing using VR headsets like the Oculus Rift.

    iOS 8 rolled out the other day, my iPhone toting counterparts in the office are happy with it. I am giving it until after the weekend to ensure that any vagaries with carrier settings are ironed out before upgrading my phone. More iOS related content here.

    Liam Neeson’s A Walk Among The Tombstones is actually based on a novel rather than a darker remake of the Taken series of films but the trailer looks epic.

  • Swytch & others at Mobile Monday demo night

    I just got back from Mobile Monday’s demo night ran at the Thistle Marble Arch featuring Swytch, Quiztix, Mylo, Viewmaker, Pronto and Adsy. This evening’s event used the facilities of an Informa-ran telecoms conference: Service Delivery Innovation Summit. I missed the start of the event so my notes probably miss part of the applications on display.

    Swytch – multiple mobile numbers on an application, these numbers could be different country codes and not only allowed calls but messages too. The Swytch application is basically a VoIP client rather than a soft SIM. There are other similar services especially in Africa, at the moment the founders think that their USP is the provision of access multiple UK mobile numbers, but I am not sure Swytch is  defensible. I don’t want to even go there with potential use cases

    Quiztix – Q&A game on both Android and iOS, because of its focus on venues as a metaphor for different game levels a couple of people were interested in reskinning it for brands. The most interesting thing for me was the way that they used advertisements to level-up within the game – increasing ad engagement.

    Mylo – was a classic millenial application that helped facilitate splitting bills in house share. The application collects billing data from suppliers including Sky. Ovo Energy. Payment of one’s share could be done by PayPal. They admitted that at the moment they had no business model.

    ViewMaker – location-enabled AR application that allowed a user to show & publish geotagged content. The business focus was to be infrastructure for other application or brands who wanted to publish their own data. They didn’t currently have a plan to overlay information from other sources such as Foursquare, Flickr or Google Maps at moment. One thing surprised me in the Q&A session was that clients not interested in indoor positioning yet.

    Pronto – A Deliverance-type food service with some key differences. Instead of it being a web interface, Pronto relies on GPS for location. Secondly they have a really simple menu, in order to allow two-second ordering and swifter delivery. The menu doesn’t change very often which is great if you are an ‘eat to live’ person. The application recently launched in Italy and is coming to London soon. Apparently a reliable set of delivery drivers is a problem because of the piece rate / zero-hour contract nature of the work they aren’t necessarily as reliable to showing up as one would like.

    Adsy  is mobile or PC platform to create mobile applications that reminded me of a  simple HyperCard set – but no scripting for fuller functinoality. They are handy for building catalogues, or a card-based personal site and can be embedded like a Slideshare or YouTube clip.  It was deliberately kept simple and non-technical to appeal to teens – which was interesting given that most CMOs think of teens as master hackers…

    IFS – IFS has its own innovation lab and they demonstrated a working prototype of wearables driving business efficiencies – business notifications to wearables, logistics etc from ERP system. Think of a smart watch as a pager. I think that most of the interesting aspects of this was the connectivity with the legacy systems. Given the current lack of compelling use cases for smart watches this could be interesting due to the provision of glance-able data.

    OpenTRV – TRV is a thermostatic radiator valve. They wished to use technology to control temperature localised within a house radiator by radiator. The current model by the likes of Nest or Honeywell relying on one centralised thermostat per house controlling a boiler was considered to be a broken model. They are aiming to lower the cost of their smart TRV 10 pounds per unit.

    More wireless related content here.

  • iPods cultural impact + more things

    On Death and iPods: A Requiem | WIRED – on the cultural impact of iPods. Each medium including iPods, CDs and vinyl before it defined and shaped the public. The design was a media in and off itself that was affected by the heritage that went before. iPods were very much in this mould of media.  I miss the time when we were still defined by our music. When our music was still our music. I miss being younger, with a head full of subversive ideas; white cables snaking down my neck, stolen songs in my pocket. There will never be an app for that. More on consumer behaviour here.

    As Phones Expand, So Does the Word ‘Phablet – WSJ – the etymology of the word phablet – originally from GSMA and first mentioned in print by TelecomTV

    Grandparents Accidentally Tag Themselves As Grandmaster Flash | NPR – genius.

    IBM News room | IBM and Yonyou to Accelerate Big Data and Analytics Adoption – interesting Chinese partner on big data

    Apple Watch ‘too feminine and looks like it was designed by students’, says LVMH executive – Telegraph – ok a bit over-exaggerated coming from the man who heads up TAG Heuer, but beneath the comments lies a deep truth about the watches that I agree with

    Huawei In Bad PR Move With Anti-Corruption Campaign | Young’s China Business Blog – interesting analysis of Huawei’s corruption drive

    China May Be Heading for a Japanese-Style Economic Crisis | TIME – the Chinese have a lot more levers to pull and a stable government (rather than a new prime minister every year like Japan); both of which are in China’s favour. On the downside China has bigger internal security issues than Japan

    阿里美国IPO首场路演的38张PPT（全） – Alibaba IPO deck

    Microsoft is found in contempt of court for refusing to hand over user emails | The Inquirer – Microsoft has to go to the line on this as it is likely to affect future international cloud services businesses

    China Misses Out on First Wave of New iPhone Releases | Re/code – I wouldn’t be surprised if the government is holding it up deliberately rather like the FCC did with H-silicon-powered Huawei phones

    A Watch Guy’s Thoughts On The Apple Watch After Seeing It In The Metal (Tons Of Live Photos) — HODINKEE – some interesting observations, kudos for their industrial design and manufacturing but some really good questions

    For Alibaba’s Small Business Army, a Narrowing Path | Foreign Policy – TaoBao needs to fix its model for smaller merchants

  • Pirate friendly platforms + more

    Govt waves stick at pirate friendly Google search • The Register – regulators upset at pirate friendly sites surfaced by the likes of Google. The problem is the momentum it starts towards mass censorship. Which begs the question, rather than just removing pirate friendly sites, why don’t they just go all the way and ask for Chinese style ‘harmonisation’ of the web and be done with it? Why not have one-party rule as well? It’s not about what they’re asking for, it’s the precedent for what might come down the line.

    Interview: Inside Google Brain Founder Andrew Ng’s Plans To Transform Baidu | Forbes – really interesting article on how Baidu is using AI or deep learning. And how Google has lost key talent to go and build these services in China instead.

    Anonymous Analytics: Tianhe Chemicals – interesting Chinese business report, the problem is one of trust and transparency make reports like these seem more credible. Audits of Chinese companies are too opaque, state secrets cover anything that China wants it to cover. It almost looks like a gangster state. More China related posts here.

    Nixon pardons Nu Skin | Bronte Capital – interesting article about network marketing beauty and wellness product company Nu Skin. Disclosure – I had consulted on Nu Skin business problems in China and Hong Kong when I worked out there.

    How China’s Mobile Ecosystem Is Different from the West | TheNextWeb – interesting how WeChat is driving app behaviours in Chinese consumers. The big impact will be felt in terms of operating system differentiation. A mid market phone becomes good enough eroding the premium phone sector.

    A billionaire’s son designs an app to keep nosy parents at bay | Quartz – interesting positioning away from WeChat and LINE, Hike has been around for a good 18 months and is only now getting publicity