Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Dyneema + more things

    Dyneema

    The Lifestyle Applications of Dyneema – Core77 – the interesting thing for me is how old Dyneema is and how long it has taken to adopt the product. Back when I first started work before college, I worked briefly for DSM – the maker of Dyneema. Dyneema and Dupont’s Kevlar both required exceptionally pure chemicals in their process. Kevlar reputedly had to scrap a third of the product made. Both were expensive and used in special functions:

    • Ships ropes
    • Motorcycle crash helmets and robust composite moulded products
    • Ballistic vests and bullet proof armour
    • Climbing ropes

    Business

    PR Agencies Need to Be More Diverse and Inclusive. Here’s How to Start. | HBR – starting points valid but nowhere near the whole formula. Angela has written an interesting article on diversity and inclusive agencies. But Angela misses so many other data points:

    • That PR degree courses are often 90+% female graduates
    • That the industry (like advertising) does really poorly at retaining older (40+ year old) staff.
    • In the UK PR agencies struggle to attract graduates from working class backgrounds as well as from minority communities

    The article is behind a paywall. More related information here

    Mark Zuckerberg in Washington DC on machine learning and hate speech. Bringing their security team up to 20,000 people to look at issues like this. Hate speech is hard to compute in comparison to (Islamic) terrorist materials. I am guessing that what constitutes hate speech changes country by country (and its interesting that Facebook is looking at this from a global perspective, rather than placating the US first). Secondly, the language that constitutes hate speech evolves to circumvent restrictions and incorporate memes a la Pepe the Frog.

    Culture

    North Korean defectors are learning English so they can survive in South Korea | The Outline – interesting English loan words in South Korean language

    The Facebook Current | Stratechery – well worth a read

    Luxury

    Streetwear Reigns Supreme, Say Teens | News & Analysis, News Bites | BoF  – The growing popularity of streetwear negatively impacted Nike, as their appeal among teenagers dropped from 31% to 23%. In contrast, brands like Vans and Adidas have successfully leveraged an “open-source” approach, allowing pop culture to shape their brand image and consumer perception.

    Marketing

    Chinese International Students Are the New Brand Champions | Jing Daily – 31 percent of Chinese students in New York and Boston escort friends and family on shopping trips at least once every three months. Thirty-four percent purchased luxury goods to take back to China at a similar frequency

    The clock is ticking for brands to ‘go native’ | The Drum – highlights issues with native ads such as ROI

  • App constellations 2018 research

    I initially looked at app constellations back in 2014, when Fred Wilson put a name to the the phenomena. And every two years or so I have gone back and looked at a number of major internet companies to see how many different types of apps that they had in play.

    I originally selected the companies back in 2014 because I felt that they represented the largest and best of their ilk. It skews Asian because the west can be viewed as one eco-system represented by Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

    China is an enclosed eco-system; though Microsoft is actively engaged in the app eco-system there. I chose Tencent and NetEase as being my Chinese bellwethers. DaumKakao and Naver were representative of the Korean eco-system which blends highly-used domestic services with western platforms. Finally LINE of Japan (a subsidiary of Korean company Naver) provided a similar bellwether of the hybrid Japanese eco-system which mirrors Korea.

    App constellations survey methodology

    For the sake of convenience I have compared the contents of Apple’s mobile app store for each of the companies. While most of the internet companies have some Android-only or iOS-only apps; the iOS app store is still a good indicator of their app activity.

    I stayed true to the definition of app constellations in terms of deciding what kind of app should go in.

    App constellation definition

    I manually assessed each app, rather than relying on the category that the app had been submitted into. Tencent and Netease, had a number of mobile utilities that aided discussion and kept players updated on their favourite game. These didn’t fit within the definition.

    Changes in the environment

    Since 2016, a couple of things have changed:

    • Apple had a purge of apps that didn’t support 64 bit processing
    • They moved away from supporting the app store within iTunes application and on the web; to within the app store on the device

    2018 marks over a decade of mobile apps in the Apple store. Many of the major players have delisted almost as many Android and iOS apps as they currently have in the store. This happens for a number of reasons:

    • The app was serving a purpose for a fixed time
    • It is an application that has fallen so far out of favour that it is no longer worth maintaining
    • The code base no longer meets Apple’s or Google’s minimum standards
    Data analysis

    I started off by looking at the number of apps. In terms of app constellations:  Tencent, Microsoft and Google were clear winners.

    Number of apps

    Both Microsoft and Google’s growth has been driven by ‘experimental’ apps that they have put out in the public for their own reasons and enterprise focused apps.

    compound annual growth in app number

    But it was quickly apparent to me that the number of apps developed were only part of the story. What about the rate of change in numbers of apps developed? This would be indicative of the rate of change in moving to mobile. Here both Facebook and Microsoft’s pivot became immediately apparent. The Asian companies looked less impressive as they had been able to keep steady in their focus on mobile.

    All of this growth in the number of apps developed by major internet companies is all the more remarkable when you consider the following:

    • In mature markets consumers are not really downloading new apps
    • They are sticking with a few in terms of regular usage. Many of the apps on their phones don’t get used
    Notes on a few of the companies in terms of their app constellations
    • Daum Kakao – notable for being the only company who I looked at who had a decline in the number of applications versus 2016. A lot of this seems to be in service consolidation of both Daum and Kakao to remove duplications or non-core services. It is the Daum brand that has taken the biggest impact. This is understandable, since Daum struggled on the move to smartphones and Kakao is a mobile-first brand.
    • Dropbox – the growth in apps has been down to the larger business acquisition strategy at Dropbox. I don’t expect further growth like what we have seen with  Facebook’s pivot to mobile
    • Facebook – Facebook’s pivot to mobile was one of the reason why I decided to look at compound annual growth rate as well as the size of app constellation in terms of app numbers. In terms of raw app ‘SKUs’ Facebook is dwarfed by most of the other companies that I have looked at. It is only by looking at the growth in apps developed where one can really see their move to mobile
    • Netease – was interesting for its focus in a couple of areas. Like other Asian internet companies, education was a big target area, but Netease went into it with major commitment. Both NetEase and Tencent were big in magazine and book apps as well. I think this is down to the fact that ‘traditional’ web surfing is harder to do with (at the moment) when URLs are written in western script and numbers.
    • Tencent – the raw app numbers beggars belief. There are a number of reasons for this. Like NetEase, Tencent has a lot of apps solely optimised for the iPad and a separate iPhone app. There are free and paid-for product variants. Lastly Tencent will have four or five apps competing in a given category like streaming music which seems insane. Only time will tell if Tencent is spreading itself too thin; like when Yahoo! was described Brad Garlinghouse’s Peanut Butter Manifesto
    More information

    Jargon watch: app constellation – back in 2014 when I wrote this post, it still took me the best part of a week to research and describe each of the apps in the main eco-systems. It would take me much longer today due to the growth in apps

    Peanut Buttergate – analysis of Garlinghouse’s original memo about Yahoo! from back in 2006

  • Voice activated coupon + more news

    Voice activated coupon

    Google’s First Voice Activated Coupon – WPP – Google distributed its first voice-activated coupon offering customers $15 off Target purchases placed on Google Express through Google Assistant –through desktop, mobile or Google Assistant enabled devices – I am surprised that Amazon didn’t introduce the voice activated coupon before Google.

    Beauty

    SK-II finds success in selling to younger Chinese: P&G | Advertising | Campaign Asia – luxury brand with an on ramp for college students

    China

    China Bans Online Bible Sales as It Tightens Religious Controls – The New York Times – I am concerned about Vatican appeasement of China. It looks like Neville Chamberlain

    Consumer behaviour

    Headline from China: Purchase Restriction and Red Streetwear | Jing Daily – interesting how streetwear brands are being cleared out of the way by the Chinese government to support Chinese originated brands

    How Americans Self-Sort Themselves by Age and Class – CityLab

    Culture

    The Overwhelming Emotion of Hearing Toto’s “Africa” Remixed to Sound Like It’s Playing in an Empty Mall | The New Yorker

    Molly Ringwald Revisits “The Breakfast Club” in the Age of #MeToo | The New Yorker – good read, what I remember is how those films nailed emotion

    Japan

    Japan to place accident liability on self-driving car owners – Nikkei Asian Review – makers liable only in case of a system flaw

    Online

    China’s Didi Chuxing prepares to launch Mexico operations | HKEJ Insights – China going global

    RSS is undead | Techcrunch – no RSS is alive, but Techcrunch haven’t worked out issues the RSS users have already. Much of the issues are solved by using NewsBlur and finding sources is organic rather than an instant end state. More online related topics here.

    Security

    Could Cambridge Analytica boss be probed for Philippine meddling? | SCMP  – This could get interesting. Putting aside arguments about whether Cambridge Analytica’s technology actually works as promised, Philippines law would still have been broken. It forbids all outside parties from participating in its election process.It is alleged that they were supporting Duterte, which would make the foreign reaction to it interesting as well.

    Technology

    ARM Mac: Piece of Cake Or Gas Refinery? – Monday Note – assumes that there will be a transition, which I am not convinced about

    API and Other Platform Product Changes – Facebook for Developers – reduces information that can be taken out to beef up privacy

    Wireless

    Smartphone shipments fall again in Q1 | Shanghai Daily – China looks saturated in terms of smartphones

    Cell Spotting: Studying the Role of Cellular Networks in the Internet by Rula, Bustamante and Steiner – (PDF)

  • Erooms Law – jargon watch

    Erooms Law is a metaphor that compares other business processes to the virtuous circle of Moore’s Law. It is literally Moore’s Law in reverse. Industries have developed processes that are getting ever more expensive.  Once could consider that is inversely proportional to the way semiconductor manufacture  reduced the relative cost of computing power over time.

    Some see this as a potential opportunity for the use of computing in a sector to reduce costs. As with most circumstances, what seems like a great idea inside an Excel spreadsheet doesn’t work out in the real world. But that doesn’t stop the management consultants, investment bankers or venture capitalists from trying.

    Eroom’s Law and the pharmaceutical industry

    The poster child for Erooms Law cited would be the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry developing new drugs.

    Here’s how Nature Reviews Drug Discovery put it:

    Eroom’s Law indicates that powerful forces have outweighed scientific, technical and managerial improvements over the past 60 years, and/or that some of the improvements have been less ‘improving’ than commonly thought. The more positive anyone is about the past several decades of progress, the more negative they should be about the strength of countervailing forces. If someone is optimistic about the prospects for R&D today, they presumably believe the countervailing forces — whatever they are — are starting to abate, or that there has been a sudden and unprecedented acceleration in scientific, technological or managerial progress that will soon become visible in new drug approvals.

    You could argue that the defence industry would also fall into this, despite the benefits of technology. (The origins of the semiconductor industry lie in the development of missiles during the cold war. Integrated circuit technology is more robust and lighter than discrete transistors or vacuum tube based systems).

    Other areas were Erooms Law is prevalent include fintech or financial technology and the automotive sector, where massive assumptions are made about the rate of innovation in battery technology based on Moore’s Law rather than the rather prosaic improvements in materials science that underpin existing battery chemistry.

    More information

    Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency | Nature Reviews Drug Discovery (paywall)
    Eroom’s Law | In the Pipeline | Science magazine
    EROOM’s Law of Pharma R & D | buildingpharmabrands
    More posts on the pharmaceutical industry on this blog.

  • Discussion on voice interfaces and services

    Interesting discussion on the use of voice interfaces and services. There is a certain amount of cheerleading involved in the talk; but that is to be expected with vendors in the room. If found it interesting that one of the panelists; Sam Liang of AISense moved out of where2.0 services and into voice. because location is a great gateway to lots of rich contextual information and voice is desperately in need of context and by extension user intent.

    It is interesting to get a perspective on the organisations involved in the discussion on voice interfaces:

    • SRI International
    • Amazon
    • Microsoft
    • AISense

    All of them seem to be well behind where the telecoms voice services managed to get to like Orange’s Wildfire.

    Key takeouts from this:

    • 50,000,000 voice devices to ship this year (2018). A total installed user base of 100,000,000 (presumably excluding voice interfaces on smartphones)
    • AISense is looking to build in voice biometrics that would prompt you about who a person is. Privacy implications are profound
    • The panel struggled to articulate an answer to privacy concerns beyond ‘services need to build trust’ and transparency
    • Information security and hacking wasn’t a point of discussion; which surprised me a lot
    • Context still seems to be a huge issue, I think that this is a bigger issue than the panelists acknowledge. Google still struggles on user intent, without adding the additional layer of understanding voice. The biggest moves seem to be ‘social engineering’ hacks, rather than improvements in technology
    • Amazon and Microsoft don’t have plans for advertising services on voice (at the moment)
    • We’re very far away from general purpose voice services
    • Work has only started on trying to understand emotion
    More information
    • Orange’s Wildfire and The Register on its shutdown. Wildfire’s problem seemed to be a failure of marketing more than anything else. We haven’t seen anything else like it. Even Siri is only scraping over the ashes of the work done on Wildfire 15 years ago
    • Google’s published research on speech processing. What becomes apparent from looking at the list of research is how basic the current state-of-the-art currently is
    • Stuff that I have written that touch on context dependent services