BBC Blogs – Technology & Creativity Blog – Shifting gear with the BBC World Service – interesting opportunities for developers, this mirrors the expansion of Chinese and Russian media internationally. The BBC World Service has also had its funding disrupted in a manner that make it more political. The long term impact of this bias is likely to damage the BBC World Service as a soft power tool
Apple manufacturer Foxconn just bought iPhone accessory maker Belkin – great move for Foxconn. Foxconn now gets a number of consumer brands including Linksys and can make better Apple accessories faster based on their knowledge of Apple production – if they can maintain secrecy
Louis Vuitton’s new men’s designer Virgil Abloh is known for streetwear, not high fashion — Quartzy – A new generation of consumers is emerging with different values and desires than previous buyers of high-end goods. Instead of spending their money on fancy suits, young shoppers are dropping hundreds of dollars on items like logo tees and sock sneakers. As clothes continue to move away from formality, brands from Berluti to Balenciaga are adjusting their wares accordingly – with younger Asian consumers as the growth market of the luxury sector the two worlds are merging. Its only been four decades in the making
This Reid Hoffman video stands in sharp comparison to the Ayn Rand-loving frat-bro culture that seems to infect technology sector companies based in Silicon Valley. However Hoffman in his past has reflected at least some of their libertarian views.
However Reid Hoffman is cut from different cloth and represents a slightly older generation in the technology sector who pioneered the dot.com era.
He grew up in Berkeley, back when the technology sector was more hardware focused and Silicon Valley actually made micro-chips. Back then HP (now Agilent) and Techtronix made measurement equipment in the Valley and it was the centre of the cold war missile technology. The east coast from IBM in New York State to the Boston corridor represented a worthy adversary of Silicon Valley. The technology sector only opted to have Silicon Valley as its home during the move to personal computing.
eWorld
Hoffman worked at Apple on eWorld – an early way of connecting Macs to the nascent public internet. There was interesting ideas that came out of that at the time including work on object orientated programming. Apple later abandoned eWorld when they saw the ‘net taking off and instead collaborated with selected ISPs like ClaraNet and Demon in the UK.
Reid Hoffman later founded a prototype-social network and was part of the PayPal mafia before founding LinkedIn. The irony is that the PayPal mafia were ground zero for the current generation of technology company CEOs.
Reid Hoffman offers a more thoughtful considered viewpoint on the future of the technology sector.
How Technology is Shaping the Future of Human Society was filmed by the Aspen Institute.
China smartphone makers join hands on apps, pose threat to WeChat | Reuters – this effort by vendors to join hands on apps reminds me of work that Google did on ‘streaming’ apps as needed that went a bit quiet. Interesting that the manufacturers are willing to go against Tencent. In a mature market handset providers want a bite of services, but is there an advantage with brands to throw in with one or more of the handset eco-systems given their disparate app stores?
Yahoo Japan Plans To Launch Cryptocurrency Exchange Amid FSA Crackdown | ZeroHedge – interesting move by SoftBank. Yahoo! Japan brand is a strategic asset, yet Son-san is willing to risk it on cryptocurrency which I perceive to be a tactical play. I can’t see continued interest in consumer speculation on it in the longer term. More related content here
Dennis Yu on the Facebook debacle – Dennis is the chief technology officer Facebook marketing business called BlitzMetrics. If anyone knows their stuff its likely to be him
Whilst Cambridge Analytica surprised most people in digital marketing who get the technology. The claims surprised for three main reasons:
Facebook’s scope of data access wasn’t surprising to marketers, but the level of shock the media felt was seismic
Cambridge Analytica was considered to have some mythical secret sauce by the media. Those marketers close to the political scene were surprised. How was Cambridge Analytica thought effective?
The media have avoided discussing the advertising technology that underpins modern online media. This creates richer data profiles and improves media targeting. Unfortunately this technology runs on their website, analysing their traffic, vending their advertising
‘Supernatural’ technology
I caught up with a friend who had recently upgraded the operating system on their Mac laptop and iPhone. They made a restaurant booking and were surprised when the web site ‘knew who they were’. and automatically completed their information. Then, on the day of the booking a notification popped up. It said that they should leave now as there was moderate traffic.
They ascribed all this magic to the the website ‘knowing’ everything about them. I explained to them that this was their Apple products trying to be helpful rather than dialing their anxiety levels to 11.
People are powerless
There is an assumption amongst the general public that technology has supernatural powers.
It makes them uncomfortable, but they feel powerless in the face of it. This discomfort reminded me of the ‘uncanny valley’ experienced with humanoid robots. For the rest of consumer there is latent inertia. They will generally put up with a lot of discomfort.
They realise at a base level that The Technium is – . They don’t realise how they should adapt to it.
The technium is a superorganism of technology. It has its own force that it exerts. That force is part cultural (influenced by and influencing of humans), but it’s also partly non-human, partly indigenous to the physics of technology itself.
It’s just the way things are. Consumer actions won’t make a difference. #deletefacebook will barely make a dent and that’s what’s scariest of all. More related issues here.
Sex Workers Say Porn on Google Drive Is Suddenly Disappearing – Motherboard – don’t assume that the contents of your Google Drive hasn’t been thoroughly examined by Google. Adult entertainment is merely the canary in the coal mine for Google Drive privacy. I would be very careful about using a cloud storage platform if you haven’t encrypted the entire folder as a bundle before uploading it. And don’t use Google Drive. More related content here.
Consumer behaviour
The unparalleled joy of writing with a fountain pen – and five beautiful pens to inspire you – Country Life – Among the obituaries of a former Conservative Minister a few years ago, there was one delightful snippet. A line in The Daily Telegraph described how, when she received the letter from Mrs Thatcher appointing her to the Lords, Lady Blatch initially believed it to be a hoax, because the letter was signed in Biro and she had been ‘brought up to believe that nobody who matters uses a Biro’.
Millennials: you will not be quite so special in the ‘futr’ | FT – could it be that millennials, the most scrutinised, criticised and debated generation of our time, were not that special any more? “Millennials are still important as a customer,” Ms Ganatra told me later. But there is now a “millennial mindset” that has nothing to do with age, she said. In other words, millennials may have been the first generation to have grown up in a digital world but the rest of us are catching on fast. People of all ages are now so used to shopping with a click or talking to a chatbot that retailers need to think about the needs and desires of all their customers, not just those born between 1981 and 1996 – or an artificial construct in terms of their digital uniqueness
Ideas
Cigarettes are the vice America needs | FT Alphaville – Cigarette smoking is essentially the anti-Facebook. While Facebook is a fundamentally misanthropic venture that pretends to be a community, smoking is a community activity for people who pretend to be misanthropes. The activity itself is fundamentally pro-social! It gives people reasons to interact with strangers (“got a light?”). And since it was banned indoors — undeniably a good choice — it gives people a reason to go outside and make idle small talk, all while pursuing a common activity. And unlike alcohol, cigarettes alone don’t often lead to property damage or missed days of work (paywall)
Study: Smart Speakers are Changing the Way We Select Products – interesting how this is impacting retail. FMCG brands in particular should be really concerned as this is far beyond what supermarkets could do with dodgy shelving layouts and look-a-like private label brands
Building for the modern web is really, really hard | O’Reilly – average website clocks in at 4MB with 100s of elements including 3rd, 4th and 5th party based interactions – which also explains page load times – and slow AF ad related technology such as trackers
Is Facebook Really Scarier Than Google? | Nautilus – worthwhile reading about the effect of Google – of course they both have an impact otherwise you wouldn’t advertise on it. The question needs to be does the utility justify the impact? I think search has a better case than a social network, but both have merits
Alex Stamos, Facebook Data Security Chief, To Leave Amid Outcry – The New York Times – Some of the company’s executives are weighing their own legacies and reputations as Facebook’s image has taken a beating. Several believe the company would have been better off saying little about Russian interference and note that other companies, such as Twitter, which have stayed relatively quiet on the issue, have not had to deal with as much criticism
Technology
China’s Huawei Technologies reshuffles board for first time since 2012 – I presume the reason why Mr Ren is getting back behind the wheel is that overall and smartphone revenue figures for 2017 was Huawei’s slowest growth in four years. I am not convinced that premium products will be the way forward when they are locked out of the North American retail system. I am also not sure why the management team at Huawei Mobile Devices hasn’t been refreshed
The Valley of Death: the students vying to be millionaires | Telegraph – In 2015 Oxford, the UK’s number one university for research, produced four spin-outs. Not per professor. That was for the whole university. The situation was not better elsewhere. Data on British university spin-outs is not in any publicly available league table. But it exists, via what’s called the HE-BCI survey (it stands for Higher Education – Business and Community Interaction). For 2015-16, Cambridge University recorded a total of two spinouts in the HE-BCI survey. Imperial College London, another of this country’s most vaunted research universities, listed three. Of 160 institutions, 59 officially produced no spinouts at all.
