Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Yahoos and things this week

    Catching up with fellow former Yahoos. Employees of Yahoo! were known as Yahoos. All three of us worked on the European marketing team in London at the time when web 2.0 was kicking off. It was great to see my fellow former Yahoos. We kicked around the move away from quality in online media, historic ‘pirated television reception’ in Ireland, the worrying state of brand marketing and new ventures. If you are looking for high-quality male grooming products Charles has been working on Scrubd.

    tres Yahoo! deliquentes

    Andrew Tuck tells the Monocle story on the Mediamasters podcast. Really interesting origin story – what’s interesting is the contrarian thinking of Tyler Brûlé. Monocle is notable for building a print magazine in the face of a digital onslaught of media. More media related content here.

    Great interview with Roger Smith about the wonders of mechanical watch.

    Smith worked with Dr. George Daniels who invented the co-axial movement which has been a major step forward in mechanical watch making – changing the way power is delivered that is more efficient and can improve accuracy.

    Smith is exceptionally articulate about the technical differences of the different watches from high accuracy quartz watches to classic Rolex and Omega movements.

    Antonio Da Silva’s Hell’s Night where famous film characters interact in one night club stunned me when I saw it a few years ago. In the meantime he did a sequel and has had time to work on the colour grading of the video to make it even more mesmerising.

    Hell’s Club

    Hell’s Club Two

    Finally I am surprised that this was something I hadn’t heard already – what if the late great Terry Wogan had listened to Skibadee or MC GQ vintage mixtapes and Rinse FM? Peter Serafiniwicz channels The TWOG$.

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  • Alternatives to big tech + more news

    Alternatives to big tech 

    Alternatives to Big Tech, and a t-shirt | Creative Good – as someone who has used RSS for a long time I am intimately aware of the needs for alternatives to big tech. Google Reader obliterated RSS readers and then obliterated RSS readership by abruptly withdrawing the product. I’d argue that you could use Apple’s default iCloud account and MacOS apps. Mark Hurst recommends Safari or FireFox but ignores Mail.app, Calendar.app and Contacts.app. I have been using these three apps since I started using OS X in 2001.

    China

    Understanding China’s Rise Under Xi Jinping — By The Honourable Kevin Rudd – probably one fo the best essays that I have read on China from a macro perspective

    Innovation

    Nice little Nesta egg: Former lottery quango took £7m from Google • The Register – details of Google’s influence in European academic life are detailed in a report by the Campaign for Accountability (CfA), an initiative part-funded by Google’s competitors. Google turned out to be the only corporate sponsor of think tank Readie, the Research Alliance for a Digital Europe, hosted at Nesta.

    Luxury

    LVMH’s Private Equity Firm is Banking on the Power of Korean Culture — The Fashion Law – its ironic given how few brands sell in Korea (which has in turn fuelled demand for fakes) that LVMH is putting so much weight on the country. More luxury related content here. 

    Marketing

    Nike, McDonald’s jump on China mobile gaming craze to entice young consumers | South China Morning Post

    Security

    Qualcomm, National Security, and Patents – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

    Technology

    Is Joplin a Serious Open Source Evernote Alternative? Hackernoon – this could be very interesting

    The US is getting Facebook Lite, a service designed for developing countries — Quartz – think about this before banging on about: cloud, IoT and 5G

    VW Just Gave Tesla a $25 Billion Battery Shock – probably the best argument that I’ve read for super capacitor and hydrogen fuel cell technology due to the shortage of cobalt. Lithium prices have also inflated massively over the past few years

    Amazon: The Making of a Giant | WSJ – Today, the AI assistant has more than 30,000 skills available on its store and can be used to control more than 4,000 smart-home devices from 1,200 different brands. (paywall)

    The battle for digital supremacy – America v China – tactical rather than the required strategic response

    China’s ‘Fun Headlines’ App Considers IPO at $3 Billion Value – Bloomberg – huge risk is China’s changing media regulation landscape

    The Seven-Year Itch: How Apple’s Marriage to Siri Turned Sour — The Information – great read (paywall)

  • Roxanne Shante + more

    The new Roxanne Shante biopic looks amazing and you know the soundtrack is going to be good. Roxanne Shante was like a breadth of fresh air in the early rap scene. She had an amazing technique and was well able to cut male competitors down to size. Roxanne Shante is a legend despite her limited profile.

    Dr. Penelope Boston: “Seeking the Tricorder: The Hunt for Extraterrestrial Life” | Talks at Google – YouTube – interesting challenges in terms of identification, methodology and analysis. The trial-corder like the Star Trek communicator has been inspiring technologists for decades. More on innovation here.

    The South China Morning Post have launched a news site for an international audience focused on the Chinese technology sector – Abacus. Given the amount of blogs that used to cover the China tech sector that have disappeared, this is a welcome addition. Its a nice looking site, it has great interactive design and a good editorial team. My one complaint is that it doesn’t have an RSS feed which is a real bummer.

    Unsupported | The Greatest Stories Retold – interesting attempts at really short form storytelling. It doesn’t work well in Safari as a web browser. Something to provide creative inspiration for those 15 second ad spot scripts.

    Re-evaluating Media is a piece of research put together that tried to rebalance expectations on more traditional media. Whilst there was room to land meaningful points (TV is better at mass reach for a given CPM), and there is an argument to be made for a media neutral approach where the media mix fits the communications problem to be solved. Instead they made bigger leaps and had a methodology that was optimistic at best – this became the focus of debate among people that I knew. There are arguments to be made about the wider role of brand building which would better help traditional broadcast advertising more.

  • Swiss watch industry & other things

    Swiss watch industry

    Is Time Running Out for the Swiss Watch Industry? – WSJ – low-end part of the Swiss Watch Industry threatened by digital disruption but not the higher end. The status of higher end brands of the Swiss Watch Industry will fit in with aspirations and drop culture that has merged streetwear and luxury

    Business

    Positive acceptance: a reinterpretation of Japanese ‘millennials’ | Analysis | Campaign Asia – 78% are disinclined to save money, meaning big-ticket items like houses, cars or even holidays are low on the agenda. While young people have rarely ever been enthusiastic savers, Harris suggested this could be an unconscious effort to resist “inevitable life changes that they don’t necessarily want”—i.e. responsibilities that make them less flexible.

    Qualcomm Replaces Chairman Jacobs with Independent Director – Barron’s – interesting move

    Inspiration

    Tablet Magazine’s 100 Most Jewish Foods List – via our Matt – just beautiful

    C L A S S I C Typeface By Particle (Gao Yang) | THEINSPIRATION.COM – really nice idea. More related content here.

    Marketing

    Royal Bank of Scotland CMO David Wheldon: More marketing will go in-house – Digiday – I’m not sure there was ever a bygone era when agencies enjoyed a great relationship with the top of the house, but what the consultants have now is the C-suite relationships, a deep understanding of technology and a deep understanding of the digitization of our services. It’s not too much of a leap for them to think they can help with the advertising part of that mix

    All LinkedIn Members | LinkedIn Help – LinkedIn assets relating to GDPR

    Get On This Soapbox | The Daily | L2 – the case for tactical (but not necessarily realtime) social

    Luxury

    The Number of Counterfeits Seized in the U.S. Grew by Almost 10% Last Year — The Fashion Law  – “The merchandise category with the highest number of seizures continued to be apparel and accessories, resulting in approximately 15 percent of all seizures in FY2017.” These products included both trademark infringing and counterfeit luxury products, including those posing as Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Chanel, and Hermes, are routinely some of the most heavily copied

    Online

    “I’m Quitting Social Media”: Will We See a Shift in Platform Use in 2018? | Brandwatch – Twitter and Snapchat are disproportionally large in comparison to their adoption

    Web of no web

    US Army’s SNES M.A.C.S Rifle Training Program – The Firearm Blog – surreal. Call of Duty takes on a whole darker turn

  • Bose Wave Music System – throwback gadget

    It is a little disingenuous to call the Bose Wave Music System a throwback gadget, mainly because Bose still makes it. It would be reasonable to call it a design classic. There are benefits to picking up a 2006 model Bose Wave Music System, rather than paying the premium of a new device.

    BOSE　Wave music system専用iPod接続キット

    Bose Wave System timeline

    The original Bose Wave System was launched back in 1984; this was back when Sony was king due to the Walkman, digital wasn’t really on the horizon with the Discman only launching same year. The Acoustic Wave 1 (AW1) was a new take on the boom box radio that was ubiquitous in households and workplaces at that time. The AW1 featured a cassette deck and a two band radio.

    Eight years later digital finally arrived when Bose switched out the cassette for a top-loading CD player instead.

    In 1993, the Bose Wave System shrank from about the size of a medium sized boom box to something about as tall as an iPod Classic but featured radio only and was called the Wave Radio.

    Five years later a slot loading CD player was integrated. In 2004, the CD player also accepted MP3 based discs and Boselink connectivity.

    Boselink

    Boselink is unique in consumer electronics in terms of the expandability it allows. It was originally designed as a communications protocol for multi-room sound systems, but is also useful for connecting modules that extend the functionality of the basic Bose Wave System. Compatible accessories include:

    • Multi-CD drive
    • Soundlink – playback of music which is streamed to the device over Bluetooth
    • DAB module – UK-only adapter allowing reception of digital radio as well as AM and FM signals

    Bose also offered an iPod kit, which charges your iPod Classic and plays back the music. There is a replacement remote for the Bose Wave Music System which integrates basic iPod playback controls.

    Vintage over new

    The key benefit of a vintage Bose Wave System over a new device is the display. New devices have a back lit LCD display which wash out and aren’t as legible as the vintage vacuum fluorescent displays.

    VFD

    Secondly, you still enjoy the ‘big box’ sound created by the diminutive size of the Bose Wave Music System. They use use a folded waveguide, which is a series of passages from the speaker driver to the speaker grill. This attempts to replicate sound from larger systems. Bose claims the waveguide “produces full, clear stereo sound from a small enclosure by guiding air through two 26” folded wave guides.” The design of the wave guides has changed minimally over the years.

    My casual listening at home is based on two systems. A 12 year old Apple iPod Hi-Fi A1121, which works as a centre speaker for my TV when I need it. It takes audio in via TOSLink and gives a better sound than most sound bars that I’ve listened to.

    I use a Bose Wave Music System of a similar age to the iPod Hi-Fi with the DAB module connected via BoseLink and iPod adaptor as my go to radio around the house. It is the default provider of background music and up to the minute news. It provides a better sound than most of its newer BlueTooth enabled competitors. It wins out over the Apple iPod Hi-Fi, because of its ability to play digital radio and hide out of the way on book shelf.

    I then use a dedicated hi-fi for serious music listening of CDs and vinyl records.