Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Chinese devices in Asia + more news

    Why the iPhone Is Losing Out to Chinese Devices in Asia – WSJ  – Xiaomi has an edge in many markets because it can customize for each country while Apple creates the same products for everyone, said Jai Mani, Xiaomi’s product manager for India. – the rise of Chinese devices in Asia are picking up the kind of clients that Apple doesn’t want. More related content here.

    In an Era of ‘Smart’ Things, Sometimes Dumb Stuff Is Better – The New York Times – nails the need for divergent design and use cases

    How This Guy Lied His Way Into MSNBC, ABC News, The New York Times and More – old news, many PRs have been case studies in newspapers and magazine articles – Janet or Jim who worked in marketing and had a medical condition or an embarrassing thing happen to them – chances are they’re a PR

    Secret HSBC memo turns heat on Topshop boss Philip Green | News | The Sunday Times – this makes a lot of sense, even more so than when Green started discussions two years ago. From a historic point of view HSBC helped KS Li and his counterparts buy out many of the then British owned conglomerates in colonial Hong Kong of the 1970s. It seems natural to have them help find Chinese buyers for his British interests. Hong Kong’s Hutchison owns mobile network (including shops) 3. It also owns Super Drug through its Watson’s subsidiary. House of Fraser also has a Chinese owner. Topshop trades on the UK being cool and trendy a la Rimmel’s iconic “Get the London look” – Brexit diminishes it with its xenophobic inward look. Domestic sales still outweigh overseas sales, I can understand why he wants out, especially if the business is leveraged

    China’s cutthroat smartphone market is coming down to a handful of major brands | South China Morning Post  – Huawei Technologies, Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi and Apple – with a 77 per cent share of the market, up from 67 per cent in 2016, according to Counterpoint. – Quite why Oppo and Vivo aren’t viewed in aggregate rather like Huawei and Honor is beyond me due to their close ties to BBK

    Instagram is killing the way we experience art | Quartz – fine art gets the kind of screen intermediation problem that live music has had for years

    Dropbox saved almost $75 million over two years by building its own tech infrastructure – GeekWire – this makes total sense when you get that to that size and scale

    Assembly of ‘Aibo’ Robot Dog (1) | NIKKEI XTECH – Nikkei have a unique take on the teardown; working with a Sony engineer to document the process of assembling the latest generation of Aibo robotic dog. It quickly comes across where your money goes as it is fiendishly complicated to build

    Young Japanese are surprisingly content – Seventh heaven at 7-Eleven | Economist – but concerned about the future

    From the Name to the Box Logo: The War Over Supreme — The Fashion Law

    Why Chengdu Spends More on Luxury Than Wealthier Cities | Jing Daily

  • Operaatio Elop

    Nokia

    Operaatio Elop covers one of the most dramatic events in Finland since the Winter War. At the time of Nokia’s high point it accounted for over 25% of the Finnish economy. There has seldom been a fall so drastic as Nokia’s fall in the mobile phone market from leading player to disaster. With that fall came the humbling of an entire country.

    Given the scale of the fall and the size of Nokia as a brand around the world, I was surprised the the Operaatio Elop hadn’t been translated and published in different language editions. Instead it was up to numerous Finns to crowdsource a translation into English for free and provide it on an as is basis.

    Has Nokia’s fall had been so complete that it literally fell out of interest for non-Finns?

    What becomes apparent is that a story more nuanced than the press coverage would allow. Elop comes out of it a flawed tragic figure – a one-trick pony; rather than a skilful trojan horse.

    Nokia’s feature phone line up where surprisingly a hero of the piece contributing positively to the business for longer than I would have expected and slowing down the business collapse precipitated in the smartphone business.

    Nokia’s board of directors and former management come out of it much worse.

    Fatal flaws

    Nokia’s strengths had become its weakness.

    • Smartphone manufacturing processes weren’t ready for mass adoption
    • MeeGo had been unfairly assessed
    • It blew its marketing budget on a bet on the North American market, ignoring other countries
    • The marketing budget was spent too early and all at once. What resulted was an ineffective and inefficient marketing campaign. By my reckoning it was roughly $100 per phone sold during the launch of the Lumia range in the US
    • Poor quality Windows Phone software, small Windows Phone application ecosystem and cheap Android phones were key issues
    • Chip technology partner issues from its relationship with Qualcomm to Intel’s failure in 4G as it focused on WiMax rather than LTE

    The more pertinent question would be is there any circumstances where Nokia stood a chance of staying on top in the mobile phone marketplace? Operaatio Elop is a compelling but balanced read and I can’t recommend it highly enough. More book reviews here.

  • Siri vs Siri + more news

    Siri vs Siri: What Apple’s AI can and can’t do on every Apple device | Macworld – Siri vs Siri implies context based on device, but they need to raise the game in particular on the Mac. More related content here.

    How Russia’s ‘red tourism’ is luring wealthy Chinese visitors bored with Paris and Milan | South China Morning Post – Russian department stores TSUM and GUM become important for foreign Chinese luxury sales

    May braced for Unilever decision on headquarters | FT  – Unilever: ‘stichting’ up a move to the Netherlands, which would make sense. 100VE is a leased building, its overcrowded and a number of the people there were contractors like me. The team that I worked in had already upped sticks to the Netherlands with the roles moving but not many of the people were redeployed, let go or didn’t have their contracts renewed

    Millennial insecurity is reshaping the UK economy – interesting impact – not moving out of region to take a job like I did when I had a degree affecting productivity and entrepreneurship. One could see how Brexit will exasperate things further. It doesn’t imply that there will be a corresponding youthquake to overturn it at a later date

    The Case Against Google – The New York Times – the problem with Found’em and the way the story was started is that it came off a bit cray cray a decade ago when it first popped up. They weren’t cut from the same cloth as Silicon Valley wunderkinder. That and they looked like Microsoft finger puppets. You had the SCO vs. Novell court case over the future of Linux at the time and there was evidence of Microsoft’s finger prints all over it (via Wikipedia): “On March 4, 2004, a leaked SCO internal e-mail detailed how Microsoft had raised up to $106 million via the BayStar referral and other means. Blake Stowell of SCO confirmed the memo was real. BayStar claimed the deal was suggested by Microsoft, but that no money for it came directly from them. In addition to the Baystar involvement, Microsoft paid SCO $6M (USD) in May 2003 for a license to “Unix and Unix-related patents”, despite the lack of Unix-related patents owned by SCO. This deal was widely seen in the press as a boost to SCO’s finances which would help SCO with its lawsuit against IBM” – And at the time if it had the taint of Microsoft involvement that overwrote any Google wrong. People seem to have forgotten the Judge Jackson trial and what an evil sack of shite Microsoft was shown to be. It would have been really hard sell to the media

    NASA Is Bringing Back Cold War-Era Atomic Rockets to Get to Mars – Bloomberg

    Amazon is merging Prime Now and AmazonFresh – Business Insider – it should add clarity from a brand point of view as well. Now they just need to get the Prime Now app to work properly

    Apple in Talks to Buy Cobalt Directly From Miners – Bloomberg – sounds like a smart use of their capital pile given the rising cost of cobalt due to electric vehicle batteries

    Dr. Penelope Boston: “Seeking the Tricorder: The Hunt for Extraterrestrial Life” | Talks at Google – YouTube – interesting challenges in terms of identification, methodology and analysis

    APAC Millennials Lead for Sharing Branded Social Content – GlobalWebIndex Blog

    George Soros may invest more in fighting Big Tech – Axios – the noose is slowly tightening around big technology

    You can call me Al (but you really shouldn’t) – The overclaims of Artificial Intelligence « Comms Planning « Planning Above and Beyond – many technologies take a number of runs to get it right; machine language translation or VoIP being the classic case study. AI takes much more to get it right; this is a timely reminder that we are in an ‘AI summer’ at the moment and may hit an AI winter

    “Just an Ass-Backward Tech Company”: How Twitter Lost the Internet War | Vanity Fair – to be fair this is probably a similar situation with Facebook as well

  • Blazed & other things

    Blazed

    I was having an online conversation with friends in the game about our favourite advertising, and this one came up. I hadn’t seen it before. It’s a public service announcement from New Zealand: Blazed – Drug Driving in Aotearoa.

    Guinness Rutger Hauer ads

    I also managed to find all the Rutger Hauer ‘Pure Genius’ ads done for Guinness. A lot of it looks like fresh thinking but mainstream production now due to CGI and After Effects, but at the time it was like nothing else that you would have seen

    Nazira

    I have been listening to this mix by Nazira. Nazira is from Almaty, Kazakhstan and plays at Berlin’s Room 4 Resistance parties. There’s also a great interview with her on the Discwoman site

    Fieldnotes Newsletter

    First issue of Fieldnotes newsletter is out! | Chad Dickerson’s blog – I used to work at Yahoo! when Chad was there, so can vouch for the newsletter being all killer, no filler. Chad headed up Yahoo!’s incubator Brickhouse. I can also recommend a second newsletter Brain Reel by Gemma Milne.

    For A Few Dollars More

    Revisiting For A Few Dollars More – I love the pace, the way it was shot and the storytelling. It also has Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood teaming up – EPIC. When I was a child I was confused the Lee Van Cleef playing two different characters in the ‘Dollars Trilogy’. In The Good, The Bad and The Ugly he plays a psychopathic gun for hire. In For A Few Dollars More he plays the honourable Colonel Mortimer looking for justice against a bandit.

    Gian Maria Volontè played both protagonists in A Fistful Of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More – and died both times. Leone didn’t intend for the films to be a trilogy, but they work quite well together. More related content here.

  • Twitter for Mac – some alternatives

    Twitter’s desktop client on the Mac has been pulled from the app store and won’t be supported any more. It is time to look for an alternative.  What you should choose depends on how you use Twitter, I’ve tried to outline what I consider are the best native Mac apps for Twitter.

    The alternative that I use is Night Owl (夜フクロウ or YoruFukurou)  which is a small lightweight client put together by a Japanese development team. I used it historically because it had a small footprint on my desktop which is handy when you a list running in the background. It allows you to use many of the same ‘short cut’ commands that used to be available when you could use Twitter via SMS – it helps in running a productive app now.  I have a breaking news list that I use, this is what it looks like.

    Night Owl

    You can download Night Owl from the Apple App Store or their website.

    Twitterific is probably the best maintained out of all the Twitter clients for the Mac, it looks similar to Night Owl and costs £7.99 on the app store.

    Echofon has a similar layout to Night Owl , but charges you £9.99 for the privilege. It has also hasn’t been updated as often as Night Owl.  Echofon comes in full price and light versions in the App store.

    If you are managing social media accounts then Tweetdeck is an obvious option. It’s multiple panels create a screen-wide dashboard so that you can handle mentions, direct messages and keep an eye on trending topics. It’s been last updated in 2015 and I’ve heard anecdotal evidence of it being buggy.

    An alternative to TweetDeck is Janetter Pro which provides a similar look and feel to TweetDeck but allows for further customisation including custom wallpapers (if you care about that kind of thing). It also supports multiple languages for the app interface including Japanese, Korean and simplified Chinese.  Janetter Pro was updated in May 2017, it costs £4.99, you can find out more on their website and in the app store. There is also a free version in the App Store. In my opinion Janetter Pro is an overlooked gem of a product if you want a comprehensive dashboard view. If I had to do Twitter community management, I’d invest in Janetter Pro.

    Tweetbot is the editors choice on the Apple App store and comes in at a premium price of £9.99, for this you get an interface that can flex between the Night Owl and Tweetdeck style interface design.