Ged Carroll

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  • Shōwa era + other things

    Shōwa era pop

    This week I have been listening to classic Japanese pop from the 1970s and 1980s – late Shōwa era for the win! The Shōwa era means ‘enlightened harmony’. It covers world war II and the subsequent economic miracle, right up to the bubble era of the Japanese economy. What we saw during the post-war Shōwa era was a massive outpouring of quality content in entertainment, film, music, product design, the arts and architecture.

    Canadian tourism board anime

    Canada’s tourism board has been running a campaign in Japan. They got the studio behind anime blockbuster ‘Your Name’ to do this 30-second spot in an anime style rather than the more traditional approach of using b-roll footage.

    It’s an interesting choice, especially given the dramatic scenery available in Canada and shows how important Canada must view the Japanese market. By comparison, there doesn’t seem to be any campaign targeting the UK or Ireland at all.

    The Isle of Dogs marries anime with Wes Anderson and looks amazing. The Isle of Dogs in question, is an artificial island in Tokyo Bay rather than the region of London.

    Porsche have done a great piece of content marketing about conductor Herbert von Karajan’s 1970s vintage Porsche 911 RS. von Karajan was famous, even amongst non-classical music fans for being a long time conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and his recordings on Deutsche Grammophon. This was probably helped by his recording being some of the first CDs available.

    Expect this in every planners tool box soon – German Performance Artists Act Out Amusingly Surreal Skits for Passengers Aboard Passing Trains

    While it might be seen to be a source of inspiration for PR stunts or experiential marketing, it fits into the idea of live advertisements that agencies and brands have been experimenting with over the past few years. More at Thinkbox here.

  • Alibaba Tencent and Huawei + more

    Alibaba Tencent and Huawei will take on the west’s technology players and win, predicts Sorrell – Mumbrella Asia – Alibaba Tencent and Huawei may also end up being Galapagos type businesses, or being seen a  threat by the Party because of their power. It would also be Huawei at least is a WPP client….

    Ideas

    The Equality of Opportunity Project  – This introductory course, taught by Raj Chetty, shows how “big data” can be used to understand and solve some of the most important social and economic problems of our time

    Luxury

    Rich Kid Buys Girl 8-Foot Tall Costco Teddy Bear, Gets Rejected | What’s on Weibo – interesting skepticism on viral moments or memes

    Free and Easy’s American Dream – Ralph Lauren magazine – great bit of media analysis on cult Japanese style magazine Free and Easy

    Security

    Source: Deloitte Breach Affected All Company Email, Admin Accounts — Krebs on Security – just wow

    China Blocks WhatsApp, Broadening Online Censorship – NYTimes.com – the wrong question being asked. Instead why did it last so long? Expect WeChat usage to pick up in Hong Kong etc for cross border communications

    Software

    macOS 10.13 High Sierra: The Ars Technica review | Ars Technica – great in-depth review

    Technology

    Will Imagination Deals Deliver MIPS to China? | EE Times – interesting discussions on the Tallwood VC / Canyon Bridge deal and possible implications for the MIPS eco-system. Interesting that China sees more potential and security in MIPS than ARM….

    Digital Evangelist: Imagination Technologies sale to Canyon Bridge – I rather expect that the Hertfordshire based business is likely to suffer the fate of Vertu and end up bankrupt and sold for scrap in less than two years because of mismanagement and the new owner having very little understanding as to just what they own and control  Imagination Technologies agrees £550m sale to Canyon Bridge | FT – the MIPS business goes to Tailwood VC (paywall)

  • AMD Live and the connected home ten years later

    A decade ago I worked on AMD Live. A hodgepodge of hardware and software that provided media access where ever and whenever you wanted it.  Here is a short video that we made at the time to bring it to life. The idea was that AMD would be able to sell higher specifications of PC components into the home to act as digital hub. They wanted to push their Opteron server processors into the home.

    An engineer came in and spent the best part of a day setting everything up throughout the house prior to shooting the film. At the time much of the streaming boxes didn’t work as promised so some of the screen images were put in post-production. There was a mix of cloud services and home hosted content. At the centre was a PC running Windows Multimedia Centre. There was a raft of third-party apps needed as well

    • Network management apps
    • Video and image compression apps
    • Instant messaging (that wasn’t MSN or Skype – no idea why it was in the bundle)
    • TV tuner software
    • A music jukebox application
    • Network management
    • An AMD GUI which provided a 3D carousel effect and integrated web browser

    It was all a bit of kludge.

    Digital content was well on its way. Streaming technology was well known but unstructured. RealNetworks had been going commercially since 1997, but the playback quality was dependent on Internet network connectivity, We only started to see widespread DSL adoption from 2003 onwards in the UK. By the first quarter of 2003, DSL was enabled at 1200 of the 5600 telephone exchanges across the UK.

    Apple’s QuickTime streaming server was open sourced back in 1999; so if anyone wanted to set up a streaming network they had the technology to do so.

    Digital audio content prior to 2003 had largely been ripped from optical media or downloaded online via FTP, Usenet or P2P networks. iTunes launched its music store in 2003.

    From a standing start in 2002; by 2004, 5 million devices with a HDMI connection had been sold. The built in copy protection had been developed by an Intel subsidiary and was adopted by all the big Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers.

    By 2005, Apple had started selling iTunes movies and TV programmes  alongside its music offering that allowed sharing of an account on up to 5 concurrent devices.

    Apple launched its MFi programme in January 2005, which begat a raft of speakers and stereos with iPod connectivity in the home and the car.

    Sonos released its speaker system including a wi-fi mesh network and AES network encryption. Flickr had a well documented API that allowed for a fully functioning photo album and picture streaming which was used in early web 2.0 mashups.

    AMD Live was on the back-foot from day one. From a high end perspective of audio streaming Sonos had it locked down. For everyone else moving an iPod from room to room had the same effect.  Mini-video servers could be configured from mini-PC boxes, but they were only for the technically skilled. Even the Mac Mini launched in 2005 didn’t make the process much easier. The key advantage is that it could use iTunes as a video source and a playing software.

    Back then because it was US centric in its view AMD Live completely ignored the rise of the smartphone as a music playback device.  By 2007, Nokia launched ‘Comes With Music‘ which put mobile streaming in play. Apple Music and Spotify have now made streaming effortless. Video playback now comes from devices the size of a thumb drive. New intermediate screens from tablets to smartphones changed viewing habits and the PC has become redundant as the home hub for all but the most enthusiastic AV aficionados.

  • Google Facebook Amazon and Apple + more

    Lost Context: How Did We End Up Here? – NewCo Shift – how did Google  Facebook  Amazon and Apple get to a position similar to that of the gilded age giants?  What can be done to regulate Google Facebook Amazon and Apple?

    Online

    Facebook (FB) on Russian ads: Our platform doesn’t influence people; people influence people — Quartz – what’s the point of advertising then?

    Security

    Troy Hunt: Face ID, Touch ID, No ID, PINs and Pragmatic Security – most people are crap at information security. Reducing the friction of signing up and using authentication raises the overall security level of consumers

    WeChat confirms that it makes all private user data available to the Chinese government – Moneycontrol.com – not terribly surprising – this is China’s answer to PRISM. Your communications are unencrypted on WeChat so commercially confidential information is at risk from hackers and your local government regardless of whether Tencent hands your data over to the Chinese government

    Really interesting design experiment from Chinese university students. It is interesting that they use the ‘goldfish’ as the avatar of the AI. It also asks questions about how we relate to pets and whether augmentation like this would work.

    Very interesting student project from Shanghai Jiaotong University, has your pet fish serve as an avatar/front end for a smart device pic.twitter.com/tHDODQHArM

    — Naomi Wu (@RealSexyCyborg) September 22, 2017

    Software

    Business Standard-Bitcoin’s wild ride shows the truth: It is probably worth zero – likely worth nothing

    And I think dealing with the foibles of macOS 11 (developer beta) was a hassle

    Technology

    UK chip designer Imagination bought by Chinese firm – BBC News – but what about the need for a customer base? The MIPS architecture stuff is interesting and probably a bit of a concern for automotive etc

    AI Turns UI Designs Into Code – NVIDIA Developer News Center – interesting project where machine learning takes design mock-ups and turns them into working web apps with code

    Wireless

    Smartphones are dead. Long live smartphones! · Forrester – emphasis away from only ads to also think about experiences – big challenge is the zero growth in aggregate app usage

    SaveSave

  • Machine learning sublime influence

    Scott Galloway talks about the way brands are using AI (machine learning) and the examples are very much in the background.  Welcome to the sublime world of machine learning where the impact on the customer experience won’t be apparent. In many respects this is similar to how fuzzy logic became invisible as it was introduced in the late 1980s.

    The Japanese were particularly adept at putting an obscure form of mathematics to use. They made lifts that adapted to the traffic flows of people going in and out of a building and microwaves which knew how long to defrost whatever you put into it. Fuzzy logic compensated for blur in video camera movement in a similar manner to way smartphone manufacturers now use neural networks on images.

    The Japanese promoted fuzzy logic inside products to the home market, but generally backed off from promoting it abroad. The features just were and consumers accepted them over time. In a quote that is now eerily reminiscent of our time a spokesperson for the American Electronics Association’s Tokyo office said to the Washington Post

    “Some of the fuzzy concepts may be valid in the U.S.,”

    “The idea of better energy efficiency, or more precise heating and cooling, can be successful in the American market,”

    “But I don’t think most Americans want a vacuum cleaner that talks to you and says, ‘Hey, I sense that my dust bag will be full before we finish this room.’ “

    This was also the case with the use technology companies made of Bayes Theory. This was used by the likes of Autonomy and Microsoft Research.

    A second technique was rules, put simply IF then THAT. This kind of technology has been used to drive automated trading models and credit card approvals for decades. Pegasystems are one of the leaders in developing rules based processing. Rules based systems could even be built in an Excel macro and would still count as a form of machine learning. 

    Finally machine learning needs to think about a number of things with regards the models being used:

    • The importance of accuracy in the use case
    • The level of precision required and ways to indicate that precision means
    • The cost of generation versus other methods, this is very important in terms of computing power and energy consumption 

    More information
    The Future of Electronics Looks Fuzzy | Washington Post (December 23, 1990)