Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Pornographers + more news

    Pornographers and social search

    Can These Pornographers End ‘MILFs,’ ‘Teens,’ and ‘Thugs’? | The Nation – when I was working on social search and folksonomies at Yahoo! a decade ago, yet pornographers are now amongst the most active users of the technology. A few things about how the pornographers worlds have changed. At the centre of this is the change in the market. Back in the day adult media companies and performers had their own sites that they sold their content through. They were found via search and audience aggregation sites that had teaser content.

    Then the tube sites came along and changed the game, the pornographers got pirated and mediated all at the same time. In order to get tube platform search to work for them, they had to embrace tagging, which revolved around the language that customers

    Business

    Haul For One: U-Haul Adapts & Reuses Abandoned Buildings | Urbanist – some of these are stunning for a modernist sucker like me

    DARPA Funds Development of New Type of Processor | EE Times

    Economics

    China’s Operation Australia: payments, power and politicians | Sydney Morning Herald – surely its what you’d expect an intelligence agency to do. Not really surprising, except for the change in tonality from Australia about China

    FMCG

    Chinese consumerism will reshape the world, and maybe even destroy it — Quartz – anything to do with China is the speed at which all this has occurred. What would the outcomes of that speed be? People wouldn’t have as many brand associations. Those brand associations would have built up in relatively short amount of time, as opposed to [being] handed down intergenerationally. Because of that speed, the amount of anxiety about having the right brand would be greater in that environment than in a place where this is unfolding slowly. Interesting also that Gerth talks about the right (communist) brands under Mao when people wanted a bike, a sewing machine and a wrist watch. I would also argue that there was latent knowledge of brands from pre-revolutionary times in older people based in Shanghai or historic brands like Tongrentang (TRT) founded in 1669

    Innovation

    WWII vehicle boneyards were essentially war machine landfills | Mashable  – Americans were so eager to get their hands on cheap surplus Jeeps that auto companies urged the government to leave them overseas, fearing they would cut into new car sales.

    I, Cringely The Robots are Coming! – I, Cringely – interesting read, but one that poses as much challenges as solutions

    Marketing

    What influencer marketing really costs – Digiday – interesting ranges in here

    Apple launches Business Chat for iMessage in developer preview | VentureBeat – looks like they have been taking a lesson or two from WeChat. I had seen Salesforce integration with iMessage and iChat demo-ed at one of the Cloudforce conference

    An aversion to logos could be Essential’s undoing | total telecom – its even more ridiculous that Essential actually have a logo that evokes Paul Rand and Saul Bass

    Media

    The One Big Reason Why BuzzFeed Needs TV – Bloomberg – so much for the online media business…. old media is the new sexy

    Apple’s new anti-tracking system will make Google and Facebook even more powerful – The Verge – a more marginal improvement than you’d think

    The Telegraph to publish daily edition on Snapchat – from 5pm today – I wonder what the monetisation model looks like?

    Entertainment Accounts Closed as Party Emphasizes News Control | China Digital Times – China clamping down on celebrity scandal accounts as well as accounts that would be disruptive to government

    Pathology of a Fake News Story – Thoughts On Journalism – Medium

    Facebook study shows what TV viewers are doing during commercial breaks | silicon beat

    Online

    Pinboard Blog – Pinboard acquires del.icio.us – a certain amount of irony in this which I’ll write about another time

    Security

    Russian malware link hid in a comment on Britney Spears’ Instagram | Engadget – really canny technique

    Software

    Apple is finally serious about artificial intelligence | Quartz – i’d disagree with the headline, but it has a good overview of the AI development pieces from Apple’s keynote

    Apple Just Joined Tech’s Great Race to Democratize AI | WIRED

    Why Apple is struggling to become an artificial-intelligence powerhouse – The Washington Post – Washington Post was bought by Jeff Bezos

    Technology

    Tom Oberheim On The Art Of Synthesizer Design | Synthtopia – amazing interview with Tom Oberheim on how he got into synthesiser design and talks about his products

    Andy Rubin’s new company already got screwed by Apple – BGR – Although Apple didn’t object to the investment, SoftBank didn’t want the conflict to happen

    Car Fact Of The Day | Marginal Revolution – Huge increase in complexity in cars

    Google vs. Uber: How One Engineer Sparked a War – WSJ – interesting write up of Andrew Levandowski’s role in it. I didn’t realise he was Belgian and its interesting how Google Street View helped birth its autonomous car project

    Telecoms

    Network Time Protocol Hardened To Protect Users From Spying, Increase Privacy – Slashdot

    Web of no web

    Japan puts up satellite in step to build homegrown GPS- Nikkei Asian Review – Quasi-zenith devices to allow location data accurate to 6cm

    Listen and create ambient sounds easily – Ambient Mixer – great for sounds to work by

  • Explore something new

    Explore something new in every brief: there is a huge tension that I see in the challenge facing FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) marketers. On the one hand they have to continue innovating as their brand media spend slowly fragments across new channels in pursuit of consumers.

    Limits on the drive to explore something new

    Although I think that there are limits on how much this fragmentation can happen in reality:

    • To explore something new in business models is expensive at a brand level, but it might make sense at a group level
    • Specifically direct to consumer a la Birchbox is attractive on paper and a great candidate to explore something new. It is what Scott Galloway would call a ‘rundle’: a recurring revenue bundle offering. But it only works on high value, high margin products. It won’t work for margarine
    • Personalised marketing is in a similar place, you need to have a certain size of the customer’s spend in order to make even database maintenance worthwhile. This also has implications for overall brand architecture. Yet digital transformation would be a key driver to explore something new

    Explore something new in every brief

    On the other hand, Zero Based Budgeting (ZBB) is now being used to bring increased accountability to marketing activity. Which fine in theory, but the advice to “explore something new in every brief” – whilst laudable, becomes harder to achieve. Unless the organisation has a ’20 percent fund’ for learning that allows that something new in each brief and the budget to capture learnings.

    ZBB

    The move towards ZBB implies that FMCG sectors are value industries, and recent stagnant growth largely validates that impression – businesses like Dollar Shave Club and the like are edge factors rather than core drivers. Secondly ZBB doesn’t lend itself particularly well to long term brand building because ROI is measured over a much smaller time period – leaning towards activation. More related content here.

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  • Smartphone addiction + more

    Smartphone addiction

    Smartphone addiction gets the Scott Galloway treatment. Childhood smartphone addiction has been a social and government issue in China for years as part of wider concerns over online and mobile gaming. So in some respects Galloway on smartphone addiction feels behind the curve. What is more interesting is how smartphone addiction goes beyond gaming into areas like airline loyalty schemes.

    40 years of hip hop

    The Hood Internet have done an amazing four minute edit of forty years of hip hop. It’s razor sharp precision. I have a pretty good knowledge of old school hip hop and couldn’t name all the tracks. The cuts are so short, Shazam isn’t likely to help either.

    Chinese dream

    BBH Shanghai have created a beautiful ad for Audi China which features science fiction author Hao Jing Fang. This feels like a mix of Wong Kar-wai and cyberpunk fiction. In some ways it isn’t that far from the aesthetic in present day Chinese tier one cities central business districts. It represents a brighter techno-utopian future than I would expect in an advert for American or European consumers.

    In some ways what was the American dream is now the Chinese dream. This implies a Chinese golden age of sorts, but there a number of headwinds to this dream from demographics to the authoritarian nature of the party.

    Louis Vuitton

    Louis Vuitton have been doing a lot of forward thinking content and events. Whilst this video is beautifully shot, it feels retro by comparison to other things that they’ve done. I went to the Louis Vuitton series exhibition was far more forward looking than this video.

    Work in Progress

    Carhartt Work In Progress created this great skate video in Italy.

    AZZURRO from Carhartt Work In Progress on Vimeo. Work In Progress have been consistently doing a great job commissioning content. In this respect, I would put them right up there on Red Bull in terms of quality, if not quantity of content. The alignment with skateboarding in this film is perfect.

  • WWDC 2017

    WWDC 2017 overview

    WWDC 2017 is the most important Apple event of the year as the software dictates There was a mix of hardware and software updates. Apple put a lot of focus on  virtual reality, augmented reality and prepping their operating systems for handling larger amounts of data.  There was work done to further optimise video and photo usage on device.

    WWDC 2017 had bad news for online advertisers and a number of consumer electronics manufacturers. Online advertising using retargeting or autoplay video is going to be blocked in Safari. The new HomePod speaker took aim at ‘casual hi-fi’ like Sonos, Bowers & Wilkins and Bose.

    Developments that Apple showcased at WWDC 2017 indicated that it is working very hard to try and understand user intent, which is one of the first pieces it needs to put in place to develop the experience of a truly programmable world. What do I mean by a programmable world? A ‘web of no web’ where device intelligence behaves as if it understands user intent like a good valet. It is moving in a stepwise manner towards this.

    What was more surprising is how Apple has gone big on VR and AR creation and consumption. Whilst video post-production houses probably have the most to complain about when it comes to Apple’s Pro equipment, they are not name checked. Apple has started to move to address their concerns. The external graphics support in macOS implies that a furture Mac Pro will have the software to match hardware.

    More details by platform:

    macOS

    The name High Sierra implied an OS update that might seem incremental to consumers, but has major technology changes under the hood.

    • Data – Apple File System as default (many features similar to Sun Microsystems’ ZFS). Faster for file swaps and giving a faster computer experience
    • Video – better quality video algorithms with smaller file sizes and integration with
    • Graphics – upgraded Metal API – Apple had been using it on machine learning applications within the OS. Metal 2 has been used to accelerate system level graphics and provides access to app developers. There is OS support for external graphics accelerators. The external graphics developer kit is based on AMD Radeon card.
    • MacOS supports VR through Metal for VR. Steam, Unity and Unreal supporting VR on the Mac. Apple seems to believe that VR and AR content is the desktop publishing of the 21st century, they have gone hard on making the best creators platform that they can
    Safari
    Focus on being the fastest browser experience, even in comparison to Chrome
    • Autoplay blocking – which will impact advertising network video views
    • Intelligent tracking prevention – positioned to target advertising retargeting and cross-site tracking
    Mail
    Productivity refinements including a split screen view
     
    Photos
    • Uses machine learning to improve searching and photo recognition and integration with photo-editing

    tvOS

    • 50 media partners integrated into TV app
    • Amazon is coming to Apple TV. Interesting move of detente between Apple and Amazon

    iOS

    iOS 11 – focus on underlying technologies:
    • Machine learning APIs – to help adoption of CoreML on device for third party apps
    • ARKit – to aid AR in apps. Clever work done on scaling and ambient light. This about providing a market for the content which which would be created on the Mac
    • Chinese specific features: including support for QRcodes, SMS spam filtering. Chinese users have a particular set of contexts and these innovations could become popular in the west
    • Interface tweaks in control centre and the lock screen.
    Messages
    • Improving discoverability of app stickers and apps – much needed
    • Automatic synchronisation of Messages across devices, delete once, delete across all devices
    ApplePay
    • Person-to-person payments as an iMessage app. Obvious competitor would be WeChat in China and PayPal in the west
    Siri
    • Improved expressive nature of the voice.
    • Follow-up questions, presumably to improve context
    • Provides translation services
    • Siri integration into a wide range of apps including WeChat and OmniFocus They’ve tried to use on-device learning to try and improve context and being helpful. Siri knowledge is synched across devices. Uses web history to improve Apple News and custom dictionary spellings
    Apple Maps
    • Indoor navigation for airports
    Photos
    • Better image compression to save space on device. New depth API that can be accessed by 3rd party apps
    • Video autorotates a la Snapchat / Snap glasses
    App Store
    • Apps now reviewed in less than 24 hours
    • First app redesign in nine years. Tweaks to improve discoverability and merchandising of apps including in-app sales
     watchOS
     
    • The biggest feature in watchOS 4 is the Siri-powered face. The Siri-powered watch face provides contextual information on the ‘home screen’. It takes into account past habits, time, location etc. Apple’s language around this was interesting, they described it as an ‘Intelligent proactive assistant’.

    More details by hardware

    Mac hardware
    • iMac – improved displays, brighter and support for 1 billion colours. Moving to Kaby Lake Intel processors. Up to 64GB of RAM on the iMac and 2TB SSD. Discrete Radeon graphics cards on larger iMacs. – big focus on VR development.
    • MacBook – Kaby Lake processors. Pro machines get updated graphics as well. The MacBook Air gets a processor boost.
    • iMac Pro – single piece machine with workstation specification including 10Gbit Ethernet. Presumably as an interim measure until the Mac Pro arrives next year. How upgradeable would the iMac Pro be, which is a key consideration for workstations
     
    iPad hardware
    • iPad Pro – 20% bigger screen, 120Hz screen refresh rate. Doubling default memory sizes up to 512GB
     
    Apple HomePod
    Apple is going after Sonos and brown goods companies like Bose, Bowers & Wilkins and Bang & Olufsen. The Siri functionality is a hygiene factor rather than a serious competitor to Amazon Echo. There was a big emphasis on the privacy functionality of Siri in HomePod
     
    Further reading

    WWDC 2015: you know the Apple news, but what does it mean?
    48 hours with the Apple Watch
    Eight trends for the future: web-of-no-web
    Eight trends for the future: contextual technology

    More content on WWDC 2017

  • 2017 internet trends + other things

    2017 internet trends report

    Mary Meeker’s 2017 internet trends report: All the slides, plus analysis | Recode – was the big thing to drop in my week.

    The key themes for me from the 2017 internet trends report were:

    • Continued slowing in internet growth showing that the previous years decline in growth wasn’t a one off. In the 2017 internet trends report we also saw a decline in smartphone growth as well
    • All of these trends don’t apply with India where the market is still growing for internet access and smartphone growth. In India the 2017 internet trends isn’t ‘2017’ but 2010
    • Lean forward media is beloved of internet entrepreneurs. Interactive gaming is becoming mainstream around the world, with 2.6 billion gamers in 2017 versus 100 million in 1995. Gaming revenue is estimated to be around $100 billion in 2016, and China is now the largest market for gaming.
    • In the US at least wearables are becoming mainstreamed. 25 percent of Americans owning one, up 12 percent from 2016. Back when I was in Hong Kong, Chinese manufacturers were cranking out low cost health monitors to monitor your exercise activity

    More related content here.

    The Reflex remixes

    The Reflex remixes Gil Scott Heron. Nicolas was one of the few remixers who can make a production that’s better than the original. 

    Ultraman theme tune

    Scatman Ultraman – Ultraman is a famous suited super hero. It is part of the Japanese TV and movie ‘special filming or tokusatsu genre. It is the grandfather of the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers. One of Ultraman’s powers was the ability to grow really large, which spawned other giant hero or Kyodai Hero characters. 

    Surreal and manic

    Surreal and manic

     

    A post shared by DJ STYLEWARZ (@stylewarz) on

    Kouhei Nakama 

    Kouhei Nakama | Design & Motion – really nice 3D animations by Japanese artist / designer Kouhei Nakama