Ged Carroll

Blog

  • VisiCalc of today + more news

    VisiCalc

    The Internet of Things is looking for its VisiCalc – Beep Networks Blog – VisCalc was a spreadsheet and the first useful application for personal computers, people bought them to take into work because of VisiCalc – VisiCalc what my university lecturer would have called a ‘killer application’. VisiCalc was the app that drove the initial adoption of personal computers, when it was developed for the Apple II computer. VisiCalc was eventually seen off by Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel

    Business

    Tech Talent: How the UK lost six potential titans – BBC News – interesting to see ARM Holdings included in this, not the kind of narrative that they would like around their brand

    Rush of Chinese Investment in Europe’s High-Tech Firms Is Raising Eyebrows – NYTimes.com – and sketchy business dealings

    The Wall Street Veteran Who’s Helping Google Get Disciplined | Fortune – the person wielding the knife at Alphabet. Making Alphabet just like any other large corporate isn’t something I’d boast about

    KKR growth equity fund – Business Insider – going after Silicon Valley opportunities, probably a sign that phenomenal growth is over

    Consumer behaviour

    Half of America isn’t downloading smartphone apps anymore, but some demographics are still avidly downloading away — Quartz – which begs a question, is a smartphone a smartphone if it’s used like a feature phone? What does this then mean to upgrade cycles etc?

    Saudi Millennials Don’t Use Their Phones Like We Do | Backchannel – what socials apps people preferred (Skype, Instagram and Path are popular; Facebook and BBM are fading out)

    The tide of globalisation is turning — FT.com – Globalisation’s future depends on better management. Will that happen? Alas, I am not optimistic. (paywall)

    Technology is taking jobs away from men—and reviving a pre-industrial version of masculinity — Quartz – the training debacle is the crucial piece in this and its a hard nut to crack

    Design

    Fyber Forma | Tyvek® Clothing & Bags – really interesting Taiwan based design house doing interesting things with Tyvek

    More people care about movies and shows than immersive 3-D games | MIT Technology Review – passive consumption trumps interactivity, does this mean that VR threatens big TVs? Makes sense give the kind of housing challenges many of us face

    FMCG

    WSJ City – Unilever Is in Talks to Acquire Jessica Alba’s Honest Co. – Unilever is in talks to acquire Honest Co., the consumer-products retailer – green / organic products aimed at new parents

    Primed for pumpkinpalooza? Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte is back | The Seattle Times – and after Pumpkin Spice Latte comes eggnog latte :-)

    Gadgets

    Two Xiaomi handset explosions in five days in mainland China | HKEJ Insight – it could be third party chargers or a battery problem, but its not going to help

    With the iPhone 7, Apple Changed the Camera Industry Forever – The New Yorker – I don’t think that this is true. Agreed that point-and-shoot cameras continue to be threatened by smartphones. The issue lies in higher end cameras, Apple and the like are pushing the limits of compact lens. Secondly, as large as the pixels are on their sensors, they’re still small compared to a full frame camera. Finally there is the tactile experience of holding a camera. The smartphone is likely to become the gateway drug to proper photography

    Ideas

    Prepare for a Big Road Trip With The “OSMEAC” Military Convoy Technique – really nice model for briefing teams

    Korea

    Controversial Chinese teaser for film on Korean war revives debate on China’s role in the deadly conflict | South China Morning Post – just wow

    On Hanjin – Flexport – Because Hanjin was a member of the CKYHE Alliance, a vessel-sharing agreement that also includes Cosco, K Line, Evergreen, and Yang Ming, it will be far more complicated for those companies and their creditors to figure out exactly which cargo should be held, and who owes whom for what

    Luxury

    Coach’s Millennial Magnet | Fashion Show Review, Ready-to-Wear Spring 2017 | BoF – repackaging Americana

    Marketing

    China’s influencers are the world’s most effective marketing platforms, says Ivy Wong – Mumbrella Asia – that’s a big claim to make

    Media

    WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer) – hypocrites (paywall) and Don’t just pardon Edward Snowden; give the man a medal | TechCrunch

    Africa’s Naspers Takes Aim at Craigslist | WSJ – interesting move by Naspers

    The rise and fall of Mode Media – Digiday – is this the end of blog ad networks and the rise of social network advertising over everything else?

    How showbiz stars and pretty boys came to the rescue of China’s version of Twitter | South China Morning Post – bread and circuses – interesting skew towards female users though

    Online

    Europe’s top court has made merely linking to stolen material on the web a crime | Quartz – Websites that link to pirated material could be in trouble for copyright infringement, the European Union’s top court has ruled. The European Court of Justice notes in a controversial ruling (pdf)

    Retailing

    UK supermarket chain takes on Amazon Lockers | TelecomTV – interesting move by Morrisons and you Argos doing pick up at store for eBay

    Security

    The cypherpunk revolution | Christian Science Monitor – great history on the impact of public key encryption

    French PM: More terror attacks coming, 15,000 under surveillance | Ars Technica UK – The newly-revealed total of 15,000 being monitored by the authorities is even larger than the previously-estimated figure of 11,000, which the Washington Post suggested would need 220,000 officers in order to provide full surveillance. By contrast, the US newspaper believed that there were around 3,000 people being watched in the UK. Although considerably smaller than the number in France, this would still require half of the police officers in England and Wales in order to monitor them properly.

    Report: New Feinstein-Burr encryption effort in works | TheHill – trying to legislate weaker cryptography for consumers, not the smartest move; but that won’t stop them

    Software

    I, Cringely What Carrie Underwood’s success teaches us about IBM’s Watson failure – I, Cringely– really interesting debate on IBM, check out the comment section

    Web of no web

    Survey reveals why Japanese players quit Pokémon GO, and it’s likely not for the reason you think | RocketNews24 – battery issues underscores the issues with much modern technology

    Android Wear hopefuls call timeout on smartwatches – CNET – I suspect that the problem is that the devices had a high price point for low utility. Huawei’s devices in particular were ridiculously spendy

    Larry Ellison demos a chat bot with a joke about his salary – Business Insider – chat bots as programming interface

    More on where 2.0 here.

    Wireless

    EU’s digital market rules land vowing free Wi-Fi, 5G tech, and copyright overhaul | Ars Technica UK – free Wi-Fi in every town, village, and city in the European Union, in the next four years

  • The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia by Bill Hayton

    In The South China Sea; Hayton sets an ambitious goal for himself to try and unpick the claims and counter claims on territory in the area. It is a massive convoluted story that encompasses colonial powers, oil companies and a plethora of Asian countries.

    In the end no one comes out of it with glowing colours. China is easy to paint as a villain and it has played to type. But other countries and major powers have made constant mis-steps and it has become an intractable problem. The more hawkish may see the inevitability of war with China.

    On the Chinese side, it makes sense for them to escalate a fight with one of their neighbours; as a Chinese idiom puts it ‘kill a chicken to scare the monkey’ and distract from the pain of change at home.  The history is wrapped up with rising nationalism and aspirations of China and its neighbours.

    From the American perspective, it makes sense to have the war with China further away from the Homeland, so the South China sea rather than the Pacific ocean.

    Hayton doesn’t take a standpoint one way or the other leaving the reader to decide.

    From a reading perspective, the tangled nature of the claims makes the book more difficult to read in small bursts. I tried reading it as a commuting book and it took a while to get it done.

    More book reviews here. More details on The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia

  • Montblanc + more things

    Montblanc

    Montblanc launches connected pen and paper | Luxury Daily – interesting move by Montblanc. The technology for connected pens similar to what Montblanc is doing has been around for a while. However it is interesting seeing a luxury brand like Montblanc enter the field. Montblanc has also done interesting things in wearables as well.

    Business

    Chinese Billionaire Linked to Giant Aluminum Stockpile in Mexican Desert – WSJ

    Culture

    A great documentary on the (little known in the UK) early 1990s US rave scene that blossomed on the west coast and gave us the likes of Hawke, The God Within aka Scott Hardkiss, Onionz and the like.

    Design

    The last day of hot metal press printing at the New York Times

    Media

    WeChat and Brands | WeChat Blog: Chatterbox – Caesars Entertainment and interesting concierge bot trial

    Evolving App Store Business Models – David Smith – move to ads from payments or subscription pricing

    Security

    Cisco’s Network Bugs Are Front and Center in Bankruptcy Fight – Bloomberg – and there is the opportunity for other vendors to get in

    Now for a more disturbing piece of technology, that my colleague Matt shared with me: OfferMoments looks like a privacy nightmare a la Minority Report. I found this a disturbing 90 seconds of viewing as marketing walks all over privacy in an unprompted very intrusive manner.

    Software

    Instagram lawyers tell owner of anti-litter app to change its name | The Guardian – interesting move, will this open the door for them to go after the likes of Telegram (messaging app) later on

    Wireless

    Un-carrier Network List of Firsts | TelecomTV Tracker – summary of T-Mobile US rollouts

    Apple Plug – neatly skewers the iPhone 7

  • September 11

    15 years ago on September 11, 2001 I worked agency side in Haymarket in London’s west end  for Edelman. It was a normal day. Well as normal is it gets when you are in the middle of the dot com bust fallout. It was a mix of mobile businesses trying to ride the mobile internet wave and service providers for the soon to launch 3G mobile networks. Alongside this was helping dot com businesses try to find their place in the new world.

    My job meant working on communications programmes for the European subsidiaries of technology companies. This was to reflect a ‘business as usual’ face to their customers. This allowed the European subsidiaries to keep their businesses largely intact so that they could be sold off to help bail out the financial hole that the US parent company had made.

    The businesses had grown on generous venture capital payments, share placements and bank loans. The dot com bust suddenly meant that there was a surplus of servers, network switches, bandwidth, commercial space and Herman Miller Aeron chairs.

    Due to the nature of the business I worked closely with colleagues on the finance team because I spoke ‘geek’ and understood how screwed these clients happened to be.

    The financial and corporate teams worked for a number of clients, notably Cantor Fitzgerald. They were to lose two thirds of their personnel by the end of the day.

    It was early afternoon, when I realised that something was up. We had TVs around the agency that often weren’t on. This time they were all turned to Sky News, which was running the footage. After the troubles and bombings in Beirut, it wasn’t a complete surprise to see another landmark attack – at least at first.

    Once the scale sunk in, then the realisation of how different the world was going to be after September 11 started to dawn on me. More related content here.

  • 2016 Apple event

    In a now annual ritual its 2016 Apple event held on September 7 left me a lot to reflect on.

    Style

    • The presentation was telling a hard story to an audience that were likely to be underwhelmed. Phil Schiller rather than Tim Cook carried the most difficult parts of the keynote.
    • The piano finish device was an obvious attempt to provide a style angle to the new iPhone and mask the aerial sections. However it is a class action waiting to happen as it will dull over time with micro-scratches
    • The story that the audience was told didn’t feel right. Lets talk about the headphone jack. The double camera only appears in the Plus, so the requirement for room isn’t a credible argument on its own, other vendors have managed to waterproof handsets with headphone jacks. I suspect that Apple isn’t sure that its backing the right horse. Its the least aggressive change they’ve made in a while. The inclusion of an adaptor shows that their user aggression still isn’t as high compared to when they got rid of: SCSI, Apple Desktop Bus (ADB), iPod 30 pin port (still pissed about that one), AppleTalk, floppy disks or optical disk playback and storage – I suspect that they are fearfully waiting to see what the pre-order numbers will be like and they should be. A straw poll of AdAge readers (core Apple user demographic) showed overwhelming disappointment
      AdAge readers on new iPhone
    • There is a lot of really nice features in iOS 10 – I’ve been using it for a while, why didn’t they make more of this and macOS Sierra?

    Substance

    • Innovation in the smartphone category has flattened out. The iPhone 7 provides reasons for laggard iPhone users to upgrade, but nothing for 6 and 6S series users. There are few if any innovations for the likes of Huawei to ape in their new models
    • Innovation in smartwatches has plateaued. Apple is coalescing around fitness and dedicated products are much more cost effective for consumers. In China Xiaomi’s fitness band sells for about £15, for many consumers it would be enough. Fitbit is doing well – Apple’s wrist computer (alongside Samsung Gear etc) looks like a sledgehammer to crack a nut
    • Apple have done nothing to address the latent demand for new laptops amongst consumers (I am still happy with my 13″ Retina MacBook Pro). There was no replacement for the Cinema display (again, I am happy with my current set-up, but where is the pro-user love)
    • Apple abandoned its flirtation with luxury by discontinuing the gold Watch. They are still holding out to be viewed as stylish by doubling down with Hermes and a white ceramic device – it would work on the opposite wrist to a Chanel J12
    • It was curious that Apple moved away from talking about security and privacy; the collaborative document working using iWork which could be seen as a potential attack vector on to the desktop. The Air Pods that sync seamlessly with a device without visible security precautions.  iPhone security was addressed in the James Corden car karaoke skit at the beginning of the show rather than woven through the materials.
    • The speech about the app store was to try and bolster developer support, I suspect that services will shore up the Apple financial numbers over the next 12 months
    • The Nike branded Apple Watch was part of a broader move reposition the Apple Watch 2 as a fitness device and probably the biggest transition of the 2016 Apple event.

    More related content can be found here.