Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Velvet by Brubaker & Breitweiser

    Velvet is the antithesis of mainstream comics. In a world of Marvel-dominated culture, it is hard to imagine more realistic material. Ed Brubaker got the freedom to publish Velvet after several years at DC, Vertigo and Marvel.

    Velvet is a welcome antidote to the superhero genre of graphic novels. Instead, you get a cold war era spy drama with modern storytelling. Velvet tells the story of a middle-aged Anne Bancroft-like secretary and one-time agent. The story gets going when she is set up for murder by persons unknown.

    In this respect, it outlines the kind of spy plot that would be familiar to readers of Len Deighton or Alistair Maclean. Brubaker’s choice of the early 1970s goes back to a pre-cellphone and computer age. This provides him with a broader canvas to work with.

    The story feels modern in its non-linear narrative that moves back and forth between 1956 and 1973. The story zips through Europe across both sides of the Iron Curtain as Velvet tries to find who set her up. The comic features highly kinetic action reminiscent of Matt Damon-era Jason Bourne.

    The first two volumes of it are available here and here. Volume three is due out in September. More book reviews here.

  • TAG Heuer + more things

    TAG Heuer Pushing Brand in China, as Rivals Scale Back | Business of Fashion – it makes sense given the lower price point of TAG Heuer watches. TAG Heuer is in an interesting place. Due to the government clampdown on corruption, the market for ostentatious watches has been curtailed for the time being.

    You could dispute whether TAG Heuer is even in the luxury space. Its range competes with the likes of Tissot on the bottom end and touches on Omega at the top end. The positioning that gives it a (temporary) tactical advantage in the Chinese market, leaves it vulnerable to the Apple Watch, which seems to have devoured the mid-market aside from rugged models. More on luxury here.

    iPhone Future — Monday Note – great piece of analysis

    Death to the Mass — Whither news? — Medium – the article proposes that content no longer king, and neither is distribution. Obviously if true, it would have major implications for the media sector. Jeff talks about conversation being more important now, which is an interesting framing of the challenge. I’d look at the opportunity as filtering or curation, and possibly social. Though in these times trust has declined alongside distribution.

    This Company Might Make Apple and Google Irrelevant — NewCo Shift — Medium – dramatic title but interesting write up on Viv. Viv seems to be a ‘Wildfire’ type personal assistant proof of concept. The idea is that it would displace the intelligence of Siri or Google on the devices. Viv hopes to upend the current platform model. Just because it’s good technology doesn’t guarantee success. It is interesting to reflect again on how mobile carriers went from having the platform business in their hands to poorly compensated dumb pipes for the likes of Facebook, Google and Tencent. And why they are now starting to retreat from the nascent global empires that they built in a fit of hubris.

  • Throwback gadget: SnapperMail

    Thinking about SnapperMail takes me back to end of 2001, I started to prepare for leaving my job at Edelman. This meant upgrading my home IT set up. I picked up an iBook. The iBook was Apple’s consumer-orientated laptop made from 1999 to 2006. Mine was a second generation ‘Snow’ laptop with a G3 processor, dual USB sockets and a combo drive which allowed me to watch DVDs and burn CDs.

    I used the move to go on the first version of OSX. The move also meant that I got a new email account, my default account to date. It had two key attributes:

    • No adverts, so it looked professional in comparison to having a Yahoo! or Hotmail email address and it wasn’t tied to an ISP.
    • IMAP support which allowed me to use my email account across different devices that syncs across the devices. POP3 downloads the  emails from the server to the device, so is ideal only for when you are accessing email from one machine

    My iBook was my only source of email access whilst I left Edelman, freelanced, and then eventually joined Pirate Communications. My first smartphone was a Nokia 6600, which I used alongside a Palm  PDA – l got this sometime around the end of 2003. The 6600 supported IMAP out of the gate, it was slow, but I was connected.

    The 6600 was eclipsed by Palm’s Treo devices which were a better device. I moved from the 6600 and a Palm Tungsten T3 combo to a Treo 600 smartphone in January 2005.

    The process wasn’t smooth. The Treo was sufficiently fragile that I got a translucent silicon jacket that worked surprisingly well with the keyboard and screen protector to look after the touchscreen. Software wise the Treo 600 was a step back from the Tungsten T3 PDA. The screen was smaller and the software felt sluggish in comparison. I had deliberately chosen the 600 over the 650 because I had previously worked agency side on the Palm account and been a long-suffering device owner so knew how crap they were at bug fixes on new devices. The media didn’t call the former Palm CEO ‘Mad’ Bill Maggs for no reason (just sayin’).
    snapperfish limited
    Unfortunately Palm had not been as progressive in comparison to Nokia with its default email client. The software didn’t support IMAP. Fortunately I used to follow Mitch Kapor’s blog and he had recommended SnapperMail: an app from a small New Zealand company SnapperFish.

    SnapperMail was a compact modern email client. It has a number of features that we would expect now:

    • It supported IMAP
    • It supported SSL client to mail box encryption*
    • it was really easy to use
    • You could work with attachments including zipped files**
    • There was no restriction on the file size of attachments, the only restriction was your email account rather than your email client

    This looks like the kind of technology you would have thought Palm should have done. At the this time Palm were competing against Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003, BlackBerry 6200 series, 7100 series and early 8700 series. Yet the default email client was back in the 1990s.

    *The full-fat application cost US$39.99

    **SnapperMail came bundled with HandZipper Lite which handled the compressed files and JPEGWatch Lite image viewer

    I used this alongside MetrO – a public transit directions app and QuickOffice Pro – to read Office documents as part of my modern smartphone experience. It wasn’t just me that loved SnapperMail, it was praised by Walt Mossberg back when he wrote at the Wall Street Journal.

    SnapperMail won two Palm Source (Palm’s software licence business) Powered Up awards in 2003. It was recognised as Best Productivity and Best of the Best Solution. More on Palm here. 

    More information
    SnapperMail Has Solid Software For Savvy Mobile E-Mail Users | WSJ
    QuickOffice
    MetrO – open source mass transit application
    PalmSource Welcomes Developers with Awards, New Tools; Announces New Licensees | PalmSource press room

  • Blockchain deals + other news

    The Dumb Money Is Chasing After Blockchain Deals | CB Insights – true enough. Warning incoming rant on blockchain. Blockchain has a relatively low transaction rate. Traceability is reliant on a reliable database rather than the decentralisation. You have better performing open source databases that aren’t dependent on the weakest link of the decentralised network. For really high translation rates you are better investing in an Oracle database and appropriate hardware support – either through a SaaS or in-house.

    Executive Shuffle at Cyanogen Amid Challenges – can Jolla step up or is it too on the ropes? Jolla has some interesting contracts with the likes of the Russian government for trusted mobile systems. Cyanogen sold purely on improvements in user experience, so Jolla’s security infrastructure has a clear benefit for enterprise users and carriers who don’t want a smartphone botnet.  Jolla also has a strong UX, it pioneered some tactile gestures and leveraged Nokia employees deep experience in mobile experience and understanding of consumer behaviour.  Jolla also has support on some Sony smartphones. The big issue would be the failure of Jolla to turn existing deals with handset manufactured into wide availability of consumer products. It hasn’t been alone in that respect. Both Cyanogen and Firefox OS had similar issues of distribution that would then aid adoption. More on Jolla here.

    Introducing 360 Photos on Facebook – every idea becomes new again. Back before the Internet there was QuickTime VR. This rolled on to the early net but the experiment was very patchy due  to the lack of bandwidth in comparison to today. Content and interaction wise there is clearly no difference from a the consumer experience between Facebook 360 and QuickTime VR. The question is how Facebook 360 goes forward, or if it just becomes a fad like QuickTime VR did before it?

  • The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

    It’s been nine years since Taleb wrote The Black Swan. Like Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man before it, The Black Swan is widely cited and paid lip service to.

    The timing of publication for Taleb was particularly pertinent as the book became popular as the financial system broke down in 2008. Some eight years later, the economy has limped along as financial issues were punted into the future, rather like a child kicking a can down an alley. Like the can, the financial issues are still here to be ran into. I thought it was time to re-read Taleb’s book.

    Taleb’s work is philosophical rather than scientific in its method. Although he avoids the talk show friendly cliches of Malcolm Gladwell or Seth Godin. Much of our world is based around the normal distribution, it is used by insurance companies and pension funds to access risk and longevity. Taleb points out that the really big changes that rock the boat often don’t fit neatly within these models.

    Taleb’s solution boils down to two things

    1. A defensive skepticism that would encourage the average person to question common wisdom and ask ‘what if’
    2. For those that can afford it, an offensive posture that asks ‘what if’ and has a mix of savings or investments most of which is put in very safe vehicles and 15 per cent or so on high risk speculative investments to take advantage of change

    Taleb’s work doesn’t seem to have had the impact that one would have expected just five years ago when it was quoted as a touchstone to modern life.

    Much of the excess and risk that had happened previously is happening again, despite a plethora of disruptive forces laid out in the media.

    Audiences are paying too much attention to listicles that go something along the line of ‘5 habits you need have to be like Bill Gates’. Where is the critical filter? More books reviewed here.

    More information

    McMansions Are Back And Are Bigger Than Ever – There was a small ray of hope just after the Lehman collapse that one of the most lamentable characteristics of US society – the relentless urge to build massive McMansions (funding questions aside) would have subsided
    The market’s most crowded trades could be causing dangerous bubbles – Business Insider
    Many Middle-Class Americans Are Living Paycheck to Paycheck – The Atlantic
    Economic Conditions Snapshot, March 2016: McKinsey Global Survey results | McKinsey & Company
    Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley – The New York Times – Mr. Grove contrasted the start-up phase of a business, when uses for new technologies are identified, with the scale-up phase, when technology goes from prototype to mass production. Both are important. But only scale-up is an engine for job growth — and scale-up, in general, no longer occurs in the United States. “Without scaling,” he wrote, “we don’t just lose jobs — we lose our hold on new technologies” and “ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.
    Crap IT means stats crew don’t really know how UK economy’s doing • The Register – and people make accusations about Chinese economic data…
    Return of ‘100% mortgages’ ease burden on Bank of Mum and Dad | FT