Ged Carroll

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  • Susan Kare + more things

    Susan Kare

    Things that made my day this week included mac pioneer Susan Kare, Luxxury, Greg Wilson and JG Ballard:

    Great interview with Susan Kare. Susan Kare is famous for her icon designs that appeared in the first nine versions of the MacOS. Even now veteran Mac users will have a reaction to the ‘Dogcow’ that Susan Kare used to illustrate orientation of paper in a printer. More Mac related topics here.

    Luxxury

    Luxxury have cut a new slice of post-disco, pre-house 1980s dance music that Maze or Hall & Oates would have been happy with. Take it Slow is out on iTunes

    JG Ballard

    JG Ballard’s High Rise makes it to the big screen alongside some great late 1960s / 1970s set dressing and a great Kraut Rock soundtrack that Daft Punk would love.

    Apple Watch

    Finally, an Acceptable Use of the Apple Watch | Hackaday and 3D printing for that matter. A lovely Mac Classic homage as watch stand. You can now find this in silicone on Amazon, if you don’t want to 3D print your own version.

    Greg Wilson & Francois K

    Great interview with Greg Wilson and Francois K talking about the early days of modern dance music. From DJing to production and everything in between. What becomes apparent is something that Robert X Cringely, pointed out in his book Accidental Empires. That the same set of (48) names keep cropping up again and again in the development of something. In Cringely’s case, this was the personal computing revolution. Watching this video; you ge the same sense in the development of dance music.

    Greg Wilson helped develop the culture at the Hacienda and  brought beat and scratch mixing to UK television in the early 1980s. Francois K’s impact was as a DJ and producer since the early 1980s. The career longevity of these pioneers is fascinating.

  • Safari suggestions + more things

    Safari Suggestions bug causes browser crashes in iOS and OS X | Ars Technica – I noticed this first thing in the morning with Safari Suggestions my Mac, goes to show how dependent we are on network based services. Safari Suggestions are a great concept, let’s hope that Apple gets it right. More Apple related posts here.

    Apple is preparing for a future where individual iPhone sales don’t matter | Quartz – but what about how the investors see it? I think this is about growing average revenue per user (ARPU), but make no mistake individual sales of devices will still be very important. Services revenue is directly tied to device sales.

    Chinese billionaire Wang Jianlin takes aim at the global credit card system, promising to become No 1 | South China Morning Post – Dalian Wanda think their internet finance business will upset global credit card payment system. …Dalian Wanda Group, China’s largest commercial property company, told the Asia Financial Forum in Hong Kong on Monday that he hopes to issue 500 million Feifan cards, a type of credit and payment card for Wanda merchants and customers, in the coming five years (paywall)

    Meizu set to layoff 4000 staff | Gizchina – Despite seeing a surge in sales by as much as 350% last year, Meizu are planning to slash its work force by 5%.

    No other tech company spends more on lobbying than Google, new stats show – GeekWire – and it doesn’t seem to be doing that much good. Apple needs to up its spend, as does Uber

    Spotify Ready to Introduce Video Product – WSJ – tough going up against Netflix, iTunes, Amazon etc (paywall)

    Censorship in the social media age – Columbia Journalism Review – news published on third party platforms like social has platform level editorial control on top of the journalistic process. What are the ethics?

    LaMem Demo – how interesting is a visual?

  • Dish network + more things

    I, Cringely Final Prediction #10: Apple will buy Dish Network – I, Cringely – bit of a reach. Dish Network has a customer base that is full of the wrong demographic for Apple. Dish Network has a legacy infrastructure that will be a cost, not an asset

    Hurt by China economic slowdown, luxury sector can recover if… | South China Morning Post – Chinese customers still have wealth from their equity market holdings and are still travelling (paywall)

    Jack on Twitter: “Was really hoping to talk to Twitter employees about this later this week, but want to set the record straight now: https://t.co/PcpRyTzOlW” – staff changes

    Apple cut iAd ‘to starve Google’s core business’: column – Business Insider – an interesting theory that the iAd downgrade was part of a much bigger, bolder Apple strategy to crush Google

    Yale psychologists have built a mathematical model for selfishness – Ever wonder why some people have a tendency to be nice—even in situations where it costs them—while others are constantly out for themselves?

    Streaming-music listeners really don’t care about missing out on CD-like sound quality – Streaming-music listeners really don’t care about sound quality. A recent survey by MusicWatch found that few music fans would pay more to listen to music with better audio quality. Which is interesting when one thinks about how CDs were marketed. Instead streaming media is more like the convenience sales pitch previously made for cassette tapes

    Amazon’s strategy for Europe expansion includes armchair grocery shopping – Amazon is gearing up to expand its European footprint, taking several services deeper into the continent, including one that’s already seen success in the UK: online grocery shopping and delivery. More Amazon related posts here.

    ★ Daring Fireball | Anywhere but Medium Dave Winer If Medium were more humble, or if they had competition, I would relax about it. But I remember how much RSS suffered for being dominated by Google.

  • Yahoo! – how did we get here?

    Understanding who Yahoo! is today means understanding changes in the technology and media sectors. These changes occurred over the past 20 years.
    Jerry, Liam & David celebrate the new Yahoo! Mail

    The Fear

    Yahoo! started off as a hack. The directory grew from a list of sites catalogued by Jerry Yang and David Filo. They did this as students in Stanford. This was back in the early 1990s, Microsoft was the dominant technology company. It is hard to understand the power that Microsoft had at the time. Apple was on a fast track to oblivion. This power was later clipped in the Judge Jackson trial of 2000.

    The Media Company

    At the time, investors and founders were reluctant to go into business against Microsoft. Even the idea that Microsoft may enter a sector was enough for others to stay clear.

    The technology sector was full of casualties: Digital Research, Borland, Go and Stac Technologies. Microsoft’s approach to competition of embrace, extend and extinguish was already well known.

    Yang and Filo would have had this in mind when they positioned Yahoo! as a media company that happened to be online. Yahoo!’s early business deals such as Yahoo! Internet Life magazine and display advertising are symptomatic of this media thinking.

    The advertising display model that Yahoo! operated was reminiscent of print magazine and newspaper businesses. It even went ahead and hired a traditional media sector CEO in 2001. Terry Semel was a former chairman of Warner Brothers. He was brought in following a 30% collapse in online advertising sales. Semel’s efforts to build a media business at Yahoo! didn’t succeed.

    The Technology Company

    Yahoo! has a history of contributing to key open source technologies including:

    • Debian Project
    • PHP
    • Hadoop
    • Oozie

    The work done on Hadoop lead to a spinout technology company called Hortonworks. Hortonworks customers include eBay, Spotify and Expedia. Not bad for ‘media company’.

    Panama, was to drive quality and profit in advertising by increasing click through rates. Yet it took too long to develop, many other projects ended up being canceled.

    Despite of the technical expertise at Yahoo!. The company bought in many key technologies rather than building themselves. Yahoo! Mail came from acquiring the 411.com directory service which owned Rocketmail in 1997. The modern mail web application has its roots in Oddpost, acquired in 2004.

    Failure To Make Big Bets

    Yahoo! bought video and audio streaming company broadcast.com in 1999 for $5.7 billion. This was the most expensive thing Yahoo! every bought. By comparison Tumblr cost $1.1 billion dollars in 2013. Yahoo! ended up with little to show for it’s $5.7 billion. This meant that Yahoo! developed a culture which made it hard to make big bet the farm kind of changes.  Terry Semel rejected the opportunity to buy Google in 2002 for $5 billion. It also failed to buy DoubleClick. Google bought it instead, and used DoubleClick to speed up growth beyond search advertising.

    A secondary effect of not being able to make big bets was a constantly changing set of priorities. Insiders have gone on record talking about the missed changes with aborted projects. This also made it harder to develop and pursue a vision.

    The Google comparison

    Google started some five years later. Google came into a world where Microsoft looked weaker. The US government filed charges against the company and Linux started to gain momentum. Google’s original business model was to be a search engine provider for web portals. There were other competitors in this space like Inktomi. It wasn’t until 1999 that the company started selling its own advertising. Google waited six years to go public. The size and profitability of its business masked from competitors and customers until 2004.

    Google hasn’t been afraid to make big bets or have a big vision:

    • Search
    • Enterprise search
    • Personal productivity
    • Enterprise productivity
    • Mobile operating system

    It has thought carefully about focus and vision – which is part of the reason why the Alphabet conglomerate was formed.

    More information

    New Panama Ranking System For Yahoo Ads Launches Today | Search Engine Land
    A Cyber-Arsenal for Road Warriors | BusinessWeek
    Reflecting on Yahoo!’s Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation
    The Yahoo! Post-Bartz post and the perils of Microsoft Excel
    Inflection Point | renaissance chambara

  • Topless model + more things

    Twist ending of moving company’s sexy topless model ad has a silver lining 【Video】 | RocketNews24 – one of the better 15 second spots I’ve seen involving a sexy topless model. This is one of the few times that you will see the words sexy topless model in one of my posts.

    IBM, Ustream-BM, we can’t believe Ustream is now owned by IBM • The Register – this feels a bit Yahoo!-esque as a deal. U-stream is a solid video streaming platform and I am not convinced IBM is a good custodian

    25% of US companies in China are planning to leave, says AmCham survey – this is interesting as the Chinese government is trying to jump start domestic consumption. The argument China would make is that these people will lose out. However, the wider tonality of the government towards foreigners and western culture in general. There is a stronger tone of Han nationalism. More China related posts here.

    Weibo to copy Twitter, abolish 140-character limitw – Tech in Asia – paid up members are a relatively small group of influencers, celebrities and brands. Chinese people have been doing long Weibo posts for years as graphic files. It was a central part of the content strategy that we were doing for CIVB when I led a digital team in Hong Kong.

    Why Google Quit China—and Why It’s Heading Back | The Atlantic – interesting that Western European government intervention is cited as a justification in this.

    Music Geeks Are Retrofitting Old iPods to Keep the Perfect MP3 Player Alive | Motherboard – its the iPod I wished Apple made. I have got a couple of them from eBay.  It would be great if we could also have an LTE compatiable version of the Nokia 6310i to use as a modem for my laptop and as as an app free weekend phone.