Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Walmart + other things

    Walmart online to offline retailing

    A really interesting video with Walmart that looks at the interface between online and offline retailing. Particularly interesting take on mobile payment form factors. Amazon presents an existential threat to the Walmart business. Walmart isn’t going down without a fight. It has innovated in the past on using technologies like data mining. More recently Walmart has been making strategic purchases across the online retail realm. 

    More retail related content here

    Water resistance

    The reality of watch water resistance is that it is usually measured in a pressurised laboratory rig. Five years ago Casio took their Frogman model from the G-Shock range and did the test in open water off the coast of Japan. It shows the reality of the watch being exposed to a depth of 200M. The two most disappointing aspects of this video are:

    • It hasn’t got as much viewer love as it deserves
    • They failed to come across any diakaiju during the dive and we don’t know what Japan’s beloved son Godzilla (ゴジラ Gojira) thinks of the G-Shock range

    Name generator

    Citizenfour the Edward Snowden documentary launched this week, which prompted a lot of NSA product name silliness including too much time spent on the NSA Product Name Generator

    Mascots

    The people at Rocket News have come up with a new take on the Japanese mascot meme with Hard Ku**mon. More here. Japan seems to have mascots for everything as a way to engage consumer attention. The mascots can build up to be big business in their own right and gain international attention. 

    NASA apps

    Finally I have been working my way through NASA’s collection of iPad and iPhone applications, more here. NASA has an amazing range of content. I would also recommend checking out their flickr accounts for high quality imagery.

  • RoomAlive + more things

    Microsoft’s ‘RoomAlive’ transforms any room into a giant Xbox game | The Verge – interesting idea, taking immersive experiences to the next level with RoomAlive without the disadvantages of VR goggles, by project mapping over the room instead. More related content here.

    Analysis: What’s Next For Waggener Edstrom? | Holmes Report – interesting analysis on WaggEd. An ideal acquisition target for BlueFocus? The agency had stagnated for a long time, despite building (and losing) a deep bench of expertise. Secondly building around a single client like that in the long term means that your margins can get hollowed out for your hero client and your processes warped to handle just one way of working. (Paywall)

    The overstated financial impact of Occupy Central | Hong Kong Economic Journal Insight – interesting analysis of the market implications of recent events in Hong Kong

    FBI Director: China Has Hacked Every Big US Company | Business Insider – admission that law enforcement is impotent in the face of widespread state actor hacking. Given that security is so lax, this is yet another great argument for strong cryptography on assets. Secondly, it highlights the US inability to fight in this grey space. This tells China that it can operate without cost, which will embolden it to act in more brazen ways.

    When review tapes were ‘kind of bicycled around from one TV critic to another’ | Jim Romenesko – two things about this, firstly media being biked around for review. I worked on the launch of IMD in the UK which saw the delivery of digital audio and video to TV and radio stations including advertising assets, music promo videos and tracks. Secondly the way the reviewer talks about his habit for following live events on TVs reminded me of the social channel hopping I do today across Twitter lists

    Weibo: TCL dotes on HTC, LinkedIn’s Shen warns of bubble | SCMP – is a tie-up with TCL what HTC needs? TCL already has a plethora of low end phone brands including Philips and Alcatel, HTC might fit into the mid range for them

  • John Legere on T-Mobile

    John Legere knows how to work his crowd, a technology CEO channelling Lenny Bruce with a mix of common sense and expletive strewn humour. Beneath that showmanship is an interesting analysis from the inside of what its like to run a modern cellular carrier business.

    Outtakes from John Legere

    • Interesting the way he talks about his clash of personality personality with  his parent company as John Legere vs. T-Mobile
    • At the time T-Mobile was winning share from Sprint, AT&T and Verizon
    • The video is on YouTube so may not be available for all readers.
    • Historically acquisitions was about spectrum, it now seems to be about industry consolidation
    • Legere on the difference of Global Crossing and T-Mobile. He was looking to adapt as a personality to his younger tech savvy consumer base. CEOs are generally a monoculture.
    • He uses social media for insights on customer experience and brand health
    • Customer care calls gives him a lot of insight about customer experience
    • All of the ‘Uncarrier’ positioning and moves were inspired by customer service calls and the experiences that customers have in the interactive voice systems. Uncarrier started with ‘how you buy’ and then went on to ‘how you use’
    • T-Mobile benefitted from being able to move fast and their competitors reluctance to change their services
    • Apple iPhone 6 ‘Bendgate’. It wasn’t a real story according to Legere and hadn’t dented demand for the iPhone on T-Mobile
    • Legere felt that the tasks he needed to address going into T-Mobile were: improving the network, getting spectrum, reinvigorate the T-Mobile brand and get the iPhone on T-Mobile.  Store traffic was incomplete, customers wouldn’t go to a cellphone store unless they had the full range of devices.
    • Before Legere arrived people wouldn’t even mention T-Mobile in terms of the data capability & network speed
    • Apple drove a lot of quality focus on Wi-Fi and VoLTE calling
    • Amazon missed out on its Fire phone (and later tablets). The company didn’t think about it in terms of service bundling with all the other assets like Amazon Fresh and Amazon Prime
    • On Windows Mobile – stop the charade that cellular networks are OEM manufacturers. Legere would have liked Windows Mobile and Amazon to be successful if customers want them

    More mobile related content here.

  • Boycott Kakao Talk & more things

    South Koreans boycott Kakao Talk social media service after president’s rumour complaints – alleged movement towards Telegram due to its reputation for security. Kakao is too useful software for everyday life in Korea for a complete boycott. Boycott Kakao Talk is unlikely to get traction, despite Korean consumers reputation for serious boycotts of consumer brands that haven’t performed. More related content here.

    Building an RSS feed with ScraperWiki and Yahoo! Pipes | Magic Bean Lab – Mat pulled together an RSS feed from Facebook’s new research portal, more about it in this link.

    Hackers’ Attack Cracked 10 Financial Firms in Major Assault – NYTimes.com – major US banks exposed. It won’t be long before it

    New Mac Botnet Leverages Reddit | Dark Reading – interesting control mechanism

    How Did the FBI Find the Silk Road Servers, Anyway? | Motherboard – interesting allegations in the article. Which begs the question, can the FBI be tried for perjury, if the article is true?

    Communities Dominate Brands: Survey of Global Market Today for Mobile Wallets and Mobile Money – In aftermath of Apple Pay launch – some interesting examples of mobile wallets and mobile money.

    Editing images of ‘hell’, in close-up – Correspondent – really interesting piece on media content covering Middle East in terms of the editorial process that is used

    Facebook & Skype Revealed as Most Popular Smartphone Messaging Apps | Park Associates – US-only data. One of the reasons that Facebook bought WhatsApp was to gain out of US relevance in mobile messaging apps. Skype’s VoIP capabilities has been disruptive  in mobile voice services businesses. T-Mobile’s European business tried to block it; Three embraced it.

    Terms of Service; Didn’t Read – do this now. An effort to empower consumers by letting them know what they are actually signing up to. Your average consumer would be surprised with what is being done. This is what gives Apple its space to focus on privacy orientated services

  • On smart watches, I’ve decided to take the plunge

    I have long thought on smart watches as a possible useful device. So I have decided to take the plunge into wearables. My previous attempt with the Nike Fuelband didn’t go very well as I seemed to break them with frightening regularity and never really learned much from the experience apart from Nike can’t build hardware.

    I haven’t gone with Samsung wrist watch, or the better looking Sony one. I will not be rocking a pre-release device from Apple. Instead I have relied on smart watches pioneer Casio, who gave us the Data Bank in the 1980s.
    blue G-shock
    Casio has built a low power Bluetooth module into a G-Shock that gets up to two years on a lithium battery and is still water resistant to 200 metres. Realistically I would be happy if I got 12 months out of it. It uses its Bluetooth skills to give you basic notifications around email, incoming calls and alerts across Facebook, Twitter and Weibo.

    At the mid-point in the price of G-Shock watches, it means that the upgrade path isn’t exactly painful. The G-Shock strikes the right balance between robust hardware and disposability required for technology improvements.  In fact, I’ve worn a G-Shock before when travelling to span timezones and as a timepiece that I won’t get too attached to if it gets stolen – the smart watch G-Shock has the advantage of my phone being on view less often, ideal for the crime-filled streets of Shepherds Bush or Shenzhen.

    I think the smartest thing about the watch is it’s deliberately limited scope to provide notifications. I don’t think that Casio has it perfect, in fact I can see how the power-saving function on the Bluetooth module is likely to miss messages; but I think that they are on to something with this approach – and so I am willing to give it a try.

    I am surprised that these watches aren’t being sold in Apple stores around the world given G-Shock’s brand presence in the street wear community. Maybe Casio hasn’t got their act together, or Apple aren’t particularly keen on the competition.

    Oh and I won’t look-or-feel like a complete dick wearing it.

    More information

    “Generation 2 Engine” Bluetooth® v4.0 Enabled G-SHOCK | Casio – yes their marketing sucks with a naming structure only a Microsoft product manager could love
    Comparison Chart of Mobile Link Functions – Casio