Ged Carroll

Search results for: “5g”

  • The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

    The Age of Spiritual Machines was written by Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is a technological rock star, responsible for great music synthesisers and much of the developments around optical character recognition and speech recognition. This is what makes him a good futurist. The fact that he has had his hands dirty.

    The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence is a book of two parts. In the first part, Kurzweil outlines how technology has progressed since the dawn of computing with Charles Babbage’ difference engine. Kurzweil uses this trip down computer memory lane to demonstrated that computing power has been increasing exponentially since the dawn of time rather than just the dawn of Intel with Moore’s Law on the doubling of transistors. Even though silicon transistors may top out computing power will keep on trucking (though Kurzweil doesn’t necessarily have the answer of what is the next technology).

    The second part of the book is likely future scenarios; and this is where things get interesting. Kurzweil is setting himself up for a possible fail.

    Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold missed the internet in the first edition of The Road Ahead when it was first published in 1995 and Kurzweil sets himself up for a potentially bigger fall in the scope of his book. Even if Kurzweil has his timing a bit wrong or doesn’t get everything right his book is still a great thought experiment in how intelligent computers would impact humanity.  More book reviews here.

  • The basics

    The current economic climate will help re-define the basics for many people.

    Since I was a child supermarkets and shopping experiences have been richer and presented consumers with progressively more choice. During the last recession of the early 1990s supermarkets created own brand products that offered cheaper alternatives with the exact same quality as own brand products.

    No Frills

    A second own-brand phenomena was own brand products that fulfilled basic needs but did away with superfluous packaging and were best seen as ‘fit for purpose’: the No Frills supermarket own brand pioneered by Kwik Save is a classic example of this category. Sainsbury has their version called Sainsbury Basics. So by the time the economy picked up again choice had been increased even further. These brands moved away from, or redefined the bare essentials, for instance recently in Sainsbury’s I have noticed basics including filter coffee and Jaffa Cakes.

    SuperValu Nice Price Jaffa Cakes

    When I left university in the late 1990s, I got a jump on other candidates that worked for the same temping agency as me by having an alphanumeric pager that allowed me to be more responsive to the agency – getting better roles because it was easier for them to find me. Over the next ten years mobile phones became ubiquitous to the point where even homeless people and crack addicts have one.

    It is pretty much the same story with internet access. I used to go over to a cyber cafe in Liverpool near James Street station to check the email in my Yahoo! account every Saturday. Although I had bought shareware Mac software online via Kagi whilst at university, I made my first modern e-commerce purchases via Boxman during my lunch break in the office when I moved down to London. It is hard to imagine that prior to Freeserve in the UK, even dial-up home internet access was largely the preserve of the middle classes in the UK. In contrast, now fixed and mobile broadband has become ubiquitous with mobile broadband connections costing as little as 5GBP a month at the time of writing.

    I get the sense that we have reached a golden age of what basics means, and that golden age will last an uncertain amount of time as environmental and resource concerns kick in. Resources as diverse as food products, oil, copper and water are all under pressure; together with rise of a huge middle class in the developing world basics are going to be more expensive and some items will come off the list as compromises are made. Globalisation will no longer just be about competition to supply products and services, but also about consumer competition to demand goods.

    What does the basics look like to you? How will it change by economics, increasing awareness of personal carbon footprint and environmental impact? More retailing related content can be found here. 

  • Jamster & consumption

    Jamster

    Jamster the ringtone, logos and java games company most famous for its crazy frog ringtone TV adverts has been all over the media this week with the success in the UK charts of a single based on the ringtone.According to the Financial Times on Saturday the company has sold about 11 million Crazy Frog ringtones across Europe at about 3GBP a time. Lets be generous and allow them a cost of transcation of about 0.15GBP, giving a potential pre-tax profit of about 31.5 million GBP. This doesn’t take into account the cost of making the ads, online advertising, business infrastructure etc.

    Now in the UK according to anonymous sources quoted by media gossip newsletter Holy Moly, they have spent about 30 million GBP on TV advertising. Given the amount of times that I see the adverts when I go to the gym, I suspect that this number is not far off the mark. So, the frog is not as profitable as it would first seem. In addition, the adverts do not drive traffic to the Jamster website where they can cross promote other products, but flash up a short code number that you SMS for your ringtone.

    Where it gets really interesting according to the same sources is that from the a TV advertising point of view is that the ringtone adverts are apparently driving down the cost of TV ads. Understandably advertisers generally don’t want to appear in the slot after a Crazy Frog ad as a large proportion of the audience will have channel surfed off until the programme is back on, this means that the TV channels finding it harder to sell on these slots. The big mystery is why they haven’t told Jamster to get lost yet? More wireless related posts here.

    Class and consumption

    The New York Times has run a very interesting article on class and consumption in the US. When the Jones’ wear jeans talks about how technology, low inflation and consumer credit has levelled the playing field for the consumption of luxury goods and that the rich are more likely to be diffferentiated by the personal services they consume like plastic surgery, a nanny and a personal chef.

    Key take outs:

    • With the demise of the community and the rise of mass media, people are less likely to be bothered about keeping up the Jones’ (ie their local community) and more bothered about getting their fair share of what the rich have
    • Consumption is patchy, people may shop for discount brands but still like Starbucks coffee, iPods and designer jeans
    • About half of Americans now have a cell phone (there is about 176 million cellphones in the US), the cost of a cellphone has fallen to about an eighth of what it was a decade ago
    • Department store prices have fallen by about 10 per cent in the last decade
    • The new hot segment in the car market is ‘sub-luxury’ cars (like the BMW 1 series and the Audi A3)
    • American consumer debt is about 750 billion USD, up about six-fold over the past 20 years
    • I found it interesting that the article made a big play about how marketers are having to move from income and gender (socio demographic) segmentation to lifestyle and interests. (Are US marketers way behind the UK in this respect? I would have thought that the likes of P&G would have led the way rather than followed?)

    Finally a quote from a spokesperson from Godiva – the chocolate firm: “People want to participate in our brand because we are an affordable luxury,” said Gene Dunkin, president of Godiva North America, a unit of the Campbell Soup Company. “For under $1 to $350, with an incredible luxury package, we give the perception of a very expensive product.”

    renaissance chambara says that it goes to show the old maxim that perception is reality.

  • China Inc. – The 800-pound dragon in the room

    The New York Times has a great review of China Inc. by Ted C. Fishman which highlights the growing economic might of China. Some interesting facts and figures featured in the review of the book include:

    • From 1982 through 2002, the United States economy grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent. China’s economy grew at an annual rate of 9.5 percent,
    • In 2003 China bought 7 percent of the world’s oil, a quarter of its aluminum and steel, almost a third of its iron ore and coal, and 40 percent of its cement.
    • China makes 40 percent of all furniture sold in the United States
    • China has 3,000 Christmas-decoration factories which exported more than $900 million tree trimmings and plastic Santas in the first 10 months of 2003.
    • China still only makes one-twentieth of everything produced in the world
    • China can rely on a vast low-wage army, working for an average of 40 cents an hour, that can turn out consumer goods of every description
    • American and Japanese companies spend $1 billion to $2 billion to develop a new car
    • New super-cities like Shenzhen, a fishing town of 70,000 20 years ago that now has 7 million people, making it larger than Los Angeles or Paris, swelled by migrants from the countryside looking for a better life in the city
    • Up to 300 million Chinese have migrated from the country to the city over the past 20 years
    • The Asian Brown Cloud, a wind-borne industrial smog that originates on China’s east coast, can be seen in California as it rides the jet stream
    • China has seven of the world’s ten most polluted cities


    The book also provides some insights into the differences between the rise of China and Japan. Unlike Japan, China Inc. is driven by local enterprises rather than the central analysis and planning carried out by Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) [now known as the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry] to find key markets to conquer. There is a certain irony in the socialist state using the brutal darwinism of the marketplace in a way that Adam Smith would have appreciated.

    Current reading at chez Renaissance Chambara:

     

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