Ged Carroll

Month: June 2011

  • Invisible birdcage + more news

    Invisible birdcage

    China’s Internet: The Invisible Birdcage | Sinocism – interesting article on the business factors driving the Chinese internet. Linguistic and cultural difference has created a vibrant domestic internet scene. The invisible birdcage in question is the Chinese eco-system of sites and services that mean China’s netizens need not stray far. Inside the invisible birdcage we see an active, lively online environment full of the kind of social activities one would expect on western platforms. The invisible birdcage confounds expectations of a censored internet experience.

    Feds to Launch Probe of Google – WSJ.com – but is this good for consumers, or just companies like Microsoft who have consistently been lobbying Washington and Brussels? The ironic aspect of this is that social search could finally shake things up

    High-tech venture capitalists to Congress: The PROTECT IP Act is bad for America – Boing Boing – which is why Silicon Roundabout turning to Silicon Britain is a pipe dream

    Luxury

    Chinese Media Giants In War Of Words Over Luxury Consumption « Jing Daily – interesting that this is on CCTV around about the same time as discussions on reducing luxury goods tax. Rui Chenggang is the Cheryl Cole of Chinese newsreaders

    FT.com – No longer a Cinderfella – fashion as a real-world attention economy. Luxury brands having to step up and provide decent men’s products

    From Alley To Airport: Beijing Urban Brand NLGX « Jing Daily

    Boutique Supermarkets Flourishing In China, But Is The Demand There? « Jing Daily

    Breaking Down China’s Booming Luxury Watch Market « Jing Daily

    In China, Women Begin Splurging on Luxury Items – WSJ.com – interesting change in purchasing power, much more egalitarian than North America or Europe

    Business of Luxury summit: Amex discovers a new luxury consumer | FT.com – gen-x new fashion buyers: electronics, home furnishings, holidays

    Media

    “Brands are over-obsessed with fans,” says Facebook adsales chief | FT.com

    Online

    Geosocial networking: The secret sexism of social media | The Economist – this feels a bit lazy. Whilst I agree that security and competition plays a role; its also probably because this stuff is early adopter in nature and that tends to skew male anyway

    Underpinnings of the Internet Shift – NYTimes.com – interesting the way governments are subverting the freedoms of citizens in developed countries. This is probably the most lasting legacy of Wikipedia, the wisdom of mobs and the lobbyists of the media industries who see UGC as akin to communism

    Retailing

    Jack Ma: we’ve got this covered | FT.com – interesting how the Baby Taobaos are specialising to combat competition, if Steve Ballmer had done this with Microsoft; they’d have been dangerous

    Security

    Hackers publish claimed Tony Blair contacts | FT.com

    Danish police proposal: Ban anonymous Internet use – Boing Boing

    Software

    Nokia’s Stephen Elop is still over MeeGo, even if the N9 is a hit – Engadget – this isn’t strategy its dogma

    Technology

    Gartner follows IDC’s PC sales cut forecast for 2011 and sees change ahead | guardian.co.uk

  • Walmart

    Today some of the most successful companies out there are ones that have a key technology platform and Walmart looks like it will be joining them:

    • Retail: Amazon, eBay, Alibaba
    • Office productivity: Google, Microsoft, Zoho
    • Telecommunications: Microsoft (Live Meeting and Skype), Cisco (WebEx)
    • Consumer services: Baidu, Google, Netease
    • Entertainment: Netflix, Amazon, Apple, PPLive

    I think we’ll soon see Walmart added to this list. At the present time the average consumer view of Walmart is likely to be that of a large, malevolent, low-class retailer in the US; the weird Yanks that bought ASDA in the UK and a trusted supermarket in China.

    What these perceptions don’t tell you is that Walmart has innovation in its corporate DNA. In 1987, they set up a satellite network connecting stores with headquarters over voice and data. When I was in college Walmart was associated with the ‘beer and diapers’ urban legend precisely because the company had a reputation for pioneering and pushing supply chain management and data-mining to the edge in order to maximise returns from its stores.

    Walmart like Amazon already has a large logistics footprint; some of the moves it has been making over the past 18 months make me think that the company is going for a big platform play – building a big box retailer online. Bear with me, while I run you through a few selected highlights:

    • Vudu – purchased in February 2010 by Walmart. The company provides stream on demand content that home audiences can pay for. The technology can be integrated into a variety of consumer electronics. It’s a digital content supermarket by another name
    • Kosmix – move forward to April 2011 and Walmart buys a social media platform that organises content by topic. Lots of smarts for social commerce, product reviews, marketing insights, customer services
    • Yihaodian – Walmart buys a minority stake in an e-commerce company with logistics in the high growth coastal areas of China. Due to the nature of the Chinese marketplace, that minority stake is the same level of commitment as acquiring a US business outright. The sale of physical goods in China maybe more attractive than the digital media market because the media industry is disrupted and alternative monetisation models are already well in place
    • Walmart is also starting recruit rock-star web tech talent with a particular focus on improving the mobile experience of their online properties

    More retail sector related content can be found here.

  • Korean churches lessons

    I was talking with a friend over dinner about the success of Christian churches gaining a foothold in Korea. There are lessons learned from Korean churches in the way that they have managed to grow. On the face of it Korea would be stony ground for a ‘new religion’.  While Korea was part of the Japanese empire for a good while.  Korea still managed to maintain a strong culture and sense of identity of which Buddhist and Confucian belief systems are a key part. (This isn’t meant to be a theological or politics-related discussion).

    A number of the success factors struck me as being classic factors for marketing success as well:

    • Location – Buddhist temples tend to be away from the population up in the hills and the mountains. This is because Korean Buddhism, like Japanese Buddhism puts a strong emphasis and place on nature. Contrast this with churches that are located in people’s neighbourhoods. It’s easier to get to your place of worship. From a marketing point of view look how Apple has improved, first by going in-store at CompUSA and later building its own stores because it is easier for people to get to an Apple retailer
    • Ritual -this kind of extends from the first point, because when you can get to your place of worship easier, it is easier to do a regularly repeatable ritual that reinforces how you feel about your religion of choice. People go to Church every Sunday. Again if you can get people to do something on a regular basis they are more likely to incorporate your product or service into their lifestyle: Google being a great example, which is why Yahoo! failed to dislodge the search giant from its position despite having a comparable product five or so years ago
    • Evangelists – people who are involved in the Korean churches already seem to do a good job in terms of word-of-mouth marketing encouraging their friends to trial Christianity. If these guys had a net promoter index they would be hitting 8+ consistently; again mirroring Apple’s rise
    • Network effects – the rise of Christianity is a virtuous circle with more of the converted going out there bringing in yet more people. From a virtual standing start, now over 29 per cent of Koreans identified themselves as Christian according to 2005 Korean census data quoted by Wikipedia. I’ve been a Mac user long enough to remember when it was unusual to own Apple products. I was one of only two people in my halls of residence of college who had a Mac; yet now you can’t move in Starbucks because of the see of glowing Apple logos on the laptop lids
    • Smart engagement process – when you start at one of these churches they put you into a study group to get a download on what Christianity is. You get to meet more people, so your engagement with the church moves beyond the person who originally encouraged you to come along to other members of the church. In marketing companies are always looking for multiple touch-points of engagement. There’s definitely lessons learned from Korean churches in terms of customer experience and customer journey. 

    Korean christianity was covered in The Economist here. More marketing related posts here.

  • iCloud thoughts

    On June 6, Apple announced a number of products at a keynote speech to kick off its worldwide developer conference. Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5 were widely anticipated; but the one that got the most attention was a service called iCloud.

    This service has received a fair bit of coverage and its worthwhile reflecting upon, some of this reflection has to do with all the things that we don’t currently know. I am not  going to focus on the iTunes Connect product that gives you a selection of your music across devices as other people have done that much better than I could.

    First of all a bit of a history lesson

    Apple has actually selling online services since about 1985, so Apple’s history with online services is almost as old as The WELL. AppleLink was an online service set up originally to connect Apple employees and dealers, it had a client software application for both Mac and the later models of the Apple II. It provided assess to remote server folders (kind of like FTP, iDisk, Box.net or Dropbox), bulletin boards for discussion and system-wide email (though interoperability with other email systems came in later).

    This system was a way that Apple distributed systems updates and drivers to dealers (you have to remember that at that time operating systems and the associated software that went along with them took up much less memory than they do today). This was all hosted on time-shared mainframes and connected by a global data network by GE Information Services. GE charged too much for the service and didn’t reflect the technological changes coming down the pipe that made these services cheaper to operate. So Apple eventually worked with Quantum Computer Services (now known as Aol) to develop a version of AppleLink suitable for consumers.

    The first email from space was sent on an Apple Portable via an AppleLink account from the Atlantis space shuttle to the Johnson Space Center in 1991. Back in 1988, AppleLink was also the host for a multi-channel story that played out with weekly episodes and included user identities woven into its plot. The storytelling used chat rooms and email was well as a more traditional narrative format echoing Matt Beaumont’s novel e by about 12 years.

    After a while, Apple, had a falling out with GE Information Services and consolidated their own service renamed eWorld and had it run by AOL.
    eWorld main screen
    Eventually eWorld was closed down as Apple realised that it couldn’t compete with AOL and they had bigger things to worry about as Apple was on the downward trajectory that would result in the return of Steve Jobs. By 1997 both AppleLink and eWorld had been closed down. The content eventually ended up on the Apple website under sub-domains like developer.apple.com and support.apple.com.

    In 2000, Apple came back with iTools which included the .mac email accounts, simple web publishing and iDisk. The email account allowed you to have IMAP4 which was rare at the time and iDisk was based on WebDAV standard to syncing. There were other services including web publishing and iCards: an electronic greeting cards service (prior to Facebook were a low impact way to exchange greetings, with a HTML card sent via email. One of the most prominent providers bluemountain.com was bought in a deal apparently worth 780 million dollars by then internet giant Excite@Home).  By 2002, Apple started charging for these services and briefly threw in a subscription to Virex.

    The service got a rebrand as MobileMe to take account of Apple’s expanded computing portfolio to take in the iOS-powered series of devices. Newcomers got a .me.com email address rather than the .mac.com email address. I myself have been signed up to these services through their evolutions for the past ten years or so, so still have a .mac.com ID.

    iCloud is a development repackaging of these offerings; an evolution rather than an innovation, it also means that Apple’s claim in the sub header of its press release that the service: Free Cloud Services Beyond Anything Offered to Date – are economical with the truth. There is also a question in my mind, for reasons I’ll outline below, about whether this next evolution is positive for end users.

    Device philosophy

    One of the things that stuck out to me when I was listening to Steve Jobs introduce iCloud, he described the Mac as ‘just another device’. On one level it makes sense; as the Mac is one of three sets of computing devices that Apple now sells: the Mac, the iPad and the iPod Touch / iPhone.

    • The second thing that marks it out, is a trust that as Sun Microsystems used to say ‘the network is the computer’.
    • Finally there is the question of primacy. Which device is the ultimate arbiter of the correct data?

    The flawed ‘net

    iCloud is based on the assumption that good quality data connectivity is ubiquitous, this is complete fiction for many people. I live in central London, apparently a world city, a hive of connectivity. Wi-fi that I can access safely is only available in certain coffee shops, and the mobile networks are full of holes like Swiss cheese. I am with Vodafone that seems to be better than most, but the only way to have a near-continuous reception is to roam on a foreign SIM; which is outrageously expensive. This situation isn’t . In the UK, the broadband infrastructure simply isn’t available to support existing streaming video services. I live in Central London within the proverbial stones throw from Silicon Roundabout and get barely 3MBs download and 400KBs upload from my ADSL connection. I live 500 metres from my local exchange.

    Data integrity

    One area I am not convinced that Apple will get right with the iCloud is keeping the integrity of address and calendar data intact. If one device doesn’t have primacy there is no control mechanism. It is easy to accidentally alter a record on an iPhone and that could then ripple through the iCloud to all associated devices based on it being the most recent edit. There is no information on how it will handle duplicate entries and failed syncs. Lots of unanswered yet critical questions.

    Household enterprise systems

    My set-up on MobileMe is relatively simple, I have one iTunes account, one address book, one calendar, one set of bookmarks and system preferences. These are synced across two devices (the MacBook Pro that I am writing this post on, and my iPhone). But increasingly, Apple’s eco-system is found at the centre of family’s IT systems. The analogy of the household CEO is often used to describe the housewife as homemaker.

    The family’s IT system needs to look more like the kind of enterprise technology that a CEO would expect. With massive data storage and policy-based systems designed to keep the right data with the right owners. I haven’t seen any evidence that iCloud would do this which is likely to result in lots of poisoned address books and music collections.

    It just works?

    One of Apple’s key selling points since Steve Jobs returned to Apple was that the company’s products just work. This is why the synergy between hardware and software is so important. When you took one of the original iMacs out of the box, you plugged in the keyboard, the modem cable into the telephone socket, the power socket and turned it one; you were ready to start computing.
    Museum of Information
    It promised elegant simple technological choices to early adopters and the late majority alike and is why products like the iPod, the iPad and the iPhone have become commonplace in many developed marketplaces disrupting incumbent players like Creative and Nokia. The complexity and challenges that the iCloud system needs to overcome could undue this unique selling proposition and tear Apple’s market-making leadership position apart.

    Open standards to Apple standards

    One of the things that has helped Apple to do well has been its adherence to open standards: the iMac benefited from being a USB pioneer. Mac laptops became popular with photographers because of FireWire. The Safari web browser and WebKit build upon W3C standards compliance and it is hard to remember now, but the first iPhone used HTML5 web applications for external developers – something that many people lost sight of.

    Apple’s online services were similar. The email service was based on IMAP4 allowing for easy synchronisation and iDisk works on WebDAV. However in the Apple press release announcing iCloud there is no information on what it supports any standards, but it does talk about iCloud storage APIs. And Apple did promise to make thse APIs available to developers. I am concerned that my social graph may be locked into a storage equivalent of the Hotel California; which is especially dangerous when you think at the amount of iterations and service closures that Apple has exhibited in the online space.

    More online related content can be found here.

    More reading

    Apple Introduces iCloud – Free Cloud Services Beyond Anything Offered to Date

    What the iCloud will cause to happen next | FT.com

    Apple details iCloud’s digital storage and syncing, free 5GB of storage

    Fourth time’s a charm? Why Apple has trouble with cloud computing

    Cloud Poll: Does iCloud Actually Have Anything to Do with Cloud Computing? | ReadWriteWeb

  • The wisdom of mobs

    Old media historically took a pride in its ability to spur the public into action, a classic example would be The Sun’s headline from April 11, 1992 which trumpeted ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’. In this case claiming that The Sun’s readers had turned the tide of an election. There is also a darker side to this: the wisdom of mobs. 

    I have been interested in how mob behaviour or the shifting of public opinion has been changed by social media and affected consumer behaviour with ‘the wisdom of mobs’.  The recent super injunction debate has again brought it to the fore, as has Anonymous and Wikileaks.

    This has all had another subtle effect, as evidenced by this quote from Jamie East, founder of HolyMoly:

    “There are fewer gobshites who aren’t media-trained and surrounded by PRs, so it’s more difficult to find things to write about. And the ‘pap’ agencies aren’t getting the pictures they used to.”

    East is describing in his own colourful way an awareness and responsibility about their own reputation, or as Singaporean blogger Pat Law put it:

    As long as the information is online, even if you’ve placed it on private mode, your privacy is automatically placed on a pedestal for potential abuse. So never publish anything you don’t want people to know online.

    This is one side to a multi-stranded solution to the wisdom of mobs problem:

    • Behavioural – individuals need to take responsibility for their actions and what they say, reputation isn’t managed: reputation is, as reputation does
    • Social – we have yet to develop an appropriate civic society online. Towns on the American frontier appointed sheriffs and town councils to try and bring a modicum of justice and decorum during the pioneering days. These appointments were symptoms of a wider awaking towards thinking less about the individual and more about the kind of society that they were creating on the frontier. We need a similar awakening for online. Secondly a better civic society, should be able to organise lobbying that is as effective as that currently done by vested interests on behalf of disrupted interests like the ABPI and Warner Music; otherwise these groups will continue to enjoy undue succor – what politicians fail to see is that these groups are the British Leyland or the Northern Rock of the digital age
    • Legislative – this is the one that I am most concerned about for a number of reasons. Politicians of all sides are not good at giving up surplus powers and striking down legislation, instead keeping it to one side for a rainy day. The Labour administration of Tony Blair kept the Criminal Justice and Public Order act of 1994 including its controversial part V dealing with criminalising rave culture. The current conservative government has kept the Digital Economy Act in place, despite the fact that it adversely affects their ability to spur digital innovation and inclusion. The threat of legislation allows politicians to adjust behaviour in industries, for instance: self-censorship by UK ISPs by Ed Vaizey. It is virtually impossible to find a legislative body with the suitably sustained light touch required
    • Governance – effective and transparent governance mechanisms for governance in commercial issues would mean that there would be less of a public interest in gossip. Allegations surrounding Fred Goodwin would have been more appropriately investigated as part of his management of the Royal Bank of Scotland
    • Professionalism – the media has a responsibility to lift its own content out of the gutter of sensationalism. They need to man up and take responsibility for the wisdom of mobs, but they won’t. There simply isn’t a desire to do decent investigative journalism or thought-provoking analysis. It is probably not considered commercially viable to do it (though the audience of documentaries at the cinema seems to suggest otherwise), there aren’t the journalists with the right set of skills and mindset: where are the next Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein or Seymour Hersh?

    More ethics related content can be found here.