Ged Carroll

Month: August 2015

  • Free WiFi & more things

    Will 5G Kill Free WiFi? | Motherboard – all I am going to point out here is that Intel backed WiMax versus LTE for 4G. Intel has consistently had issues in the wireless space. The use cases between 5G and free WiFi are likely to be very different. The potential low latency of 5G will be attractive in certain use cases. I don’t think it will be a consumer product for a while yet due to network build out issues in comparison to free WiFi (or the paid variety. More wireless related content here.

    EU Deepens Antitrust Investigation Into Google’s Practices | WSJ – its telling that a US commenter claims this is economic warfare and they might have a point…

    Phone numbers may start with ‘unlucky’ 4 and 7 as Hong Kong mobile demand outstrips supply | South China Morning Post – not terribly surprising when you have seen the phones are mounted on the dashboards of taxis by drivers participating in virtual motor pools. Hong Kong has had a reputation for the average consumer being ‘over-phoned’ and this is a consequence of it.

    The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Add-ons Blog – really interesting changes going on Firefox that is going to break popular plug-ins

    Piece Lets Your Phone Dual-Wield SIM Cards | Technabob – interesting idea, a slave phone. Though I could imagine mobile carriers viewing it more like a GSM gateway.

    From The Register:

    GSM gateways were common features of the 1990s and early 2000s telephone landscape. At the time, phone companies charged eye-wateringly high sums for overseas calls. In those dreary pre-Skype and pre-WhatsApp days, if you wanted instant contact with loved ones the phone was your only option. GSM gateways themselves, banks of SIM cards, worked a bit like a modern VPN does for an internet connection: you call the gateway, then once connected you enter the overseas number you want to be connected to. Government officials have claimed they frustrate surveillance by spy agencies and others because identifying caller data is not forwarded through the gateway, making it difficult to eavesdrop on a particular call going overseas.

    Fjord – Living Services Report – interesting report from Fjord on dynamic digital services

    EU Deepens Google Antitrust Investigation | WSJ – (paywall)

  • The changing culture of Silicon Valley

    I have have been thinking about how platform changes are marking a changing culture in Silicon Valley. This changing culture will play not only into innovation but workplace practices.

    1990s

    When I was in college I interviewed for a few placements, one was with Hewlett-Packard in Germany. They wanted a marketing student to look after their printing brochures on demand initiative for their UNIX product line. This was going to save them a mint in terms of marketing spend using an Indigo Digital Press rather than brochure runs on litho printing, reducing waste, storage needs and allow for faster document updates. (HP went on to buy Indigo in 2001).

    Commercial adoption of the web was around the corner, I was already using it in college, but its ubiquity still seemed quite far away. I decided I didn’t want to go for the job primarily because I wanted to get my degree over and done with. Also HP weren’t paying that much for the role.

    We were interviewed by a succession of people, the only one who was memorable  was a guy called Tim Nolte who wore a Grateful Dead ‘dancing bears’ tie and had a Jerry Garcia mouse mat in his cubicle.

    At that time HP, had the dressing of the company man but had more than a few hippies on the payroll who permeated its culture. Reading Robert X Cringely’s Accidental Empires made me realise that technology was as much a culture war as technological upheaval.

    Counterculture

    If one looks at the icons of the technology sector up to and including the early noughties many of the people were influenced by the counterculture movement if not part of it. The  Grateful Dead where one of the first bands to have their own website at dead.net. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded by John Perry Barlow, a lyricist with The Grateful Dead. Steve Jobs was influenced by Indian mystics and his experiences using LSD.

    Stewart Brand who founded WIRED magazine and The WeLL was the editor of The Whole Earth Catalog, a guide to useful things for people who wanted to get back to the land. He was influential in the early environmentalist movement and had been involved in the counterculture of 1960s San Francisco.
    Members of the Golden Circle Senior Citizens Club of Fairmont holding quilt they made. The quilt was raffled off during the Fairmont centennial, May 1973
    Ideas from open APIs and creative commons came from their libertarian values. Open Source Software again comes from academic and countercultural attitudes to information and has had to defend itself from accusations of communism, yet it now runs most of the world’s web services and gadgets from smartphones to Google’s search engine.

    Reading the Cluetrain Manifesto is like reading a screed that could have come from an alternative Haight Ashbury.

    Aeon magazine wrote an article on how yuppies have hacked the hacker ethos, but the truth is they’ve got behind the steering wheel as web2.0 declined. The move from open web API’s and the walled garden approach of Facebook and their ilk marked a changing of the guard of sorts.

    Flickr had and ability to move your photos as a matter of pride in their product. Just a few clicks kept them honest and kept them innovating. Joshua Schachter’s similar approach on del.icio.us allowed me to move to pinboard.in when Yahoo! announced that it would be sunset.

    Government always is the last to catch up, which is the reason why open data only really gained mainstream political currency in the past five years.

    Yuppies

    Were now in a changing culture that sees a Silicon Valley whose values are closer to the Reagan years and I am not too sure that it will be a positive development.

    I suspect that the change won’t be positive for a number of reasons. Greed will be good. There will be no lines that won’t be crossed in the name of shareholder value. Innovation will be viewed as a cost. Silicon Valley’s imperfect meritocracy will be undermined by a boy’s club mentality.

    More information
    Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date by Robert X Cringely
    Don’t listen to Bill Gates. The open-source movement isn’t communism. | Slate
    How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos – Aeon

  • Breakfastarians

    Marketers have a unique knack of mangling the English language to put labels on market segments, but breakfastarian isn’t one of them.
    The festive pie obsession continues
    Breakfastarian seems to be a self description rather than a market segment on this occasion. It’s people who like breakfast for dinner. Apparently, this is a segment of the population who appeals to McDonalds who is suffering from stagnating sales.

    On the face of it McDonalds might be setting themselves up for a failure.

    One of the reasons why breakfasts are only available for a certain amount of time is they are cooked on separate hotplates. Franchisees might not have the space or the inclination to redesign kitchens. If they were willing to go there, there is then the problem of double the work in back kitchen preparation and in-kitchen cooking.

    There is two ways to consider extending breakfast time. You can think of it as a new product, or you can consider it as an effort attract heavier consumption. McDonalds seems to think its the latter. Research by the Ehrensberg Bass found that most consumption was driven by light brand promiscuous consumption. It reminds me of efforts that Kelloggs made to try and get people to eat cereal at night, which tried to increase consumption at a different time.

    While McDonalds have some breakfast menu items on the menu in markets like Hong Kong and the US; they aren’t catering to UK breakfastarians yet. More marketing related content here.

    More information
    McDonald’s Is Now the Top Choice for ‘Breakfastarians’ | TIME

  • Google Hangouts + more news

    Google Hangouts

    Google Hangouts breaks out on its own site | TechRadar – dismantling Google+ piece-by-piece literally with the Google Hangouts service. Google+ has been a failure for user adoption; even if they did benefit from the enrichment of search data. Whether Google Hangouts will remain, who knows?

    Consumer behaviour

    China is two-speed consumer market | warc.com – high speed and low speed consumers – These high speed households, consisting mostly of the urban middle-class, currently number 81m people and generate $1.7tr of the $3.2tr in total urban consumption, but their numbers will swell to 142m by 2020 when they will account for $3.8tr of the $5.6bn in total urban consumption. – high speed consumption is crucial to China moving to balance its dependence on exports. More China related posts here.

    Tinder and Hookup-Culture Promotion | Vanity Fair – is this really that different from the traditional meat market approach?

    Culture

    HAVE BRITS ABANDONED RAVE CULTURE? | DJMag – Newsbeat was probably the wrong format to do the report from

    How to

    How Long to Read – find how long it will take to read any book

    Luxury

    Ritz-Carlton, Naples shares a slice of pie on social media | Luxury Daily – being useful, smart social play

    Luxury Hotels Move Into Low-Touch Luxury | L2 Think Tank – thinking carefully about process and the use of digital

    Media

    Channel Mum looks ahead after ITV takes a stake | digiday – ITV investing in YouTube content

    Online

    Is Bing Trolling Google & Alphabet With ABC.WTF Redirect? – looks like some prankster punk’d Alphabet

    Retailing

    China’s Ecommerce Giant JD.Com Expands to Russia | SocialBrandWatch – just because Russia is under western sanctions doesn’t mean that the Chinese won’t go there. Chinese tourists are already driving much of the demand for luxury goods at GUM and other high end shopping destinations in Moscow. I would imagine Logistics across Russia would likely prove to be challenging. More on retailing here.

    Wireless

    Smartphone giants have lost 15,000 jobs to cheap Android phones this year | Quartz – commoditisation belting the life out of the market. Premium smartphones won’t go away but low market handsets and mid-market will likely converge

    Intel Said to Unseat Q’Com in iPhone | EE Times – Qualcomm has the best modem technology in the market and the iPhone 6S is a premium phone. I can’t see Apple settling for second best technology – will Intel have the IP and the staying power to match Qualcomm? If Intel history is anything to go by; Qualcomm is likely to emerge victorious over time

  • The limits of Google

    Earlier I wrote a post on the work blog: Alphabet: what does it all mean? – which I have republished below. One thing that came through to me from this exercise was the growth limits of Google and by extension the growth limits of online advertising. The ceiling on advertising is limited by a number of factors:

    • Cost of acquisition – the most obvious ceiling is tat advertisers generally won’t pay more than their profit margin is wort to acquire customers. Search advertising did see bubbles of a sort around mortgages and insurance, but as performance marketing has improved measurement of attribution in the customer journey buying stratagems have become more efficient. More efficient the purchaser, the less profits for Google
    • Supply – when Google rolled out search advertising there was only really display advertising as competition. Now there is a plethora of social platforms and advertising technology behind display advertising that provides better data and a more nuanced understanding for media agencies
    • Context – ten years ago Morgan Stanley claimed that seven out of ten web journeys start with search. This knocked the guts out of the portals: Yahoo!, Excite and MSN. Now social and mobile advertising platforms via for Google’s lock on context. Google’s stewardship of Android facilitated some of these competitors. Now Google is prevented from even from access to the Chinese marketplace, one of the fastest growing internet markets in absolute terms. Amazon has ended up having such a lock on retail that many consumers don’t go to Google first but instead use the search box on the Amazon store for many of their purchases. Every search on Google is a potential loss of advertising opportunity
    • Screwing the channel – marketing groups such as WPP have facilitated and many cases bought a whole sector of media buying ‘middleware’, or what the industry calls ‘ad tech’ platforms. Google has stopped playing nicely with them and their largest customers publicly view them as co-opertition – behind closed doors the sentiment is likely to be less amiable

    Social media went into overdrive on Monday evening UK time when Google announced a formal restructure of all its businesses, creating a new company called Alphabet. For the man on the street, Google means Search, YouTube, Drive (including Docs, Sheets etc.), email and Android. For the average marketer you can throw various advertising products and Google Analytics into the mix. For business IT managers, it is everything from productivity, software-as-a-service and possibly as a supplier of a search appliance for its internal servers.

    Three different customer types exist and a product set that grows layer-by-layer like an onion. The bulk of Google’s revenue currently comes from advertising due to the clever technology behind it. One can see from Microsoft’s move to the cloud that there is less revenue in cloud computing than in Google’s current business, so when advertising reaches a natural ceiling for growth, services will provide an incremental benefit at best.

    Android was designed as a conduit to Google services and for advertising to venture out into the mobile space. But the world’s most popular mobile operating system is not without its own issues. Despite all phones essentially looking the same, there is a massive amount of fragmentation in the Android marketplace, which makes life harder for developers. Google is also a developer, so building applications that it can build loyalty through and make money from becomes more difficult.

    Secondly, an appreciable amount of Android devices (those sold in China) and many sold in Russia don’t use Google services and provide little to no opportunity for Google advertising.

    This means that Google is forced to make big bets in very different sectors. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, partly because of their entrepreneurial nature to explore new opportunities, built in an ability to scale Google beyond the business lines that I have outlined above. This was apparent from their original IPO share prospectus and accompanying letter. Xerox is famous in Silicon Valley lore for fumbling the future, by inventing lots of products that would be recognisable to us today in the late 1960s and early 1970s, only to see a corporate head office miss the boat. Brin and Page would have had some awareness of this. Microsoft’s inability to leapfrog beyond its core business successfully is probably also a factor for consideration.

    Alphabet formalises the framework that Page and Brin had been working to for a number of years.

    So what does this mean to Google?

    For the foreseeable future it will be more of the same for Google. We’ve the seen the business scale back services; by September last year Google had closed down 30 services. It has cut back the functionality of Google Adplanner as a reference tool, to just focus on sales. Google has continued to prune back services such as Google+ (a challenging task given the tentacles + has across Google’s services). The changes inside Google for staffers also reflect similar moves towards profit optimisation, move away from experimentation and being a ‘mensch’.

    The biggest move was to get rid of the 20% of time engineers could devote to projects that interested them. The truth is since at least 2009, the Google myth of people working there to change the world rather than delivering profit hasn’t held sway for a great deal of their staff.

    On the outside Google will still likely have playful swag and cool offices, but the reality is that it will be more of a ‘normal’ business. That means that we won’t see the next Facebook coming from within Google and that whilst the speed of evolution will continue to run along at the same pace, substantial innovation probably won’t. This kind of business requires a different kind of leader to Page, and by appointing Sundar Pichai, will create a cultural break from the past. Pichai is likely to be able to get more revenue out of the Google ‘cash cow’ to help drive innovation in these other areas.

    Page and Brin are freer to bring their energy to the other businesses in Alphabet. For instance, keeping Nest out of Google allows it to work easier with Google competitors like Apple and Microsoft as part of a wider eco-system.

    Lastly, it could be an effort to ring fence Google’s anti-trust woes within the existing business and prevent restrictions being imposed against its newer businesses because of the past sins of the core business.

    So what does this mean for marketers?

    Google is likely to pursue a steady as she goes approach. The focus will be to optimise revenue, so there will be tension with agencies on advertising practices. We’ve already seen this, with Google restricting methods of buying YouTube advertising. These changes will impact the advertising technology business around programmatic advertising.

    The picture with SEO is more about slow and steady change; Google has evolved its Panda index changes to a rolling change rather than the massive shake-ups of old.

    More information
    Android Fragmentation Report August 2015 – OpenSignal
    2004 Founders’ IPO Letter – Investor Relations – Google
    Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer
    What’s eating Google’s brand | renaissance chambara
    Why Google Employees Quit? | TechCrunch
    Google Tightens How Advertisers Buy YouTube Ads | AdWeek
    Google’s $6 billion miscalculation on the EU | Bloomberg Businessweek