Ged Carroll

Month: July 2017

  • Vivienne Wei + more things

    Vivienne Wei

    WeChat consumer perspective  by Chinese video blogger Vivienne Wei. Vivienne Wei put together this great video about how WeChat is the Swiss Army knife of apps in China. It is a great consumer perspective on how WeChat works.

    Carl Jr resets

    Carl Jr is a casual eating restaurant chain in the US. It is owned by the same people who won Hardee’s. Carl Jr is known for producing frat boy / brogrammer-friendly adverts like these

    Wiser heads seem to have prevailed in the marketing department, so they came up with this ad to press reset using humour rather than the indignation of political correctness

    Vice, New Balance and footwork sub-culture

    Vice and New Balance have put together a documentary on the Japanese adoption of the footwork sub-culture. Japan has a history of adopting a subculture (like dancehall) and elevating it. Chicago’s footwork skills look like they are getting the same treatment

    Godzilla

    The King of Monster Island Godzilla is back in an anime film. The plot looks like Avatar – humans coming to wipe out planet for commercial / political benefits. Of course all of that plan will go to shit when they find out the inhabitants aren’t lanky blue people but the original kaiju bad boy and friends.

    Baby Driver

    I got to see Baby Driver. It is a curious mashup of a couple of film genres

    • 1980s style films popularised by John Hughes.
    • 1990s to the present day gritty heist films

    I was also reminded of the Tony Scott film True Romance

    The iPod Classic makes a come back in the film in a spectacular way, expect a minor cultural backlash against ‘radio’ as music service currently popular. Personally curated, shareable music and physical artefacts come to the fore. (Though I still can’t see young men proudly carrying rhinestone encrusted pink iPod Classics just yet). More related content here.

  • Of time and networks

    Time and networks are intertwined and have been forever. Communities have marked time in different ways. It used to be marked by the bells of a church or the clock on a local factory. At that time, it didn’t matter that the clock told the precise time, but that it was consistent. This meant that different ‘time zones’ existed in areas separated by little distance.

    The amount of reference time pieces expanded as mechanical clocks were installed in churches, farm estates and early factories. In the case of factories the change of shift was often punctuated by the blast of a fog horn or a steam powered whistle.

    I can remember this being the case even during my early childhood at the nearby Unilever factory. The change of shift signal marked my walk to infant school.

    Over the centuries canals sprang up throughout the country as the first mass transport link, facilitating the movement of heavy goods such as coal and iron ore in a more efficient manner. Canals were transformative, but the boats still only moved at the speed of the horse. Railways broke the ‘horse speed’ barrier.

    This was transformative because it suddenly shone a light on inconsistent time keeping across the country. Railway timetables couldn’t incorporate all the variations in time zones between stations, so it became the arbiter of accurate time.

    Over time radio and television played their part, audiences could set their watch by the start of key news programmes, for instance the time pips in the run into BBC Radio 4’s today programme or the Angelus chimes on RTE Radio  1.

    The telephone came into play when looking for an exact time (to reset a watch or alarm clock) outside the broadcast schedule.

    The popularity of mobile phone networks didn’t have as much of an impact as one would have thought. NITZ (Network Identity and Time Zone) was an optional standard for GSM networks. It has an accuracy in the order of minutes. A competing standard on CDMA 2000 networks used GPS enabled time codes that were far more accurate.

    Modern timekeeping for the smartphone toting average person goes back to NTP; one of the earliest protocols in for the early internet that was created some time before 1985.

    1

    Back in 2001 when I installed the earliest version of macOS (then known as OSX 10.0 ‘Cheetah’) the date and time settings made reference to Apple owned NTP servers that were used to calibrate time on the computer. This infrastructure has since provided time to Apple’s other computing devices such as the iPhone and the and the iPad.

    We are are now living on the same time. Time synchronisation happens seamlessly. We tend to only realise it when there is a problem.

    SaveSave

  • eSports discussion

    The rise of eSports as a form of entertainment is a popular discussion area in both media and technology. Brandon Beck is the co-founder of Riot Games (best known for League of Legends) on the rise of eSports from a cultural and business perspectives.  His ideas what online gaming future looks like; are interesting, if a little self-serving.

    eSports takeouts:

    • Interesting that Riot are trying to give players a better base to build their careers. How will this affect teams over individual player talent?  How long is their professional life? When do they burn out? What does post-eSports athlete life look like?
    • They acknowledge that competitive gaming will have a long runway to adoption rather than the hockey stick models predicted by financiers in this area. Traditional sports management professionals see eSports as a new opportunity.
    • Professional athletes come out of second and third generation gamers and parents who pursued traditional sports at a competitive level
    •  The new nature of competitive gaming has an exclusively young audience. The vast majority of content is streaming. The audience is cable cutters, which implies that they didn’t have traditional sports as a substitute content
    • Player access and the Asian ‘idol’ phenomenon seems to be very similar with ‘around game’ content. There is an immediacy to it. There is also a grey zone between the athlete and online influencers, I could see a crossover
    • I found it concerning that it revolves so much around China, given the rule by law approach to things that the Communist Party of China takes. It would take nothing to crush competitive gaming in China. Comments on the negative social impact of gaming doesn’t bode well

    More on professional online gaming here and more on Riot Games here. It will be interesting to see how Riot Games continues to develop under the ownership of Chinese technology company Tencent.

  • Jawbone + more news

    Jawbone

    Jaw-bone-d: Wearables biz Jawbone shuts down | The Register – pretty sad end for Jawbone. Jawbone was the wearables company that pioneered noise cancelling Bluetooth headsets. I had the good fortune to go on a work trip to San Francisco. While there I picked up an early Jawbone headset. At the time it was a retail exclusive with AT&T Mobile and weren’t available outside of the US. With the rise of Apple’s AirPods, surely this should have been Jawbone’s time to own BlueTooth headsets if it had been able to keep going and innovating?

    Business

    Chat app Kakao raises $437M for its Korean ride-hailing service | TechCrunch

    The Japanese Company Betting Billions to Prepare for the Singularity | Wired – I think that Softbank have overreached on the vision here

    Cision IPO – Great guns for brand situational awareness | Forrester – but it needs to do a better job with its brand and PR people

    Consumer behaviour

    Hong Kong women spend over HK$4,000 on beauty products | Marketing Interactive – I guess it depends on how you define beauty products

    Staring down internet trolls: My disturbing cat and mouse game – unremittingly grim

    Economics

    North Sea becomes burden on taxpayers | Business | The Times & The Sunday Times – this is down to lower oil prices and tax relief against investment (predominantly decommissioning platforms) which will accelerate over the coming years. This will squeeze the UK government hard in the face of Brexit

    FMCG

    发现新大陆 – amazing marketing for McDonalds’ spicy chicken wings

    How (FMCG) markets grow | Kantar World Panel – interesting read

    Gadgets

    Nokia Branded Phones to Get Zeiss Branded Cameras | Fortune.com – Nokia’s handset business getting the gang back together

    Nokia, Xiaomi sign patent sharing agreement | ZDNet – Nokia and Xiaomi will work together on optical communications solutions for data centers, IP Routing for the Nokia FP4 processor, and a data center fabric solution

    Alibaba Challenges Google, Amazon With New Echo-Like Device – Bloomberg – Interesting that they are using the Tmall brand rather than TaoBao

    Amazon Launches Customized Kindles With China Mobile | China Tech News – interesting deal with China Mobile. Jailbroken Kindles have been going around in China for years

    Media

    It’s the end of an era: Channel 18 cancels international format that served generations of L.A. immigrants – LA Times – a sad indictment of media economics

    Chinese site Weibo to ban ‘bad talk’ about Chinese affairs – CNET – not clear if this is an addition move on top of the recent regulations to clean up the web

    I Cannes | No Mercy No Malice | Scott Galloway | L2 – so much to read about here

    The Awful Truth Behind the Glamorous Facade of the Chinese Live-Streaming Host – not that different to modern record label practices or the Hollywood (and Hong Kong) studio system of the past

    Retailing

    Instagram and Nike Want to Show Fashionistas How to Shop – Bloomberg – really soon after the deal with Amazon

    Software

    US army spin-off GPU database bags $50m Series A funding • The Register – interesting use of GPU technology

    Technology

    China Is About to Bury Elon Musk in Batteries – Bloomberg – what’s this going to do to the price of lithium?

    Why the Future of Stuff Is Having More and Owning Less | Singularity Hub – but all the wealth will flow to the suppliers ie generation rent – its the first step on the way to serfdom

    How AI Boosts Industry Profits and Innovation by Purdy & Daugherty – Accenture white paper looking into the machine learning crystal ball and what it means for businesses (PDF)

    Azeem Azhar, entrepreneur | China will win AI race – China are also more focused on pragmatic usage of machine learning rather than flailing around like western startup eco-systems

    Crypto Miners Hated by VR Players as Graphic Cards Sold Out in China | NEWS.8BTC.COM – which gives you an idea of how much crypto currency mining happens in China now

    Apple is suspiciously interested in Fisker’s electric car – BGR – the Fisker Emotion appears to be a technical marvel, with a fast-charging system that enables the vehicle to charge up in just nine minutes. As we noted a few weeks back, the Emotion’s impressive battery system is based on supercapacitors using graphene as opposed to the more traditional lithium-ion batteries used in vehicles like the Tesla Model S

    Telecoms

    Bidders gear up for Li Ka-shing’s fixed-line network business | South China Morning Post – interesting no bid from China Telecom or any of the other Chinese SOEs. More telecom related posts here.

  • Per Eklund + other things

    Per Eklund

    Feast your eyes on Per Eklund’s record breaking ascent of Pikes Peak back in 2001 in a car that looked superficially like a Saab 93. It weighed just 1,000Kg and had 850BHP and four wheel drive. Eklund was 55 when he did this and still drives today alongside peers like Stig Blomqvist.

    Per Eklund trained originally as a driving instructor with fellow classmate Stig Blomqvist. He then went be a Saab factor team driver from 1970 to 1979. He was Swedish champion in 1978, ahead of Stig Blomqvist. Eklund won a World Rally Champion ship event in a privately entered Saab 99 Turbo in 1982, three years after Saab shuttered its works team.

    Per Eklund drove on selected events for Toyota Team Europe, focusing on African events of the World Rally Championship like fellow Swede Björn Waldegård.

    Like Waldegård, Per Eklund has had a long and successful career in rallycross. Probably his crowning achievement was setting a records on the Pikes Peak climb that wasn’t bettered for another ten years. Per Eklund beat best times set by fellow rally champions Michèle Mouton, Ari Vatanen and Walter Rohl

    Here’s a documentary (mostly in Swedish) about how they did it. It’s a surprisingly basic effort. More related content here.

    Back To The Future with pugs

    Winston and C-Milk currently live in Southern China and put out regular content on live in China. Their video discussing China’s ecosystem of fake Nintendo Famicom (NES) machines. Video games were banned for 15 years in China, so piracy stepped in to fill the vacuum. Check out the clone of Nokia’s Snake but with NES vibes.

    Or Super Mario 10 featuring Confucius

    I’d also recommend their perspective on China’s role in VR. President Xi Jin Ping said that VR was the cornerstone of development, and that China would pursue VR with everything it’s got. Gadget makers have piled in to make Samsung Gear-like googles.

    Social Cooling – really interesting hypothesis on how social platforms are changing consumer behaviour over time.