Ged Carroll

Month: November 2017

  • Older iPhones + more news

    Apple CEO Cook breathes new life into old iPhones | Reuters – how Apple’s lower models contribute in markets like India. Older iPhones resold also drive services sales on an ongoing basis, whether the older iPhones are based on to children or sold on

    Culture

    Funko CEO reacts to stock’s 40% plunge on figurine maker’s first day as a public company | Geekwire – surprising given the prominence of geekdom in popular culture

    Gadgets

    aibo | Sony Japan – Matt’s commentary on this from his Web Curios newsletter ‘When I was about 20 I was obsessed with the idea of Sony’s Aibo, the robot dog that was JUST LIKE A REAL PUPPY  but with no hair or faeces or propensity to maul people.; now Sony have announced a rebooted version which is slightly less robotic and slightly more cute, and doubtless far more sophisticated in its ability to dance and caper and charmingly present to demand tickles that will never feel. The weird thing is, though, that now I am older I look at this and feel nothing but a deep and abiding sadness at the thought of the sort of people for whom this actually designed – not rich twats who want a toy, but the terminally lonely for whom a small robotic dog and stroking its plastic, unfeeling case in lieu of actual biological contact. Imagine that being your only interaction with another ‘thing’ for days and days and days on end. I don’t want to grow old.’ Not too sure if this a manifestation of his realisation of mortality that usually kicks in with the start of middle age. It does reflect the resurgence of Sony and how it thinks about consumer products for a greying market.

    Marketing

    See the cool kids lined up outside that new restaurant? This app pays them to stand there. – The Washington Post  – “They hire promoters and marketers and PR agencies to connect, but it’s a one-sided interaction that involves blasting out a message to get people engaged, but they don’t necessarily know if that message is being received.”

    WPP’s PR Units Slip as Sorrell Warns on ‘New Normal’ – O’Dwyer PR  – “It does seem that in new normal of a low growth, low inflation, limited pricing power world, there is an increasing focus on cost reduction, exacerbated by a management consultant emphasis on cost reduction and the close to zero cost of capital funding of activist investors and zero-based budgeters,” wrote Sorrell in WPP’s trading update.

    Online

    Damning stat Facebook tried to bury | News.com.au – 270 million accounts are duplicate or fake

    Software

    This app is like Shazam for fonts | The Next Web – genius, more design related content here.

    Berlin’s Ada Health raises $47M to become the Alexa of healthcare | TechCrunch – would the money be better spent on building skills into Alexa or Google Home?

    Wireless

    Q’comm Profits Dive Amid Patent Disputes | EE Times – ingredient brand most hated by its partners….

  • Dogs of Amazon + other things

    Dogs of Amazon

    About Amazon – Working at Amazon – Dogs of Amazon – interesting page on the Dogs of Amazon. I worked at Yahoo! which tried to have the nanny dot com culture coupled with the work hard but laid back Silicon Valley vibe – it wasn’t pet friendly like Amazon proports to be. I can’t work out if Dogs of Amazon is a relic from when Amazon was a small dot com era startup.

    Dogs of Amazon is that at odds with the narrative about Amazon being a hellish white collar employer. I know friends who described their Amazon middle management experience in very negative terms. I also couldn’t reconcile this dog friendly culture with their warehouse and logistics operating conditions for employees.

    Origins of PowerPoint

    The Improbable Origins of PowerPoint – IEEE Spectrum – built by a couple of former Apple employees and sold to Microsoft. Microsoft also bought MS-DOS (which was a hacked together clone of CP/L, which in turn tried to copy the experience of the PDP-11 mini-computer)

    Carhartt

    There was a great talk at Google from Carhartt about their brand and approach to products

    The Soviet internet that never happened

    InterNyet: why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network – (PDF) – it is interesting how the discourse on the networked country moved from being extremely positive for communism in the early 1960s due to its ability for economic control. The rise of ‘economic cybernetics’ sprang out of the end of the Stalin era as there were shortages and production distortions as central planning was failing to control the economy. Decentralising solutions built a massive bureaucratic infrastructure which affected things further. The Soviet Academy of Sciences suggested advocated for the use of computers for statistics and planning. You can see some of the influence of this now in the uptake of networking, machine learning and technology by the Chinese government over the past few decades.

    What I’ve been listening to this week

    I loved this edit of Earth, Wind and Fire.

  • The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

    I bought The One Device when it came out in July and have gone back and forth reading it. I’d read books on Silicon Valley before; the Apple eulogy  Insanely Great by Steven Levy which told of the graft and hard work that went into the original Macintosh or Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner & Lyon which discussed engineers working really long works. My favourite one is still Robert X Cringely’s Accidental Empires that portrays Gates as a coupon-clipping megalomaniac and Steve Jobs as a sociopath cut from the same cloth as Josef Stalin.

    Merchant’s The One Device is different. It doesn’t eulogise in the same way, but it also lacks immediacy as it feels detached from its subject matter. Unlike Levy’s work, Apple didn’t cooperate with Merchant at all. The book is broad in scope and sometimes loses its way, each one of the chapters could have been an interesting short book in their own right and this leaves it being faintly unsatisfactory.  I guess this is one of the reasons why it took me so long to read it.

    In the meantime the book stirred controversy over quotes attributed to Tony Fadell about then colleague Phil Schiller.  This made me cast a critical eye over some of Merchant’s adventures in the book. In particular inside the Foxconn industrial complex.

    On a more positive note, Merchant’s vision is grander than previous authors. One man’s mission to pull all the intellectual threads together on what made up the iPhone. The iPhone moves from becoming the child of an over-worked and under-appreciated Apple engineering team to being the totem of a global village.

    If you’ve read a quality newspaper you know what he’s going to say about the global supply chain. He also touches on the decades of software and technology development that led up to the iPhone.  How its multi-touch interface came out of a 1990s doctoral thesis. Ultimately the value of Merchant’s book many not be his writing, but instead becoming a new template for journalists writing on Silicon Valley to look beyond the David & Goliath mono-myth and instead dig into the tangled history of innovation. More book reviews here.

  • Apple Knowledge Navigator + other things

    Apple Knowledge Navigator

    Apple Knowledge Navigator was a rewarming of Vannevar Bush’s ideas in his essay ‘As We May Think that’ was published in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic. There is a clear line between Vannevar Bush’s notional Memex machine and the Apple Knowledge Navigator.

    While Bush had the good sense to realise that a device with all of a user’s books, records, and communications had value. It reminded me a lot of the modern smartphone or the Wikireader. But there was less consideration with regards organisation and search in the Memex.

    These were some of the challenges that Apple thought through in this 1987 concept film.

    The Apple Knowledge Navigator concept film had really interesting search concepts in it. It is a shame that we’re nowhere near where Apple thought search and natural language processing would have been in 2007. This is still a concept video for today.

    Business

    Apple should shrink its finance arm before it goes bananas – The Economist – the risks associated with Apple’s cash mountain

    Media

    Update on Our Advertising Transparency and Authenticity Efforts – Facebook Newsroom – desperately trying to get ahead of regulation

    China Box Office: ‘Geostorm’ Blows to $33 Million Win as ‘Blade Runner’ Flops – Variety – interesting that Blade Runner cratered. I talked to a couple of friends and found out that the first film was not known in China, even amongst film buffs. Secondly the Chinese name was very misleading – moviegoers were expecting a film about a killer.

    How many people see your content on each digital channel? | The Drum  – bookmark for heuristics

    Retailing

    Amazon gains wholesale pharmacy licenses in multiple states | stltoday.com – this is going to blow up the share performance of Walgreens, CVS etc etc. More related content here.

    Security

    Facebook denies ‘listening’ to conversations – BBC News  – probably not the microphone, but would be surprised if they aren’t dipping into chat data or beyond

    Software

    Huawei AppStore and Huawei Video Service heading to Europe in 2018 – Gizchina.com – interesting move challenging Google

    LG K7i (LGX230I) – Smartphone With Mosquito Away Technology | LG India – if this wasn’t being sold on a legitimate LG site I would question if this was a shanzhai phone with fake LG branding. Its an interesting idea though