Ged Carroll

Month: September 2018

  • China male beauty market + more

    The booming male beauty market in China – Daxue Consulting – Market Research China – finding the latest Asian male beauty market trend – Korean idol flower boy image difficult to square with mainstream male beauty products. I guess this male beauty market trend must be analogous to the new romantics of the early 1980s. In that case the new romantics had a high degree of cultural impact that dwarfed the actual size of the movement.

    Hayden Cox On Becoming An IWC Ambassador, And The Watches We Should Be Wearing – GQ – interesting choice of ambassador aiming at millennials. Hayden Cox shapes surfboards. He started Haydenshapes when he was in high school. In this respects his career mirrors the old school shapers like Shawn Stüssy in 1970s. Cox’s business is still laser focused on shaping boards as a business person.

    It is interesting that IWC focused on an entrepreneur, rather than an athlete, celebrity or adventurer. There is a certain commonality that can be drawn between the craft of shaping and the expertise of the veteran watch maker.

    Leading taxi-hailing app providers in Japan and South Korea to collaborate | The Japan Times – interesting move by Kakao. It shows the rise in Korea – Japan tourism. This goes against the wider policy dynamics prevalent in Korea – Japan government relations. Both vendors need to partner to deal with the South East Asian, Chinese competitors and Uber. In technology spheres, scale matters; innovation doesn’t.

    Doing One Thing, Well: The UNIX Philosophy | Hackaday – great essay on the design philosophy on Unix. The design philosophy was based around simplicity. Specific pieces of software were built to do one thing well. (That approach was mirrored decades later in web 2.0 design ethos as well). These applications were designed to work effortlessly together. This all made computing simpler and more accessible. It is the foundations that the web from network core, to smartphone clients run on. This post is written using Unix powered laptop and hosted on an instance of Linux (an operating system that apes Unix).

    Baidu in Hot Water After Hospital Mix-Up – Caixin Global – not the first time for Baidu

  • Dr Eugenia Cheng & things that made last week

    Dr Eugenia Cheng

    Dr Eugenia Cheng talks about the key themes in her book The Art of Logic: How to Make Sense in a World that Doesn’t

    Outtakes from Dr Eugenia Cheng talk:

    • Pure mathematics is a framework for agreeing on things
    • Pure maths is a framework for how to think
    • Make progress rather than repeat things to make a better logical argument
    • Logic validity doesn’t equal morally valid in analogies
    • Interconnectedness is often erroneously simplified by blaming a single item as a cause
    • Its easier to change actions, than it is to change feelings. Feelings just are
    • Great feedback loops tied into obesity is fascinating
    • Relationships between things – media affects thinking by shoehorning natural geometry into one or two dimensions
    • Intelligence: reasonable – can be reasoned with, powerfully logical – not just using logic but using techniques to move an organisation further and being helpful: emotion

    More ideas related content here.

    Merino wool producers assume that cyber punk is a synthetic dystopia, instead of thinking abut how wool is a technical fabric by its very nature. The ad was done for the Woolmark Company by TBWA Sydney. Do humans dream of technical merino wool?

    Live footage of Talking Heads performing Once in a Lifetime in 1980. The performance encapsulates everyone that I expect Talking Heads to be.

    Zegna’s radical reinvention | How To Spend It – great profile of Gildo and the fashion brand that he manages. The process of reinvention doesn’t seem to create a tension with the heritage – which is a great attributed to a luxury brand. There isn’t that much difference between Zegna and Stone Island in terms of innovation.

    Jori Hulkkonen – Attack Magazine –  he has a great back catalogue, so looking forward to his Simple Music for Complicated People album. Hulkkonen’s work goes from extremely emotive soulful house to minimal techno and everywhere in between.

  • iPhone Xs launch

    Random notes as I watched the iPhone Xs, iPhone XR and Apple Watch Series 4 launch.

    Phil Schiller

    Watching the introductory clip, this felt like an event designed mostly for an internal audience. The events have become a parody of themselves with very well worn tropes.

    Company and eco-system update

    • Apple stores: 500,000,000 visitors per year. The stores have free wi-fi and classes, so this isn’t just about purchasing or building loyalty with customers. It has become public private space.
    • 2 billion iOS devices – many users will have replaced at least three devices so the community of likely iOS users is probably closer to 600 million. iPad tend to end up being communal devices in family homes and so have a longer life.
    • Apple Watch is the number one watch – I found this clip suprising. I find that hard to believe given the ubiquity of the Casio G-Shock range, or the F-91W family of basic digital watches

    Apple Watch series 4

    It is clever in some of the engineering: mass producing a ceramic back. the way Apple has managed to squeeze an ECG function in there. But there is a lot not to like about the watch
    The case design preportions seem off in the video, it may look better in real life. I am guessing that part of the move is about the cellular aerial, but then you have the ceramic back

    • They still haven’t sorted the crown positioning and protection – it will still fire up Siri for no apparent reason
    • The device is only minimally waterproof
    • The awful information design in the face used on Apple Watch hero images

    apple-watch-series4_watch-front-training_09122018
    Which got me rooting through old copies of Wired magazine. They used to have a ‘Future of’ section on the back inside cover. And lone behold
    watch

    iPhone Xs

    I was really unimpressed by the iPhone Xs. Don’t get me wrong it looks ‘nice’ and takes a lot of engineering. There isn’t an upgrade reason for X users. I find the AR applications are gimmicks rather than necessarily being regularly used apps. The notable exception would be the measuring tape app included in iOS 12

    Screen pixel counts are now getting ridiculous – you won’t be able to see the difference in terms of pixel refinement. Contrast may improve in HDR.

    The sound on the device doesn’t recognise that consumers use headphones. It was all about louder speakers.

    For iPhone 6/7/8 users the battery life descriptions for the new iPhone Xs devices were weasel language that would make me be wary of upgrading on this cycle.

    Facial recognition but no in screen biometric touch sensor means that you still have a notch. It also means that there is a dissonance in experience between the touch sensors on the latest MacBook Pro models and iPad models. How will Apple be handling websites that have integrated Apple Pay validation?

    As a MacBook Pro user, this told me to hang on to my current device. Wait and see if Apple changes the authentication again on the next round.

    A12 Bionic chip. 20 years ago five trillion instructions per second would have been impressive as this would have been a super computer. Now it is pretty much in line with what one would expect in Moore’s Law. Intel are squeezing double the rate fo computing power out of FPGAs. You’ve got all that power and you get animojis…

    How the software handles the paralellism of the chip is key. That is something that Sony found in the Cell architecture of the Playstation 2. Don’t expect that power to be obvious in 3rd party applications. The addressable memory claim surprised me. Its a 64 bit processor, so of course it could address 512GB of memory.

    • How much of the A12 chip is required to get FaceID to work?
    • How will the software get the most out of the cores?
    • There isn’t modem integration which helps rivals with their circuit board designs.

    iPhone camera ‘breakthroughs’ seem to come from intellectual property that Lytro developed?

    Dual SIMs – it is definitely a minority interest. It is likely to annoy carriers in mature markets with the exception of challengers like T-Mobile US.

    The SIMs are all non-standard formats which is a pain in the backside. eSIMs are only supported by EE and Vodafone in the UK. The nano-SIM is yet another smaller format of SIM which will be hard to sell to carriers. The most attractive model is the China market one with two physical SIMs.

    This could be:

    • Because China Mobile, China Unicom or China Telecom wouldn’t get on board with eSIMs
    • To screw with the Chinese grey market for iPhones (which is on the decline anyway
    • An unfortunate side effect is that it makes the China models more desirable for a (minority) consumer like me. So the grey market is likely to go the other way

    iPhones are coming with a USB rather than USB C cable in the box, which raises questions about the longer term commitment to Thunderbolt 3…

    iPhone Xr

    Why did Apple create so many colour versions. It has too many colour variations. One of Apple’s historic strengths has been keeping a tight leash on the product portfolio.

    More Apple related content here.

  • Good strategy inspired by Matt Holt

    A couple of tweets on good strategy by Matt Holt inspired this post. Strategy and planning are considered to be disrupted by changes in the advertising industry. It often boils down to ‘ who needs strategy when you have big data / machine learning’.

    Big data; isn’t good strategy. Instead it tells you retrospectively where you should have zigged rather than zagged. It doesn’t plot an overall direction.  It is usually pretty reductive only focusing on sales now. It doesn’t think about future sales through building a brand and its good standing.

    In marketing automation, it is focused on ‘harvesting’ from the end of the marketing funnel.

    Travelling

      • It is sacrifice. It’s about making choices and saying no
      • It is specific. There is a specific well-defined problem to be solved. 
      • It is simple to explain (even if the subject matter is complex). If you’re setting a direction, the roadmap has to be clear for all stakeholders.
      • it has elegance. Which is a good measure of its simplicity.
      • It steers tactics. It provides a directional lens to the data and helps in deciding KPIs (key performance indicators) and HVAs (high value actions).
      • Good strategy is stubborn in the face of the shiny and new. Strategy is not a fad is a long term roadmap. The shiny and new can be a facilitator at best. At worst its a distraction. 
      • It is saying no to excess. Keep the strategy focused on the objectives that it addresses
      • Good strategy seems self evident in retrospect. It’s not just a way to solve the problem, but has been sweated out to optimise it to the point that it seems self evident in retrospect.
      • It is emergent, but not realtime. A strategy needs to be able to flex as conditions change. Its the direction, not an exhaustive road map.
    • It is not ‘big data’. Big data can be a source of insights that will help develop a strategy, but it’s not a strategy in of itself. For example the inspiration for Compare the Market’s meerkat campaign was misspellings in search data for the word market

    More ideas related posts here.

  • NYPD surveillance + more things

    IBM Used NYPD Surveillance Footage to Develop Technology That Lets Police Search by Skin Color – you might feel a bit squeamish about the application but this is established image recognition that Google (and Yahoo!) search engines used 12 years ago rather than anything new. We shouldn’t be surprised that the NYPD surveillance search system doesn’t use all aspect of physical attributes that might turn up in a witness statement.

    eBay builds its own customized servers to ‘replatform’ its data center infrastructure | SiliconAngle– surprised that they weren’t doing this already

    Luxury Daily | eBay extends authentication program to high-end watches – Paywall

    Immersive art – JWT Intelligence – In China, where fine art isn’t typically part of a school curriculum, art collectors and curators have been working with mall developers and brands for a number of years to create crossover opportunities among Chinese audiences, fueling interest and building a culture around art. Zheng’s approach is to focus on making his visitors the protagonists in his exhibitions to help them “accept art as an element in their lives.”

    WE ARE IN AN EFFICIENCY BUBBLE – BBH – at the expense of effectiveness. Just good enough commotised creative

    The Path Ahead: The 7th Forum on China-Africa Cooperation | China Africa Research Initiative – (PDF)

    Cryptocurrency exchange Changelly admits it can steal users’ Monero (if it wanted to) – I think this is over egging the opportunity and underestimating challenges

    WeChat, Alipay to Block Crypto Transactions on Payment Platforms – CoinDesk – surprised that this is taking so long

    JD CEO’s arrest steps on governance landmine – Breakingviews – (paywall) it shows how tenuous ‘foreign’ shareholding in Chinese entities are. According to The New York Times he has some form for these kind of events

    Manipulation, Chinese style – Nikkei Asian Review – cunning and clever. This should be compulsory reading for anyone doing lobbying or in corporate communications. It mirrors some of the Russian philosophy on information warfare, but the Russians take it in a much more kinetic direction.

    The “experiential advantage” is not universal – the less well-off get equal or more happiness from buying things – Research Digest – really interesting finding on consumer behaviour and retailing