Ged Carroll

Category: business | 商業 | 상업 | ビジネス

My interest in business or commercial activity first started when a work friend of my Mum visited our family. She brought a book on commerce which is what business studies would have been called decades earlier. I read the book and that piqued my interest.

At the end of your third year in secondary school you are allowed to pick optional classes that you will take exams in. this is supposed to be something that you’re free to chose.

I was interested in business studies (partly because my friend Joe was doing it). But the school decided that they wanted me to do physics and chemistry instead and they did the same for my advanced level exams because I had done well in the normal level ones. School had a lot to answer for, but fortunately I managed to get back on track with college.

Eventually I finally managed to do pass a foundational course at night school whilst working in industry. I used that to then help me go and study for a degree in marketing.

I work in advertising now. And had previously worked in petrochemicals, plastics and optical fibre manfacture. All of which revolve around business. That’s why you find a business section here on my blog.

Business tends to cover a wide range of sectors that catch my eye over time. Business usually covers sectors that I don’t write about that much, but that have an outside impact on wider economics. So real estate would have been on my radar during the 2008 recession.

  • Yahoo Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation

    With the Yahoo Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation  – Yahoo! published a list of properties that it was closing down and services that it was changing support on over the next few months. Most of the coverage amongst the people I follow has been around the shutdown of Yahoo! Pipes, as despite its flakey behaviour it was tremendously useful for putting together cheap, fast services to help with social media monitoring. I ‘built’ monitoring pipes for the likes of Microsoft and AMD after I had left Yahoo! that included careful key word filtering. This allowed them to take this feed and syndicate ‘good’ news machine translated into different languages on different micro-sites. This ‘Pipe building’ process took just a few hours.

    My friend Mat Morrison had put it up to much more inventive uses.

    Yahoo! Pipes, like the Fire Eagle location service came out of a golden age of web development. An influx of talent into the business like Bradley Horowitz, Simon Willison, Stewart Butterfield, Tom Coates and Joshua Schachter brought with it a web 2.0 philosophy of data being:

    • Portable – consumers could back up their own data at any time, or use it to move to a rival service. In stark contrast to the Facebook and WeChat walled gardens of today
    • Data is to be manipulated – data could be overlaid or processed through other services, like crime data on maps, or Pipes

    But enough eulogising; Pipes was an interesting idea that never got the support from consumers or Yahoo! that it needed. The service was flakey at times, if it was a car it would have been a late 1970s/early 1980s vintage Alfa Romeo or Lancia – it was that bad. It is obvious from the Yahoo! Pipes blog that it has been in a mode of minimal maintenance for years – the last post prior to the shut down notice was posted in 2012 to outline a work around from Yahoo! shutting down its Babelfish translation service (which was originally on AltaVista.com in the late 1990s and relied on technology licenced from Systrans).

    Lets look at some of the other services that Yahoo! has sunset this time around.

    The market specific services are interesting, as they paint a picture of Yahoo! under-performing across international markets and in sectors where it previously had a strong advertising offering. Take the cars section across the main European markets, looking at the UK offering – there is no page takeover by a car brand, there is no sponsored content and there is two banner ads (one for AutoTrader, one for BSkyB), one tiny rich content ad at the bottom of the page for the new Terminator film and one re-targeting module. If this is an indicator of what other European markets are like then automotive advertising at Yahoo! Europe is in a bad way.

    TV and film properties have little to no ads on the front page, again no takeovers or sponsored content. So Yahoo! seems to be struggling with getting advertising spend in two key sectors.

    If we go to Asia, the move out of the Philippines is particularly interesting, presumably driven by advertising opportunity – or the lack there of. But when you look at the economic indicators of the Philippines, there is a consistent growth predicted in retail sales according to Statista
    philippines retail sales

    According to Ken Research, the Philippines online advertising market grew with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 43.4% during the period 2008 – 2013 and is predicted to grow almost 15% CAGR between 2013 and 2018. E-tailing is expected to grow by 101.4% CAGR over 2013 – 2018. So why is Yahoo!, which has been established in the Philippines unable to capitalise on the in-market growth. Is it that Yahoo! sees ways to earn more money elsewhere and the opportunity cost is too high in the Philippines, or is it a broken advertising sales machine?

    The closure of Yahoo! Entertainment in Singapore is more curious as Yahoo! still manages to get advertising from major brands. As I write this Oreo has a full page frame running and there is a dynamic banner by group shopping site Qoo10.

    Yahoo! Mail and Contacts support of older Macs and iPhones. I was surprised that these were called out. Yahoo! Mail is depreciating support for devices running iOS4 or older and running the native mail application. A couple of things here; given Apple’s expertise at upgrading iPhone users speedily why would this even be an issue?

    Secondly,  why does Yahoo! need to make a special effort to support accounts that were presumably using POP3 or IMAP email standards? The webDEV standard would make a similarly curious point about Yahoo!’s depreciation of support for contacts on a Mac running OS X 10.8 and earlier. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

    Former CEO, Carole Bartz famously said of Yahoo! that you can’t cut your way to growth. So what do these ‘product updates’ say about Yahoo!? Over the past two years prior to this update, Yahoo! has already closed over 60 services, where does it all stop? More technology related content here.

    More information
    Q2 2015 Progress Report On Our Product Prioritization | Yahoo! Blog
    Pipes End-of-life Announcement | Yahoo Pipes Blog
    Q4 2014 Progress Report | Yahoo! Blog

  • Tech trends myopia in ideas

    Tech trends event at The Churchill Club

    The Churchill Club recently had their annual Top 10 Tech Trends event in Silicon Valley. This was the 17th time that they had their event. It’s a great bit of content to have on in the background. The collective opinions in the panel bought up concerns for me with a consumer behaviour myopia exhibited around tech trends in Silicon Valley.


    Cognitive behavioural therapy

    A classic example was some of the very smart things said about wearables and health monitoring in the session. There was skepticism expressed for some very valid social behavioural reasons – if one looks at Facebook, consumers generally share only the good things in their lives, with the notable exception of life events, such as the death of a family pet. Stephen Waddington even describes his behaviour on Facebook as ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’.

    So people really into fitness are far more likely to employ self tracking than couch-dwellers.

    Quicken problem

    Self tracking was described as a ‘Quicken Problem’. Quicken allows US consumers to easily complete their tax returns – a universal problem, yet is only used by five per cent of the population for various reasons.

    All of this is very valid stuff of its self, but what happens if it isn’t only consumers making the decision?

    Self tracking tech trends

    My reservations about self tracking technologies are well recorded, to quote myself from Stephen Waddington’s Brand Vandals

    Self-tracking adds massive amounts of data to your personal data pool and social graph and raises huge privacy concerns that users need to be cognisant of

    A number of the key points that I made in my conversation with Stephen was not about consumers using their self-tracking data but how the data could be used to recalibrate car insurance, home insurance (based on absence from home) and health insurance based on activity and risky behaviours.

    Let’s look at a specific type of self tracking, the car insurance black box. Aviva (Norwich Union) trialled the use of telematics to set car insurance premiums on a monthly basis as a type of continuous assessment. It looked at factors such as:

    • When the car was used, nighttime driving was considered to be risky behaviour
    • What distance was covered, charges were on a per mile basis
    • Car location (particularly when cross-tabulated with crime statistics)
    • Speed
    • Braking data

    In IBM Research’s case study, Norwich Union envisaged that black boxes would allow it to sell insurance to consumers that drive less often. Norwich Union dropped the pilot in 2008, apparently due to a lack of consumer interest, but resurrected the car insurance black box when the European Union ruled that charging for car insurance on the basis of gender was illegal. Presumably the needed some other form of actuarial data instead of whether the driver was a female or not. This is just one example where consumer behaviour didn’t drive  product innovation that wouldn’t be accounted for in the tech trends discussion.

    Credit ratings were driven by the need for businesses to mitigate risks, direct (rather than operator) dialling on a telephone was developed to help reduce the manpower required to run telecoms networks. Night safes and ATMs (automatic teller machines) were about providing services without staff. The US airline tradition of baggage charges came from shareholder pressure not consumer demand yet is worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

    The point at the end of the day is that opportunities for venture capitalists are broader than meeting consumer needs and wants.

    More information

    Brand Vandals by Stephen Waddington & Steve Earl
    AA launches black box car insurance | Guardian
    Norwich Union heralds new Pay As You Drive insurance – Aviva Media Room Archive
    Norwich Union Insurance Telematics Pilot – Pay As You Drive Telematics trial of usage based motor insurance by Volker Fricker of IBM Research – (PDF)
    Aviva Telematics Insurance Review | Telematics.com – Norwich Union (now Aviva) abandoned telematics insurance a number of years ago and is now reinstating it

    More related content here.

  • Android device fragmentation + more

    Android Sales: Guess how many Android devices are available for sale | BGR – 18,000 different types of Android devices which is an insane amount of device fragmentation. Imagine the pain in Android device testing needed and that isn’t even getting into different app stores and non-Google Android devices –  a la Russia and China. More wireless related content here.

    Regarding Chrome’s Power Efficiency on OS X | The Verge – interesting how Google is falling into the same traps when coding across platforms that Microsoft did

    Why China’s economy is slowing and what it means for everything | Quartz – interesting bit of economic analysis via charts

    Fascinating chart in HBR (above) on the relative change in valuation of Brands… | Broadstuff – interesting data on the decline of brand value

    Hush Technology will block snoring but play your alarm with its smart earplugs | VentureBeat – interesting how noise cancelling technology has shrunk

    Moscase Is Like Batman’s Utility Belt For Your iPhone | TechCrunch – the modular nature of the back is quite interesting, I like the e-ink screen

    Daring Fireball: The Apple Watch Edition’s Upgrade Dilemma – it won’t be replacing my Swiss watch any time soon

    Nokia nears deal to buy Alcatel-Lucent mobile networks unit | Hong Kong Economic Journal Insight – two turkeys won’t make an eagle

    GSMA Intelligence – interesting diagram talking about latency and bandwidth requirements of different applications on mobile networks when you scroll down the page

    Activist Puts Pressure on Qualcomm – WSJ – inevitable when one looks at the increasing competition in the chip business for them and the move by major players (Apple, Samsung, Huawei)

    Samsung Galaxy S6 review: It’s what’s on the outside that counts | Ars Technica – this review is emblematic of the pedestal that Samsung has fallen off

    LINE CEO bets on selfies and macho stamps to expand overseas | Japan Times – really interesting insight into app localisation and branding

    Twitter Ends its Partnership with DataSift – Datasift Blog – ok this could be interesting

    These slides are all you need to make the case for an all-flash data center | SiliconANGLE – that responsive data has to change the economics of cloud as well and not in a good way

    Exclusive: Twitter A/B testing a Yahoo style directory for non-logged in users | SiliconANGLE – and Google seems to be supplementing search results with content from DMOZ about links

    If Nokia Map Unit Is for Sale, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo All Might Want a Look | Re/code – it makes sense that Nokia would want to sell this separately from the phones, but who would it go to

  • Chaebol + more news

    Chaebol

    Anger and Envy in the Chaebol Republic | Foreign Policy – there will come a point when it it will undermine the iron grip that chaebol groups have on Korean society. The irony was chaebol power was based on a compact between President Park and prominent business families as a way to jump start the economy. Somewhere along the way the power dynamic changed and the chaebols got into the driving seat rather than the other way around. The chaebol families haven’t lived up to the promise of their compact with President Park – yet the Korean government still gives them a free pass (paywall)

    Business

    Tumblr is getting sucked into the Yahoo mothership | Business Insider – likely to suffer similar kinds of challenges to flickr et al. More Yahoo! related content here.

    Korea

    LG Eyes New Approach With AKA Phones – Korea Real Time – WSJ – interesting approach to try and shake up the form factor and design as a differentiator in smartphones with its AKA phones. Anything that provides form factor like these; AKA phones is a good thing when one thinks about how it has now become a design monoculture. More gadget related content here.

    Media

    VivaKi integrates anonymised Tencent data into its DMP – Campaign Asia – focus on cross screen campaigns

    Baidu and Alibaba capture 70% of China online ad spending | Resonance China – which shows what a power house Baidu still is

    TV for Babies, Born of a Reality | WSJ – with a subsidiary plan of targeting EDM loving millennials?

    WPP’s Martin Sorrell reconsiders strength of newspapers – Media Week – newspapers starting to get some respect from Martin Sorrell

    Technology

    Intel in Talks to Buy Altera – WSJ – interesting move from a business perspective in terms of the expansion beyond micro processors and into FPGAs. Processors whose layout is ‘flashed’ on to them like software written into memory. They tend to be used in products that need a dedicated processor design, but aren’t made with the scale to justify one

  • Smartphone crown in China + more

    Apple takes smartphone crown in China – CNET – the smartphone crown is based on over a quarter of urban smartphones sold; Apple’s smartphone crown profit share rather than market share approach. More related content here.

    A New Wave of Chinese Smartphones Set to Emerge in 2015 – TechNode – the key thing here is likely to be relevant patents which many of these companies currently don’t have

    Billionaire Fridman targets US and Europe in $16bn telecoms spree – FT.com – board will include Lastminute.com co-founder Brent Hoberman and Irish telecoms entrepreneur Denis O’Brien, has been brought together to aid acquisitions in the technology sector to augment an already substantial portfolio of telecoms businesses. It will also include Osama Bedier, a former Google payments executive, former Skype executive Russ Shaw and Sir Julian Horn-Smith, one of the founding management team at Vodafone (paywall) – presumably a shedload of leverage as well since $16Bn won’t go that far

    Cyber Trends: 5 Subcultures on the Internet | Highsnobiety – interesting how the internet is melding and spawning tribes

    Panasonic to Release Spherical Fan/circulator – Nikkei Technology Online – gives Dyson a run for his money with this design. I love the space age feel of it

    From Socks To Sex Toys: Inside America’s Subscription-Box Obsession | FastCompany – I think that there is something to be said about careful curation ridding one from the tyranny of choice and giving the approximation of the great record store clerk or the guy at the comic shop – if they are done well. But I am also reminded mostly by these services of book and record clubs of yore

    How To Make A Secret Phone Call | Fast Company – interesting art project which illustrates the complexity of modern privacy

    Windows RT: Mission Accomplished | Fast Company – leverage on Intel

    Casio App Enables Word Searches on Recordings – WSJ – if this works as promised it is amazingly cool and the technology could revolutionise web search