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.

  • Keybase + more news

    Keybase – ‘Keybase is a website, but it’s also an open source command line program’ – outlines one of the key problems with encryption right there for widespread consumer adoption. (Note:  Keybase ended up being acquired by Zoom in 2020). More security related content here.

    FMCG

    What Chinese brands know that MNCs don’t – Campaign Asia – marketers targeting too small a segment of Chinese middle class. Don’t really get Chinese middle class dynamics (paywall)

    Hong Kong

    One in five Hongkongers may emigrate over political reform ruling | SCMP – no they won’t and the people who feel the most strongly about this are in the least good position to leave

    Ideas

    LOOK Google gamifies search with Google Mo Lang | Marketing Interactive – interesting Google tactic to increase usage

    Luxury

    Luxury brands in a quandary as China’s wealthy young develop resistance to bling | The Observer – picking Wendi Deng as an ambassador won’t do anything for their appeal to a Chinese market and they could have got more contemporary than Gong Li (gorgeous as she is)

    Media

    Facebook Earns 10% of Digital Ad Dollars, More Than Any Other Online Platform | Adweek – a third of global social spend is in APAC

    VML China acquires Teein, fills hole in social media capability – Campaign Asia – really interesting that IM2.0 didn’t already have social and used to outsource it. VML in China is formidable

    Online

    Line temporarily cancels its IPO | Techinasia – avoiding the kerfuffle around Alibaba

    Quality

    iPhone 6 Is the Most Durable iPhone Yet, Says Insurer – WSJ – you would need to do a larger sample of phones for statistically significant sampling

    Security

    MIT Students Battle State’s Demand for Their Bitcoin Miner’s Source Code | WIRED – it’s all a bit weird

    The free wifi war’s security edge in China | WantChinaTimes – interesting that Chinese internet companies are rolling out free wi-fi. Where does this leave the likes of China Mobile?

    The Athens Affair – IEEE Spectrum – anatomy of the Vodafone Greece hack. Very Snowden-esque

    Microsoft no longer Trustworthy | The Register – interesting that it is getting shut down, I suspect integrated is a better way of looking at it

    Wireless

    Apple – Press Info – First Weekend iPhone Sales Top 10 Million, Set New Record – take this with a pinch of salt may have something to do with not all markets being address which has driven demand and scarcity

  • Charlie Rose, Tim Cook, Apple and television

    Charlie Rose runs the a talk show. His show appears on the PBS network. His interviews give the public something new, without ruffling the feathers of the senior executives and celebrities that he has on his show. He is both inquisitor and coach like a defence lawyer interrogating his client at the stand. Rose studied law at Duke University.
    Charlie Rose / Ken Burns
    Charlie Rose is also one of the elite. His estranged wife is the sister of John Mack, the former chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley. His current partner is Amanda Burden. Burden’s father was an heir to the Standard Oil fortune, her first husband is related to the Vanderbilt family. Her second was the head of Warner Communications. Burden was the former chairman of the city planning commission under New York’s Mayor Bloomberg. Before being a journalist, Rose worked at Bankers Trust; and continued working there for a while whilst working as a reporter on the weekend.

    All this is why he has had access to all the titans of the technology sector, including Steve Jobs. So it made perfect sense that Tim Cook would sit down with him after the launch of Apple’s wearable products. Cook also used the opportunity to reiterate Apple’s new positioning on privacy that makes a virtue of the fact Apple isn’t an online advertising company.

    Despite being on PBS, Rose’s interviews gain respect and become media agenda setters in their own right. Similar to the way BBC Radio 4’s Today programme influences the UK political agenda.

    I found it interesting that Rose’s interview with Cook triggered so many news stories afterwards. I had at least one friend phone me to ask what I thought the significance was of Cook’s comments about television. Like me, they had been peppered with questions about when Apple’s transformation of TV was due?
    New Apple TV w/Flickr
    I found the interview of interest only because Apple executives rarely do interviews. The questions were a temperature check and update of ones Rose had asked Steve Jobs on a previous interview. The television industry comments Cook made Apple’s position in only one respect. They acknowledged that the Apple TV business is now a bit larger than a ‘hobby’. Steve Jobs called the Apple TV a hobby at AllThingsDigital four years ago. When Cook said TV was stuck in the 1970s; Jobs had said the same thing: the current TV business model squashed innovation. My understanding of news was that it was about events that were new, surprising or noteworthy. The commentary on TV was none of these things.

    The media took this to mean that Apple was going to do ‘something’. What they failed to pick up on was Cook’s comments later on where he talked about business focus. Steve Jobs had talked about all Apple’s product range could be fit on a desk, showing the level of company focus. In contrast to industry peers with thousands of SKUs (stock control units). Cook made the same comment about the entire Apple product range fitting on a desk in this interview. The people at Apple are smart enough to realise that lots of products and services are bad. But they will only address a few where they can make the most difference. (More Apple related content here).

    The media saw a hook and ran with it, psychologists would call it perceptual closure. There is a temptation with a company as private as Apple to write anything. There is also the pressure of producing enough content for online. This pressure can have a few outcomes:

    • A temptation to ‘chunk’ content without context to create more stories out of a given bit of information
    • Insufficient time to research how this content fits with past statements
    • No longer the same level of fact-checking that one would have seen at traditional publications like The New Republic (and even then they had Stephen Glass)

    More informtion
    Charlie Rose interview with Tim Cook part one
    Charlie Rose interview with Tim Cook part two
    Apple sets its sights on redesigning the TV after CEO Tim Cook describes it as being ‘stuck back in the Seventies’ | Mail Online
    Tim Cook Hints at Improvements for Apple TV in Charlie Rose Interview | NBC News
    Apple CEO Tim Cook talks to Charlie Rose about TV and why he bought Beats | Engadget
    Tim Cook Talks up Apple TV, Steve Jobs and the Future with Charlie Rose | Patently Apple
    Jobs: Apple TV a hobby because there’s no viable market | AppleInsider
    Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organisation | About.com
    Stephen Glass | Wikipedia

  • Yahoo stock + more things

    Yahoo Stock Crashes As Alibaba IPOs – Business Insider – Yahoo stock represents an ideal target to do an LBO and asset strip to pay down the debt. The challenge for shareholders of Yahoo stock is how to minimise

    Ashley Madison Steps Up Search For Asian PR Support | Holmes Report – they are banned in South Korea and Singapore. Thailand would likely be added to the list if Ashley Madison launched there

    Logistics: The flow of things | The Economist – explains why e-railers are building their own logistics networks (paywall)

    Dude, where are my socks? | the Anthill – great story about a small TaoBao reseller

    Bits Blog: Net Neutrality Comments to F.C.C. Overwhelmingly One-Sided, Study Says | New York Times – paywall

    Apple – Privacy – interesting that Apple didn’t do this sooner

    Peter Thiel Says Computers Haven’t Made Our Lives Significantly Better | MIT Technology Review – Peter Thiel often comes across as a bit of a dick but is right on the money with regards the lack of hard innovation and excess of soft innovation

    Single Chinese company owns 60% of world market for tantalum | WantChinaTimes – which is really important for electronics manufacture

    Move over Hong Kong, here comes…Chengdu? | SCMP – huge economic growth in Chengdu which is viewed as an important city due to its proximity to the western edges of China which are the current high growth areas

    Smartphone stress in Coolpad cuts, China Mobile ‘naked’ strategy | SCMP – bottom end of market suffering with Coolpad laying off 1,000 employees

    Why news extortion is so hard to uncover | China Media Project – not just a Chinese problem, look at the uncomfortable aspects of media power with NewsCorp / News Int’l

    Clamshells Gets Smart | CSS Insight – could we see a return of clamshell devices?

    Facebook Is Hiding Important Information – Business Insider – nothing new pointing out yet again that mobile app adverts count for a significant amount of their revenue sales

  • Swytch & others at Mobile Monday demo night

    I just got back from Mobile Monday’s demo night ran at the Thistle Marble Arch featuring Swytch, Quiztix, Mylo, Viewmaker, Pronto and Adsy. This evening’s event used the facilities of an Informa-ran telecoms conference: Service Delivery Innovation Summit. I missed the start of the event so my notes probably miss part of the applications on display.

    Swytch – multiple mobile numbers on an application, these numbers could be different country codes and not only allowed calls but messages too. The Swytch application is basically a VoIP client rather than a soft SIM. There are other similar services especially in Africa, at the moment the founders think that their USP is the provision of access multiple UK mobile numbers, but I am not sure Swytch is  defensible. I don’t want to even go there with potential use cases

    Quiztix – Q&A game on both Android and iOS, because of its focus on venues as a metaphor for different game levels a couple of people were interested in reskinning it for brands. The most interesting thing for me was the way that they used advertisements to level-up within the game – increasing ad engagement.

    Mylo – was a classic millenial application that helped facilitate splitting bills in house share. The application collects billing data from suppliers including Sky. Ovo Energy. Payment of one’s share could be done by PayPal. They admitted that at the moment they had no business model.

    ViewMaker – location-enabled AR application that allowed a user to show & publish geotagged content. The business focus was to be infrastructure for other application or brands who wanted to publish their own data. They didn’t currently have a plan to overlay information from other sources such as Foursquare, Flickr or Google Maps at moment. One thing surprised me in the Q&A session was that clients not interested in indoor positioning yet.

    Pronto – A Deliverance-type food service with some key differences. Instead of it being a web interface, Pronto relies on GPS for location. Secondly they have a really simple menu, in order to allow two-second ordering and swifter delivery. The menu doesn’t change very often which is great if you are an ‘eat to live’ person. The application recently launched in Italy and is coming to London soon. Apparently a reliable set of delivery drivers is a problem because of the piece rate / zero-hour contract nature of the work they aren’t necessarily as reliable to showing up as one would like.

    Adsy  is mobile or PC platform to create mobile applications that reminded me of a  simple HyperCard set – but no scripting for fuller functinoality. They are handy for building catalogues, or a card-based personal site and can be embedded like a Slideshare or YouTube clip.  It was deliberately kept simple and non-technical to appeal to teens – which was interesting given that most CMOs think of teens as master hackers…

    IFS – IFS has its own innovation lab and they demonstrated a working prototype of wearables driving business efficiencies – business notifications to wearables, logistics etc from ERP system. Think of a smart watch as a pager. I think that most of the interesting aspects of this was the connectivity with the legacy systems. Given the current lack of compelling use cases for smart watches this could be interesting due to the provision of glance-able data.

    OpenTRV – TRV is a thermostatic radiator valve. They wished to use technology to control temperature localised within a house radiator by radiator. The current model by the likes of Nest or Honeywell relying on one centralised thermostat per house controlling a boiler was considered to be a broken model. They are aiming to lower the cost of their smart TRV 10 pounds per unit.

    More wireless related content here.

  • Digital PR report (in the UK)

    The PRCA have put together a digital PR report for the UK market in association with YouGov and the Holmes Report. The report made for interesting reading and raised some questions in my own mind about the industry.

    The main challenge raised by the panelists interviewed by the Holmes Report was one of agencies spreading themselves to wide in terms of a service offering. I think that this is about knowing when to partner and when to do it in agency. They flagged training as a secondary issue; I have done training in a number of agencies and found that the issue was having teams be able to implement their knowledge in a timely manner.

    Back to the digital PR report:

    Considering that the digital PR report was both agencyside and inhouse the sample size could be bigger. I suspect that the sample skewed towards business-to-business sectors looking at the answers later on. I suspect that the total digital marketing spend was bigger than the figures quoted simply because it probably happens outside the sphere of the communications department interviewed in these surveys.

    A smaller majority of respondents struggled to measure the ROI of social, but majority of respondents also said that their goals for social were ‘general marketing’, brand awareness and reach. This would be harder to wrap SMART objectives around to measure the activity against. Perhaps it is a mistake that so many in-house teams were defining social strategies? For business-to-business clients that I work with marketing automation tools are being looked to, in order to provide the ‘last mile’ in attribution and ROI for tactics that would fall under digital PR.

    I was surprised that 74% of respondents felt that the communications department was the first choice for digital tactical activity. I would have expected a stronger showing from marketers, this may be skewed by the sample. Part of the reason for my surprise is that many of the tactics used in digital PR would fall under search and digital marketing disciplines; we’ve hit a singularity in marketing and the roles and responsibilities could get messy. The numbers suggested a rise in the number of organisations with dedicated social teams; which was closer to my hypothesis.

    Looking at in-house needs versus agency offerings I was very conscious of the fact that search seems to have largely passed the PR industry by; except when it comes to ‘online reputation management’ and ‘digital crisis management’. Whilst agencies think that digital is going to be a massive source of revenue, there seems to be be a reallignment of figures required as more inhouse teams get on with it without agency help.

    In terms of branching out into future platforms I was surprised to see Instagram rank so highly for what feels like largely business-to-business respondents. I can only assume that Google+ was considered a future platform as this survey could have been conducted prior to Google recently moving away from attaching content authorship to Google+ profiles. In terms of training requirements, web design and build is probably something that should be provided by a professional rather than training PRs to have a go. Whilst intelligent, generally PR people aren’t that visual in their thinking (despite what they may say, the proof of the pudding is in the multitude of pitch decks that I have seen over the past 16 years or so).

    More information
    Study: Digital Skills Gap Poses Challenge For UK PR Firms | Holmes Report