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.

  • Is Brexit bad for Europe + more

    Judy Asks: Is Brexit Bad for Europe? – Carnegie Europe – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – interesting take on Brexit from a US perspective. Is Brexit bad for Europe focuses on the EUs role on the world stage including regional and global security. According to my reading of Is Brexit bad for Europe there looks to be opportunities to grow in defence research and development and upgrade the economic performance of the EUs smaller nations.

    5G Deployment State of Play in Europe, USA and Asia | European Parliament ITRE Committee – interesting snapshot on 5G adoption across the EU (PDF)

    Microsoft worked with Chinese military university on artificial intelligence | Financial Times – US worried about dual use of the technology (paywall)

    Toyota will put Tundra, Tacoma trucks on a single platform, report says – Roadshow – interesting that Toyota is embracing the Volkswagen Group approach to vehicle engineering. I didn’t realise that Toyota no longer sells the Hilux in the US, apparently its because it isn’t big enough

    Panda TV’s demise makes way for gaming giant Tencent to dominate live streaming too | SCMP – China’s Twitch goes under, leaving Tencent to dominate live streaming too. This reinforces the oligarchy running China’s online sector from financial services and e-tailing to gaming and media

    DJ Craze: “Sync is your friend… embrace technology” – News – Mixmag – wow, controversial. This is the reformation of the DJ world. The problem with these things is that once people know the button is there new DJs will skip the valuable learning process of beat mixing

    Facebook ‘morally bankrupt pathological liars’, says NZ privacy commissioner – AdNews – 5 I’s pattern starting to emerge on Facebook. You take this stance with the UK’s proposal to treat social networks as publishers and Australia’s daft views on crypto. There are lots of reasons to criticise Facebook, but this isn’t one of them. Instead its cynical pandering to the populist political peanut gallery. More related content here.

  • Automata Eve launch

    Automata Eve launched the other week and I got to go along to their headquarters just off the Pentonville Road to find out more.

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    Automata Eve first impressions

    At £5,000, the Automata Eve sits at a weird place in robot manufacture. It’s an expensive hobby device or a lightweight industrial product. Automata freely admitted that they sit somewhere between the £1,500 hobbyist kits and starter industrial models that are £20,000+ excluding arm tools, programmable control units and everything else required.

    Automata Eve human friendly product design reminded me a bit of early Apple Macs. Their very product design sophistication made them look like ‘toys’ in the eyes of IT departments. Automata’s Eve is an equally polished appliance as robot and it might take a bit more effort to have it taken seriously in light industrial roles.

    Eve even has a lopsided Picasso-esque face with two buttons on the top of the arm in a vertical manner.

    Untitled

    Maybe it needs a different colour palette of heavy plant yellow or yellow and black diagonal stripes better telegraph its industrial credentials.

    The shadow of Brexit

    Brexit afflicted sectors such as food preparation seem to be some of the people who have started to explore using Automata and rivals already. The companies realise that it will hard to get further workers from the likes of Stoke on Trent or Sunderland working on sandwich production lines. Robots are part of their plans to replace labour who decide to leave the UK. Automata assemble their robots in the UK, but their supply chain partners are half way around the world in Asia.

    Pain is the mother of invention

    The founders story reminded me a lot of the way that machine learning projects have historically been sold into clients by creative, digital and advertising agencies.

    They used to work for Zaha Hadid Architects and had used algorithmic design. This gave Hadid’s work abstract yet organic lines. So when they were looking to use a series of interlocking panels, they expected that these could be mass-made and bent by robotics.

    A bit like strategy and client services teams in agencies they over-estimated the capability of technology; in their case industrial robotics.

    That plan didn’t go too well. Which got them interested in why there weren’t light industrial robotics. A good number of years later and the Automata Eve was born.

    Industry robotics industry structure

    What really surprised me was how industrial robots essentially use the same components and innovation tends to happen in the software instead. For instance industrial robots use a compact way of strain wave gearing.

    Only a few companies make the components. This means that the industry is very horizontally structured like the PC or smartphone industries relationship between processor and software manufacturers.

    Robots are already accurate enough to get rid of workers who don’t care

    One of the case studies used in the presentation was about an industrial electronics company who replaced a human work station that did some pretty basic soldering.

    For reasons that one could assume to be a lack of work ethic. By contrast Foxconn, seems to have failed in its efforts of using robots for smartphone assembly. The reason is that they require a high degree of dexterity, rather like a watch maker. Robots still struggle with very accurate placement, but a lot of low volume manufacturing tasks don’t necessarily need the same level of accuracy.

  • A Shadow Intelligence by Oliver Harris

    I was given a galley copy of A Shadow Intelligence to read.

    TLDR: version of my review is that its a thoroughly modern spy thriller.

    The protagonist Elliot Kane is a British intelligence officer who has returned from Saudi Arabia to London. He is sent a video of himself in a room that he’s never been talking to a man that he doesn’t know. Harris takes the reader on a spy story that takes place in the Central Asian republics between China and Russia.

    It is a thoroughly modern book:

    • Addressing the confluence of interests between government and businesses going abroad that had long driven policy and actions in Africa and the Middle East. But is now driving along the Silk Road with the expansion of China’s Belt & Road Initiative and the quest for oil and mining
    • Privatisation of military, cyber and intelligence capabilities. We know have a private intelligence and military industrial complex. Edward Snowden worked for Booz Allen & Hamilton. Palantir do data analysis for intelligence, as does Detica for the UK. SCL Group ran outsourced psychological warfare programmes for western militaries and supported political interference in the developing world
    • Technology including modern information warfare over social media channels, fake news and deep fake videos. Even pretty crude efforts at the moment drive effective disinformation campaigns, deep fake video and audio completely undermines what the nature of truth is.

    Kane comes across as a jaded, human bookish character more George Smiley than James Bond. Harris did his research really well. He brings alive the locations and the main characters.

    If I had one criticism it would be that the end felt a bit rushed, rather like the author was trying to exceed a word count. Despite this I am happy recommending A Shadow Intelligence as a good leisure read. More book reviews here.

  • China is the big winner + more things

    China is the big winner from Europe’s Brexit chaos – which is probably why the UK will get a shitty deal in phase II. China is the big winner because:

    • It ensures its inbound investment into the UK becomes more important. China can have more influence and spend less money proportionally than they had to do before
    • It weakens the EU a bit, in particular amplifying the power of just two partners in the bloc: France and Germany. It means that the northern bloc including the Netherlands has less of a voice in the union creating opportunity for division
    • European power projection is reduced. As is European soft power
    • China is the big winner, but Russia also has similar benefits on a smaller scale

    More on Brexit here.

    McDonalds acquires Israeli company Dynamic Yield | Silicon Angle – really interesting purchase by McDonalds

    Naspers to Separate Tencent Stake, Web Assets in Dutch Listing – Bloomberg – this is just the kind of listing one would have expected in London

    Michael Avenatti charged for attempted extortion of Nike – Business Insider – interesting how a celebrity level lawyer is on the end of this case

    The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2019 | Fast Company – interesting how APAC companies are at the very top

    LOEWE on Instagram: “When @danielnorris18 is not playing baseball, he loves to climb into his van and hit the open road. Wearing the new #EYELOEWENATURE…” – interesting where Loewe is going with this campaign, crossing the lines between sports marketing, streetwear and luxury

    Materials science is helping to transform China into a high-tech economy – technique-wise very similar to the west. Back over 20 years ago we weren’t using brute force in the labs I worked in but computer-assisted formulations. You did some trials, put the results in. Put in the desired results and then the computer worked to bring you towards an optional formulation using fourier analysis

    Pinterest’s IPO filing, annotated – Digiday – nicely put together if no suprises, worthwhile as a reference / 101

  • Ken Kocienda on software

    Interesting talk with Ken Kocienda, covering his experience on product management and software design at Apple. Kocienda was a software engineer at Apple during Steve Jobs second time as CEO. Kocienda has since written a book – Creative Selection about his experiences.

    Interesting bits include:

    • Apple’s approach to open source in 2001. Apple looked at licensing and building their own software, but felt that open source was the right thing to do. Especially when it was the responsibility of a team of two to build a browser. Netscape was built for 20 different platforms, in that respect the Apple team had an easier time. KDE Conqueror had to only be moved from Linux to the Mac.
    • The role of demos in Apple’s development process. Safari was built with a stop watch because the brief was to deliver the best experience to customers. Speed was the differentiator that Ken Kocienda and the team locked on to very quickly. Dial up usage at the start of the development made page load time critical. A page load test was used on builds to ensure that there was no speed regression, build on build. At launch Safari was three times faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer for the Mac. Demos were done on a regular basis to demonstrate strength and potential of a project as its built.
    • Importance of focus. Apple doesn’t ship a lot of products (compared to rivals). Essentially the Mac line-up is four products laptop and desktop, consumer and professional. Because of the focus, it allowed the management to keep tabs on how the software doing.
    • The concept of a “Directly Responsible Individual”. Team formation and building was important part of culture. Top down leadership and bottom up contributions. The vision was very clearly communicated.
    • The role of whimsy and playfulness in designing software

    More on Apple here.