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.

  • iPod SSD

    iPod SSD

    Trawling eBay gives access to a cottage industry of predominantly China-based suppliers of the iPod SSD. They take iPod Classics and remanufacture them. They get new cases and new batteries and a new drive.

    SSD

    The real trick is in the new component put in the device. Out goes the Toshiba micro-hard drive of 120GB or 160GB and in goes a 256GB SSD. Apple had abandoned production of the iPod Classic because it couldn’t get the right parts any more. Technology had moved on and flash memory had replaced micro hard drive’s as storage technology of choice for portable consumer devices.
    iPod ClassicSwapping out the hard drive for an SSD provides an iPod with a number of advantages:

    • The iPod SSD is a third lighter than Apple’s version of the iPod Classic. This changes dynamics in usage. It no longer has the same heft, you feel less conscious of it in a pocket or jacket
    • The battery lasts longer. I now get about 30 hours of listening from the iPod SSD. By comparison I get 18 hours out of my smartphone. If I used the smartphone as a music player as well, that battery time would drop further. If I used a streaming service, that would sound worse, hammer the battery life and mobile phone bill even further
    • It holds more music. At 256GB up from 160GB in the last model of iPod Classic it makes the difference between being able to hold all of my music library with me or not. You don’t have Spotify when you have 15,000+ tracks to choose from
    • The same great iPod experience. iTunes still syncs with the device. It has a good quality DAC (digital-to-analogue convertor) chip. With the right headphones and a sufficiently high sample rate it is indistinguishable from CDs. Under normal circumstances it sounds better your typical smartphone – which is trying to do lots of job well
    • It is quieter than the original iPod Classic. There is no longer the noise of a hard drive spinning up and reading the music data from the disk
    • Vigorous movement is not a problem. Apple had done a good job with the original iPod Classic songs were cached in RAM to iron out temporary stoppages due to movement affecting the hard disk. An SSD had no moving parts so it isn’t an issue any more

    What becomes apparent is that Apple wouldn’t have had to make that much effort to make the product itself, but for no known reason it didn’t want to.

    I suspect that part of this is down to:

    • The law of big numbers. The iPod Classic revamped in this way would be a decent business for most companies, but just isn’t as big as Apple is used to
    • A modified iPod probably too simple a design solution. Apple likes to take a big step forward (even when it doesn’t) – there are no plaudits or design awards in an iPod Classic with a solid state drive

    The reimagined iPod is a development in sharp contrast to Apple’s new product developments:

    • Loved products bought by key Apple advocates have not been updated or ignored: the Mac Pro and the Apple Display (which Apple has abandoned)
    • Moving out of entry level products. With the MacBook Pro and MacBook line-ups, the entry device is now a secondhand laptop rather than the 11″ MacBook Air or the non-Retina MacBook Pro
    • Big bets that aren’t resonating with the marketplace: the Apple Watch has been a best selling smart watch; but is in a category which lacks a compelling reason to purchase. The iPad is a passive content consumption device for most consumers. It has a replacement cycle that would be more familiar to television manufacturers than a computer company

    More related posts here.

  • Stone Island + more things

    Stone Island

    Arco Maher’s video lookbook for Stone Island via Dazed & Confused. With the book Maher and Stone Island are trying to draw a clear line between the Milan Paninaro sub-culture of the 1980s and urban British youth. There are clear parallels for Stone Island to draw on: conspicuous consumption, international orientation love of club related music. However the Paninaro look itself now has faded into staples of street style so is no longer distinct. Also Stone Island earned itself an unenviable reputation as the clothing of football casuals in the UK. A Stone Island top was enough to get you barred from many establishments.

    Halifax

    This Cheesy, 1980s Promotional Video for a Northern Nightclub is UK Nightlife’s Finest Hour | Thump – OMG was the first thing that sprung out of my mouth watching this. I spent a good deal of my university time in Halifax working part-time as a market research analyst. This early 1980s glamour is so faraway from what the town was when I was there. The video reminds of Fitzcarraldo; bringing culture and class to an otherwise inhospitable place for their endeavour.

    The Webbys

    The Webby Awards have a good Instagram account. This quote from Iain Tait stood out for me. Is it about agencies, the metaphysics of quality or both – you decide.

     

    A photo posted by The Webby Awards (@thewebbyawards) on

    BMW films

    BMW Films have returned, its a 13 minute feature film. Jon Bernthal plays the foil to Clive Owen in a role that is eerily similar to the look and feel of The Accountant. I wasn’t impressed with him on his outing as The Punisher on Daredevil, but if he keeps this up – he could work on the standalone series if Marvel gave it the go-ahead.

    Start up stock tracker

    The Startup Stock Tracker – WSJ.com – based on secondary market value (don’t expect an update every 15 minutes)

  • Republic of Samsung + more

    Republic of Samsung

    Galaxy Note 7 Recall Dismays South Korea, the ‘Republic of Samsung’ – NYTimes.com – interesting how attached Korean people are to the Samsung brand. Samsung represents over 20 percent of Korean GDP and the Korean stock market – hence the Republic of Samsung. The Republic of Samsung has a wide reach in Korea. You can shop at Samsung, go to a Samsung Lions baseball game, pay for petrol to put in your Renault Samsung SUV with a Samsung Card. And go for an appointment in a Samsung hospital where you can be prescribed Samsung medicine.

    Samsung can censor the media by withdrawing its media spend. They stop negative books by pointing out that the publisher could face legal action and a lack of Samsung retail distribution. The Republic of Samsung owes its rise to former President Park who put in place the chaebol system to drive the Korean economic miracle at the end of the 1960s. The Republic of Samsung success is mirrored by the likes of LG, Lotte and Hyundai.

    Samsung ‘blocks’ exploding Note 7 parody videos – BBC News – if it wasn’t a PR train wreck before. It also reinforces how the Republic of Samsung nickname has value. Like India’s Tata, Samsung is almost like a country within a country.

    Business

    LeEco Who? Chinese Tech Giant Tries Its Luck In the US With ‘More Products Than You’ve Ever Seen’ – Slashdot – what about patents / intellectual property?

    Starbucks pushes ahead with China expansion | Marketing Interactive – interesting that they are going big in the face of declining economic growth

    Economics

    As Chinese Incomes Rise, So Does Pollution | The New Republic – it was a similar state in the UK and US during the industrial revolution. Super Fund sites would have looked familiar to the Chinese. That’s what industrially driven progress looks, smells and tastes like

    History tells us where the wealth gap leads | Aeon Essays – really interesting read

    Brexit could be halted after Government admits that MPs likely to have final say | The Independent – It raised the prospect, at the very least, that MPs and peers could amend the Brexit deal if they opposed key elements of the impact on trade, immigration or other areas. However, it could also mean Britain tumbling out of the EU – probably in early 2019 – with no deal whatsoever.

    Finance

    How One Goldman Sachs Trader Made More Than $100 Million – WSJ – junk bond trading (part of the 1980s making a return)

    Hong Kong

    Move over K-Pop: desperately seeking an international cultural icon made in Hong Kong | This Week In Asia | South China Morning Post – how does Hong Kong claim is place on the international cultural stage?

    7-Eleven, McDonald’s, Circle K … Google launches Android Pay at 5,000 Hong Kong locations | South China Morning Post – way behind WeChat and ApplePay and Octopus card

    Ireland

    Kenny: Suggestion of EC probe into Ireland ‘wrong’ | RTE – Irish Times report stirred the hornets nest

    Japan

    How I started my company in Japan | Danny Choo – really interesting read

    Luxury

    Saving the Swiss Watch Industry—Again – Bloomberg – I think this is over egged this time. The big challenges is that there is less growth globally and so less luxury purchases. The prestige brands will be fine, the mid-market Tissot and the like will have problems

    Marketing

    72andSunny Launches Social Media Influencer Division | AdWeek – it makes complete sense as ad agencies need content to amplify via paid and interact with via multi-channel story telling. It also shows how porous the walls of public relations as a discipline have been eroded

    Media

    The New York Times is buying The Wirecutter for more than $30 million – Recode – The Times will pay more than $30 million, including retention bonuses and other payouts, for the startup, according to people familiar with the transaction – so in reality less than 30 million but still a great result for Brian Lam and the team

    Yahoo to Clapper: Global, Global, Beyond our Borders, Global | Emptywheel – basically Verizon will likely look to write off the value of Yahoo!’s European businesses as they are likely to go through a legal grinder. US government likely to get kicking by EU

    Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking | Propublica – Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome make this particularly interesting

    Retailing

    Hong Kong lifestyle retailer accuses competition of copying design of his shop | SCMP – interesting area for IP, what about retailers that transplant formats (Yo! Sushi etc)

    Security

    AT&T Spying on Americans for Profit, New Documents Reveal | Daily Beast – The telecom giant is doing NSA-style work for law enforcement—without a warrant—and earning millions of dollars a year from taxpayers

    The Decline in Chinese Cyberattacks: The Story Behind the Numbers | Technology Review – or just taking liberties that could be then easily bargained away to create the illusion of a win

    Every LTE call, text, can be intercepted, blacked out, hacker finds • The Register – Ruxcon Hacker Wanqiao Zhang of Chinese hacking house Qihoo 360 has blown holes in 4G LTE networks by detailing how to intercept and make calls, send text messages and even force phones offline

    GitHub – DaylightingSociety/WhereAreTheEyes: Surveillance Detection and Mapping App – interesting move that would be of value to the surveilled and the watchers

    Technology

    What is Dolby Vision? | Electronics EETimes – high dynamic range video

    Homeless on Stockholm’s silicon slopes – POLITICO – with the implication that they prefer refugees over technical talent

    Batteries May Trip ‘Death Spiral’ in $3.4 Trillion Credit Market – Bloomberg – of course this doesn’t seem to take into account the finite supply of lithium and rising cost of the metal…

    IBM claims moving to Mac drastically reduced support calls, operating costs | ExtremeTech – ironically over 20 years ago Arthur D Little Consulting did a report on this (sponsored by Apple) that showed exactly the same thing. The more things change, the more they stay the same

    Fed-Up Belichick Takes Screen Out of His Arsenal. (The Hand-Held One.) – The New York Times – not great for Microsoft’s Surface, its sponsorship of the NFL seems to be starting to come undone

    Microsoft kinda did OK this quarter – but whatever, Wall Street loves Satya Nadella – this is as much PR as financial results. Don’t get me wrong its good for Microsoft, but it shows how Ballmer was dogged by shitty PR – the Nokia decision notwithstanding

    Web of no web

    My first virtual reality groping | Mic – why should we be surprised that VR mirrors the best and worst of real life?

    Twitter Fires Its New Head of VR After Two Days | Gizmodo – where was the due diligence in the hiring process?

    Wireless

    Xiaomi is selling the concept phone of your wildest dreams – The Verge – impressive design, it will be interesting to see if it can take the crown back in China from Huawei and Oppo

    Huawei Mate 9 to sport 4X optical zoom, cost up to $1300 | Phonearena – trying to use ridiculous pricing to develop a perception of quality

    Sky’s CEO drops MVNO bombshell at results conference | The Register – I already thought Sky had a triple play, the way they presented their multi-screen entertainment offering Sky Q, it will be interesting to see if they roll this out to other countries beyond the UK

    KODAK EKTRA – Main | Kodak – this looks like a better camera orientated smartphone than the Huawei P9 or LG’s collaboration with Hasselblad

    Qualcomm Announces New X50 5G Modem, First Gigabit Class LTE Network and Router | Anandtech – we don’t know exactly how it is all going to work out; but Qualcomm has a modem for it anyway

  • Leatherman + more news

    Leatherman

    Origin Of Leatherman: The Road From Start-Up To Mega-Brand – great interview with Tim Leatherman. The development of Leatherman cam out of an unmet need. But what was of particular interest was how Gerber Knives went from Leatherman supplier to competitor by looking at the Leatherman production orders. There’s a lesson from Leatherman for globalised brands using ODM firms in places like China.

    Business

    Samsung Targeted by U.S. Activist Elliott Urging Separation – Bloomberg – interesting move, launched just as the Lee family transitions a leadership handover. Basically, break things up, and allow American activist investors to tear your business to pieces. Part of wider trend where technology is now viewed as value rather than growth stocks

    Consumer behaviour

    Loving Our Phones May Come At A Physical Price | Buzzfeed – not terribly surprising when you think about it

    Economics

    Spotify is causing a major problem for economists – Business Insider – surely the same as services? – HSBC global economist James Pomeroy recently published a fascinating paper that looks at this question. “The rise of the digital natives” argues that the increase in digital services like Spotify — and Apple and Google and Facebook and Amazon and on and on — put downward pressure on prices and inflation.

    Finance

    WSJ City – Woodford: Investors Face Short-Termist Pressures – Neil Woodford’s criticisms remind me a lot of Will Hutton’s The State We’re In. The key difference is that Woodford seems a bit suspect (paywall)

    FMCG

    McDonald’s Celebrates 26th Birthday in China | Whats on Weibo – great WeChat and Weibo brand marketing case studies from What’s On Weibo. McDonald’s is very well known, but is surpassed in Chinese success by KFC.

    How to

    Foundations of Data Science by Blum, Hopcroft & Kannan | Cornell University – (PDF)

    Use iMessage apps on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch – Apple Support – not the most intuitive process, quite easy to miss the whole app store process

    Ideas

    Nabeel Hyatt on Silicon Valley innovation vs invention – Business Insider – and herein lies why China and other countries are able to dial-down silicon valley’s halo and make the bay area look more like Detroit-in-waiting

    Photos: How Tools Start a Revolution | Learning By Shipping – iPhone (or any other smartphone) is not the bokeh you were looking for

    Media

    Shazam’s CEO Talks 1 Billion App Downloads And The Future Of The Brand | Forbes – a billion downloads to get to profitability…

    Verizon reportedly wants $1 billion discount on Yahoo | VentureBeat – expect more things to come out before this fight ends. It was inevitable that Verizon would revisit the value as this would affect many younger tech savvy Yahoo! customers

    Bloomberg Announces New Multiplatform Brand for Tech News | Adweek – interesting that much faster page load times is pulled out as a key differentiator

    Yahoo! rebrands its main app as Yahoo Newsroom, lets you post your own news links | TechCrunch – a mix of Metro style tiles and Apples News app, I don’t think that this will be a success as there are similar services with longer traction. The ironic thing is that these are newsreaders are still using RSS on the back end. The window dressing has changed, but the importance of RSS / Atom hasn’t

    Viceland UK scores zero ratings on some nights after Sky TV launch | The Guardian – I’d seen these numbers the previous week, but its not a good narrative for Vice. I suspect the problem is being on Sky given the propensity for cord cutting

    Online

    Introducing Marketplace: Buy and Sell with Your Local Community | Facebook Newsroom – second (or third) time lucky?

    Retailing

    Amazon bans incentivized reviews tied to free or discounted products | TechCrunch – this is going to have an impact on influencer relations by PR agencies

    Security

    Yahoo Disputes Report on E-Mail Scanning for U.S. Government – Bloomberg – ‘non-denial’ denial

    Yahoo Slams Email Surveillance Story: Experts Demand Details | Threatpost – would you believe Yahoo!’s denials? But how could they adequately disprove it now, the FBI and NSA won’t help them

    The Hacking of Yahoo – Schneier on Security – “state-sponsored actor” is often code for “please don’t blame us for our shoddy security because it was a really sophisticated attacker and we can’t be expected to defend ourselves against that.” – this might be Marissa Mayer‘s leadership legacy at Yahoo!

    Delete Your Yahoo Account | The Intercept – Yahoo program seems “in some ways more problematic and broader” than previously revealed NSA bulk surveillance programs like PRISM or Upstream collection efforts. “It’s hard to think of an interpretation” of the Reuters report, he explained, “that doesn’t mean Yahoo isn’t being asked to scan all domestic communications without a warrant” or probable cause. – It probably won’t impact Yahoo!’s core active audience of techno-neophytes, but it does nuke any fantasy Verizon had of growing the user base

    Exclusive: Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence – sources | Reuters – expect more dirty laundry to drop

    Software

    WeChat’s world | The Economist – a boisterous four-year-old living in Shanghai, is what marketing people call a digital native. Over a year ago, she started communicating with her parents using WeChat, a Chinese mobile-messaging service. She is too young to carry around a mobile phone. Instead she uses a Mon Mon, an internet-connected device that links through the cloud to the WeChat app – its a WeChat world, the other technology companies are just copying their innovation

    Behind The Crash Of 3D Robotics, North America’s Most Promising Drone Company – it’s just going to be inherently much more difficult for a Silicon Valley-based, software-focused company to compete against vertically integrated powerhouse manufacturing company in China

    Apple Said to Plan Improved Cloud Services by Unifying Teams – Bloomberg – I wonder what the implications could be for product leaks? Or are services an area of less concern?

    Microsoft’s bot platform is more popular than Facebook’s among developers | VentureBeat – interesting, though this might change with Facebook for Work

    Technology

    Encouraged by Apple, Sharp invests in OLED production equipment | Electronics EETimes – also managed to get some interesting tech that improves VR experience

    Sharp’s IGZO Display Makes Dots Invisible for VR | Nikkei TechOn – and Apple is looking to dial up production of OLEDs by buying from Sharp….

    Wireless

    Google’s 24/7 live support for the Pixel phones comes complete with screen sharing | Android Police – interesting step up in customer services, presumably what was required to get them into Verizon

    Source: Huawei passed on chance to produce Pixel phones, US division badly struggling | Android Police – big issues across handset business in US, interesting that they cleaned out the Honor marketing team despite them being the best performers. This is likely to create motivation issues moving forwards

  • Danger Hiptop

    Thinking about the Danger HIptop

    When I was reflecting on the Danger Hiptop I was reminded of an article which talked about the collective memory of London’s financial district being about eight years or so. Financiers with beautifully crafted models in Excel would be doomed to make the same mistake as their predecessors.

    Marketers make the same mistakes, not being able to draw on the lines of universal human behaviour when it meets technology. Today’s obsession with the ‘dark social’ of OTT messaging platforms is very reminiscent of the culture that grew up around the Danger Hiptop. The  Hiptop drove a use of instant messaging platforms (Yahoo!, Aol and MSN) in a similar way to today’s use of Kik, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp by young people.

    Heritage

    Danger was started back in 1999, by veterans from Apple, Philips and WebTV.

    Back then mobile data was very primitive, email was slow and the only people I knew who used mobile data on a regular basis were press photographers, sending images back from early digital SLRs using a laptop connected up to their phone. At this time it was still sometimes easier to bike images over. 3G wireless was on the horizon, but there wasn’t a clear use case.

    Apple was not the force it is now, but recovering from a near death experience. The iMac, blue and white G3 tower units and ‘Wall Street’ laptops reignited belief in core customers. Mac OSX Server 1.0 was released in March that year and pointed to the potential that future Macs would have.

    WebTV at the time was a company that felt like it was at the apex of things. Before the internet took off, companies like Oracle and BT had tried providing interactive TV services including CD ROM type experiences and e-commerce in a walled garden environment. This was based on having a thin client connected to a TV as monitor. WebTV took that idea and built upon the internet of the mid-1990s. It wasn’t appreciated how commoditised the PC market would become over time. They were acquired by Microsoft in 1997,  later that year they would also buy Hotmail.

    At the time, Philips was a force to be reckoned with in consumer electronics and product design. The company had a diverse portfolio of products and a reputation for unrewarded innovation including the compact cassette, interactive CD media and audio compact discs. Philips was the company that the Japanese wanted to beat and Samsung still made third-rate televisions.

    Some of them were veterans of a failed start-up called General Magic that had spun out of Apple. A technology super-team of engineers and developers came up with a wireless communicator device that failed in the market place.  It’s name became a byword for a failed start-up years later.  Talent was no predictor of success. General Magic was the silicon valley equivalent of Manchester United getting relegated and going bankrupt in a single season. So it is understandable that they may have been leery of making yet another wireless device.

    The device

    The Danger Hiptop was unapologetically a data first device. It was a thick device with a sliding screen which revealed a full keyboard and four-way directional button to move the cursor. On later devices this became a trackball. The screen was a then giant 240 x 160 pixels in size. It became available in colour during the device’s second iteration, later devices had a screen that was 854 pixels wide.

    I was large enough provide a half decent browsing experience, read and write messages and email. It was held in landscape arrangement and the chunky frame worked well in a two handed hold not that different from a games console controller, with thumb based typing which worked better than the BlackBerry keyboard for me.  Early devices allowed you to move around the screen with four-way rocker switch. Later devices had a trackball. This keyboard rather than touchscreen orientation made sense for two reasons:

    • Touchscreen were much less responsive than they are now
    • It enabled quick fire communication in comparison to today’s virtual smartphone keyboard

    Once the device went colour it also started to have LEDs that lit up for ringing and notifications, providing the kind of visual cues enjoyed by Palm and BlackBerry owners.

    The Hiptop had a small (even by Symbian standards) amount of apps, but these were held in an app store. At the time, Symbian had signed apps as a precaution against malware, but you would usually download the apps from the maker’s website or the likes of download.com or TUCOWS and then side load on to the device from a Mac or PC.

    The Hiptop didn’t need the mediation of a computer, in this respect it mirrored the smartphones of today.

    Product life

    When Danger was launched in 2002, carriers had much more sway over consumers. The user experience of devices was largely governed by carriers who usually made a mess of it. They decided what the default applications on a device and even the colour scheme of the default appearance theme.

    The slow rise of the Danger Hiptop to popularity was because it had a limited amount of channels per market. In the UK it was only available via T-Mobile (now EE).

    In the US, the Hiptop became a cult item primarily because IM had grown in the US in a similar way to SMS usage in Europe.

    Many carriers viewed Hiptop as a competitor to BlackBerry and refused to carry it in case it would cannibalise sales.

    Danger was acquired in 2008 and that is pretty much when the death of the Hiptop set in as Microsoft acquired the team to build something different. An incident with the Danger data centres losing consumers data and taking two months to restore full service from a month-old back-up didn’t help things. It was a forewarning of how dependent on cloud services that users would become.

    Danger held much user data and functionality in the cloud, at the time it made sense as it kept the hardware cheaper. Danger devices came with a maximum of 2GB internal memory.

    Even if Microsoft hadn’t acquired Danger, the Danger would have been challenged by the rise of both Android and iOS. Social platforms like Facebook would have offered both an opportunity and a challenge to existing messenger relationships. Finally the commoditisation of hardware would have made it harder for the Hiptop to differentiate on value for its millennial target market. More gadget related posts here.