Ged Carroll

Category: gadget | 小工具 | 가제트 | ガジェット

What constitutes a gadget? The dictionary definition would be a small mechanical or electronic device or tool, especially an ingenious or novel one.

When I started writing this blog the gadget section focused on personal digital assistants such as the Palm PDA and Sony’s Clie devices. Or the Anoto digital pen that allowed you to record digitally what had been written on a specially marked out paper page, giving the best of both experiences.

Some of the ideas I shared weren’t so small like a Panasonic sleeping room for sleep starved, but well heeled Japanese.

When cutting edge technology failed me, I periodically went back to older technology such as the Nokia 8850 cellphone or my love of the Nokia E90 Communicator.

I also started looking back to discontinued products like the Sony Walkman WM-D6C Pro, one of the best cassette decks ever made of any size. I knew people who used it in their hi-fi systems as well as for portable audio.

Some of the technology that I looked at were products that marked a particular point in my life such as my college days with the Apple StyleWriter II. While my college peers were worried about getting on laser printers to submit assignments, I had a stack of cartridges cotton buds and isopropyl alcohol to deal with any non catastrophic printer issues and so could print during the evening in the comfort of my lodgings.

Alongside the demise in prominence of the gadget, there has been a rise in the trend of everyday carry or EDC.

  • The Flip video camera

    A while ago I shared the unboxing pictures of The Flip camcorder that I got sent by Weber Shandwick. I’ve had a chance to play with it and here’s my inital thoughts.

    Recording

    The device is pretty robust and has been perfectly happy to float around in the bottom of my messenger bag the past number of weeks. In terms of video quality it provides a superior video experience to both my Nokia E90 and my Nokia N95.

    The video itself is easy to remove from the device as an upload, my Mac treats The Flip the same way as a USB memory stick. The pop-up USB connector is where it gets its name from as it ‘flips’ out from the device. I did find  with the videos that I made at Interesting 08, that there was a problem converting the video shot into a suitable format for YouTube and the supplied software was a bit flakey on occasion. For this reason I would recommend that Mac users download ffmegx  instead – a shareware application that costs the princely sum of 15 USD.

    Things to remember

    • Video eats through batteries compared to a still camera, however AA batteries are easy enough to pick up on the go
    • The microphone on the camera has quite a large angle for picking up sound – you can hear myself and Jonathan Hopkins talking low in one of the videos I recorded at Interesting 08 despite the fact that both of us were well behind the camera
    • A light plastic case means that you will get camera shake, however a standard camera tripod will do the trick

    Conclusion 

    The Flip presents an easy way to record digital video and transfer it on to a computer, however the more technology conscious may want to wait around for the Kodak Zi6 camcorder which also offers SD card storage and HD video quality. Ultimately, the films are only going to be as good as the camera operator.

  • Chinese nationalism + more

    Chinese nationalism

    Talking heads spar over Carrefour boycott  – internal debate on China’s self confidence and identity and how it should be expressed. I think that Wang Xiaodong was one of the authors of China Can Say Now – a groundbreaking collection of essays on Chinese nationalism published in 1996

    EastSouthWestNorth: Why Is CNN Patriotic? – interesting piece on the western media from a Chinese perspective – it tells us a lot about Chinese national identity, confidence and rising Chinese nationalism

    What Tibet and Carrefour Can Teach Us About the Chinese Internet – Interesting article on BBS phenomena in China and how it is being incorporated in Chinese national identity exploration and Chinese nationalism

    When China learned to say no – interesting interview with Chinese authors about ‘China can say no’ and the Chinese national identity. It does beg the question of when does Chinese national identity stop and Chinese nationalism start

    China

    New rules for expats in China – International Herald Tribune

    Consumer behaviour

    Predictably / Irrational » Blog Archive » A Prada overnight bag – interesting anecdote about the interaction between consumers and brands

    Global Youth Panel: Spending Habits – if only I had this data before last week’s MobileYouth conference!

    brandchannel.com | People buy brands the way they make friends – nice piece on brand relationships

    Faster – Why Constant Stress is Part of Our Future

    Culture

    PingMag – Archive » Style Wars: Art or Crime? – reflections on the classic graffitti documentary

    Design

    The rise of contextual user interfaces – nice article on the development of user interfaces over the years

    NYTimes.com hand-codes its HTML – Boing Boing – nice interesting piece mirroring the craft that goes into traditional newspaper printing :)

    FMCG

    Opal Fruits make a comeback after decade away – Brand Republic Login – Brand Republic

    Gadgets

    Trace Me Luggage Tracker Purchase – interesting that this has been developed by a UK company – the home of the disastrous baggage handlers at LHR have won world-wide acclaim for their unique approach to their work. Definite must have though

    Hong Kong

    CrunchGear » Archive » One-third of Hong Kong households watch TV via the Internet; U.S. not even close

    How to

    Five Tips for Podcasters

    Ideas

    Web 2.0: Obsolete within three years? – this isn’t as bad as it sounds, most technological progress is littered with failures. I think the bigger issue is the yuppification / tech bro culture starting to rear its ugly head in Silicon Valley. Web 2.0 is the last gasp of the ‘hippy’ influence on Silicon Valley culture – something that the article doesn’t address

    Innovation

    Upgrading processors for speed is doomed to failure – the need of paralellism in software – PS3 coders who have had a lot experience on programming for paralellism could be in demand doing business software

    Bill G Puts Faith In Innovation – Interesting analysis of Microsoft post the Yahoo! deal by Portfolio magazine

    Japan

    JapanLinked – Gyaru Gal Styles – view in amazement, shock, horror at some of the make-up these kids are wearing.

    NHK’s ‘Domo-kun’ to be aired in 101 countries › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion – Way cool Domo-kun is a bit of an icon, looking forward to seeing his TV debut in UK

    Korea

    Paper is passe for tech-savvy South Koreans – SEOUL (Reuters Life!) – Young, tech-savvy South Koreans are making coupon clipping a thing of the past and turning to their mobile phones instead. Some of the fastest-growing mobile phone services in the country let retailers send discount coupons…

    Luxury

    Louis Vuitton gets Brand-Jacked, Collateral Damage in Anti-Genocide Campaign

    Marketing

    Reebok rethinks marketing plans for Beijing Olympics

    Media

    Zattoo | TV meets PC

    Online

    Powerset’s Dilemma: Go For It, Or Sell – I hope that they go for it, Powerset is built on some interesting ideas, the big challenge is finding an advertising model to monetise it and prevent them running out of cash and selling their intellectual property for pennies

    Consumers Using Social Media to ‘Vent’ about, Research Customer Service

    MicroHoo: Mail Monopoly Part of Yahoo’s Price Holdout | AllThingsD

    Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang: Valley Internet icon now in a tough spot – SiliconValley.com – I think that history will show Yang as having been grossly misjudged.

    Software

    Author: Microsoft Is Still Here, Dammit! – Mary-Jane Foley on Microsoft

    CrunchGear » Archive » Secret firmware gives Canon point-and-shoots that old razzamatazz – interesting hacking story

    Russia warming up to open source

    Technology

    I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Reality Check | PBS – Cringely questions the conventional wisdom of having analyst firms advise enterprises on what technology to purchase

    Bits: How Google’s Checkbook Stymied Microsoft

    Why Can’t Microsoft Close the Deal? – Seeking Alpha  – culture, image and reputation are critical

    Apple: Salesforce to become an all-Mac shop

    Telecoms

    Skype for your mobile – VoIP java application for some 50 low and mid-priced feature phones, it will be interesting to see how the networks (with the exception of 3/Hutchison Telecom) handle this

    Europe Lags on Internet Penetration, Moves Ahead on Broadband Take-Up – interesting take on the mobile web here by Edelman thats a bit at odds to what I have heard from developers (rather than marketers) in terms of its viability

    Web of no web

    Web 2.0 Asia :: Cyworld 3D about to enter closed beta – I think that is potentially more interesting than Second Life given the social norms and size of the existing Cyworld communities

    Wired News – GPS market challenges – GPS devices heading towards market saturation

    Wireless

    Top-5 handset vendors losing ground in profit share, says Strategy Analytics

  • MobileYouth trend workout

    MobileYouth trend workout introduction

    Nokia E90

    Here is the notes that I made mostly from the morning sessions of the mobileYouth trend workout. There will be presentations and videos of the event available from their site next week. I was speaking on a panel later in the afternoon so was able to pay attention to the earlier panels.

    Graham Brown – mobileYouth, the organisers of MobileYouth trend workout

    Event introduction

    • Young people spend about 1.3 trillion USD per year, 130 billion of which is spent on mobile services (or roughly ten per cent of their total income). This impacted the sales of chocolate, music (in the form of CDs) and cigarettes
    • Young people spend an average of 20 – 25 GBP per month
    • Mobile services of young people grow at about 4.5 – 5.0 per cent year-on-year. This growth comes at the expense of, and in competition with television, entertainment and clothing

    Brown asked the audience of mobile operators to think beyond ARPU and instead think about lifetime spend. By the time that consumers are 33, they have already completed half their lifetime spend. Yet this is the age group that is currently most attractive to carriers looking at the ARPU model. It was an interesting counterpoint to marketers viewing the grey market as the next big opportunity.

    Mobile marketers run the particular risk of ending up with an aging or aged brands due to the virtue of a misplaced focus. Brown delivered a case study on Harley Davidson to prove his point. In the 1960s circa Easy Rider, Harley Davidson was a youth brand, now their average customer age is 51 years old.

    If things carry on this way, in a little over twenty years, their customer base will be 70, possibly only ready to ride a zimmer frame. According to Brown the consumer lifecycle begins at 10 years old.

    Geoff Goodwin and Marc Goodchild – BBC

    Children still view as much children’s television as ever, however their consumption of television overall has declined as expected

    The BBC is now looking for integrated media properties and partnerships. No one organisation has it right, hence the need for partnerships. Young audiences churn at an incredible rate so the BBC is constantly having to rework itself to remain relevant, rather than having the brand advantage that most people thought they had.

    Important mobile technologies for young people are FM radio, SMS and Bluetooth. This low-level tech is because most young people get by with found technologies: hand-me-down mobile phones, an old TV from the living room or a discount model picked up at ASDA or Tesco and vintage computers from work or the living room.

    Roundtable: Johan Winbladh mobile channel editor – Danish Broadcasting, James Davis head of mobile – News International, Michiel de Gooijer business development manager – Endemol, Giovanni Maruca director interactive and mobile EMEA – Paramount and Tim Hussain head of mobile monetisation – AOL UK

    Mr Winbladh was the hawk in the discussion: mobile devices weren’t ready to put to the kind of mobile experience that users wanted and the industry thought was appropriate, whereas the other audience members felt that the latest generation of mobile handsets and all you can eat tariffs are readdressing the issue.

    Maruca was excited about the way that advertising could be delivered in a context aware manner. By adding value to the advertising it can become unobtrusive and essentially no longer be advertising, but information.

    Roundtable: Richard Miller general manager for consumer convergence – BT and Derrick Heng director segment marketing and communications – Singapore Telecommunications Limited

    BT’s vision of Wi-Fi as a mobile technology is at odds with the GSM/W-CDMA orthodoxy of the mobile industry.

    SingTel in contrast has complete fixed and mobile integration and pay TV. SingTel segments its customer base and actively manages the customer relationship with a long-term view. They provide email to mobiles on an ad-funded revenue model. In Singapore the killer apps for mobile usage by young people were email and SMS. By comparison audience member Jonathan MacDonald sales director of Blyk pointed out that for UK mobile users the three killer apps are voice, SMS and the phone’s alarm clock.

    The audience debate then raged, the killer application for young people is doing the basic things well, providing decent customer service, having a decent relationship with the clients and not charging them excessively for that relationship. More related content here.

     

  • Sunday Miscellany

    You know when you’re part of the the technorati when: you’ve had your comments login for Valleywag before they threw the door open to the proletariat. Valleywag is the gossip site du jour for the tech sector, following on from the PC era Notes From The Field that featured in InfoWorld.

    Christmas Cracker ticket

    Whilst everyone at Fortune magazine gets excited that a candid interview with Bill Watkins of Seagate Technology has an admission that consumers use their ever larger hard drive to hold more porn; they manage to gloss over the real telling comments that offer more than a brace of Valleywag articles.

    The M&A boom: The Valley is no longer “about building a company and a culture. It’s about making money for the top guys. If you look back to Intel (Charts) and Fairchild, they set out to build a company that would become massively large. Google (Charts) was another good example. They waited a long time. They wanted to build a big company. People don’t think like that now.” That includes, Watkins continues, YouTube. “YouTube is like eBay. The founders didn’t know what they were doing. The consumers just took hold of it.”

    The private equity boom: Seagate went private in 2000 – in a $2 billion buyout led by Silver Lake Partners – only to go public again in 2002, giving Watkins insight into the current privatization wave. “It’s all about investors getting short-sighted. They’ve lost their patience. There’s nothing these private equity firms do that Fidelity couldn’t do. If you’re Fidelity, and you own $40 million of my business, and you want a meeting to discuss how my business could be run more efficiently, I’ll take the meeting. I’ll listen. But that’s not the way things work. When you go private, the only thing you think about is going public again.”

    Silicon Valley is running a risk in losing the key thing that separates it from Bangalore, Cambridge Mass. and Epsoo Finland. The culture. This is what makes engineers work days and nights to code great products and attracts some of the brightest people from around the world.

    The short-termism that Watkins goes on about shows how the Valley is no longer seen as separate to mainstream corporate America; but you can’t run a technology company in the same way as a biscuit company.

    On the way back from Liverpool I managed to read Irresistible! Markets, Models and Meta-Value in Consumer Electronics by Bailey and Wenzek. Given that the book was published by IBM and the authors are business consultants for IBM it was no accident that the future of consumer electronics is powered by cell processors and embedded Linux.

    What is interesting is the way Bailey and Wenzek see a blurring of the line between a product and the adjunct services like the iPod and iTunes. They also predict an electronics industry with only 25 per cent of the players that are currently in the marketplace and highlight the needs for localised products for local consumers. More book reviews here.

  • Palm for sale

    The Good Morning Silicon Valley newsletter carried a story about Palm’s largest shareholders asking the company to sell out to another player while its fortunes are still on the rise. This raises concerns about Palm’s roadmap and vision if even their largest shareholders don’t believe them.

    Why sell out?

    Palm has a number of challenges to overcome:

    • Maintaining relationships with distribution channels which are different and distinct for both the Treo and PDA ranges
    • Palm needs a new OS that will have it ready for the next ten years. It could have done with that new OS in the year 2000
    • Innovation and localisation: in order to keep its head above water in the PDA market Palm needs to innovate, Pocket PC manufacturers can leverage reference designs and even sell devices at a loss to support service businesses in the enterprise. In the cell phone market, Palm needs to localise the device to meet each carriers needs.
    • Make like Dell: Palm not only needs to get better at innovation and localisation, it needs to innovate operationally; something that had a positive transformative effect on Apple. Dell is a by-word for a slick logistics chain that keeps cost down and allows for user customisation at the order stage
    • One-trick pony: when HP goes into business it is looking to sell everything from a HP9000 Superdome high-end computer to an iPaq and the services to support it. When Nokia speaks to carriers it can sell them everything from all the kit to run a network to budget phones for PAYG (Pay-As-You-Go) customers
    • Convergence: cell phones now have PDA functionality and so do iPods, Palm has unsuccessfully tried to make a convergence play with the LifeDrive and seems to have a crisis of ideas
    • Get big or get out: As can be seen from the MP3 player market, where there is a hot, competitive sector size wins because it can bring economies of scale to bear. Palm could not have taken the gamble that Apple did in terms its forward contracts for flash memory to role out a flash-based LifeDrive even if it had the vision to do so.

    Who should buy?

    A lot of the heat in this discussion centres on Research In Motion, Nokia and Apple.

    Research in Motion has never had the best product design and user experience, Palm could help them.

    Palm’s pen computing experience could be invaluable to Nokia.

    Apple is the collectively the player considered by technology pundits the people who can make a market work and has the expertise and chutzpah to make change the game devices work. Palm could bring carrier relationships and expertise.

    Why buy?

    Palm has a strong brand its name has been a by-word for PDAs for a long time. The Treo has made a name for itself amongst early adopters and has proven itself to be more adaptable than the Blackberry. Its product design has made it a success that has saved Palm up to now. However, much of the crown jewels within Palm (its distinctive look and feel) marched off with PalmSource acquisition by Access and even then there was a lot of work to be done to assure the future of the PalmOS as a modern platform.

    • If Apple wanted to build a Palm-like device it already has much of the expertise needed, arguably the best product design team in the world and it could license or buy the PalmOS software from Access. It even has the talent to build its own OS over Darwin. However, this would necessitate a hell of a lot of work during the time that the company is migrating its hardware and software to the Intel platform and rolling out new entertainment services. This means that a Palm-like Apple device is probably not likely
    • Research in Motion could poach a few of the Palm design team and licence the PalmOS software, but it has bigger issues as competitors are using the NTP case as an excuse to eat the companies lunch. In addition, services and software are more lucrative so there is already some industry signs that RIM are looking to move away from being a hardware player
    • Nokia has some of the best mobile phone designers in the world, the user experience of its Symbian phones rivals Palm. It makes sense only as a way to eliminate competition, but it would be more profitable to tempt key staff away and watch Palm nose-dive into wherever dead companies go

    Conclusion

    OK, first of all there is the question of whether Palm needs to be sold: probably not, but a shot of energy, vision and cajones in the management team wouldn’t go a miss and this shareholder action may be the boot in the backside that they need. Bottom line is that this question can get kicked back and forth for a long time to come, what’s more its an emotive area so don’t expect a consensus soon.

    If a ‘for sale’ sign went up, Palm may get a buyer, but I would expect the purchaser to come from the Far East rather than the established tech players named. I would also expect them to buy if or when the company is on its knees. Ningbo Bird, Haier, Lenovo, BenQ or HTC for example already know how to make phones, if they want cute industrial design they can buy it in as necessary from IDEO, frog design or their ilk. If the company did tout around for a buyer, you could expect the business to drop as carriers and enterprise look for alternative ‘safer’ suppliers. If the business isn’t on its knees when the for sale sign goes up, it may be by the time the deal is signed.

    The crown jewels: the PalmOS software is already available to whoever wants to licence it at a discount to Windows Mobile, the value would be in the carrier relationships and the brand recognition of the Palm name.

    UPDATE: Palm Addicts ran this piece in full, you can find it here. More related posts here.