Ged Carroll

Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

 

  • 3 & Wind merger + more things

    Consolidation in Italy as Wind, 3 ink €21.8bn merger | TotalTelecom – I I hope that it won’t affect 3 UK roaming? I wouldn’t be surprised if 3 did similar deals in other mature European markets like the UK. Li Ka Shing is no one’s fool and wireless is mature and capital intensive. More wireless related posts here.

    Fancy 10 Gbps home broadband? Broadcom’s built the guts of it | The Register – fibre dreams?

    Less Money, Mo’ Music & Lots of Problems: A Look at the Music Biz | REDEF – interesting business analysis of the music industry

    Apple denies plan to sell mobile services directly to consumers | Reuters – interesting that they went to the trouble of denying it. It might make sense for them to have a corporate MVNO for their staff

    Nikkei report paints a disturbing picture of Konami | SiliconAngle – PR trainwreck

    The Unemployable Programmer – a nice counterpoint to the ‘get everyone programming’ meme

    Walt Disney Animation Studios | Hyperion technology – interesting write-up of their Hyperion render engine

    Apple is testing a Siri voicemail transcription service – Business Insider – will it work any better than SpinVox?

    brandchannel: Every Product Placement in ‘Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation’ – love the early press release quoted and remember getting to site in college

    FBI Struggling With Cybersecurity Because of Shit Pay and Drug Tests – both of which says a lot about the war on drugs and government getting tech

    Official Google Blog: Everything in its right place – downsizing of Google+. The move to break it up is viewed by many as a defeat, it also makes sense when one thinks of app constellations, though I cannot help think of Brad Garlinghouse’s famous ‘peanut butter manifesto’ at Yahoo! nine years earlier. Though that was a blatant grab for political power, it resonates with some of what seems to be happening at Google in terms of retrenchment

    Why the fear over ubiquitous data encryption is overblown – The Washington Post – interesting op ed by a former head of the NSA, a former secretary of homeland security and a former US defence secretary challenging the intelligence industrial complex demands for weaker encryption and more surveillance legislation

  • Seabasing

    In a tale of fact imitating fiction the US Navy is looking at ways to support the military in future conflicts by creating bases which allow ships to act as a combined space, which they call sea basing (or seabasing). The reason for this is in battles with the likes of China they may not have the luxury of a nearby land base like they have had in the Middle East, so they need to provide a flexible platform that will perform a similar function including floating docks and logistics.

    Being out at sea and operating in this way helps put the force out of range of enemy weapons as well, or what the US Marines describe as exploit the sea’s maneuver space.

    This includes ramps and sensors that would allow service men and equipment to exchanged from ship-to-ship with as much ease as moving around a base on land. Presumably this would have some sort of affect in terms of increasing the data network connections between ships to help them function better and more cohesively.
    140211-D-NI589-094
    The idea of seabasing echoes the carrier and lashed together boats of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Snow Crash is a classic work of cyberpunk fiction written in 1994. In the book refugees play a key part in the plot. The refugees have attached themselves to a privatised aircraft carrier owned by a media company that is heading to the US. More design related content here.

    More information
    The future of sea basing | Armed Forces Journal
    Sea Basing: concepts, issues and recommendations by Sam J. Tangredi (PDF)
    Pacific seabasing exercise will highlight new ships | Marine Corps Times
    Globalsecurity.org – Seabasing
    Figuring Out the Future of War in the Pacific — Or, What the Hell is Seabasing? | Vice News
    What is Seabasing | United States Marine Corps
    Seabasing Annual Report | United States Marine Corps

  • Hacknet + more things

    Hacknet

    Some Australian developers have made an immersive game about hacking that will be distributed on Steam when released. It’s called Hacknet and here’s the trailer.

    Key outtakes:

    • Misdirection: Matthews would allow surveillance teams to tail him, so that other colleagues would be tail free
    • Playing into stereotype and using them as a judo move; Warsaw Pact men tended to believe a woman’s place was in the home and didn’t think of Matthews’ wife as a potential operator
    • Interesting points on the problems that intelligence agencies have in understanding the motivations of ‘non state actors’ such as religiously motivated terrorists
    • During the cold war, Russians who spied for the US generally didn’t get to spend any money they made, as they would only survive 18 months on average
    • China’s approach is much more long-term ‘picking up grains of sand on the beach’
    • The most dangerous threats in his opinion: Iranian nuclear programme for the set of unknowns that it creates, China as a short, medium and long term threat, Russia as an ongoing but less serious threat than China and ‘non state actors’

    Matthews also took a New York Times journalist on the street to explain what surveillance infrastructure looked like now

    “You never try to elude or escape from surveillance,” he explained. “You want to lull them into thinking that you’re not operational on this particular day. You want to calm the beast.”

    Shadowing Jason Matthews, an Ex-Spy Whose Cover Identity Is Author | New York Times

    More posts on related areas here.