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.

 

  • 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

  • Wearable devices

    The Apple Watch launch gave me a chance to go back and revisit the development of wearable computing and my experience with wearable devices.

    Wearable computing had it’s genesis in academic research; some of it government funded. For instance DARPA had a hand in the US Army Land Warrior programme. France has it’s FÉLIN programme and Germany IdZ. All the programmes sought to provide soldiers with location data  and in communication with their colleagues.  Unsurprising  key issues for the soldiers involved included:

    • Weight
    • How cumbersome the equipment was
    • Battery life
    • Reliability / robust product design
    • Value of information provided

    It is worth bearing in mind these criteria when thinking about wearables in a consumer context.  SonyEricsson’s LiveView remote control for Android handsets launched the current spurt in ‘smart’ watches. Sony made a deliberate decision to position the LiveView as an augmentation to the smartphone. Think of it as a thin client for your wrist.

    Samsung and Apple in some of their communications have looked to muddy the water in the way that they presented their devices, despite the fact that both of them rely on the smartphone  in a slightly more sophisticated way than LiveView.

    Much of the early drive in wearables has been around health and fitness where the likes of Nike and Jawbone reinvented the kind of service provided to dedicated fitness enthusiasts by the likes of Polar and Suunto. These devices are primarily about simplification of design to democratise the technology.

    By contrast Samsung and Apple have a greater ambition for their devices in terms of the what they can do. I don’t know what the killer app is for a general purpose device and I suspect neither do Apple or Samsung.

    Wearables are not particularly robust by design. I have had three Nike Fuelbands fail in 12 months or so. Compare this to the Casio G-Shock and IWC watches that I generally wear. I don’t have to think about wearing my watch; I didn’t worry about washing my hands or stepping in the shower or the swimming pool with it on. You couldn’t do that with a Samsung Gear.

    A second unknown factor is how often consumers would be willing to upgrade a smart watch? When one thinks about the expected price point of Apple’s premium watches, it is similar to the products coming out of Switzerland. The cases and straps are well made, but the price of buying an Omega watch is also about buying into a service centre that will keep the watch going for decades to come. Apple’s iPod Classic barely lasted 13 years. The electronic innards of an iWatch would be built from components that would become obsolete, even if Apple wanted to service them.

    Would Apple compromise with a modular design that could make it easy to swap out smart watch innards in a case as an analogy to having a watch serviced? I don’t think so, if one looks at Apple’s design move over the past decade towards sealed computing appliances: the iPod, the iPhone, the MacBook Air and the Retina MacBook.

    More information
    FÉLIN | Army Technology
    SonyEricsson LiveView remote and the changing face of mobile computing | renaissance chambara

  • First Apple Watch impressions

    I was underwhelmed by the Apple Watch wearable product. It is impressive what they have done, but from a product design point of view the case looks cumbersome rather like a slightly better Samsung Gear. The use of haptics was one of the smarter things that I saw in the demonstration and the use of emoji as an essential ‘social lubricant’ borrows heavily from Asian mobile usage of stickers on the likes of LINE, KakaoTalk and WeChat.

    Looking at the demonstrations, I still think that the use case for a wearable still isn’t there for mainstream consumers. The use cases for haptic communications for instance were downright creepy and I wasn’t convinced by the cloud of spots interface. The fitness app and workout apps were similar to products from the likes of Suunto and Polar or the miCoach app by adidas for a smartphone. There needs to be more general purpose apps, then the Apple fitness option might be able to drive out the fitness sector.

    In terms of the industrial design, I was particularly interested in the strap. Apple has borrowed a distinctive looking catch and strap connector  from one of the strap designs from the now defunct Ikepod Watch company co-founded by Marc Newson who recently joined Apple’s design team.

    Ikepod Megapod strap
    ikepod

    First Apple Watch strap. This probably explains why Marc Newson was brought on board as part of Jonny Ive’s team; as the Ikepod strap was something that he had designed back in the mid to late 1990s. You can see it on the Hemipod watch design here.
    applewatch

    While the case shape looks suspiciously like a homage to H Moser, I think that luxury brands won’t be particularly concerned, at least at this first Apple Watch, lets hope that future iterations prove me wrong. More on design here.

  • Cristiano Ronaldo & things from last week

    Football star Cristiano Ronaldo is sponsored by a Japanese company to promote a facial fitness device resulting in a cringeworthy advertisement and some of the most uncomfortable event footage I have seen in a while. It is worthwhile watching just for the cringe factor. There is no word on how well the Cristiano Ronaldo promotion has been doing for manufacturer MTG.

    The deal looks like a triumph of money over fit with the Cristiano Ronaldo’s profile. It is a freakish spectacle. More related content here.

    Amazing video of how the FBI used to handle fingerprints prior to digitisation of records. The filing cabinets are impressive and the process is laborious. The sheer scale of the filing cabinet room is mind boggling. It is more like a factory than an office space.

    Finally a great presentation from New Zealand conference Webstock on the benefits of quitting, which seemed appropriate content to round this post off on

  • Ghost in the Shell

    Masamune Shirow’s Ghost In The Shell is a three-volume manga series (volumes 1, 1.5 and 2) that is based on a Japanese security service team who try and solve cyber-crime related issues.

    The stories deal with a future where technology is embedded into human beings and augment them. It is also based around a world where the internet of things is an everyday occurrence. Shirow’s future is believable. Unlike Star Trek, he recognised that the future is built in layers on the past. So you see this in the architecture in the background of picture cells.

    You also see that layers in terms of everything from clothing and personal effects to vehicles of the protagonists.

    The author obvioiusly goes deeply into the story as a thought experiment with copious side notes explaining either technological developments or why he has made certain decisions. The stuff that he incorporated was cutting edge scientific research at the time. Whilst I love the anime adaptions, this insight into Shirow’s thinking makes the books invaluable.

    The books seem to have been remarkably prescient about hacking and the risks of technology. In previous literature, hackers were generally on the side of good or libertarians. In Ghost In The Shell you have cyber warfare and cyber crime similar to our own reality today. A crumbling healthcare system, organised crime, private military entities and shadowy state actors.

    Unfortunately, the designers of smart televisions and refrigerators didn’t pay much attention to these books, otherwise they would not have left these products so open to being hacked. Come for the sci-fi stay the course of the books for the underlying ideas. More book reviews here.