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.

 

  • New Yorks information for Amazon + more

    New Yorks information for Amazon – crazy number of data points and a must see for any planner looking at campaigns targeting New Yorkers (PDF). From a more sinister point of view about New Yorks information for Amazon – it shows a corporate culture that’s out of control.

    Marriott Data Breach Is Traced to Chinese Hackers as U.S. Readies Crackdown on Beijing – The New York Times – The Trump administration also plans to declassify intelligence reports to reveal Chinese efforts dating to at least 2014 to build a database containing names of executives and American government officials with security clearances – (paywall)

    ‘Agencies are shitting themselves’: SCA dean Marc Lewis on tutoring for today’s ad world | The Drum One of the biggest pitfalls in the industry is “worshipping at the altar of wanky new tech”

    Just who is Huawei listening to? | Business | The Sunday Times – “In the event of an international crisis — say, if the Chinese were to invade Taiwan — if you own a fleet of thousands and thousands of routers, you can launch service-denial attacks on a massive scale,” said Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University. “You can potentially make the internet unavailable for days or weeks.”

    A bunch of millennials explained in a survey why they despise phone calls – BGR – basically poor social skills

    Researchers Found a Way to Shrink a Supercomputer to the Size of a Laptop | Futurism – interesting, though parallelism presents problems for software

    Honda, CalTech and NASA’s JPL might have a real alternative to Li-ion batteries – Roadshow – great opportunity in terms of energy density but copper and more particularly lanthanum are a materials supply chain bottle neck. One can see how China disrupted Japan’s access to rare metals years ago which affected the use of magnets in high-technology products

    The Chinese Social Network – Hacker Noon – the story of Pony Ma

    Jack Poulson, ex Google, says management obsessed with stopping leaks – Business Insider – indicating a crisis in culture and leadership. The way Google is dealing with it is by stopping people knowing about the issues

    More technology related content here.

  • Economics The Users Guide: A Pelican Introduction

    Economics The Users Guide: A Pelican Introduction by Ha-Joon Chang is a great reader for the average person on economics. If I had this during my first economics modules at college, it would have been really useful.

    As an engaged member of the electorate it would allow you to for example critique Brexiters vision of Britain as a free market utopia a la Singapore just off the coast of continental Europe.

    Singapore isn’t actually a free market utopia. The government houses almost 90 per cent of the population through the HDB (Housing Development Board). State-owned businesses are responsible for roughly 25% of gross national product. It is easy to set up a business there; but they have a very one dimensional view of Singapore’s success if they consider it to be a free market utopia.

    Chang critiques the major economic theories and pulls no punches on any of them. It is a level of frankness that members of the public don’t normally get from experts in the media. How scientific are economic numbers?

    What does deindustrialisation even mean from an economists perspective? Without spoiling the book for you, it doesn’t mean Stoke-on-Trent or Scunthorpe’s vision of post industrial dystopia. Instead it would be more honest to call it servicisation. An analogy would be if you look at industrialisation took workers away from the land, but agriculture continued on.

    The move to service economy has issues with productivity that Chang covers eloquently. If you want to understand the UK’s consistent low productivity, this will give you something to consider.

    Economics The Users Guide is a powerful book that calls BS on ideas like the happiness index and neoclassical economics. It is hard not have a Keynesian viewpoint having read Chang’s work and force of argument. The happiness index looks like little more than a Malcolm Gladwell fuelled daydream. More book reviews here.

    Economics the users guide

  • Walter Cronkite & things from last week

    US newsreader Walter Cronkite narrates a 1967 programme on what the future held in the 21st century. The soothing voice of Walter Cronkite makes the future look less scary

    An Unknown Enemy is a Mexican series on Amazon Prime that follows the rise of Fernando Barrientos, Head of the National Security Directorate, Mexico’s Secret Police in the late 1960s

    Panasonic helps workers create their own head space with new crowdfunded device | The Japan Times – the design looks hokey, but it mirrors the transformation of offices with hot desking and always on headphone culture to try and provide distance. More design related content here.

    The People’s Republic of Desire documents China’s online streaming culture that has developed over the past few years. The film financed by the Ford Foundation provides an inside view of the direction interaction between personalities and their audience. Young girls become online personalities funded directly by besotted fans. More interaction happens online than in real life. Of course, all this happens under the ever-seeing eye of the Chinese government.

    https://youtu.be/auHtqCJV4Rw

    Super-excited by an album of Smith & Mighty’s unreleased back catalogue from 1988 – 1994 being released this week. It is available via digital channels, double vinyl album and on compact disc. While the tracks were unreleased, there is no filler tracks in the collection, the quality is all top notch. Here is a taster.

    Have a great weekend.

  • The buzz of an emergent community

    I was chatting with a friend who was evangelic in their description of the emergent community on the AltSpace VR (virtual reality) social network They had met great friends, the kind of meaningful interactions that seldom occurs on your Facebook wall now.

    But was this about the power of VR? My take was that it is a minor factor at best. VR acted as a filter, it brought similar likeminded early adopters together. In many respects this mirrored other technology filters: the early days of dial up bulletin board services (particularly in the US with free local calls on the Bell network carriers),  AOL and CompuServe chat rooms or the Usenet.

    Filipino community gathering under the HSBC building

    The power of connecting likeminded people can be a transformative experience in the minds of participants.

    If I think back before my time on the internet, my friend’s experience in the emergent community of AltSpace sounded like the people I met at the Hacienda. It sounded like the experience of many of the regulars at acid house club Shoom – which was hosted by Danny Rampling out of a small gym in South London.

    These experiences are once lived, often never recaptured experiences rather like being on a school or college sports team. They only exist for a fleeting moment in time.

    It was like being an early member on Flickr, or my friend Ian’s experience on CompuServe chat rooms (where he met his future wife).

    So what makes these communities special?

    • Likeminded people who are likely to share a certain amount of norms and have common grounds to be there
    • A relatively small number of people. This number becomes inexact. In a good nightclub it would be a certain amount of exclusivity because not everyone knew it was there, rather than a strict door policy. The strict door policy is usually a remedial item done once the norms try and break down
    • Agreement to a set of common behaviours, for many years a common etiquette held sway on networks like Flickr. Facebook doesn’t have this except in tightly managed private groups

    So what happens to these communities?

    • A number soldier on, particularly around passion points such as Harry Potter books / films / games
    • A small minority (cough, cough) Facebook for example transcend their community and turn into a utility with pockets of interest hidden in secret
    • Things move on. Think about restaurants or nightclubs that are now sites of investment properties in London or Manchester

    About the photo: I took this on an early trip to Hong Kong. Every Sunday the Filipino and Indonesian communities would gather in different parts of the city to see friends, eat, sing, dance and trade items. This picture is of Filipinos,  taken in the private public space under the HSBC building in the Central district. Some years later this was a site for the Occupy Central protesters.

  • In praise of the DSLR camera

    If you still use a DSLR camera nowadays given the usefulness of smartphones, the phrase mirrorless has become de rigueur.

    Photography like most other things in life have become progressively more digital. Technology is increasingly mediating every aspect of our experiences, a screen comes with everything.

    Digital retouching and filters have dramatically changed the reality of modern photography. It has also made photography even more ephemeral. I have an online photo library that holds thousands of pictures, compared to the hundreds of photos that my parents have in an old album and envelopes from film processing labs stuffed in a chest of draws.

    Viewfinder

    I still like ‘mirrored’ or single lens reflex cameras.

    The digital single lens reflex or DSLR camera free the photographer from the tyranny of film; but still allows the photographer to frame up a shot in advance before using the battery life of the camera.

    Looking through the view finder of an SLR gives you a temporary isolation from peripheral visuals allowing you to focus mentally as well as physically on the subject in question.  It allows you to slow down and take your time in the moment. It changes the way you see the world. The experience using a mirrorless camera is rather different. There isn’t the ‘focus’ in the experience and it blends post production with taking the picture in the same time and space.

    Of course, as with most technology experiences, the human experience is viewed in a very one dimension manner. An object to be overcome in the least minimum viable way possible. It’s a very regressive approach to design, cost is put before simplification. The increased focus on software engineering leaves a rough unsatisfactory digital experience.

    The products lack the ability to spark joy as Mari Kondo would say. That makes the whole obsolescence and replacement cycle so much easier. More related content here.