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.

 

  • Great Scud Hunt + other news

    Great Scud Hunt

    What the Great Scud Hunt Says About War With North Korea | War Is Boring – pretty grime reading. The Great Scud Hunt was a key aspect of the Gulf War. The Great Scud Hunt pitted allied special forces units against the Iraqi army which had scattered its Scud launchers across the desert. The Great Scud Hunt was important to stop Israel coming into the war and fracturing the alliance against Iraq. it was also to prevent scud missile attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure and cities. Despite the terrain being reasonably flat and barren, the allies weren’t as successful the Great Scud Hunt as they would have liked. By comparison North Korea is mountainous and covered in vegetation making the job orders of magnitude harder. North Korean missiles could target the US, Japan and the whole of South Korea. 

    DD-ST-92-07789
    A relic of the Great Scud Hunt – a missile being examined after having been shot down in the desert by a Patriot missile

    Economics

    3D printing a threat to global trade | ING – Research report with hyperbole

    Legal

    INMA: Pros, cons of EU’s General Data Protection Regulation for publishers  – GDPR could lead to a reduction in programmatic ad spend because advertisers will struggle to measure whether their ads lead to purchases, according to Eric Berry, CEO of TripleLift. There’s uncertainty about how the law will be enforced, but if users have to give consent to individual publishers, demand-side platforms, and attribution vendors, the attribution companies won’t have enough data to make accurate measurements

    Luxury

    Supreme Said Close to Deal with Carlyle | Business Of Fashion – was the Louis Vuitton deal just rolling out the carpet for private equity interest?

    Media

    My new chapter: joining Google to better explain search & help bridge the gap – Danny Sullivan is a great person to fill the hole left by Matt Cutts and more. Sullivan’s status as the godfather of search marketing gives him the kind of authority and audience few others have

    Online

    A Farewell to AIM: AOL Instant Messenger Shutting Down in December – ExtremeTech – wow. The ironic thing is that messenger services could (and should) have been the WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger of today

    Retailing

    How supermarkets choose where to open … and where to close | Cities | The Guardian – even retailers don’t like chavvy areas

    Security

    The Uber app can secretly spy on iPhone screens – BGR – mother fucker…

    Screwdriving. Locating and exploiting smart adult toys | Pen Test Partners – one more security issue to worry about

    Guess what Chinese travellers are bringing back home? VPNs, lots of them | South China Morning Post – exaggerates the volume of desire for unfettered access – outside the intelligentsia, most won’t care

    Yahoo says all of its 3bn accounts were affected by 2013 hacking | Technology | The Guardian – how is this only coming out now?

    Technology

    Why isn’t Apple Pay taking off? | The Drum – and other NFC payment technologies for that matter

    Survey: Facebook (FB) is the big tech company that people trust least — Quartz – its only 1,600 Quartz readers

    High Sierra’s Disk Utility does not recognize unformatted disks | Tinyapps – a lot of a fuck up there Apple, although its now fixed by a security update. Related – Think twice before encrypting your HFS+ volumes on High Sierra | Carbon Copy Cloner – big issue

  • Out and about: Blade Runner 2049

    *** No plot spoilers*** Where do you start when talking about Blade Runner 2049 – the most hyped film of the year?

    Blade Runner 2049 starts up some 20 years after the original film. It captures the visuals of the original film, moving it onwards.  The plot has a series of recursive sweeps that tightly knit both films together which at times feels a little forced, a bit like the devices used to join Jeremy Renner’s Bourne Legacy to the Matt Damon canon.

    Blade Runner 2049

    The 1982 film took the neon, rain and high density living of Hong Kong in the late summer and packaged it up for a western audience.  Ever since I first saw  it represented a darker, but more colourful future. I felt inspired, ready to embrace the future warts and all after seeing it for the first time.

    The new film is a darker greyer vision largely devoid of hope. You still see the Pan Am and Atari buildings of the first film, now joined with brands like Diageo. The police cars are now made by Peugeot. It also captures the visual language of the book, something that Scott hadn’t done in the original to the same extent. In the book, Dick (and the Dekkard character) obsess on how the depopulated world’s crumbling ephemera is rapidly becoming dust.

    Visually the film dials down its influences from Hong Kong, Tokyo or Singapore and instead borrows from the crumbling industrial relics of the west and third world scrap driven scavenging from e-waste in China and Ghana to the ship breaking yards of Bangladesh. The filthy smog and snow is like a lurid tabloid exposé of northern China’s choking pollution during the winter. It paints a vision more in tune with today. Automation and technology have disrupted society, but orphans are still exploited for unskilled labour and vice is rampant.

    Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford do very capable performances. And they are supported by a great ensemble of cast members of great character actors at the top of their game. Dave Bautista, Robin Wright, Barkhad Abdi (Eye in The Sky) and David Dastmalchian (MacGyver, Antman, and The Dark Knight). The one let down is Jared Leto – who now seems to play the same character in every film since his career high point of Dallas Buyer’s Club – I suspect that this is as much a problem with casting as performance. I think he needs to be cast against type more.

    For a three-hour film it still manages to hold your attention and draw you in to its universe without feeling tired. It’s also a film that forces you to think, so if you are looking for visual wallpaper for the mind a la Marvel’s Avengers series of films it won’t be for you.

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  • Grenadier car project + other news

    Grenadier

    Ineos Projekt Grenadier: an old-school 4×4 off-roader for 2020 by CAR Magazine – interesting that they think there is a gap here. Chemical conglomerate Ineos, have the money to pull the Grenadier off.

    Grenadier market?

    The larger question is around whether there is a market for the Grenadier? While we think of Land Cruisers as luxury vehicles, you can still get a barebones one in markets like Australia, the Middle East and Africa. Mercedes still does a bare bones G-Wagen.

    Grenadier costs

    A mass production assembly line for the Grenadier including tooling would cost about £100 million or so, based on previous refits I have seen done at the Vauxhall car plant in Ellesmere Port.

    That wouldn’t include an engine foundry. I would expect Grenadier to raid the parts bins of other manufacturers for things like engines. They will buy off the shelf transmissions from the likes of ZF or Magna PT, if they can’t raid a parts bin. The problem with raiding parts bins is that you are using products that are designed to be digitally integrated together now. Would companies like VDO be able to provide you with analogue instruments? Most modern cars aren’t unreliable because of cabin electronics, the problems are usually the underlying mechanics and control systems. Those electronics are put there to get the vehicles to ‘limbo’ under the tightening environmental standards and Grenadier will be no exception.

    Overall development of the Grenadier may cost multiples of the price of the production line, including type approval across markets.

    Business

    Publicis and WPP are takeover targets and Accenture ‘looks a credible buyer’, bank says – interesting hypothesis

    T-Mobile and Sprint are in active talks about a merger | CNBC – Son-san and Legere could be an interesting and complementary mix

    Consumer behaviour

    Under The Surface: The Why of Chinese Consumer Behaviour | Holmes Report  – with a billion people and a fast-growing economy, those feelings of uncertainty are even more profound and widespread.   The true meaning of technology for Chinese users? The ability to feel in control in an era of anxiety.

    Douglas Todd: Men do well in science and tech, but lag elsewhere | Montreal Gazette – the real reason more males complete STEM degrees, says Tabarrok, of George Mason University, is that, to put it too bluntly, “the only men who are good enough to get into university are men who are good at STEM. Women are good enough to go into non-STEM and STEM fields.”

    The findings of Card, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Payne, of McMaster University, are consistent with wider concerns about the under-representation of men in higher education and in many sectors of the labour market, says Tabarrok.

    “If we accept the results (of Card and Payne), the gender-industry gap is focused on the wrong thing. The real gender gap is that men are having trouble competing everywhere except in STEM,” says Tabarrok – the big question is the why? It also makes one wonder if the narrative of privilege has gone into reverse for some reason?

    Economics

    Sustainable development: China’s path out of poverty can never be repeated at scale by a country again — Quartz – interesting read. It puts the internet into perspective, shipping containers had more impact in China’s economic rise

    Ethics

    Idle Words | Anatomy of a moral panic – worthwhile reading as it illustrates the current poor state of news reporting

    Ideas

    Blade Runner 2049_: Inside the Dark Future of a Sequel 35 Years in the Making | WIRED – “Blade Runner changed the way the world looks and how we look at the world,” William Gibson says. It was one of the things which inspired me to move to Hong Kong

    Innovation

    Really interesting hologram imagery created using the persistence of vision effect

    Here’s another example of it from a Chinese company in Shenzhen thanks to Naomi Wu for the video. According to Naomi this is a Rainbo device.

    Media

    ​Facebook: news a pagamento entro il 2017, anche in Italia – Rai News – Facebook to trial paywalled content

    China’s Booming Live Streaming Market Has Reached Its Zenith – Huajiao. Long answer: emoji-like “gifts” from the viewers that can later be cashed in for money. Chinese viewers are less enamored by mindlessly goofy check out my six pack vids (*cough* Logan Paul), and more interested in watching the mundanities of their favorite influencer’s everyday life — i.e. singing in the shower, driving, and… slurping soup? – There is a clear line between this and things like Korean ‘eating’ videos.

    Influencer Marketing Effectiveness is Limited by Management! | PARKLU – not only China!

    Uber Sues Mobile Agency Alleging Ad Fraud – WSJ – interesting implications around tracking showing weakness in Uber’s much vaunted data expertise?

    Should Social Go Local? | The Daily | L2 – some nice assets

    Online

    Twitter to test longer tweets – but only for European languages – Mumbrella Asia – to be honest it makes sense for languages like German and Finnish

    The New York Times on Facebook

    The First Web Apps: 5 Apps That Shaped the Internet as We Know It | Zapier blog – great lunch time read

    Security

    DuckDuckGo: The Solopreneur That Is Beating Google at Its Game – The Four-Week MBA

    Signal Has a Fix for Apps’ Contact-Leaking Problem | WIRED – I so hope they sort it

    Distrustful U.S. allies force spy agency to back down in encryption fight  – academic and industry experts from countries including Germany, Japan and Israel worried that the U.S. electronic spy agency was pushing the new techniques not because they were good encryption tools, but because it knew how to break them.

    The NSA has had to drop all but the most powerful versions of the techniques – those least likely to be vulnerable to possible hacks by the NSA

    Technology

    Unilever finds startups can replace some agency tasks – Digiday – marketing automation gone mad

  • Shōwa era + other things

    Shōwa era pop

    This week I have been listening to classic Japanese pop from the 1970s and 1980s – late Shōwa era for the win! The Shōwa era means ‘enlightened harmony’. It covers world war II and the subsequent economic miracle, right up to the bubble era of the Japanese economy. What we saw during the post-war Shōwa era was a massive outpouring of quality content in entertainment, film, music, product design, the arts and architecture.

    Canadian tourism board anime

    Canada’s tourism board has been running a campaign in Japan. They got the studio behind anime blockbuster ‘Your Name’ to do this 30-second spot in an anime style rather than the more traditional approach of using b-roll footage.

    It’s an interesting choice, especially given the dramatic scenery available in Canada and shows how important Canada must view the Japanese market. By comparison, there doesn’t seem to be any campaign targeting the UK or Ireland at all.

    The Isle of Dogs marries anime with Wes Anderson and looks amazing. The Isle of Dogs in question, is an artificial island in Tokyo Bay rather than the region of London.

    Porsche have done a great piece of content marketing about conductor Herbert von Karajan’s 1970s vintage Porsche 911 RS. von Karajan was famous, even amongst non-classical music fans for being a long time conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and his recordings on Deutsche Grammophon. This was probably helped by his recording being some of the first CDs available.

    Expect this in every planners tool box soon – German Performance Artists Act Out Amusingly Surreal Skits for Passengers Aboard Passing Trains

    While it might be seen to be a source of inspiration for PR stunts or experiential marketing, it fits into the idea of live advertisements that agencies and brands have been experimenting with over the past few years. More at Thinkbox here.

  • Machine learning sublime influence

    Scott Galloway talks about the way brands are using AI (machine learning) and the examples are very much in the background.  Welcome to the sublime world of machine learning where the impact on the customer experience won’t be apparent. In many respects this is similar to how fuzzy logic became invisible as it was introduced in the late 1980s.

    The Japanese were particularly adept at putting an obscure form of mathematics to use. They made lifts that adapted to the traffic flows of people going in and out of a building and microwaves which knew how long to defrost whatever you put into it. Fuzzy logic compensated for blur in video camera movement in a similar manner to way smartphone manufacturers now use neural networks on images.

    The Japanese promoted fuzzy logic inside products to the home market, but generally backed off from promoting it abroad. The features just were and consumers accepted them over time. In a quote that is now eerily reminiscent of our time a spokesperson for the American Electronics Association’s Tokyo office said to the Washington Post

    “Some of the fuzzy concepts may be valid in the U.S.,”

    “The idea of better energy efficiency, or more precise heating and cooling, can be successful in the American market,”

    “But I don’t think most Americans want a vacuum cleaner that talks to you and says, ‘Hey, I sense that my dust bag will be full before we finish this room.’ “

    This was also the case with the use technology companies made of Bayes Theory. This was used by the likes of Autonomy and Microsoft Research.

    A second technique was rules, put simply IF then THAT. This kind of technology has been used to drive automated trading models and credit card approvals for decades. Pegasystems are one of the leaders in developing rules based processing. Rules based systems could even be built in an Excel macro and would still count as a form of machine learning. 

    Finally machine learning needs to think about a number of things with regards the models being used:

    • The importance of accuracy in the use case
    • The level of precision required and ways to indicate that precision means
    • The cost of generation versus other methods, this is very important in terms of computing power and energy consumption 

    More information
    The Future of Electronics Looks Fuzzy | Washington Post (December 23, 1990)