Innovation, alongside disruption are two of the most overused words in business at the moment. Like obscenity, many people have their own idea of what innovation is.
Judy Estrin wrote one of the best books about the subject and describes it in terms of hard and soft innovation.
Hard innovation is companies like Intel or Qualcomm at the cutting edge of computer science, materials science and physics
Soft innovation would be companies like Facebook or Yahoo!. Companies that might create new software but didn’t really add to the corpus of innovation
Silicon Valley has moved from hard to soft innovation as it moved away from actually making things. Santa Clara country no longer deserves its Silicon Valley appellation any more than it deserved the previous ‘garden of delights’ as the apricot orchards turned into factories, office campus buildings and suburbs. It’s probably no coincidence that that expertise has moved east to Taiwan due to globalisation.
It can also be more process orientated shaking up an industry. Years ago I worked at an agency at the time of writing is now called WE Worldwide. At the time the client base was predominantly in business technology, consumer technology and pharmaceutical clients.
The company was looking to build a dedicated presence in consumer marketing. One of the business executives brings along a new business opportunity. The company made fancy crisps (chips in the American parlance). They did so using a virtual model. Having private label manufacturers make to the snacks to their recipe and specification. This went down badly with one of the agency’s founders saying ‘I don’t see what’s innovative about that’. She’d worked exclusively in the IT space and thought any software widget was an innovation. She couldn’t appreciate how this start-ups approach challenged the likes of P&G or Kraft Foods.
On the face of it The Inevitable is a less ambitious book than What Technology Wants. And when I started reading the book I didn’t get the kind of electrifying feeling that a big idea can bring, like when I read What Technology Wants.
In the book Kevin Kelly touches on the kind of areas one would expect in typical presentation given by an innovation team at an advertising agency. He is an unashamed techno-optimist, but the key difference in his thinking is two-fold:
Kelly pulls it together as a coherent idea rather than 12 slivers. He provides in-depth cogent arguments that bind the trends together
Kelly argues that transparency in governments will compensate for the erosion of privacy. While I understand where the idea has come from, I don’t agree with this particular viewpoint at least as it would manifest itself in the west. I certainly don’t think that would be the case in the East either. The Nazis use of IBM technology damn near destroyed the world as we know it. The level of trust between the government and the governed is in decline
Digital News Report by Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism latest findings discussed by Dr. Rasmus Kleiss Nielsen. This Digital News Report is based on a survey of more than 70,000 people across 36 countries.
P&G’s Pritchard Calls for Next Generation of Digital Ads | Special: Dmexco – AdAge – I kind of agree with him from a an overall sentiment point of view, but viewability is also a function of how much of the viewable area it fills? I realise that it would be hard to measure but it would be a function of ad size, scrolling speed and display size. In the real world think about the ads on the tube escalators.
P&G Asia brand director: ‘We were clickbaiters – and a giant duck still got more likes than we did’ – “I’ve been through generations of training in how to make a good Facebook ad, which has gone around 360 degrees and come back to the simple principles of marketing. We went through lots of complications in how to get clicks – we were clickbaiters. We honestly were. And yet that duck in Hong Kong Harbour got more likes than any of pure branded messaging, and we thought that’s maybe a good thing. But it’s not and it doesn’t help brands or businesses. It’s taken us time to get to where we are and the simplicity of those core marketing principles.”
Security
On the Equifax Data Breach – Schneier on Security – Surveillance capitalism fuels the Internet, and sometimes it seems that everyone is spying on you. You’re secretly tracked on pretty much every commercial website you visit. Facebook is the largest surveillance organization mankind has created; collecting data on you is its business model. I don’t have a Facebook account, but Facebook still keeps a surprisingly complete dossier on me and my associations — just in case I ever decide to join.
I also don’t have a Gmail account, because I don’t want Google storing my e-mail. But my guess is that it has about half of my e-mail anyway, because so many people I correspond with have accounts. I can’t even avoid it by choosing not to write to gmail.com addresses, because I have no way of knowing if newperson@company.com is hosted at Gmail.
Apple’s facial recognition aka FaceID has spurred a number of discussions about the privacy trade-offs in the iPhone X.
Experts Weigh Pros, Cons of FaceID Authentication in iPhone X | Dark Reading – One concern about FaceID is in its current implementation, only one face can be used per device, says Pepijn Bruienne, senior R&D engineer at Duo Security. TouchID lets users register up to five fingerprints. If a third party obtains a user’s fingerprint and reproduces it, and the user is aware, they could register a different unique fingerprint.
Can Cops Force You to Unlock Your Phone With Your Face? | The Atlantic – Even if Face ID is advanced enough to keep pranksters out, many wondered Tuesday if it would actually make it easier for police to get in. Could officers force someone they’ve arrested to look into their phone to unlock it?
How Secure Is The iPhone X’s FaceID? Here’s What We Know | Wired – Marc Rogers, a security researcher at Cloudflare who was one of the first to demonstrate spoofing a fake fingerprint to defeat TouchID. Rogers says he has no doubt that he—or at least someone—will crack FaceID. In an interview ahead of Apple’s FaceID announcement, Rogers suggested that 3-D printing a target victim’s head and showing it to their phone might be all it takes. “The moment someone can reproduce your face in a way that can be played back to the computer, you’ve got a problem,” Roger says. “I’d love to start by 3-D-printing my own head and seeing if I can use that to unlock it.”
Now lets talk about the Apple Watch, which I consider to present more serious issues.
The Apple Watch 3 is interesting from a legislative point-of-view. The software SIM in the Apple Watch clones the number of your iPhone. The security services of the major powers generally don’t broadcast their capabilities. Politicians are generally untroubled by knowledge of what is possible. Giving politicians an inkling is likely to result in broad sweeping authoritarian power.
Imagine what will happen when Amber Rudd goes into parliament looking for real-time access to everyone’s phones. She now can point to the Apple Watch 3 as evidence that LTE and 3G connections can be cloned. What kind of legislation will her special advisers start cooking up then?
Secondly, it will only be a matter of time before criminals either work out how to do it themselves, or co-opt mobile carrier staff. Two factor authentication that depends on SMS is already compromised. This allows it to be compromised and undetectable.
The Apple Watch 3 may have royally screwed us all.
Voyager probe – NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched some really cool posters to celebrate 40 years of the Voyager programme. You can download them here.
The Voyager programme consisted of two probes that were launched in 1977. The original launch time was designed to take an advantage of an alignment of Jupiter and Saturn that would allow a fly by so that scientists could learn more about them. During the Voyager journeys the have revealed previously unknown details about planets and their moves. We found out about Jupiter’s complex weather system and the complexity of Saturn’s rings. More related content here.
Skeletor
Moneysupermarket nail it with this advert, I wonder if its any coincidence that Dirty Dancing has just arrived on Amazon Prime this month?
Who knew. Red Hot Chilli Pepper makes acid tracks, some of it is pretty darned good. Back in the late 1990s, you had a surprising group of bands who dipped their toe in the water, either through their choice of producer or pseudonyms like Acid Test. Tears for Fears had Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams that was released as a white label without their name on it with a remix by Fluke. The Cult experimented with techno remixes of She Sells Sanctuary.
Banjo covers
Slipknot covered on banjos with a great video. The acoustic instrument works surprisingly well for Slipknot and the down-home gothic vibe is very in keeping with them.
Don Dayglow
I’d been listening to the sounds of Don Dayglow aka Adam Hignell who specialises in post-disco remixes similar to Luxury but with a little more funk in the mix. Hignell has only released his recordings on digital formats so far. When he isn’t doing Don Dayglow project he works as a sound engineer. More on Don Dayglow at Discogs
There is only one winner when start-ups advertise on Facebook | Business | The Times & The Sunday Times – every day at Jam Jar, our angel investing fund that backs UK entrepreneurs, we sit through pitch after pitch, for every conceivable type of start-up, from dog food to posh watches, and everyone — and I do mean literally everyone — is selling their equity and raising millions and millions of pounds seemingly for one reason — to pay for ads on Facebook.It is a phenomenon so consistent across the companies we see, the money being raised is so big and the faith in the strategy so absolute, that at the end of every pitch, we are always left with the same conclusion: we should just buy shares in Facebook
How to handle an HireVue interview with an investment bank – “There are over 15,000 traits that can be used to identify top performers,” says Clark. These include your choice of language, the breadth of your vocabulary, your eye movements, the speed of your delivery, the level of stress in your voice, your ability to retain information, your ‘valence’ (emotion), and 14,993 others. With a HireVue interview, it’s not just about running through your work history and academic achievements, or using the S.T.A.R. technique to answer questions. It’s about your delivery, and what’s going on beneath the surface.
