Ged Carroll

Category: innovation | 革新 | 독창성 | 改変

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.

  • Christina Xu on Chinese UX

    About Christina Xu

    I’ve been a big fan of work by Christina Xu for a while now and this presentation is a great example of her research. She has worked as an ethnographer for a range of clients including Daimler Benz, VF Corporation (the people who who own Timberland, North Face and Supreme) and Spotify. This presentation on Chinese UX in action is well worth bookmarking to watch it if you don’t have time now. Save it and watch it during your lunch break.

    Key takeouts

    • Etiquette about the order of proffering versus scanning a QRcode to exchange (WeChat) contact information
    • Digitisation of red envelopes drove take up in mobile payments
    • Great examples of online to offline (O2O) interaction in processes and services that are continually expanding.  
    • Driven by ubiquity of mobile phones 95.5 phones per 100 people with a number of people using two phones
    • Users across ages and demographics
    • Mobile adoption is coming on top of a rapid industrialisation. People are getting used to a whole much of stuff at once. Interesting points about the lack of social norms or boundaries on the usage of online / mobile service in the real world. I’ve seen people live their online life in the cinema there are NO boundaries as Christina says.
    • Mobile payments came up the same time as credit card payments
    • Population density on the eastern seaboard of China. Density has helped delivery services and high speed public transport
    • DidiChuxing allows for tailored surge benefits for drivers rather than search-and-forget version on Uber
    • WeChat commerce doesn’t facilitate international shipping
    • Westerners build messenger experiences for scale with automation, Chinese look for bespoke customisable ‘squishy’ experiences down to western interpretation of convenience. Chinese convenience is an absence of ‘nuisance experiences’ – real world interactions help prevent friction. Or is it culturally sanctioned ‘nuisance experiences’ that deals with differing experiences

    More related content here.

  • Rosemary Smith + more things

    Rosemary Smith is a 79 year old Dublin woman who owned her own driving school. But from the 1960s through the 1970s Rosemary was one of the world’s foremost rally drivers. With the right support, Smith could have done so much more. Part of her problem is that motorsport is still a very privileged sport. Renault decided to put Rosemary Smith behind the wheel of a single seater racing car. Rallying and racing are different disciplines, but Smith still had some of the magic as you could see in this video. More Ireland related content here.

    Westbam featured in a short film talking about how he started off and the intersection of music and culture in Berlin during 1989. It is hard to  comprehend how West Berlin with its cheap accommodation at the time became a hot bed of art and culture in Germany during the 1980s. The constant cold war threat gave art a space to flourish

    American Petroleum Institute has put together a video reminding the public of all (ok just a small amount of) the stuff that oil actually goes into. When Teslas rule the roads, we’ll still need oil. If you’ve painted a room in your house, or built an Ikea Billy bookcase; you’re been handing a product made with oil. Pharmaceuticals are based on oil, so are many medical devices.

    The sound track of my week has been various mixes from DJ Nature

    Campfield Futon – Snow Peak – I love the design and quality of Japanese outdoor brand Snow Peak. The Campfield Futon is an amazingly flexible piece of furniture that would be great outdoors or in an apartment. There is a lightness to Snow Peak design that is fascinating. It is more similar to the design approach of Norman Foster than the technical outdoor approach of Arc’teryx and The North Face.

  • IDM model + more things

    IDM model no longer viable for Japan semiconductor industry: Q&A with Socionext CEO Yasuo Nishiguchi – fascinating read. Understanding the IDM model is crucial to understanding the semiconductor industry and technological developments to date.

    Sky Garden (Stoned Moon) | Robert Rauschenberg Foundation – my favourite work from Rauschenberg’s commission in 1969 by the NASA Art Programme

    Amazon.com: Spark – Amazon creates a social network to showcase its products

    Moscow spooks return to Hungary, raising NATO hackles – POLITICO  – “Back in 2014-2015 [the Russians] went from maybe 50-100 intelligence officers up to 300 plus” in Hungary, said the former embassy official.

    “Generally we expect they are openly capturing telecoms, running HUMINT [human intelligence] sources all over Europe, planning and staging all kinds of cyber sabotage, linking up with organized crime and supporting folks in parties like [the far-right] Jobbik with fat sacks of cash and maybe even some intel-sourced dirt,”

    Yandex open-sources CatBoost, a machine learning library that can be trained with minimal data– interesting rival to TensorFlow et al

    How’s an investor in The Peninsula’s holding company linked to Xi Jinping’s right-hand man? | South China Morning Post (dead link) – this won’t play well in Beijing. It makes the princeling’s wealth look excessive, the article was taken down 24 hours later

    China Merchants Bank has got out-of-home adverts in high footfall parts of central London aimed at Chinese consumers shopping in the UK point out a promotion on their Visa credit card.

    Those are extremely aggressive promotional offers, 5% back on what they spend. 3,000 yuan (£340) worth of rewards for spending abroad and $5 cash back if they spend $50 via Visa PayWave (contactless payment). The mind only boggles at how much customer acquisition and retention costs are for Chinese high net worth credit card users. More finance related content here.

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  • Living with the Apple Watch

    I got the first iteration of the Apple Watch and managed to put up with it for about 48 hours before giving up on it. I have managed to persevere with the the Apple Watch 2.

    Apple managed to speed up the performance of glanceable content, but it still doesn’t have the use case nailed. Watch 2 tries to go hard into fitness, which is a mixed bag in terms of data and accuracy. I am not convinced that it is any better than Fitbit and similar devices.

    They did improve the product in two design areas. The Nike straps make the watch less sweaty to wear on your wrist. It is now comparable to wearing a G-Shock. They also managed to life-proof the Watch. You can now wear it swimming (but I wouldn’t advise snorkelling or scuba diving) and in the shower.  The battery life is still meh.

    I upgraded the OS to watchOS 4 public beta but haven’t managed to use the Siri powered contextual face yet. As a concept it promises to be a step in the right direction to provide the kind of transformation wearables needed.

    watchOS 4 made me realise something that had been nagging me for a while.

    The Apple Watch doesn’t have any personality, or at least traits of a personality that I’d care about. It’s a detail that disappoints me. Mostly it’s invisible as a device, with the occasional glances. It gives me the occasional messages that sound like a vaguely resistant teen or like bursts of micro-aggression.

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    It wouldn’t take that much effort to have a bit more manners or personality in the copywriting. How about some icons?

    Susan Kare was the icon designer for original Apple Mac, back in 1984. She came up with icons that were useful and gave the machine a personality. You got a sense of the personality behind the developers who created the machine. This was the kind of detail that Apple was known to obsess over.

    dogcow

    Some of the icons like the dogcow, the bomb and the sad mac became iconic shorthand amongst Mac users. The dogcow was used in printer utility to show page orientation.

    Like the early Mac, the Apple Watch doesn’t have a clear killer app and defined use case. It would benefit from manners, humour or even a bit of Siri wit. What’s more using well designed icons would reduce the effort in terms of product localisation.

    You could argue that limited device resources don’t allow it. But I don’t buy that theory, an Apple Watch has more memory and computing power than the original Mac. I think its about that legendary attention to detail that Steve Jobs had (and drove everyone else made with. Apple has tried to codify this in their process, but you can’t bake in quirky obsession.

    I guess I am old school Apple. I use an iPhone because it works well with my Mac, rather than the other way around. I still come across things where I see ‘Ahh, Apple’s thought about…’ in my Mac. My iPhone is a portable extension of my data, and doubles as a mobile modem for the Mac as needed; it gets in as the Mac’s plus 1.

    By comparison the Apple Watch has less of a connection to the Mac and leeches off the iPhone. For a product that has little use case, it needs to work harder at building loyalty through my relationship with it as a device.

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  • Samsung smartphone + more

    Samsung smartphone sales

    Samsung Smartphone Sales – Korean analysts report that the Galaxy S8 is Selling 20% below last year’s S7 – not terribly surprising. The market is mature and Samsung smartphone sales will be losing ground to the Chinese Android players like OnePlus, Huawei and ZTE. Samsung smartphone sales are caught between two prongs. On the one hand the Samsung smartphone has fast-followed Apple. On the other hand Samsung smartphone value proposition is getting trumped by Chinese late followers.

    Business

    Bell Pottinger Dismisses Lead Partner & Apologises For Gupta Scandal | Holmes Report – At various points throughout the tenure of the Oakbay account, senior management have been misled about what has been done. For it to be done in South Africa, a country which has become an international beacon of hope for its progress towards racial reconciliation, is a matter of profound regret and in no way reflects the values of Bell Pottinger.

    China

    China Disrupts WhatsApp Service in Online Clampdown – The New York Times – I didn’t realise that WhatsApp worked in China unless you were roaming on a foreign SIM

    Consumer behaviour

    Why Some Men Don’t Work: Video Games Have Gotten Really Good – The New York Times – this is frightening

    Economics

    Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates For The United States by Piketty, Saez and Zucman – interesting data on economic distribution

    Innovation

    A bank replaced a fax machine with blockchain. Was it worth it? | Quartz

    Conference speakers are now presenting during attendees’ flights to the events | Quartz – why not just stay at home and watch it on YouTube in this case

    What NASA Could Teach Tesla about Autopilot’s Limits – Scientific American  – “What we heard from pilots is that they had trouble following along [with the automation],” Casner says. “If you’re sitting there watching the system and it’s doing great, it’s very tiring.” In fact, it’s extremely difficult for humans to accurately monitor a repetitive process for long periods of time. This so-called “vigilance decrement” was first identified and measured in 1948 by psychologist Robert Mackworth, who asked British radar operators to spend two hours watching for errors in the sweep of a rigged analog clock. Mackworth found that the radar operators’ accuracy plummeted after 30 minutes; more recent versions of the experiment have documented similar vigilance decrements after just 15 minutes. – human factors 1, technology nil

    Marketing

    Malaysia Airlines ties up with LINE | Marketing Interactive

    Media

    The real fight in the TV streaming wars is not over you. It’s over your kids. | Quartz – its the medium rather than the content in reality

    Making media fun again: why we must free our industry from outdated models | Campaign Live – The threat to agencies is not the ANA or procurement or consultants, it is their own addiction to dated models and an inability to conquer the three rants and create something new.

    The clients don’t want a world that dwells solely in the lower funnel. Any new business model embraces both upper and lower funnel, both brand and demand. It is both about the big idea and the 1,000s of iterations of that big idea – it’s just that the vast majority of clients aren’t doing that very well or systemically. They don’t want us building a data monster dwelling in the lower-funnel data lake. (paywall) – well worth a read

    Myanmar

    A new candidate for world’s worst media law – Columbia Journalism Review – reputatiion management must be a doddle in Myanmar

    Online

    Twitter lets you avoid trolls by muting new users and strangers | TechCrunch – interesting implications for trying to grow account follower numbers organically

    Software

    Apollo – Baidu’s automotive OS for self driving cars

    AI and Wall Street | WSJ City – Robotic Hogwash! Artificial Intelligence Will Not Take Over Wall Street. I guess it depends which Wall Street jobs that you mean

    Google’s research chief questions value of ‘Explainable AI’ – Computerworld – but that won’t deal with the legal and regulatory challenges

    Web of no web

    Facebook Slashes Oculus Price For Second Time As World Refuses To Adopt Virtual Reality | Zero Hedge – the problem is supporting hardware and content. Oculus requires way to high a spec machine and there isn’t compelling content. More related content here.