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.

  • Microsoft Windows event

    I’ve been in-and-out of meetings that prevented me from reflecting fully on the Microsoft Windows 10 event of October 7, 2015. Microsoft put a lot of content out there which is worthwhile picking through. I have put these items in the order that they occur to me rather than an order of importance.
    Windows 10 : Everything You Need To Know About

    Microsoft Windows 10 is designed to run on a wide range of devices, a by-product of this is that the PC on your desk maybe a phone connected to a screen and keyboard. Now this may not work for all applications, but it could be enough for browser-based needs. It also means that bring-your-own-device could move beyond having your email on your phone.

    The Surface Pro 4

    Whilst Microsoft has undergone a regime change since the launch of the original Surface, somethings haven’t changed. I think that the Surface Pro 4 represents a continued effort to decapitate the Microsoft PC eco-system. The targets in the frame are devices like:

    • Lenovo La Vie Z
    • Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro
    • H-P Spectre 13x 360
    • Dell XPS 13

    All of these devices broadly fit into the 13 ultra notebook format that Apple plays in, but I think that the goal is to maximise Microsoft’s revenue share of the Windows eco-system. The hardware design hasn’t done the wider Microsoft brand any harm at all.

    New Lumia devices

    The 950 and 950XL put Microsoft in the game, at least from a hardware perspective with the Android eco-system, comparing favourably on hardware specifications with the likes of Huawei, LG and Samsung. What I found more interesting is the allusion in Microsoft’s own commentary of the event that the phones would face a gradual rollout in markets and Microsoft wouldn’t be rolling it out to all markets in Europe.  Don’t necessarily expect to see these handsets being rolled out in multi-national companies without an extensive availability and support network.

    Whilst mobile network providers would like a third eco-system to reduce the power of Android and iPhone, there doesn’t seem to have been universal carrier acceptance of the devices. This maybe partly due to the tighter integration of Skype in the Windows 10 OS?

    Xbox on Windows 10

    Xbox need to bring more customers on board and having backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 games provides a more cost effective gaming experience thanks to eBay and other used console game exchanges. It also does beg the question about possible non-gaming or even enterprise use that could be made of the new Xbox (beyond running Linux on them).

    Rolling out an OS so universal as Windows 10 is an interesting move. It presents some risks:

    • Compromised user experience due to different user contexts (gaming, business desktop computing, consumer PC usage, tablet experiences). A touch orientated interface on a laptop is sub-optimal for content creators who can touch type for example
    • Bloat due to the ‘Swiss Army knife’ requirements catering at a core level for different form factors and displays

    More information
    The Secret of iOS 7 | I, Cringely
    Final 2014 prediction: the end of the PC as we knew it | I, Cringely
    Thoughts on Microsoft Surface | renaissance chambara
    Skype in Windows 10 Preview: Built into Windows 10 so you can do more with friends across devices | Big Blog (Skype owned blog)
    Windows 10 Devices: a new chapter | Microsoft News

  • Evernote + more news

    Evernote is in deep trouble – Business Insider – kind of glad I don’t have data in Evernote, if I did what would be my emergency migration plan? The lack of migration plan is one of the key issues with post-web 2.0 services – that use web 2.0 technologies. But businesses like Evernote lack the open data approach of forebears like flickr or delicious

    Tor browser co-creator: Experian breach shows encryption may not be security panacea – “Experian differentiated between personally identifying information that was not stored encrypted, and credit card info which was stored encrypted — both were hacked,” Goldschlag wrote in a note to VentureBeat. “Experian added that it is likely that the hackers were able to decrypt the encrypted information too,” he said. (Experian’s CEO admitted this.) “So storing information in an encrypted form may not be the panacea that people expect.” – did they use a weak algorithm? Was it an inside job? What was the nature of the cryptography attack?  More security related content here

    How to Set a Looping Video as Your Facebook Profile Picture on iOS | Lifehacker – something to get a handle on, as it is expected that this will also roll out on brand profiles

    Know Your Language: The Ghost in the Shell Script | Motherboard – yes Vice Media giving you the 101 on Unix…

    FT correspondent on how to survive — and thrive — in Hong Kong – FT.com – the title is deceptive, but its a nice summary of Hong Kong

    iPhone 6s vs. iPhone 6: Sales and adoption comparison | BGR – interesting analysis of the data beyond the press release headline

    SK-II opens SoHo pop-up to change consumers’ destinies – Luxury Daily – interesting campaign, just a few years ago how many beauty campaigns tagline would have been a hashtag? The hashtag came from documenting items in the C programming language, which in turn came out of Bell Labs and their work on the AT&T Unix operating system #unixrunningtheworldnow

    A Flip On Encryption From Former Fed – Defense One – interesting take on cryptography related things

    End of the road for journalists? Tencent’s Robot reporter ‘Dreamwriter’ churns out perfect 1,000-word news story – in 60 seconds | South China Morning Post – robot journalism in China as well

  • Fairphone 2 + more things

    Fairphone 2 – a pre-production review of the new modular smartphone – Computing – a review of a Project Aria-esque device. The Fairphone 2 is similar to Jolla, which also experimented with their ‘other half’ concept but no eco-system built up around it. It will be interesting to see if Fairphone 2 can be any more successful

    16 Deals Feeding Chip Biz’s Merger Fever | EE Times – the flurry of M&A activity is the product of Wall Street’s relentless pressure on chip companies to show revenue growth that cannot be achieved organically

    Online IT Project Management Software | LiquidPlanner – interesting project management software

    Will digital books ever replace print? – Craig Mod – Aeon – Digital books stagnate in closed, dull systems, while printed books are shareable, lovely and enduring. What comes next? – which is usually the kind of problem digital solves….

    No More Coffee Queues, Starbucks Mobile Order and Pay Comes to London | Lifehacker – I hope that it has less friction than Qkr

    Samsung refutes claims that its TVs are more energy-efficient in lab tests than real life | VentureBeat – it will be interesting to see how this plays out

    Have The World’s TV Makers Been ‘Doing a Volkswagen’? | Time – Samsung accused of cheating on energy consumption tests for TVs

    This Is Why Dunkin’ Donuts Is Closing 100 Stores | Time – aggressive market for breakfasts in the US

    IBM’s super fast, powerful and tiny carbon computer chips could soon be in all our devices | Quartz – if they don’t mess it up like Josephson Junction chips in the 1980s. More technology related posts here.

    Caffeinated Peanut Butter Is Here | Time – putting this on my wishlist from Santa Claus

    How Steve Jobs Fleeced Carly Fiorina — Backchannel — Medium – something that Steven Levy doesn’t not but in an added piece of irony of this is that Compaq had one of the first hard disk based MP3 players that no one remembers any more. It was a product licensed to Hango Electronics and sold as the Personal Jukebox

    Amazon to Ban Sale of Apple, Google Video-Streaming Devices – Bloomberg Business – so the back of your TV is going to be festooned with boondoggles and black hockey pucks as everyone decides to play nasty

    Synaptics Said to Shun $110-a-Share Bid From China Investor – Bloomberg Business – which would help China’s strategic position to be higher up the food chain on chip design

    Google, Microsoft Resolve Patent Fight Over Phones, Xbox – Bloomberg Business – war on trolls like Microsoft founder Paul Allen and his business Intellectual Ventures. Will Microsoft still be taxing Android phone makers though?

    iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus Preliminary Results | Anandtech – interesting how performance has been improved across the circuit board including memory access and processor performance

    Phil Knight sees the finish line as Nike’s leader | US Today – kind of a big deal in the sports industry

    Why have marketers stopped putting creativity first? | CampaignLive – I’d also add that performance marketing has created a culture of marketing being about Excel spreadsheets

    brandchannel: Reader’s Digest Owner Rebrands to Trusted Media Brands – it makes sense as Readers Digest is actually a stable of magazines

    Never not wrong: Saying Apple should ditch its chips | Macworld – but that doesn’t stop it from licencing more Qualcomm technology

  • Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte

    Strictly speaking this is a bit different from when I have written about books. This is the second time that I read Being Digital, the first time was during my final year in college.
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    I was curious to know how the book would hold up in the space of 20 years since it was first published. In twenty years we’ve seen televisions shrink as we moved from cathode ray tubes to plasma and LCD displays. The cost of telephone calls has declined, cellphones are really no longer phones but a type of mobile computer that happens to do voice calls poorly. The dominant form of personal computing is Android rather than Windows. The internet has facilitated a raft of services that used to exist in the real world or didn’t exist previously.

    In the subsequent 20 years Negroponte has gone from being one of digital’s poster children with a column in Wired and his leading role at MIT Media Lab to a more obscure position in digital history. His biography over at MIT has him listed as sitting on the board of Motorola Inc.

    It is easy to dismiss his showmanship and bluster, but the Negroponte did work that foreshadowed in-car sat navigation devices, Google Street View and the modern stylus-less touch screen.

    The book first of all emphasises how far we have come when it talks about 9600 baud connections, I am writing this post sat on the end of an internet connection that provides 50mbps download and 10mbps upload – and that’s slow compared to the speeds that I enjoyed in Hong Kong. Negroponte envisioned that satellites would have a greater role in internet access than it seems to currently have, cellular networks seem to have brought that disruption instead.

    It has the tone of boundless optimism that seemed to exemplify technology writing in the mid-to-late 1990s but with not quite the messianic feel of peer George Gilder. Negroponte smartly hedges his bets for where the ‘rubber hits the road’ as society brings some odd effects in on technology usage.

    Online media

    Negroponte grasped the importance of digital and the internet as a medium for the provision of media content. That sounds like a no brainer but back in the day the record industry didn’t get it. In fact record industry went on to make blockbuster profits for another five years, N’Sync was the best selling artist of the year in 2000 with No Strings Attached selling 9.94 million copies. Over the next decade or so profits halved in the face of determined record label countermeasures including suing their customers.

    OTT and cord cutting

    Negroponte was dismissive of high definition video and television considering it wasteful of bandwidth. On this I get the sense that he is both right and wrong. We are surrounded by high definition screens (even 4K mobile screens – where their size doesn’t allow you to appreciate the full clarity of the image). But this doesn’t mean that our entertainment has to come in high definition, much YouTube isn’t watched on full screen for instance.

    Disruption of publishing

    Negroponte grasped that it would also shake up the book industry and Being Digital has been published in a number of e-book reader formats, but at the moment the experience of digital books leaves something to be desired compared to traditional books.

    Tablets

    Negroponte labours a surprising amount of copy on tablet devices. At the time that he published his book GO was in competition with Microsoft with pen computing devices and software, EO had launched their personal communicator – a phablet sized cellular network connected pen tablet and the first Apple Newton had launched in 1993. Negroponte goes on to insist that the finger is the best stylus. MIT Media Lab had done research on the stylus-less touch experience, but reading the article reminded me of the points Steve Jobs had made about touch on the original iPhone and iPad.  It is also mirrored in the Ron Arad concepts I mentioned in an earlier blog post.

    Agents

    Negroponte considered that we would be supported in our online lives with agents that would provide contextual content and do tasks, which is where Google Now, Siri and Cortana have tried to go. However his writing implies an agent that is less ‘visible’ and in the face of the user.

    Negroponte’s critique of virtual reality at the time provides good insight as to how much progress Oculus Rift and other similar products have made. He points out the technical and user experience challenges really well. If anyone is thinking about immersive experiences, it is well worth a read.

    Going back and reading the book provided me an opportunity reflect on where we have come to in the past twenty years and Negroponte’s instincts where mostly right.

    More information

    Nicholas Negroponte – biography | MIT Media Lab

  • Ron Arad’s tablet design concept for LG

    Ron Arad is more famous for his architecture and art than product design. I went along to see him speak at an event that is part of London Design Festival last week thanks to the China-Britain Cultural Exchange Association. Arad’s presentation felt largely unplanned as the curator of the talk asked him to jump around from project to project rather than a clear narrative being presented. Arad showed imagery or video that he then talked around.

    During the presentation he showed off the design concept that he did for LG that pre-dated the iPad. It sounded at the event like Ron Arad had started his thinking in 1997, but the sources I looked at online stated that this project was done in 2002 and the video copy I found on YouTube states that the copyright is 2003.


    The video is quite prescient in a number of ways

    • The device was primarily about content consumption and messaging
    • He nailed the in-home use case, with the exception of realising that the iPad may be a communal shared device rather than belonging to an individual
    • It has a flat design interface (though this might be a limitation of their ability to create it on video and a spin on the circular LG logo)
    • The soft keyboard on screen
    • There is no stylus
      There was auto-rotation of the screen
    • It has no user serviceable parts (this was at the time when cellphones and laptops came with detachable batteries)
    • Inductive charging with a table rather than the small pad used by the like of the Microsoft/Nokia Lumia devices
    • The way the controls where superimposed on footage of the user working with the device is reminiscent of the way TV and films are now treating parts of a plot that involves messaging

    There were a few things that it got wrong:

    • Arad clearly didn’t understand the significance of the iPod, so the device had an optical drive rather than side loaded video content
    • The device is really big, more like a laptop screen than a phablet, a la the iPad Mini or Galaxy Tab
    • The form factor was too thick, understandably so when they are trying to squeeze a battery and optical drive in the device, the thickness had a benefit in that the device was self-standing. Apple relied on covers and cases to provide the standing mechanism

    More gadget-related posts here.

    More information

    The Israeli designer who (almost) invented the iPad | Times of Israel
    The Simple Way “Sherlock” Solved Hollywood’s Problem With Text Messaging | Fast Company