Ged Carroll

Category: japan |日本 | 일본

Yōkoso – welcome to the Japan category of this blog. This blog was inspired by my love of Japanese culture and their consumer trends. I was introduced to chambara films thanks to being a fan of Sergio Leone’s dollars trilogy. A Fistful of Dollars was heavily influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.

Getting to watch Akira and Ghost In The Shell for the first time were seminal moments in my life. I was fortunate to have lived in Liverpool when the 051 was an arthouse cinema and later on going to the BFI in London on a regular basis.

Today this is where I share anything that relates to Japan, business issues, the Japanese people or culture. Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Lawson launched a new brand collaboration with Nissan to sell a special edition Nissan Skyline GT-R. And that I thought was particularly interesting or noteworthy, that might appear in branding as well as Japan.

There is a lot of Japan-related content here. Japanese culture was one of odd the original inspirations for this blog hence my reference to chambara films in the blog name.

I don’t tend to comment on local politics because I don’t understand it that well, but I am interested when it intersects with business. An example of this would be legal issues affecting the media sector for instance.

If there are any Japanese related subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.

  • December 2024 newsletter

    December 2024 newsletter introduction

    Welcome to my December 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 17th issue. MIT computer students described 17 as the least random number following research asking respondents to provide a number between 1 and 20, 17 was the most popular answer.

    In some Chinese dialects 17 can be considered unlucky as it sounds similar to ‘life of anger’. I am hoping for a life of relaxation rather than a life of anger over the Christmas holiday period.

    Christmas lights in the garden

    I have found London to be cold, but not necessarily crisp, but the dark days will start to become lighter soon.

    Whatever the holiday season throws at you, and whatever your favourite festival of choice to celebrate is called. Have a great one! (Here’s a soundtrack for the vibes.)

    Being thankful

    A good deal of December is about being thankful. The people and things that I am being thankful for (a by no means complete list).

    My strategy fam: Parrus Doshi, Lee Menzies-Pearson, Sarath Koka, Colleen Merwick, Rob Fuller, Alice Yessouroun, Zoe Healey, Ian Crocombe, Michael Zarri and Calvin Wong, MBA.

    My clients and partners this year including: Craft Associates, Havas, PrecisionAQ, & TANK Worldwide.

    Other smart people in and around the industry: Stephen Potts, Darren Cairns, Robin Dhara, Nish Lad, Katy Howell, Nigel Scott, Rory Natkiel and Tom List.

    Things: WARC, the IPA., IPSOS and Meltwater.

    With that done, let’s get into the December 2024 newsletter!

    New reader?

    If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here. 

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    Things I have written over the time covered by this December 2024 newsletter.

    I will be dropping my review of 2024 on December 31st (technology permitting); here’s my review of 2023 to give you a feel about what you can expect to see.

    Books that I have read.

    I have been a bit slack on reading this month, but have made up for it with film recommendations below.

    • I am stilling reading it at the time of writing, but I am really enjoying reading The Peacock and The Sparrow by I.S. Berry. The book rides a resurgence of espionage as a genre. Unusually for books it covers the early 2010s in Bahrain with a clear-eyed look at the civil disturbance that happened at the time. Obliquely, the book also deals with the post-petroleum phase of Bahrain’s development. Bahrain is a former petro-state that has now pivoted to Gulf area tourism and related services industries.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    2025 trends reports.

    Matt Muir of Web Curios fame reminded me of the annual strategy and ad planners ritual of collating annual trends reports. While they aren’t the most scientific piece of work, they give you a good idea of what the corporate publishers who paid for them think in terms of:

    • What they think their future business looks like
    • What they think they need to say to remain relevant in the next year

    Thanks to Ci En Lee and Amy Daroukakis who help wrangle this effort.

    Things I have watched. 

    Election 2 – Johnnie To’s trouble with the Hong Kong and Chinese government following his interview with the BBC meant I bought a lot of films I will be sharing here over the next few months. I watched Election last month and followed it up Election 2. The sequel focuses on Louis Koo and Nick Cheung’s characters from the first film amongst others. It’s a film that pulls less punches and alludes to the machinations of how the Beijing government captured control of the Triad groups in Hong Kong. Needless to say, unlike the first film less than two years earlier, Election 2 didn’t get released in China.

    The Hitcher – The Hitcher is an amazing film for a number of reasons. Rutger Hauer’s performance as John Ryder is amazing. You have a really taunt horrific thriller of a story, completely at odds with the film’s 15 certificate. The story is matched by a director who wrung a big production out of a small budget. The cinematography at times is breathtaking, shot in the deserts of California. When it got released on Blu-Ray I had to watch it.

    I vividly remember the first time I watched it, with my mate Joe. His folks were away for the weekend and we hit the local convenience store bought an armful of snacks and fried up a packet of Bird’s Eye frozen paella prior to sitting down and watching the film. We were glued to the screen watching a rental VHS copy of The Hitcher. My friend Joe’s house backed on to a copse and a couple of tramps dossed in the small wood during the summer. While we were watching the film, a vagrant tried his back door, which was locked and scared the living daylights out of us. We ran him off wielding whatever we had to hand in the kitchen. I had to lock all my windows and doors before I pressed play this time around.

    Rare Exports – Rare Exports is an amazing Christmas film made in Finland. It’s funny, touching, action-filled and horrific. It’s a modern twist on the Krampus legend.

    Troll Hunter – Troll Hunter is a Norwegian film borrowing from the found footage genre including the likes of The Blair Witch Project and Canniblal Ferrox. A documentary film maker seeks to find out more about a mysterious hunter who is thought to poach bears out of season. The reality is far darker.

    Useful tools.

    Maven

    If you’ve followed technology and social platforms for the past three decades you’ve probably heard the name Ev Williams. He was one of the founders of Pyra Labs who developed the Blogger platform that powered Google’s blogspot.com blogs, publishing platform Medium and microblogging platform Twitter. Maven is his latest social platform looking to provide a healthier alternative to other platforms focused on the dopamine hit triggers of followers, likes and comments.

    It’s too early to see whether Maven will be successful, and people have lots of platform choices from BlueSky, Threads and Mastadon to Reddit. Give Maven a try here.

    The sales pitch.

    I have enjoyed working on a number of projects for Havas and am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from January 2025 onwards; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my December 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into 2025.

    Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!

  • Revenge on society + more stuff

    Revenge on society

    China has had a number of ‘lone wolf’ attacks on the public all of which had a common theme of ‘revenge on society’. It might be that the perpetrator had economic setbacks or a sense of being wronged by a government decision that set them on this direction.

    The profiles of the attackers are often middle-aged men. The revenge on society attacks all seem to be driven by people who feel that they have little to lose. While attacks that meet the revenge on society profile have been documented at least as far back as 2004. There seems to have been an acceleration in the occurrence of revenge on society attacks in 2024. Unlike Uighur related incidents of 2013 and 2014, there isn’t a particular group that China can suppress to reduce the incidents easily. Revenge on society attacks are more likely to be dealt with using mass-population surveillance and reporting a la Minority Report’s preventative crime approach and raised security.

    Raising security against revenge on society attacks requires a mix of infrastructure investment like bollards

    Police car

    A Suzhou school bus was attacked by a knife-wielding attacker looking to kill and maim Japanese children. He killed the school bus attendant who defended the children from his attack.

    September 18th saw a 10-year old Japanese child was stabbed to death by a 44 year-old man. Anti-Japanese sentiment is fanned by Chinese government rhetoric and a constant barrage of content on Chinese media. The attack happened in Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong.

    On September 31th, 3 were killed and 15 injured by a revenge on society attacker in a Shanghai branch of Walmart. He had been arrested by police who said that he was angry due to a personal financial dispute.

    The following day on October 1st, while most were celebrating China’s national day holiday – Chinese man conducted a revenge on society attack in Zurich, Switzerland. He attacked and injured three children near a daycare centre. He was a postgraduate student who publicly expressed extremist nationalist views.

    A 60-year old man convicted of previous attacks stabbed two students and one woman outside a primary school in Guangzhou on October 8th.

    On October 28th, a 50 year old man attacked and injured three children and two adults in Beijing in an attack that had all the hallmarks of revenge on society.

    A revenge on society attack on November 11th killed 35 people and injured 43 more because the 62-year old attacker was unhappy with his divorce settlement. The Chinese government attempted a news blackout of the incident. The incident happened in Zhuhai, a city just across the border from Macau.

    On November 16th, a Wuxi third level education college was the site of an revenge on society incident that killed eight people with a knife attack and 17 others injured. A 21 year old male was detained.

    On November 19th, the 39 year-old perpetrator drove into students arriving at a primary school in Changde. He was eventually stopped and beaten by a crowd until being taken into custody by the police.

    Words of the Week: “Revenge on Society” Attacks Lead to Government Monitoring of “Individuals With ‘Four Lacks and Five Frustrations’” (四无五失人员, sìwú wǔshī rényuán) | China Digital Times

    Consumer behaviour

    How many toys is too many? | Vox – One reader told Vox recently that her family was “absolutely drowning in toys.” And while adults have been complaining about kids’ junk for generations (please see my father’s fruitless search for my brother’s one-inch-long toy wrench in Los Angeles International Airport circa 1992), many millennial and Gen X parents have the sense that something is different now — that kids have more toys than in past decades, and that they seem to arrive in ways Randall describes as “unintentional” and Parents Are Stressed About Playtime. Their Anxiety Is a Goldmine. – WSJ – same as it ever was

    Could shifting beauty standards have predicted Trump’s win? | Dazed

    Economics

    Putin’s «Deathonomics» – Riddle Russia – the Kremlin seriously expects a positive economic outcome from the creation of a high-salaried contract army. If we assume that the number of mobilised and contract-based soldiers ranges from 400,000 to 450,000, then their minimum total allowance will amount to approx. 1 trillion roubles a year. The government will have to allocate about the same amount for compensations in case of killed or wounded soldiers, even if there are 50,000 or 100,000 such people in a year. These sums represent nearly 10% of pre-war federal spending, and some people are already predicting the emergence of a social group of «the young rich» and even making plans for how this money will contribute to long-term investment programmes. – Deathonomics is allowing the Russian government to shape its population pyramid to reduce the burden of the aging population on the economy.

    The costs of maritime supply chain disruptions: The case of the Suez Canal blockage by the ‘Ever Given’ megaship – ScienceDirect

    Endless business closures, through the eyes of a Chinese consumer | Following the Yuan

    Ideas

    If an alien could speak, could we understand it? – Leeds Trinity University Research Portal

    How These Men Left the Manosphere — and Why Some May Never | Teen Vogue – “The more you shame people for what they’re espousing, the more they’re driven underground deeper into online communities who welcome them with open arms and say, ‘this is where you belong. If those people don’t understand you, they’re just a bunch of triggered snowflakes or whatever,’” Miller-Idriss says. Another tactic, she says, is to point out the commercialization of the manosphere in which everything is for sale including courses, supplements, and crypto-currencies. Pointing out the profit motive of these influencers can be effective, Miller-Idriss says.

    That’s part of what got Tom out of the manosphere, which he says he fell into when he was 27, after leaving the Army and finding himself “stuck trying to look for work consistently, having basically no social support, having no options other than to just work, pay bills, work, pay bills, in an increasingly difficult world to do that.” He was lonely, he says, and the influencers he followed had some pretty good talking points, he thought: men were more affected by things like incarceration rates, workplace death and injury rates, and mental health and no one was taking it seriously.

    “The more you shame people for what they’re espousing, the more they’re driven underground deeper into online communities who welcome them with open arms.” Pasha Dashtgard, an assistant professor at the Polarization & Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, says this is a common entry point. “They start their conversations with, ‘men are in crisis and no one’s talking about it. It’s like, that’s true, men are in crisis and we should be talking about it… [but] that opens up, ideologically, the door for them to be like ‘and now, here are the solutions’ and it’s this horrible, toxic nonsense.” But after after a couple months in the manosphere, Tom realized that, while men’s health is a serious subject, he wouldn’t find the answers he was looking for in the manosphere, which was overrun by what he calls “grifters, frauds, or sort of religious zealots.” Now, Tom says he doesn’t actively use the label ‘feminist’ but “considers it part of my worldview.”

    Indonesia

    Indonesia rejects Apple’s $100 million investment offer | Techxplore

    Luxury

    From Edition to Ritz Carlton, how global luxury hotels are localizing their strategies amid expansion | Jing Daily – interesting comment on staff as ‘intelligence agent’

    Marketing

    Is there a future for personalisation? | WARC – Right person, right place, right time: for over a decade this idea has been an ideal in advertising. But an alternative point of view is that personalisation is self-defeating because advertisers chase a moving target when they are unable to prove return on investment. 

    Patagonia’s Restructuring Has Led to Employee Fallout – Business Insider – Patagonia’s historic worker commitment is less well known than it’s sustainability credentials which probably explains why recent moves haven’t led to the kind of brand dissonance amongst consumers that the likes of Bud Light or Nike experienced.

    Jaguar rebrand

    Jaguar’s teaser campaign for its rebrand and new vehicle model prompted immediate feedback. I am not clear on what the ask was by the marketing team, so have kept an open mind. Here offered without comment are some of the related commentary:

    Media

    Baidu Q3 2024 earnings| CNBC – the interesting bits in here are static online marketing business revenue and increasing AI / cloud services business

    AI-Powered Buzzfeed Ads Suggest You Buy Hat of Man Who Died by Suicide

    The Rise, Fall, and (Slight) Rise of DVDs. A Statistical Analysis

    Online

    How a 15-Year-Old Gamer Became the Patron Saint of the Internet | WIRED

    The Fantasy of Cozy Tech | The New Yorker – cozy gaming came from COVID and Animal Crossing – gaming and cute

    Let’s check in on MrBeast – by Taylor Lorenz – User Mag

    Retailing

    Ted Baker relaunches website in the UK – Retail Gazette

    Security

    China’s Surveillance State Is Selling Citizen Data as a Side Hustle | WIRED

    Philippines recruits civilian tech talent to fend off cyber attacks – Rest of World

    How Silicon Valley is prepping for War – by Michael Spencer

    Software

    Apple Working on ‘LLM Siri’ for 2026 Launch – MacRumors

    HarperCollins Confirms It Has a Deal to Sell Authors’ Work to AI Company

    Style

    Streetwear Has Lost Its Popularity. Is That a Good Thing? | HighSnobriety – if it kills drop queues I’ll be happy

    Technology

    Qualcomm – Falling Behind or Laying in Wait? | Digits to Dollars

    Telecoms

    I Don’t Own a Cellphone. Can This Privacy-Focused Network Change That?

    Web-of-no-web

    Meta brings certain AI features to Ray-Ban Meta glasses in Europe | TechCrunch

    Receiver enables dead reckoning when GPS/GNSS fails | EE News

  • AE86 + more things

    Toyota AE86

    The rear-wheel drive AE86 model generation of the humble Toyota Corolla has a dedicated following. The cars were light, had twin-cam engines, a very balanced weight split and a limited slip differential.

    11_01

    Back in the 1980s in Ireland they were a steady performer on the local rally scene. The AE86 because of its simplicity became very adaptable for street and motorsport tuning. The AE86 popularised car culture internationally, turning up across media formats and supported by a vibrant cottage industry of parts manufacturers who exported their parts around the world.

    The car entered popular culture across Asia and beyond through the manga and anime adaptions of Initial-D, which told the tale of Takumi – a student holding down two jobs – a petrol station attendant and delivery driver for the family’s tofu business in a Toyota AE86 Sprinter Trueno.

    Takumi’s adventures in the family AE86 went on to be portrayed in an 18-year long manga series, a Hong Kong film featuring Taiwanese entertainer Jay Chou as Takumi, 27 game adaptions at the time of writing and at least 12 anime series or feature length films.

    This soft culture footprint gave the AE86 an impact across Asia, hence the Malaysian meet-up that Hagerty shot in Kuala Lumpur. Will the popularity of the AE86 die off with this generation of young adults? It’s possible given that over a quarter of them in the US don’t drive.

    Toyota / Hyundai motorsport collaboration

    In advance of Rally Japan, Toyota’s Gazoo Racing and Hyundai’s N Sport held a joint event in Korea. It’s quite rare to see rival manufacturers partner in this way.

    How to read a compass

    This took me back to my 12-year old self away at scout camp (which I did only once) doing the activity for my map-making activity badge. Taking bearings from multiple locations and triangulating them allowed me to plot out my map. I need to dig out my Silva compass that my Mam and Dad probably still have somewhere in their attic.

    I found myself using the basics of reading a compass when living in urban Hong Kong and Shenzhen as the extremely tall buildings stopped GPS from working that well. Sharing here, partly out of nostalgia and the the life skills benefits.

    Hello Kitty and an adoption mindset.

    Japan popular culture commentator Matt Alt put out a video about the history of Hello Kitty and Sanrio. One of the interesting things that came out of the video was how adult women embracing the playfulness of Hello Kitty, rather than ‘adulting up’ then became on the leading edge of technology adoption. I thought the idea of a ‘playful mindset’ and adoption was very interesting – yet something that we don’t often think about. I used to think about it as curiosity, but it’s more specific and it can be fostered regardless of age.

  • November 2024 newsletter

    November 2024 newsletter introduction

    Welcome to my November 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 16th issue. 16 is a low power of two which saw it used in weighing light objects in several cultures. For instance in the British Imperial system of weights 16 ounces were in one pound. This lived on far longer with British drug dealers who looked to sell cannabis in ‘teenths’ (16ths) or eighths of an ounce. Prior to decimal being implemented in China 16 taels or liǎng equalled one catty or jin. Chinese Taoists counted on their finger times and joints of the fingers with a the tip of the thumb, so 16 can be counted on each hand.

    The highlight of November was meeting up for brunch with Calvin who I used to work with in Hong Kong and collaborate with on occasion for projects going in-or-out of China. He was passing through London on his way to Web Congress in Lisbon, supporting one of the burgeoning number of start-ups coming out of Shanghai.

    New reader?

    If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here. 

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • Ghost Signs – how legacy signage allows us to peer back into history, camcorders having their ‘lomography’ moment and much more.
    • Layers of the future – or how innovation doesn’t exist in a fully-formed world, but instead exists within layers of progress over time.
    • Presidential election beliefs – amongst the autopsies of the campaign that have been discussed, one of the things that struck me was the role of presidential election beliefs that have wrong-footed analysis
    • Klad & more stuff – a Russian pioneered integration of dark web markets and concealed ‘Amazon locker’ type infrastructure to deliver a new approach to drug dealing. Other items include bottlenecks in gadget manufacturing, internet maturity and more.

    Books that I have read.

    • Dead Calm by Charles Williams – the early 1960s crime novel packs a lot into the story. Trauma, mental illness, murder and intrigue on the high seas. Dead Calm was later made into a film and relocated from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.
    • Jipi and the paranoid chip by Neal Stephenson. A short story that fits into the Cryptonomicon universe of Stephenson’s books – shares the story of Jipi a former flight attendant who works for Mindshare Management Associates Inc. – an agency that distracts tourists to Manila from the rapid construction work taking place during a China-like economic miracle. Because of her personality, Jipi has to track down errant AI powered car alarms fitted with plastic explosives that were designed to deter thieves, but AI happened. If you’ve ever had to write prompts, you’ll likely appreciate it.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    The fame game

    Rosemary_Smith
    Irish rally driver Rosemary Smith, had the skills but never did get the fame. Smith even got behind the wheel of a Renault formula 1 car to get a test drive at 79 years of age.

    I am by no means a sports addict but even in my psyche I know the names and reputations of several famous sports stars across hurling, gaelic football, motorsports rugby league and even soccer. Sid Lee and Appino have raised the issue of how this fame gap is bridged in women’s sports drive into long term mainstream success. Where is the women’s sport equivalent of Stig Blomqvist, Arnold Palmer or Michael Jordan who are hailed in a similar way? Want to know more, reach out to Rory Natkiel.

    Yes, Christmas really is getting earlier

    He's back from vacation, there are already Christmas decorations and Christmas cookies everywhere

    My local supermarket started to sell mince pies right after the August bank holiday this year. It had Christmas decorations for sale before the Halloween ones. Christmas seems to be coming earlier this year. The Guardian researched how Christmas was arriving earlier each year, from charting music to mince pies and Christmas puddings going on sale. This year lo-fi girl had their first Christmas soundtrack up on November 4th. If you want a change from the Spotify Christmas list, try this old mix from former streetwear boutique The Hideout.

    WARC noted how companies like John Lewis with dedicated Christmas campaigns look to gain a first-mover advantage to aid the talkability around their campaign and gain the full benefit from their emotion driven campaign bedding in and building new memory structures.

    WARC predicted that Christmas advertising spend would rise 7.8% to over £10.5 billion. Big growth for search, online display and out of home compared to last year. The biggest losers including TV, direct mail, magazine and print news media.

    Things I have watched. 

    Famous Hong Kong cinema film director Johnnie To criticised Hong Kong’s national security regulation in an interview for the BBC’s Chinese language service. With that in mind, I thought it prudent to buy up as much of his back catalogue as possible because the classics amongst them may be harder to get hold of in the future.

    PTU – PTU starts in a similar way to Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog with a policeman losing their duty weapon. However that’s where the parallels finish. In Stray Dog the young detective looking for his gun feel empathy at the end with the criminal who used his weapon. The moral being two-fold – crime starts with a few wrong choices, but are still human. In order to deliver law, over time the policeman needs to become less empathetic, losing a bit of their humanity. PTU on the other hand shows how police blurred the line between the law and crime with extra-legal methods to solve crime. It also highlights the complex relationships between criminal gangs and the police. To keeps the tension going with PTU throughout the film. The ambiguity between police and criminals would not be allowed in future Hong Kong films thanks to the National Security laws that have come into force.

    Election – The literal Cantonese title for this film is ‘Black Society’ – which as a term covers all kinds of organised crime groups. Two members of the Wo Lin Shing are up for election become leader (aka chairman or dragonhead) of the organised crime group. It’s a common trope in Hong Kong cinema that these elections happen on a regular basis. Wo Lin Shing is a stand-in name of the very real Wo Shing Wo – a group that have a side hustle doing wet work for the Beijing forces at work in the city.

    The film focuses on the election and immediate fallout. Lok runs a more rational campaign, whereas Big-D runs a showy campaign offering money for votes. The elders appoint Lok and Big-D tries to steal the symbol of power. To moves the tension and action on at a rate of knots. It features many of the heavyweights of Hong Kong cinema including Simon Lam, Louis Koo, ‘Big’ Tony Leung, former policeman Nick Cheung and Lam Suet.

    Not a Johnnie To production, but I have been enjoying Detective Chinatown on Amazon Prime. The show is similar to the BBC show Sherlock and CSI in the way its plot devices and how its story arcs work. It has been interesting to watch for a number of reasons. The series was produced for Chinese streaming platform iQiyi – think Chinese Netflix. The series is based in Bangkok, Thailand. The senior Thai police representative is portrayed as dramatic, volatile and religious in nature – interesting stereotyping by the Chinese production team. The plot line has a very supernatural aspect to it, which is generally considered to be a no-no with Chinese censors. I am curious to see where they take the show.

    Useful tools.

    Mac keyboard shortcuts

    Alongside David Pogue’s Missing Manual series of reference books for each version of macOS, MacMost’s videos are a great resource for the Mac user. MacMost now have a free downloadable table of Mac keyboard shortcuts.

    AI-powered diagram creation

    Ever sat in front of a blank Keynote or PowerPoint slide and wondered how to represent something? I am across the Napkin AI which takes your written text describing something and renders it into a diagram. I don’t use these diagrams as the finished product, but as an inspiration for me then to artwork together in Keynote, OmniGraffle or PowerPoint. You can output from Napkin AI as a PNG file. At the moment it’s free to use as a beta product.

    Woznim

    Woznim allows you to record the names of people and where you met them to try and aid in recall of of them if you run into them again. It reminds me of Foursquare and social bookmarking. Foursquare because of its where 2.0 location based data and social bookmarking because if you develop the Woznim habit it could be life-changing, but if it doesn’t gel with you it’ll be dropped as a service in no time. At the moment it’s an iPhone-only app.

    Bluesky

    Bluesky has been having a moment as another tranche of social media users follow The Guardian’s lead to leave Twitter and need a micro-blogging service. Bluesky has got a good deal of attention because of its starter packs and list features. Whether Bluesky will continue to grow into a vibrant post-Twitter place isn’t certain yet. But if you are going to use Bluesky then these two tools might help:

    • Bluesky tools directory. There is a surprisingly rich set of tools available rather like ‘golden age’ era Twitter.
    • Starter packs. Starter packs are a set of curated recommended accounts to follow based around interests. This site has a large directory of them covering everything from professional interests to sports passions.

    The sales pitch.

    I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from January 2025 onwards; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my November 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into the Christmas season and the rush to complete projects before clients disappear on holiday.

    Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!

    Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.

  • Layers of the future

    This post about layers of the future was inspired by an article that I read in the EE News. The article headline talked in absolutes: The external power adapter Is dead. The reality is usually much more complex. The future doesn’t arrive complete; instead we have layers of the future.

    GITS 3

    Science fiction as an indicator.

    The 1936 adaption by Alexander Korda of HG Wells The Shape of Things To Come shows a shiny complete new utopia. It is a tour-de-force of art deco design, but loses somewhat in believability because of its complete vision.

    https://youtu.be/knOd-BhRuCE?si=HfIDYsaa7nUZKrYE

    This is partly explained away by a devastating war, largely influenced by the Great War which had demonstrated the horrendous power of artillery and machine guns. The implication being that the layers of architecture assembled over the years had been literally blown away. So architects and town planners would be working from a metaphorical clean sheet, if you ignore land ownership rights, extensive rubble, legacy building foundations and underground ground works like water pipes, sewers, storm drains and cable ducting.

    In real-life, things aren’t that simple. Britain’s major cities were extensively bombed during the war. The country went under extensive rebuilding in the post-war era. Yet even in cities like Coventry that were extensively damaged you still have a plurality of architecture from different ages.

    In the City of London, partly thanks to planning permission 17th century architecture exists alongside modern tower blocks.

    Contrast the blank sheet approach of Things To Come with the immersive story nature of anime Ghost In The Shell; which based its architecture on Hong Kong.

    GITS 2

    You can see a mix of modern skyscrapers, tong tau-style tenements and post-war composite buildings that make the most of Hong Kong’s space. Given Hong Kong’s historically strong real estate marketplace, there are very strong incentives to build up new denser land uses, yet layers of architecture from different ages still exist.

    COBOL and other ‘dead’ languages.

    If you look at computer history, you realise that it is built on layers. Back in the 1960s computing was a large organisation endeavour. A good deal of these systems ran on COBOL, a computer language created in 1958. New systems were being written in COBOL though the mid-2000s for banks and stock brokerages. These programmes are still maintained, many of them still going long after the people who wrote them had retired from the workforce.

    Computer History Museum 10

    These systems were run on mainframe computers, though some of these have been replaced by clusters of servers. IBM still serves its Z-series of mainframe computers. Mainframe computing has even been moved to cloud computing services.

    In 1966, MUMPS was created out of a National Institute of Health project at Massachusetts General Hospital. The programming language was built out of frustration to support high performing databases. MUMPS has gone on to support health systems around the world and projects within the European Space Agency.

    If you believe the technology industry all of these systems have been dead and buried by:

    • Various computer languages
    • Operating systems like UNIX, Linux and Windows
    • Minicomputers
    • Workstations
    • PCs and Macs
    • Smartphones and tablets
    • The web

    At a more prosaic level infrastructure like UK railway companies, German businesses and Japanese government departments have been using fax machines over two decades since email became ubiquitous in businesses and most households in the developed world.

    The adoption curve.

    The adoption curve is a model that shows how products are adopted. The model was originally proposed by academic Everett Rogers in his book Diffusion of Innovations, published in 1962. The blue line is percentage of new users over time and the yellow line is an idealised market penetration. However, virtually no innovations get total adoption. My parents don’t have smartphones, friends don’t have televisions. There are some people that still live off the grid in developed countries without electricity or indoor plumbing.

    Diffusion_of_ideas

    When you look at businesses and homes, different technologies often exist side-by-side. In UK households turntables for vinyl records exist alongside streaming systems. Stuffed bookshelves exist alongside laptops, tablets and e-readers.

    Yahoo! Internet Life magazine

    yahoo internet magazine

    Yahoo! Internet Life magazine is a microcosm of this layers of the future co-existence . Yahoo! is now a shadow of its former self, but its still valued for its financial news and email. The company was founded in 1994, just over 30 years ago. It was in the vanguard of consumer Internet services alongside the likes of Wired, Excite, Go, MSN, Lycos and Netscape’s Net Center.

    Yahoo! Internet Life magazine was published in conjunction with Ziff Davis from 1996 to 2002. At the time when it was being published the web was as much a cultural force as it was a technology that people adopted. It was bigger than gaming or generative AI are now in terms of cultural impact. Yet there was no incongruity in being a print magazine about online media. Both existed side-by-side.

    Post-print, Yahoo! Life is now an online magazine that is part of the Yahoo! web portal.

    Technology is the journey, not the destination.

    Technology and innovation often doesn’t meet the ideals set of it, for instance USB-C isn’t quite the universal data and power transfer panacea that consumers are led to believe. Cables and connectors that look the same have different capabilities. There is no peak reached, but layers of the future laid on each other and often operating in parallel. It’s a similar situation in home cinema systems using HDMI cables or different versions of Bluetooth connected devices.