Category: media | 媒體 | 미디어 | メディア

It makes sense to start this category with warning. Marshall McLuhan was most famous for his insight – The medium is the message: it isn’t just the content of a media which matters, but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate.

But McLuhan wasn’t an advocate of it, he saw dangers beneath the surface as this quote from his participation in the 1976 Canadian Forum shows.

“The violence that all electric media inflict in their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their physical bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous systems. As if this were not sufficient violence or invasion of individual rights, the elimination of the physical bodies of the electric media users also deprives them of the means of relating the program experience of their private, individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity. The loss of individual and personal meaning via the electronic media ensures a corresponding and reciprocal violence from those so deprived of their identities; for violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.”

McLuhan was concerned with the mass media, in particular the effect of television on society. Yet the content is atemporal. I am sure the warning would have fitted in with rock and roll singles during the 1950s or social media platforms today.

I am concerned not only changes in platforms and consumer behaviour but the interaction of those platforms with societal structures.

Yahoo! – how did we get here?
Understanding who Yahoo! is today means understanding changes in the technology and media sectors. These changes occurred over the past 20 years.

The Fear

Yahoo! started off as a hack. The directory grew from a list of sites catalogued by Jerry Yang and David Filo. They did this as students in Stanford. This was back in the early 1990s, Microsoft was the dominant technology company. It is hard to understand the power that Microsoft had at the time. Apple was on a fast track to oblivion. This power was later clipped in the Judge Jackson trial of 2000.

The Media Company

At the time, investors and founders were reluctant to go into business against Microsoft. Even the idea that Microsoft may enter a sector was enough for others to stay clear.

The technology sector was full of casualties: Digital Research, Borland, Go and Stac Technologies. Microsoft’s approach to competition of embrace, extend and extinguish was already well known.

Yang and Filo would have had this in mind when they positioned Yahoo! as a media company that happened to be online. Yahoo!’s early business deals such as Yahoo! Internet Life magazine and display advertising are symptomatic of this media thinking.

The advertising display model that Yahoo! operated was reminiscent of print magazine and newspaper businesses. It even went ahead and hired a traditional media sector CEO in 2001. Terry Semel was a former chairman of Warner Brothers. He was brought in following a 30% collapse in online advertising sales. Semel’s efforts to build a media business at Yahoo! didn’t succeed.

The Technology Company

Yahoo! has a history of contributing to key open source technologies including:
- Debian Project
- PHP
- Hadoop
- Oozie
The work done on Hadoop lead to a spinout technology company called Hortonworks. Hortonworks customers include eBay, Spotify and Expedia. Not bad for ‘media company’.

Panama, was to drive quality and profit in advertising by increasing click through rates. Yet it took too long to develop, many other projects ended up being canceled.

Despite of the technical expertise at Yahoo!. The company bought in many key technologies rather than building themselves. Yahoo! Mail came from acquiring the 411.com directory service which owned Rocketmail in 1997. The modern mail web application has its roots in Oddpost, acquired in 2004.

Failure To Make Big Bets

Yahoo! bought video and audio streaming company broadcast.com in 1999 for $5.7 billion. This was the most expensive thing Yahoo! every bought. By comparison Tumblr cost $1.1 billion dollars in 2013. Yahoo! ended up with little to show for it’s $5.7 billion. This meant that Yahoo! developed a culture which made it hard to make big bet the farm kind of changes. Terry Semel rejected the opportunity to buy Google in 2002 for $5 billion. It also failed to buy DoubleClick. Google bought it instead, and used DoubleClick to speed up growth beyond search advertising.

A secondary effect of not being able to make big bets was a constantly changing set of priorities. Insiders have gone on record talking about the missed changes with aborted projects. This also made it harder to develop and pursue a vision.

The Google comparison

Google started some five years later. Google came into a world where Microsoft looked weaker. The US government filed charges against the company and Linux started to gain momentum. Google’s original business model was to be a search engine provider for web portals. There were other competitors in this space like Inktomi. It wasn’t until 1999 that the company started selling its own advertising. Google waited six years to go public. The size and profitability of its business masked from competitors and customers until 2004.

Google hasn’t been afraid to make big bets or have a big vision:
- Search
- Enterprise search
- Personal productivity
- Enterprise productivity
- Mobile operating system
It has thought carefully about focus and vision – which is part of the reason why the Alphabet conglomerate was formed.

More information

New Panama Ranking System For Yahoo Ads Launches Today | Search Engine Land
A Cyber-Arsenal for Road Warriors | BusinessWeek
Reflecting on Yahoo!’s Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation
The Yahoo! Post-Bartz post and the perils of Microsoft Excel
Inflection Point | renaissance chambara
January 25, 2016
Focus on the user + more

Focus On The User – interesting lobby and direct consumer action that is very EU focused. The idea of Focus On The User brings to mind past antitrust remedies against Google and Microsoft. It will be interesting to see where Focus On The User goes. More posts related to antitrust in the EU specifically here

Why WhatsApp scrapped its $1 annual subscription fee | VentureBeat – no more shadowy gateways you buy online for marketing messaging but proper corporate accounts that you pay for – only years behind LINE, KakaoTalk and WeChat…

People trust Google for their news more than the actual news | Quartz – its a reputation engine rather than just a search engine

Recovering Teletext data from VHS recordings / Boing Boing – it takes such “phenomenal processing power” to accurately and reliably scan VHS recordings of text that we’re only now on the cusp of being able to do so. That hundreds, even thousands of frames of each teletext page are required to OCR each one is also a powerful tribute to just how astoundingly awful VHS is.

GM says you don’t own your car, you just license it / Boing Boing – which will affect the right to repair or modify your car and possibly even resell it

MI5 agent on how surveillance of Islamic State terrorists works – Business Insider – Because they’ve had this golden opportunity with technology and the internet, because they could and did hoover up as much info as they can, that’s actually hampering their work and damaging national security.

Burson·Marsteller | World leaders on Facebook – nice collection of government usage examples on Facebook

Microsoft decrees that new PCs will ONLY be able to run Windows 10 | SiliconAngle – Microsoft is stepping up its efforts to push the world onto Windows 10 by revising its support policy in a way that means newly purchased PCs will no longer support older editions of its OS. Given how much of China is on cracked versions of XP; expect legal trouble ahead

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist: We’re Headed for Oligarchy – The Atlantic – this is so like William Gibson’s latest novel The Peripheral

Chinese factory replaces 90% of humans with robots, production soars – TechRepublic – but does have some limitations

How Tumblr Can Save Yahoo — Thoughts on Media — Medium – there is delicious irony to this post being hosted on Medium. The problem is that a lot of the magazine content which has failed is also hosted on tumblr, how could Yahoo! be trusted to monetise third party content any better

January 20, 2016
Cellular network surveillance + more

The Dragnet | The Verge – or how cellular network surveillance was unmasked. A US criminal case into online returns fraud provides the reader with information about law enforcement usage of cellular network surveillance. More wireless related content here.

New Technologies and Mixed Use Convergence by Applin & Fischer (University of Kent) – interesting paper on how technology forces an alteration of consumer behaviours called ‘covert agencies’ in this paper (PDF)

Worldwide smart home device shipments to nearly double in 2016, says ABI Research | Digitises – (paywall)

Chinese citizens are boycotting search engine Baidu—and praying for Google to come back – Quartz – Baidu quickly announced Tuesday (Jan. 12) (link in Chinese) it had replaced the owner of the “hemophilia” post bar with a representative from an NGO working on the disease, but also seemed to confirm it has been selling these positions for profit, saying it would “stop commercialized operation” of all illness-related post bars, and invite non-profit organizations to run them. A Baidu spokesman told Quartz he couldn’t say what percentage of Baidu’s 19 million post bar groups were run by a commercial partner. – Native social advertising risks have been particularly challenging in healthcare. Baidu’s service is more than search the way we understand it and includes ‘expert’ Q&A as well. Imagine Quora if its was trusted and reliable in nature.

Detect and Disable an Airbnb’s Hidden Wi-Fi Cameras With This Script – Lifehacker – waiting until someone builds this into a gadget; I think that there is a market for privacy related gadgetry.

How Could The Winds of Winter Be Published In Only Three Months? | Tor.com – interesting breakdown of book publishing work flow

Shell of a mystery new Huawei leaked, rumoured to run SD616 – Gizchina.com – interesting focus on product design to try and achieve a premium position versus similar hardware. There needs to be a corresponding focus on software and experience to make it work

January 16, 2016
Cool tools & things that made last week

Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools website has a podcast series, this episode on great tips

Cool Tools is a direct descendant of The Whole Earth catalogue. Kelly started his career helping Stewart Brand edit the last few editions of the Whole Earth catalogue. He was then an editor for follow on projects including the Whole Earth Review and The WELL (Whole Earth eLectronic Link). More Kevin Kelly related stuff here.

For the right content Chinese audiences will watch longer form branded content, Pepsi’s Bring Happiness Home campaigns are designed to tap into Lunar New Year celebrations and this February ushers in the year of the monkey. This is a beautifully made short film about the different portrayals of the Monkey King over time.

There is a new Monkey King film due out with an awesome looking trailer

The X-Files has a new teaser out for the six-part TV series reboot, more over at a microsite which seems to be strangely appropriate. I enjoyed the original series just at the start of my internet usage at college and watched series one of The X Files on a Casio TV with a postage stamp sized LCD screen.

The campaign: Zwitsal is a well-known baby brand in the Netherlands. For many parents and carers, it has associations with the first formative years of a baby’s life.

The aim was to use Zwitsal’s famous fragrance and team it with Robijn laundry (both cleaners and conditioners) to produce a unique highly-emotive new product that would extend the reach of both brands.

Nostalgia and the power of smell was the focus of the brand campaign which used bloggers and Facebook to engage and harness the sharing power of socially engaged mothers.

The results: The campaign, which ran over ten months, saw over 3.5 million people engage with it on Facebook (average engagement rate 8.4%), 137,752 YouTube video views, 23,861 online views and an 11% uplift in sales.

January 15, 2016
Cinema building obligations

Hong Kong Looking at Cinema Building Obligations | Variety – When the British colonial government was building new towns in Kowloon and the New Territories it operated policies that specified the minimum number of cinema screens that should be built per head of population. The Hong Kong government are looking to revisit cinema building obligations because retail rental prices for cinemas in Hong Kong have become cripplingly expensive

Tangible Media Group | Biologic project – really interesting project, the question is how to keep the functionality if the garment is washed

Ryanair and easyJet eye work with rivals – FT.com – working as feeder airlines for long haul flights. The big issue would be fares once baggage charges had been incorporated; the discount will be negligible compared to legacy airlines like BA or Swiss(paywall)

PGP-encrypted Blackberrys aren’t immune to being cracked | TheNextWeb – not really terribly surprising. It is remarkable that PGP has been so robust for so long

Snapchat’s Daily Mobile Video Views Said to Rival Facebook’s – Bloomberg Business – so 7 Billion clips delivered for up to 100 million users per day. That’s a lot of video, but a clip delivery doesn’t necessarily mean a view by a human

Qualcomm Asks U.S. Court for Documents in Korean Probe – WSJ – Qualcomm must be crapping themselves

Japan’s Newest Adults Pessimistic About Nation’s Future – The Macromill study found that Line continues to be the most popular social network service among 20-year-olds, with about 90% of them using it. Twitter followed a distant second with a little more than 70% of them saying they use it. The study found the overall percentage of people using social media was dropping, with Facebook and Mixi seeing sharp declines. – more Japan related content here.

Official Grindr.com Blog | Exciting announcement: Grindr takes investment from Beijing Kunlun – the irony is that Grindr has a better chance of tapping the Chinese market than Facebook does

January 14, 2016