Ged Carroll

Category: online | 線上 | 온라인으로 | オンライン

The online field has been one of the mainstays since I started writing online in 2003. My act of writing online was partly to understand online as a medium.

Online has changed in nature. It was first a destination and plane of travel. Early netizens saw it as virgin frontier territory, rather like the early American pioneers viewed the open vistas of the western United States. Or later travellers moving west into the newly developing cities and towns from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

America might now be fenced in and the land claimed, but there was a new boundless electronic frontier out there. As the frontier grew more people dialled up to log into it. Then there was the metaphor of web surfing. Surfing the internet as a phrase was popularised by computer programmer Mark McCahill. He saw it as a clear analogue to ‘channel surfing’ changing from station to station on a television set because nothing grabs your attention.

Web surfing tapped into the line of travel and 1990s cool. Surfing like all extreme sport at the time was cool. And the internet grabbed your attention.

Broadband access, wi-fi and mobile data changed the nature of things. It altered what was consumed and where it was consumed. The sitting room TV was connected to the internet to receive content from download and streaming services. Online radio, podcasts and playlists supplanted the transistor radio in the kitchen.

Multi-screening became a thing, tweeting along real time opinions to reality TV and live current affairs programmes. Online became a wrapper that at its worst envelopes us in a media miasma of shrill voices, vacuous content and disinformation.

  • Classic movies + more things

    Watching classic movies and TV with my Dad. Some of the classic movies we watched I hadn’t seen since I was a child like Ice Station Zebra. Watching them with him now as an adult was a different experience and we discussed the relative merits of the plot as we went along. As a child, my Dad had bid me be quiet so that we didn’t miss any details.

    • True Romance – Tony Scott on direction, Tarantino on the script and great grind house cinema moments with a Sonny Chiba triple bill.
    • Ice Station Zebra – my Dad is a big fan of Alistair Maclean’s books, this is one of the better film adaptions of his books with Rock Hudson taking a starring role. Looking back on this now, it is the proto-Tom Clancy book. Confrontations with with the Russians, a tech gizmo and a Jack Ryan type figure who always does the right thing. Like Maclean’s books Clancy focused on pace rather than character building and character’s died at a steady tempo.
    • I worked my way through series one of The X-Files and was impressed by how fresh many of the episodes still felt. The tech looked old but the storytelling wasn’t. It was twenty years since I had last watched it. Then I was at college and watched each episode on the postage stamp sized screen of a Casio TV-100B handheld television that got me through college.

    a16z Podcast: Writing a New Language of Storytelling with Virtual Reality | Andreessen Horowitz – or why 2016 is going to take a good while to bring about the compelling content for VR to take hold as a mainstream consumer product

    Louis Vuitton casts video game character in new campaign – Dazed Digital – interesting logical progression from their series 3 exhibition earlier in the year. Interesting how luxury brands are taking the transition to digital in new directions

  • Demographics of social + more

    Demographics Of Social Media By Gender – Business Insider – interesting opportunities for smart mass targeting by using the demographics of social outlined in the article. More content related to the demographics of social here.

    Samsung Addresses a Growing Mobile Health Market with Industry’s First Smart Bio-Processor – Samsung Blog – am sure Apple already has custom silicon that does similar, at least since the M7 motion co-processor in the Apple iPhone 5S or the Apple Watch’s S1 SiP. It feels like they might be a little disingenuous or even dishonest claim by Samsung to call it the first ‘bio processor’ without a much narrower definition

    NO.1 A10 Rugged Smartwatch – closer to what I would want a smart watch to be in terms of ruggedness, lacks the style of Casio’s G-Shock at the moment

    Chinese Communist Party Modernizes its Message — With Rap-aganda – China Real Time Report – WSJ – more Cassette Boy style than Jay Z (paywall)

    Hong Kong MTR payphones to be pulled from all subway stations – SCMP – universal wireless coverage on MTR and universal cellphone ownership in population. One of the first clients that I worked with was a company called iMagic who made PowerPhones –  a cross between a payphone and an internet enabled kiosk. These PowerPhones were rolled out across the MTR network and in Chep Lap Kok  (paywall)

    Daring Fireball: Doomsaying Apple Analyst Loses Job – as was once attributed to an IRA spokesperson about the Brighton bombing of the Conservative party conference in 1985 ‘…we only have to be lucky once, you have to be lucky always‘. Eventually expect a story that Adnaan Ahmad is eventually vindicated when Apple misses a quarter or two on its numbers

    A look at how Australian Bank ANZ is creating their own quality content via @ANZ_BlueNotes | Andrew Grill | LinkedIn – more of a wake-up call for PRs than a revelation for digital marketers

    Google, HP, Oracle Join RISC-V | EE Times – interesting developments as ‘anything but ARM’ grouping forms in data centre giants

    Why Snapchat is ‘the one to watch in 2016’ — at the expense of Twitter – Business Insider – at least in the US, according to MEC

    There’s An App That Takes Care Of Your Customer Service Woes | Refinery 29 – interesting, mediated customer service experiences

    China to Require Internet TVs to Use Homegrown Smart TV OS | Marbridge Consulting – China’s State Administration of Press and Publication, Radio, Film and Television’s (SAPPRFT) Science and Technology Department and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT)’s Electronic Information Department recently announced a new smart TV operating system, TVOS 2.0 – (paywall)

    Samsung will reportedly make 5M Galaxy S7 phones ahead of February launch | VentureBeat – relatively small beer when you think that Huawei alone sold 100 million handsets this year

    China Antiterror Law Doesn’t Require Encryption Code Handovers – WSJ – China passed a new antiterrorism law that stepped back from previous language of concern to global technology firms, however its still very similar to Teresa May’s nosey parker powers in the UK (paywall)

    Delivery Rates on Kickstarter by Ethan R. Mollick :: SSRN – Using a large survey with 47,188 backers of Kickstarter projects, I examined the factors that led to projects failing to deliver their promised rewards. Among funded projects, a failure to deliver seems relatively rare, accounting for around 9% of all projects, with a possible range of 5% to 14%. There are few indicators at the time of project funding as to which projects might ultimately fail to deliver rewards, though small projects (and to a lesser extent very large projects) are more likely to fail to deliver rewards, as are some project categories.

    A Brief Introduction to the Basics of Game Theory by Matthew O. Jackson :: SSRN – really nice primer

    Mobile Web – Opinion – Quinn: Living our lives from inside a messaging app – US adoption on Facebook Messenger over 30 percent of population, surprised Skype is a mere 19 million monthly UUs

    LeBron James releases virtual reality film for Oculus and Samsung Gear VR – Months after it had been used in football by Vincent Kompany and Aaron Ramsey

    GQ is now blocking its readers running ad blockers – Digiday – Conde Naste taking action against ad blockers

    Thai prime minister releases New Year song to appeal directly to the people | PR Week – (reg wall)

  • Chip implanted everywhere + more

    Marc Andreessen: ‘In 20 years, every physical item will have a chip implanted in it’ – Telegraph – but is it needed? I could see this idea of a chip implanted as being touted as a sign of biblical end times. Also how cheap can chips go and solutions like QRcodes and barcodes work fine to do the same job in many applications already. The gains of a chip implanted are often marginal at best

    Browsers Are Starting to Block Ads by Default | Motherboard – interesting move, especially when one thinks about the trend of manufacturers like Sony (and others) to load their machines with crapware for money. Privacy is increasingly looking like a luxury good, which should be of concern to everybody.

    Three Chinese state-owned banks using lie detectors and customers don’t know it | SCMP – to improve marketing, efficiency and security. I had heard of this also being experimented with in western financial institutions. As if banking interactions weren’t stressful enough as it is, now there is this? I find the marketing aspects of this darker and even more scary (paywall)

    WhatsApp Video Calling Coming In Update, Leak Reveals | BGR – Skype compete. Given Skype seems to be lost in the wilderness as a product and WhatsApp has focus this could get interesting. For me only Skype’s low international calling rates for when I have to dial into conference calls or phone relatives keep it on my device

    Aethra Botnet Attacks WordPress Sites – Wordfence – back doors don’t work

    Samsung launches 6-inch, all-metal, super-thin Galaxy A9, in China | VentureBeat | Mobile | by Evan Blass – this is from the usual Samsung playbook of having large amount of variants to go after all aspects of a given market. In this case the Galaxy A9 seems to be going after the Huawei P-series devices. More about Samsung here.

  • My 10 most popular (trafficked) blog posts of 2015

    These are the ten most trafficked posts of 2015, in reverse order:

    Throwback gadget: Nokia N900 – I tried Nokia’s first Maemo-based phone. It was amazing how useless it was as one forgets how linked the modern smartphone is to web services. Despite these problems one could see the now lost potential of the phone. More on the Nokia N900 at GSMarena.

    Generational user experience effects – a meditation on user experience from the analogue era to the present

    2015: just where is it all going? – I had a think about where digital and technology would go over the next 12 months or so. You can see how I did here.

    Reflecting on Yahoo!’s Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation – by June this year, the product rationalisation that Yahoo! underwent provided ample opportunity to show that it’s core offering was collapsing in many international markets. Rather than it being a market wide condition, the data pointed to Yahoo! specific issues.

    Traackr – beyond the buzzword event – a post about how a diverse range of organisations from Coca-Cola to a luxury jeweller were thinking about influencer marketing.

    Throwback gadget: Made 2 Fade (by KAM) GM-25 Mk II phono pre-amp and mixer – a review of a mixer that has been lost in dance music culture history, yet was responsible for much of its popularity outside the super clubs.

    That Jeremy Clarkson post (or lies, damn lies and sentiment analysis) – or why everyone from the mainstream media to PR Week got the story so wrong about Jeremy Clarkson’s departure from Top Gear.

    An experiment on fake Twitter followers – I spent some of my hard-earned cash to see what difference if any buying fake followers had. I chose Twitter as a channel mainly because it would be easier to measure any impact, otherwise it could have just as easily been Facebook followers, Pinterest subscribers or Instagram followers. My overall conclusion on the fake follower business is that it almost purely about personal vanity rather than gaming a system.

    O2O (online to offline) or what we can learn from the Chinese – East Asia is way ahead of marketers in the west in terms of multi-channel marketing particularly the integration of of online with offline aspects.

    48 hours with the Apple Watch – hands down the most popular post of this year on my blog was my short experience living with the Apple Watch. I felt that it was a nicely designed, but un-Apple experience. It also convinced me that the use case for wearables wasn’t here yet.

    That’s the end of my posts of 2015.

  • 2016 just where is it all going?

    I started to think about 2016 just where is it all going?And Uber immediately sprang to mind. It is obvious that Uber’s CEO had never watched The Princess Bride, a cultural touch stone for both generation x and generation y, otherwise they would have known the maxim:

    Never get involved in a land war in Asia

    There is a lot of reason why this is true, the phrase captures the essence of a remark Douglas McArthur had said. If you play the board game Risk, Asia poses a problem due to the amount of territories involved.

    I expect Uber will continue to funnel money into China and still get sand in its face. Quite what this means for Lyft I am not so sure.

    Twitter gets a change of management, but that doesn’t do any good. The reasons for this are already apparent:

    Twitter has stopped growing at all in the US in 2015. This is a big deal because the US is the bellwether market for advertising innovation and advertisers like growing audience numbers.

    It has growing content volumes on broadly static growth, which has infrastructure costs. It also has costs from trying to innovate itself out of trouble with advertisers.

    Although there aren’t hard numbers to support it, there is a body of evidence to suggest that the number of times a day a consumer accesses the platform has declined and the number of impressions per post would flatten or decline.

    All of this would be bad news for potential advertisers and their intermediaries in the advertising and PR world.

    Fintech bubble that will take good ideas and bad ones down together. Banks are currently considered to be ripe for disruption. One of the key problems with this is that technologists think it will be easy to sweep aside regulations that banks operate under.

    The reality is rather different, these aren’t taxi services or hotels but people with real political and financial clout. These are the same organisations who managed to persuade governments to bankrupt themselves in order to bail them out in 2008.

    In the late 1990s and early 2000 there was a similar bubble around Linux and open source software. A number of companies at the front of it including VA Linux didn’t last the bubble, but the effect was to make Linux ubiquitous from consumer electronics to banking systems. I suspect a similar impact for technologies such as Blockchain. It may prove to be a handier way than historic transactional databases for say low transaction rate businesses; but that doesn’t mean that corporate enterprises will buy the technology or services from start-ups. Instead, the bits that prove themselves through the Linux Foundation are likely to be co-opted by the likes of HP, Oracle or Huawei in the future.

    Ultimately these providers aren’t selling a shiny technology but trust. Think of it in terms of two axis of risk:

    • CTOs will take a chance on a technology where a major vendor is involved if it makes sense (IBM and the internet for instance)
    • They will take a chance on a new vendor to do something that is well understood (think the Indian outsourcers like Infosys and Wipro)
    • But they would be hard pressed to take a risk on both vendor and technology at the same time, think systems integrator marchFIRST which championed then new web technologies to enterprises around about the time of the dot com bust

    We will have reached peak ad-blocking. Ad blocking still requires a modicum of savvy from a consumer audience, just as an in the same way encryption isn’t completely mainstream – the same will be true with ad-blocking. However there will be an increased interest in native advertising.  There won’t be the complete meltdown of retargeting or programmatic for instance that ad blocking would tend to imply.

    The internet in the EU will become increasingly regulated. At the moment the European Union is succumbing to The Fear. In the past, whether it was the Red Brigade, The Baader Meinhof gang or Northern Ireland there was a lot of emphasis put on keeping normality. The only real notable change in the UK was sealing up bins on the London Underground and other public transport services. Because there was a collective memory going back to the second world war, there was a recognition that keeping society normal was a key element in dealing with terrorism – whether the rise of the right or the left.

    After the cold war the parameters of risk versus impact on societies reaction acted to it changed. This was the coming of The Fear – the roots of it can be found in the US reaction to 9/11. America had not experienced terrorism or foreign attack on its soil since the war of Independence. The fear felt by Americans was palpable and infectious. Each risk faced by a society was coupled to an asymmetric response. This was something that terrorist theorists planned. The risks become more abstract including paedophiles or the catch-all of ‘organised crime’ to give governments greater insight into consumers lives. It has only taken 20 years for Germany to forget the lessons of life under the Stasi.

    This won’t change any time soon as governments have a lack of incentive to give up on powers they have already legislate for themselves. If one looks at the UK mainstream political spectrum, both Labour and Conservative regimes have been remarkably similar in terms of legislating consumer privacy out of existence.

    We will have reached peak smartphone and tablet. China has now reached replacement rate for devices, there is a corresponding lack of paradigm shifts in the pipelines for smartphone design and software. Tablets have shown themselves to be nice devices for data consumption but not requiring regular upgrades like the smartphone or replacement for the PC.

    VR in 2016 will be all about finding the right content. VR won’t work in gaming unless it provides e-gaming athletes with some sort of competitive advantage, if it does then gaming will blow things up massively. Gaming will not be the only content vehicle for VR, it needs an Avatar-like moment to drive adoption into the early mainstream. From a technology point-of-view the smartphone drive towards OLED displays should benefit virtual reality goggles.

    GoPro is going to get eaten alive. Manufacturers like drone-maker DJI have been integrating GoPro-esque cameras into their products and UPQ (think a cross between gadget company and a fast fashion outfit like Forever 21) are providing much cheaper (but not cheap and nasty) alternatives.

    More information
    What stands between Uber and success in China? | CNBC
    Uber CEO accuses Chinese messaging app WeChat of censorship | The Telegraph
    Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It) – Umair Haque
    MarchFirst enters the terrible twos | CNet
    Why ISIS has the potential to be a world-altering revolution — Aeon
    LG Secures Super Bowl Slot And Ridley Scott For OLED TV ad | Forbes

    Older predictions
    2015: just where is it all going? | renaissance chambara
    2014: crystal ball gazing, how did I do?
    2014: just where is it all going? | renaissance chambara 
    Crystal ball-gazing: 2013 how did I do?
    2013: just where is it all going?
    Crystal ball-gazing: 2012 how did I do?
    2012: just where is digital going?
    Crystal ball-gazing: 2011 how did I do?
    2010: How did I do?
    2010: just where is digital going?