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.

  • 2015 predictions

    It’s become a bit of an annual tradition on this blog for me to put together some guesswork on what is likely to be coming down the pipe over the next 12 months so here are my 2015 predictions.

    Business

    Sony Corp. cleans house with the management teams of its US businesses. One of Sony’s start-up bets (the e-ink watch, smart locks etc) comes good. Sony will still be supported by its Japanese financial services business.

    For years IBM has charged Huawei a fortune for consulting, telling Huawei the IBM way. In 2015, I could see the student becoming the master as Huawei sells into IBM enterprise markets in the developing world and possibly Europe.

    Shareholder activists don’t take a run at Google. Google is moving from a growth stock to value as search advertising revenue growth is declining. However the structure of Google makes life very difficult for the activists to gain leverage. Any activist that does take a run at Google would need to go to court to help dismantle the two-tier structure that handicaps the shareholder voting structure. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be shareholder grandstanding and public letters to the board. Google’s privacy and antitrust regulatory woes will continue to fester outside the U.S.

    As Fred Wilson over at A VC put it, the sharing economy is actually the rental economy, the digital economy equivalent of bulk breakage: breaking a larger container down to sell smaller, more manageable pieces to consumers for a profit. It’s disruption usually stems from breaking regulations: labour laws, public transportation regulations, laws governing guest house and hotels rather than innovation. It is likely to prey on the have-nots and is likely to see increased resistance. For me it is indicative of a move in founder culture, from the counterculture influenced start-ups of Apple’s era to a yuppie Patrick Bateman-like culture today. Expect more societal push-back as geeks become the new investment bankers in terms of being societal punch bags.

    IoT / wearables

    There won’t be an over-arching XML type bridge for the IoT. Battery life will limit the fantastic visions that pundit have for wearables and the internet of things.

    I would be surprised if we didn’t see some devices trying to power themselves by scrounging energy from wider electromagnetic spectrum (wi-fi networks, cellular devices, radio, TV etc).

    Consumer electronics

    We are going to continue to see baby steps towards more immersive experiences, as VR glasses slowly make progress in the marketplace. OLEDs would be an ideal application for VR glasses, particularly if they want to hold off smartphones in a frame. Content is likely to role out in a similar way to IMAX – visually stunning documentaries about space and nature alongside computer games. Content and gaming will be slow due to it being difficult to make. Storytelling in VR won’t be a problem solved in my 2015 predictions.  It will be interesting to see what James Cameron does with VR. There will also be some baby steps towards haptic feedback (think a better Nintendo PowerGlove).

    Despite The Interview, Hollywood still won’t do cinema / digital simultaneous releases, or global simultaneous releases for any content that wouldn’t have been direct to TV/video in an earlier age.

    Wireless

    The YotaPhone2 won’t get the customer base it deserves as it struggles against the superior marketing muscle of Samsung in the premium Android segment of the market.

    The Cyanogen distribution of Android won’t go anywhere fast due to its geographic exclusivity agreements with the likes of OnePlus and MicroMax cramping the style of handset manufacturers with global ambitions. This offers an opportunity for Jolla’s SailfishOS. but I suspect that my 2015 predictions will mark a high spot in diversity of smartphone brands. Instead we’re likely to see a thinning out of brands over the coming of years, slowly but surely.

    Google revamps the resources and process to get more Chinese smartphone manufacturers going through its official channels for compatibility (CTS) and have a Google Mobile Services (GMS) license. At the moment there are a number of Android handsets going into developing markets without these, which means Google is losing out on incremental licensing revenue. More wireless content here.

    Online/social

    There is a change of emphasis in business, social is no longer well, social. Businesses start to pull ‘social’ media back into business functions. An increased emphasis on paid media over earned engagement / community management and marketing automation makes social look more like electronic direct marketing.

    Asian platforms WeChat, LINE and KakaoTalk have led the way in both consumer and brand adoption. They will continue with a relatively slow international rollout. Facebook Messenger doesn’t seem to fill the same user context as these applications, is this an opportunity that a SnapChat or new player can fill?

    Things could get very interesting if WeChat or LINE professionalise their international marketing and start rolling out some of their more advanced features internationally such as integrating payments and m-commerce. They can’t do it by going alone, they would need to be good partners and deals like that take time to negotiate.

    I suspect that international e-commerce will have breakout years. Yesasia.com, Rakuten and Aliexpress have been percolating for years. Combine this with the valuation put on Asian e-commerce outfits, it would be quite easy to see how cost-conscious consumers in economically challenged Europe and the developing world may appreciate a new Amazon. Secondly, Chinese purchases of foreign goods are likely to expand further due to a rapidly developing logistics network within China, increasing international acceptance of UnionPay and a rein-in on more ostentatious tastes due to Mr Xi’s anti-corruption drive. Consumers will be looking for quality less overt luxury and premium products. Foreign travel for shopping will start to be scrutinised by the government and foreign shopping through intermediaries will become professionalised by the Rakutens of this world.

    We’re likely to see European states take a similar stance to India and China and more widely blocking sites for security considerations and media IP enforcement. Expect the UK and Australia to lead the way in terms of site censorship.

    What do you think about my 2015 predictions?

    More information
    Who is behind the e-paper FES watch? | WSJ
    Sony Qrio smart lock crowd funding page
    What Just Happened? AVC

  • UK pirate notice programme + more

    MPAA Considered Pulling Out of UK Pirate Notice Program | TorrentFreak – Both Vaizey and Luke felt that if notices only started going out in the months preceding the May 2015 general election that would be an unwelcome development. A delay on notice-sending until the fall of 2015 was preferred all round – the UK pirate notice programme shows how media piracy is a vote-losing political hot potato. What the MPAA needs is a better idea, like what iTunes did for music piracy, rather than the UK pirate notice programme. More related content here.

    Personal tracking and online identity – 31C3 – from the CCC conference watch this and have a serious think about the quantified self etc. The security implications of this are quite frightening

    Xiaxue.blogspot.com – Everyone’s reading it.: The Big Gushcloud Exposé – interesting Singapore blogger ad network spat. Singapore has an odd bloggersphere due to its unique laws governing media. However, influencers have been quick to monetise their work with brands

    How the Graft Crackdown is Rippling Through China’s Economy | WSJ – (paywall)

    The Battle for Space | Slate – really interesting overview of space technology

    Apple expands its social presence with new iTunes Tumblr blog | 9to5Mac – social publishing

    The tao of Lei Jun, founder of Xiaomi | Techinasia – interesting business model. Software and services are the Gillette razors, the phone is the Gillette shaver handle. And Lei Jun comes across as a bit of a dick; ok a lot of a dick

    Morgan Stanley Analysts Try GoPro, Discover Their Lives Are Boring | WSJ – just brilliant content. Not everyone has a life worthy of the X Games, but does raise questions about the GoPro as a mainstream consumer product over the long term (paywall)

    Google eyes Android to be built directly into cars | Shanghai Daily – is it ready for this? More importantly, what will be the security and safety related safeguards, given that you need your brakes to work at all times?

  • The ten most popular posts of 2014

    First of all thank you for having visited my site this year, I thought I would revisit the most popular posts of 2014.

    1. The WhatsApp | Facebook post (part I) – On February 20, I woke up to find out that Facebook had acquired OTT messenger service Whatsapp for an apparently very large sum. I wrote two posts that day which tried to make sense of what was happening. I drafted the posts in a franchise Starbucks on the edge of the A41. If I had to sum up this post in one word it would be gobsmacked. You can read part II here
    2. Throwback gadget: Apple iPod hi-fi – my throwback gadget posts I write seem to do very well on an ongoing basis. I had a new old stock unit in storage which I brought out of storage and pressed into use when I moved back to the UK and wrote about what attracted me to this system. It seems to have a marmite reputation even amongst Apple fan boys
    3. The WhatsApp | Facebook post (part II) – part two of my analysis for the Whatsapp / Facebook acquisition came together later that morning after a Facebook and WeChat conversation with my friend Calvin Wong. I started to think about the why of the purchase in more detail
    4. Throwback gadget: Nokia E90 Communicator – Ironically for someone who maybe perceived for being digitally forward, I miss having a proper keyboard that I can still slip in a (Carhartt) jacket pocket. My ode to the E90 got picked up by Tomi Ahonen and the rest as they say was history
    5. On smart watches, I’ve decided to take the plunge – At the beginning of October I decided to experiment using a smart watch. This was the first of a couple of posts that outlined my thought process and what I found out through using the Casio G-Shock G+ watch
    6. Jargon watch: app constellation – I started off what I thought was a pretty straightforward post and got to be a bit of handful in the end. I went down the rabbit hole looking at the different app constellations rolled out by the worlds major internet companies. The research was manageable, but editing the HTML on the table turned turned out to be more of a handful than I expected
    7. The Apple Watch post – I stayed up to watch Apple’s messy online presentation of the Apple Watch. Whilst I was impressed by the technical expertise, I was unimpressed by the likely customer experience and was struck by the obvious ‘borrowing’ of design elements from Marc Newson’s Ikepod watch range of yore
    8. Garnier’s PS Cream campaign – Garnier’s advertising agency doing a classic PR hijack in China that shows the innovative environment of Chinese platforms and the blurring of lines of what PR actually means now
    9. My digital tool box – I was doing some work at the end of April and was struck by how many tools and hacks that I used to use in my daily work life were no longer available. I thought it would be a good idea to do a snapshot of the stuff I currently used for posterity. I hope to revisit it on a regular basis, we’ll see how it works out
    10. The Amazon Dash post – I am intrigued by new technology that seems to reject the icons-under-glass metaphor that seems to dominate convergence these days. Amazon Dash is a dedicated order-input device for Amazon’s grocery service in the US that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Braun product brochure from the 1970s

    According to the site analytics that was the most popular posts of 2014. What was the favourite thing you read in 2014?

  • Regional news sites + more things

    Yahoo announces plans to kill off some regional news sites, sunsets Yahoo Classic Games, alerts, and profile sites | VentureBeat – this is really big, Yahoo! is abandoning high growth markets in the Middle East and South East Asia. Just this time 12 months ago I was looking at running an ad campaign with Yahoo! Vietnam so this is a shock.  What must have happened to Yahoo!’s ad sale operation in those 12 months is somethingThe closure of regional news sites implies a cutting down of the business to package it for a sale based around its core US customer base. More related content here.

    Huawei Honor 6 Plus Preview – CNET – detailing still slipping on design, otherwise you are getting a reasonably well specified phone that would be adequate for man people. You can see how HTC is getting caught between the hammer and an anvil. Mid-range handsets is a squeeze point.

    The secret to the Uber economy is wealth inequality | Quartz – sharing economy relies on grinding poverty and is almost Victorian in nature. The big expansion of gig economy businesses, combined with their confrontational approach to government regulation means that it will only last for so long.

    Social sellers: A new weapon for brands on WeChat | Campaign Asia – Social sellers (people who are selling through WeChat but not using official WeChat shop interfaces known as ‘weidian’ 微店) could help to bring e-commerce on WeChat to the next level. The Weidian pose a challenge to the dominance of TaoBao.  (paywall).

    McDonald’s Dim Jack to “hijack” HKTV’s drama to promote Chicken nuggets | Marketing Interactive – really interesting execution breaking the advertising / programming wall. The closest I have seen of this was Sega’s pirate TV break into adverts. Washing powder brand Tide also did this on their Super Bowl ad spots one year

  • 2014 crystal ball gazing: how did I do?

    2014 crystal ball gazing

    2014 crystal ball gazing was a culmination of thinking that I have been doing on where digital is going. For the past few years I have been thinking about where digital is going and what it all means. At the end of last year here were my projections. I do realise that putting my 2014 crystal ball gazing out there may make me luck very foolish, I guess you can make up your own mind.

    Drone deliveries

    Amazon won’t do drone delivery in 2014 – Whilst trials of drone deliveries have been ongoing and drones seem to be getting more mainstream thanks to companies like DJI Amazon hasn’t done deliveries yet. In addition, the FAA in the US started to regulate commercial drone usage, which is likely to slow down adoption in the short term, while providing a stable legal framework of operation in the longer term.

    Small data

    Small data – Not so much an explicit interest in smaller data sets for meaningful things, but the Hortonworks IPO had an almost Netscapean quality to it with shaky revenue streams and a healthy share price bounce when it came to market. It also made Silicon Valley nervous as companies were concerned about negative perceptions toward the big data ‘sector.

    O2O

    Offline to online integration – O2O seems to be a bigger thing in China and other east Asian markets with ‘mobile search keywords’ put into adverts and TV programmes for years. The QRcode seems to be a uniquely Asian form of integration largely abandoned by western developers – mainly because they didn’t seem to use them in as imaginative a manner compared to Tencent et al. Lower power Bluetooth beacons are still experimental. Weve the joint company set up by the UK wireless carriers to provide contextual data about consumers to integrate online and offline marketing is running at a loss and has abandoned peripheral business opportunities in mobile wallets/ m-payments.

    Programmatic

    Algorithmic display advertising – there are a number of ways in which greater data is being brought to bear on programmatic ad spend but algorithms weren’t the biggest thing shaping the market this year. Major brands seem to have developed a distrust of the agency trading desks and the lack of transparency into market data. Instead of giving agencies an unfair advantage and allowing them to play both sides of the trade, they are bring the trading desk in-house.

    Mobile ad formats

    Mobile display advertising gets a radical reduction in formats – at the time I wrote this prediction, I had been concerned about clickthrough rates and mistaken clickthroughs, so I considered a reduction in mobile formats to just the ones that worked best like the page takeover. I didn’t forsee a bubble economy driving mobile display revenues around games apps. This may come to a head soon as western consumers seem to be less open to downloading to new apps according to research by Deloittes.

    Content marketing

    Content marketing on OTT platforms – WeChat has evolved in leaps and bounds with some amazing campaigns coming out in China, Burberry has worked with Tencent to push the envelopes on their campaigns and have included live webcasts. We haven’t seen so much of this happening with campaigns aimed at western consumers, but one brand springs to mind Vivienne Tam who ran a super model contest on the platform including a voting function and a special blog covering activity around New York Fashion Week as a separate tab on the account – all in English.

    China going global

    Chinese technology brands will finally be successful outside China – It’s still early days, but we’ve seen Lenovo and other Chinese brands demolish Samsung’s share of the smartphone market in the developing world. WeChat has expanded into India, Spain and South East Asia. OnePlus and Xiaomi have started selling direct in Europe, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Alibaba had a monster IPO and Baidu bought into fast start-ups like Uber.

    Consumer privacy

    Privacy issues won’t change much with consumers – Back at the end of last year I didn’t expect the Snowden story to continue to echo onwards. On the surface things didn’t seem to change with consumers, but there has been sufficient consumer interest that technology vendors are addressing (some) consumer privacy needs much to the chagrin of the law enforcement/military industrial complex. This privacy experience hasn’t been universally enjoyed (depending on country regulations) but things are changing.

    Tech workers

    Technology company workers are the new bankers – the tech worker bus protests that started at the end of December 2013 mushroomed, so by August 2014 Westboro Baptist Church got involved. Uber’s surge pricing and Snapchat’s frat boy CEO were just some of the lightning rods that made the tech sector look like vintage Wall Street.

    Immersion

    The rise of immersion – When I wrote my predictions I felt that I had been cheated out of the cyberpunk future that I had been promised and saw it as a major opportunity. Virtual reality had lost out in the 1990s when cumbersome helmet displays would disorientate you and cause you to throw up as the visuals and movement created dissonance partly due to a lack of computing power. Now we’ve seen cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson the chief futurist at one VR company, Facebook own another and companies like Zeiss and Samsung enter the fray. Together with advances in AR post-Google Glasses we are likely to see major innovations beyond gaming in the web-of-no-web.

    Machine programming

    Machine learning will threaten to disrupt programming – while machine learning is making an increased amount of noise in the tech media it is being seen as a leap forward in artificial intelligence rather than as an alternative strategy to traditional application programming. Skype adopted for their latest language training.

    Hyper-competition

    A race to the bottom will bring out hyper-competition in mobile semiconductor suppliers – the mobile market did race to the bottom which has made a major dent in Samsung and Huawei’s marketshare. Mediatek and Hi-Silicon are producing innovative silicon that has pushed phone performance forward. However rather than being a race to the bottom on pricing, Qualcomm has been taken to task by the Chinese government and Qualcomm admitted in its own financial documents that there at least some partners who weren’t paying them licence fees.

    How do you think I did on 2014 crystal ball gazing?

    More information
    2014: just where is it all going? | renaissance chambara