Ged Carroll

Category: technology | 技術 | 기술 | テクノロジー

It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.

One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.

My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.

I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.

My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.

Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.

That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.

  • Sailfish OS + more things

    Jolla raises $12 million to continue developing Sailfish OS | Tech.eu – glad that they found funding, but things will be a lot tougher with AndroidOne’s progress and Cyanogen getting their act together with their geo-licences. Hopefully Sailfish OS will find the market share that it deserves. More wireless-related posts here.

    PLOS ONE: Tracking Protests Using Geotagged Flickr Photographs – interesting that they are using flickr. Web 2.0 era networks have more accessible data structures. Flickr has a relatively smaller community but a passionate one

    In the Cloud, Oracle Shops the Discount Aisle — The Information  – there’s a lot of upside potential to buying small, targeted cloud software businesses. It can improve their profitability by shifting their services to its own infrastructure. Most obviously, it can shrink sales and marketing costs, typically the single biggest expense for cloud software, by integrating the products into its own formidable sales organisation (paywall)

    brandchannel: Protesters Boycott Target Following Retailer’s Stand Against ‘Bathroom Bills’ – interesting challenges that brands face in the US

    Jammers, Not Terminators: DARPA & The Future Of Robotics « Breaking Defense – it could be an interesting way of maximising spectrum usage

    How Intel Missed the Smartphone Call | EE Times – interesting read, but completely misses the role that Intel played in WiMax – which didn’t help thing either

    South Korea revives GPS backup project after blaming North for jamming | Reuters

    Apple’s Uncharted Territory | Techpinions – customer upgrade cycle up to 27 months

    Cyanogen OS no longer exclusive to Yu in India, here’s why | Gizchina – so OnePlus could have been spared the hassle of creating OxygenOS

    Huawei boss says 2K displays are a waste! Do you agree? | Gizchina – tend to agree with him

    British “Spies” Among Thousands Of names Exposed Following Massive Leak At Largest Mid-East Bank | Zero Hedge – Not sure that this is true, however if it is then the hackers leaked profiles that they built up based on the bank data but went beyond to look at things like social media profiles

    The Internet Economy — Medium – no real surprise but a nice analysis

  • What about the work desk phone?

    I was in touch with a former colleague of mine the other day and they sent me a picture of my old work desk phone. It was still logged into my account and with a divert through to my mobile phone.
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    The office had hot desking because there wasn’t enough space for everyone to be in at the same time.  We had email account size restrictions and people walked around with secondary hard drives plugged into their laptops as local and network storage wasn’t adequate enough to schlep all the documents on to a file server. There wasn’t a cloud-based equivalent of a file server in use 3either.

    Yet my former work desk phone remained logged in because no one was bothering to use it. So they have a surplus of desk telephones, when there was a shortage of pretty much every other resource the knowledge worker needed.

    Often times, people still used the land line number which followed them due to the Cisco VoIP PBX, but they diverted it to their mobile handset. The culture was very much based around conference calls, international teams would dial into a bridge number and be connected. You would see people pacing the common spaces such as corridors or reception and participating in conference calls on headsets wired into their smartphone.

    At the point of my project finishing they were just starting to roll out Skype for business. I suspect that this wasn’t going to change dramatically the use of mobile handsets, just the nature of how the call got to the recipient.

    Mobile infrastructure manufacturers have been expecting this for years, they rolled out pico-cell products aimed at enterprises to deal with reception dead spots in metal framed office buildings. What really seemed to have spurred things into action is the rise of all-you-can-eat voice tariffs.

  • AI love advice + more things

    Japanese communications company to introduce AI love advice specialist | Rocket News 24 – we can all stand around an snigger about this. But it’s also really interesting. One of the ways that Yahoo! failed to innovate around search was a concept they called knowledge search. This was about opinions rather than facts: what’s the best place to get a cup of coffee in Greenwich? Yahoo! had envisioned it would be people powered.

    Eventually it would become Yahoo! Answers – which filled up with spam content. This was a fault of incentives and community management not principle as Quora proved. The more pertinent question would be: what would stop an AI love advice specialist?

    China’s Baidu Misses Expectations As Net Profit Crashes 18.9% | ChinaTechNews – Baidu is between a rock and a hard place. Yes it has a market protected from Google. But it is also shut out of the WeChat walled garden. Alibaba is where most purchases happen so Baidu isn’t that needed and they’re at the mercy of the Chinese government. Success has a price

    Spy Chief Complains That Edward Snowden Sped Up Spread of Encryption by 7 Years  – it came from the National Security Agency. “The projected growth maturation and installation of commercially available encryption — what they had forecasted for seven years ahead, three years ago, was accelerated to now, because of the revelation of the leaks.” More on privacy related posts here.

    Microsoft Flow is like IFTTT for connecting cloud services – Business Insider – back in the day this would have been called middleware. When I started off my agency career I happened to have telecoms clients. A lot of my colleagues had small software companies that provided software components for ‘n-tier’ systems. This allowed development of flexible and reusable apps. Logic and processing of data could be built into workflows.

  • China tech data slides

    I have been pulling together China tech data slides for me that were useful for some work that I have been doing. I thought it would be worthwhile sharing these slides with a wider audience.

    This month, I have selected a few slides that shed a light on advertising and consumer behaviour in China.
    May online marketing
    Looking at platforms it is hard to over play the importance of Tencent in the Chinese internet which is show at the heart of the China tech data I have collated. Looking at mobile behaviour Tencent is responsible for at least four of the top ten properties: WeChat, QQ, QQ Browser and Tencent Video.
    May online marketing
    If we look at two Chinese internet companies Tencent and Netease we can see how the companies have massively increased the number of non-game apps that they provide to keep consumers in their eco-system for their digital lives.
    May online marketing
    (Microsoft’s high number is driven by a number experimental project apps and enterprise apps). What this means is that the mobile OS becomes less important, which is one of the reasons why western brands from Samsung to Apple have been hit in the market. Their platforms give them less leverage.

    Tencent’s WeChat is one of the most popular methods of payment in China
    May online marketing

    If we look at advertising spend in the Chinese market we can see that digital and radio advertising spend over-indexes. In some ways this is surprising. Online content is huge and historically the government controlled traditional media much more tightly than online media – to the detriment of watchable content on the television. More recently, government regulation has tightened across platforms.
    May online marketing
    Print advertising only slightly over-indexes in comparison to digital or radio. On the face of it there looks to be a massive opportunity in television advertising.

    If we look at the media market consumption habits two things immediately stand out. Television and radio are largely holding their own in the face of rapidly growing digital consumption. The rapid growth in digital consumption is being driven by non-PC devices.
    May online marketing

    If you want to know why Huawei has partnered with Leica to boost the perception of its smartphone camera function, one of the factors involved is the massive growth of photography in Chinese mobile behaviour. This is especially interesting when one compares it to messaging and social – WeChat the largest mobile social platform is all encompassing in its functionality and place in modern Chinese life. A second factor is the way manufacturers are trying redefine the premium smartphone sector, at a time when innovation and experiential difference have become incremental.
    May online marketing
    May online marketing


    You can see the full presentation here. More posts on China and technology related subjects.

  • QQ themed KFC + more news

    First QQ themed KFC opens in Shenzhen | Marketing Interactive – interesting brand collaboration. KFC has always made a point of being more local and closer to the Chinese consumer than rivals. This has paid off over time. It is no surprise that there is a QQ themed KFC, but what’s next in terms of media-dining experiences? What could be the content tie-ins that would bring a QQ themed KFC concept to life? Is it the China market answer to Chuck E. Cheese?

    Here’s How Snapchat Might Be Beating Facebook | TIME – relative engagement rates and popularity with millennials desirable for marketers. But it has easily copied features and might end up being the beta tester for Instagram’s new features.

    Pentax K-1 Hands-on First Impressions – Bokeh by DigitalRev – I really like the look of it. Pentax has had a rough ride with change in owners but they are still a great DSLR camera platform. One of the key reasons for this is the cheap but good quality lens available for it.

    Google takes aim at Microsoft and IBM’s enterprise clients (GOOG, GOOGL, MSFT, IBM) | BusinessInsider – probably not what IBM needs at the moment. I think that Microsoft would have much less worried simply because it has better client relationships. IBM Global Services have had issues for years documented by Robert X. Cringely in The Decline And Fall Of IBM

    Is Apple starting to rot in China? Top level thoughts – SocialBrandWatch – It is less about ‘what the phone projects externally’, and more about “does the phone allow me connect digitally, if so, I am open to what fits me best” – interesting cross platform commoditisation as app layer becomes OS. WeChat is doing what Netscape thought that they could do with the browser and the web in the late 1990s. Also smartphones in trough part of innovation. The big gains between models are no more.

    How Facebook’s Stock Split Lets Mark Zuckerberg Keep Control | Fast Company – getting out ahead of things to prevent a future Yahoo! situation with activist investors and slowing growth ending up in tortious tech death

    Twitter now bills itself as a news app, not a social network | Digiday – ok, but where’s the revenue and user growth? Twitter has a lot of things going for it except the ability to effectively

    Google just pissed off the entire TV industry | TheNextWeb – hahahahahaha really, lets see reach curve data across different consumer groups and CPMs. Technology companies don’t get marketing and branding. They do get sales, but they’re lame on brand and really understanding the consumer. More posts on advertising here.

    The Guardian bets big on VR: ‘We’ve jumped in the deep end of the pool’ | Digiday – feels more like an experiment or a PR stunt rather than a meaningful media exercise. I guess it could be an interesting way to explore storytelling in VR. Film doesn’t work as well as an analogue as it has in video gaming. VR seems to be more about experiences and emoting

    Yahoo’s $8 Billion Black Hole – Bloomberg Businessweek – My own take is Mayer had a nearly impossible job as a turnaround, but a manageable job as an optimise and shred. The products launched just weren’t up to standard and those that were aren’t monetised well. How on earth could Tumblr be worthless. We’re talking not just about underachieving a la Twitter, but literally having no value. When Yahoo! bought Flickr it was breaking even and they managed to ruin that as well

    This is one big example of the market conditions that are holding Apple down (AAPL) – lengthening upgrade cycles. You’ll see an emphasis on services. It also means that the first Apple device is a pre-owned Apple device

    Kaiser Kuo on Baidu, Foreign Reportage, and the ‘Paradoxes’ of China | Asia Society – great interview. Kaiser is one of the best ‘translators’ of China out there.

    The Shape of Things — Welcome to Thington — Medium – interesting vision thing on the IoT by Tom Coates.

    Traffic to Wikipedia terrorism entries plunged after Snowden revelations, study finds | Reuters – The traffic dropped even more to topics that survey respondents deemed especially privacy-sensitive. Viewership of a presumably “safer” group of articles about U.S. government security forces decreased much less in the same period. 

    Penney’s results, subjected to peer-review, offer a deeper dive into an issue investigated by previous researchers, including some who found a 5.0 percent drop in Google searches for sensitive terms immediately after June 2013. Other surveys have found sharply increased use of privacy-protecting Web browsers and communications tools. – I am not terribly surprised as an Irish child growing up in the UK during the Troubles I saw the community around me self-censor so they couldn’t be accused of anything.

    Apple iPhone, Once a Status Symbol in China, Loses Its Luster | NYTimes.com – “None of the brands do really great,” he said. “But while I might sell one or two Huawei phones in 10 days, I may not even sell one iPhone 6s.” (paywall)

    The rise of China’s millionaire research scientists | South China Morning Post – A total 1.4 trillion yuan was spent on the sector last year, according to the government, more than the entire GDP of New Zealand