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.

Shop OS versus mobile OS

I decided to write this post to reflect on the very different visions of digital retailing that consumers are currently experiencing. I’ve labelled these two visions mobile OS and Shop OS respectively.

The Mobile OS

I went to Wagamama with some colleagues from Racepoint where we were encouraged to all download Qkr!. Qkr! is an application that was developed by MasterCard rather than the restaurant, it isn’t exclusive to Wagamama either. MasterCard has built the application with a view to building a wide eco-system merchants. It is notable that the application is actually card issuer agnostic, so I was able to set up an account with a Visa card. Wagamama bribed us with free desserts to download the application, so they clearly have some skin in the game. We downloaded it, set up our account with at least one mode of payment, our email address and a password. One of us became the host and gave us all a number which was our common bill. We could order straight from the app and food was supposed to arrive. When we wanted to pay we selected our items and paid our share of the bill. A couple of us only had cash, so they paid a friend and the friend paid on the app. If I am absolutely honest with you, it was a lot of work for casual dining and but for everyone around the table working in technology marketing (and so having a modicum of curiosity about things app-related) – it probably wouldn’t have had us all on board. Now that we have the app on our phone, I could see Qkr! hoping that we use it regularly and likely try and steer us to its merchant network though notifications and special offers. From Wagamama’s point-of-view it saves them from building, testing and maintaining a bespoke application. There are also presumably productivity benefits from reducing the order taking staff required. Qkr! didn’t prevent Wagamama from making mistakes with our order and we ended up one chocolate cake down. Contrast this with the approach that McDonalds have rolled out in their new (to me) Cambridge Circus branch. The area between the counter and the entrance is dominated by a series of vertical kiosks.

These kiosks contain an identical touch screen interface

With a basic card reader on the bottom, there is no Apple Pay or NFC facilities, just a chip and PIN reader. The touch screen menu takes you through a smartphone app like experience, if smartphones came with 27 inch screens. Once payment was successfully received, you then received a deli counter style receipt

And collected from a counter when your number appeared on the screen

This is all designed to reduce consumer interaction and improve efficiency in the restaurant, if there was any way to cheapen the McDonalds’ experience making you queue like an Argos seems like the ideal way to go. The logical progression for this would be to move back to the Automat format (presumably this time using some sort of algorithm to optimise production.

The irony of it all is that the rise of fast food restaurants like McDonalds killed off the Automat as a trend in North America and many Automats were converted into Burger King franchises.

Both Wagamama and McDonalds may have had some efficiency gains but lost out in terms of brand experience, they moved a bit further towards commoditised casual dining and fast food respectively – which goes against the brand equity that they have striven hard to build over decades.

Shop OS offers some advantages over Mobile OS, you can standardise on the hardware to reduce coding and testing requirements. It is ideal for tourists who may not want to roam on foreign mobile networks, nor be able to navigate free wi-fi offerings. The flip side is that there isn’t the same opportunity to capture customer data and behaviour, the notification screen on the smartphone is a key place for brands to intercept the customer using geofencing.

October 13, 2015
Microsoft Windows event
I’ve been in-and-out of meetings that prevented me from reflecting fully on the Microsoft Windows 10 event of October 7, 2015. Microsoft put a lot of content out there which is worthwhile picking through. I have put these items in the order that they occur to me rather than an order of importance.

Microsoft Windows 10 is designed to run on a wide range of devices, a by-product of this is that the PC on your desk maybe a phone connected to a screen and keyboard. Now this may not work for all applications, but it could be enough for browser-based needs. It also means that bring-your-own-device could move beyond having your email on your phone.

The Surface Pro 4

Whilst Microsoft has undergone a regime change since the launch of the original Surface, somethings haven’t changed. I think that the Surface Pro 4 represents a continued effort to decapitate the Microsoft PC eco-system. The targets in the frame are devices like:
- Lenovo La Vie Z
- Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro
- H-P Spectre 13x 360
- Dell XPS 13
All of these devices broadly fit into the 13 ultra notebook format that Apple plays in, but I think that the goal is to maximise Microsoft’s revenue share of the Windows eco-system. The hardware design hasn’t done the wider Microsoft brand any harm at all.

New Lumia devices

The 950 and 950XL put Microsoft in the game, at least from a hardware perspective with the Android eco-system, comparing favourably on hardware specifications with the likes of Huawei, LG and Samsung. What I found more interesting is the allusion in Microsoft’s own commentary of the event that the phones would face a gradual rollout in markets and Microsoft wouldn’t be rolling it out to all markets in Europe. Don’t necessarily expect to see these handsets being rolled out in multi-national companies without an extensive availability and support network.

Whilst mobile network providers would like a third eco-system to reduce the power of Android and iPhone, there doesn’t seem to have been universal carrier acceptance of the devices. This maybe partly due to the tighter integration of Skype in the Windows 10 OS?

Xbox on Windows 10

Xbox need to bring more customers on board and having backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 games provides a more cost effective gaming experience thanks to eBay and other used console game exchanges. It also does beg the question about possible non-gaming or even enterprise use that could be made of the new Xbox (beyond running Linux on them).

Rolling out an OS so universal as Windows 10 is an interesting move. It presents some risks:
- Compromised user experience due to different user contexts (gaming, business desktop computing, consumer PC usage, tablet experiences). A touch orientated interface on a laptop is sub-optimal for content creators who can touch type for example
- Bloat due to the ‘Swiss Army knife’ requirements catering at a core level for different form factors and displays
More information
The Secret of iOS 7 | I, Cringely
Final 2014 prediction: the end of the PC as we knew it | I, Cringely
Thoughts on Microsoft Surface | renaissance chambara
Skype in Windows 10 Preview: Built into Windows 10 so you can do more with friends across devices | Big Blog (Skype owned blog)
Windows 10 Devices: a new chapter | Microsoft News
October 11, 2015
Outlook for Mac + more

Use Outlook for Mac? Don’t upgrade to El Capitan | The Inquirer – yet. It looks like the Microsoft dev team for Outlook for Mac have more work and testing ahead of themselves.

Read our lips, no more EU roaming charges* | The Register – surely this would be pre-dictated on their network footprint? Would this mean that Vodafone Germany could sell me one of their SIMs in the UK?

Attention! Facebook is losing its footing – Fanpage Karma Blog – as a service platform, it wouldn’t surprise me as Twitter’s context in this regard makes more sense, though I know people like BT have invested in customer services on Facebook (and in their case it makes sense due to the universal nature of their brand)

The Surprisingly Traditional Media Path of Razor Clubs | L2 Inc. – I suspect down to needed authoritative endorsement?

Why are luxury brands poaching leaders from the mainstream | Marketing Interactive – will this bring an existential crisis about what luxury means?

Georgia Tech Pumps Water Through Silicon for Chip Cooling | Hackaday – this sounds really impressive. More semiconductor related developments here.

What We Know About the Secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership that Was Just Signed | Motherboard – it makes some interesting reading

Digital Ads Sell Candidates and Causes, in 15-Second Bursts | New York Times – short-form political campaigns

Is the dotcom bubble about to burst (again)? | The Guardian – The issue that I see is that lack of liquidity in the market for $200M+ valued companies. There will be a series of events that cause more people to turn their non-public large tech holdings into cash than available buyers. This is not materially different from the repo market which caused significant issues in 2007/2008

Study: Brands that message more, sell more | Venturebeat – just don’t piss off the customer

Didi Kuaidi buys stake in Indian ride-hailing group Ola – FT.com – interesting international expansion moves, a coalition of the willing against Uber

October 8, 2015
Evernote + more news

Evernote is in deep trouble – Business Insider – kind of glad I don’t have data in Evernote, if I did what would be my emergency migration plan? The lack of migration plan is one of the key issues with post-web 2.0 services – that use web 2.0 technologies. But businesses like Evernote lack the open data approach of forebears like flickr or delicious

Tor browser co-creator: Experian breach shows encryption may not be security panacea – “Experian differentiated between personally identifying information that was not stored encrypted, and credit card info which was stored encrypted — both were hacked,” Goldschlag wrote in a note to VentureBeat. “Experian added that it is likely that the hackers were able to decrypt the encrypted information too,” he said. (Experian’s CEO admitted this.) “So storing information in an encrypted form may not be the panacea that people expect.” – did they use a weak algorithm? Was it an inside job? What was the nature of the cryptography attack? More security related content here

How to Set a Looping Video as Your Facebook Profile Picture on iOS | Lifehacker – something to get a handle on, as it is expected that this will also roll out on brand profiles

Know Your Language: The Ghost in the Shell Script | Motherboard – yes Vice Media giving you the 101 on Unix…

FT correspondent on how to survive — and thrive — in Hong Kong – FT.com – the title is deceptive, but its a nice summary of Hong Kong

iPhone 6s vs. iPhone 6: Sales and adoption comparison | BGR – interesting analysis of the data beyond the press release headline

SK-II opens SoHo pop-up to change consumers’ destinies – Luxury Daily – interesting campaign, just a few years ago how many beauty campaigns tagline would have been a hashtag? The hashtag came from documenting items in the C programming language, which in turn came out of Bell Labs and their work on the AT&T Unix operating system #unixrunningtheworldnow

A Flip On Encryption From Former Fed – Defense One – interesting take on cryptography related things

End of the road for journalists? Tencent’s Robot reporter ‘Dreamwriter’ churns out perfect 1,000-word news story – in 60 seconds | South China Morning Post – robot journalism in China as well

October 6, 2015
Made 2 Fade GM-25 Mk II mixer

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a house party wasn’t a house party without a set of decks and the Technics SL-1200 MkII is well known as being the de-facto turntable that even now manufacturers try to emulate. A second ingredient in the DJing process was a mixer to well mix the sound from one record to another; this usually fell to the Made 2 Fade GM-25 Mk II.

Once you had spent the best part of 700 pounds on a pair of turntables you usually looked to cut costs on a mixer. In terms of value orientated mixers you didn’t have a lot of choice.

Some brands like Formula Sound were exclusively the preserve of the more expensive nightclub installations as was Rane. Other mixers like the Bozak CMA-10-2DL rotary mixer was popular in non-hip hop US nightclubs and the Ministry of Sound (which had imported its sound system design from the States trying to duplicate the Paradise Garage nightclub) in Elephant and Castle – in pre-internet days you just wouldn’t have seen one. Brands like Stanton, Vestax, GLi and Gemini where ‘second mixers’ – the one you managed to save up for after your first mixer – a basic two channel Vestax model would have set you back 350 pounds (about the street price for a new Technics deck at the time). Made in China wasn’t really a thing yet, so the costs of many products were in real terms more expensive than they are today – but weren’t as badly made either. The thing was for many people, they never got to moving on and buying a second mixer, buying new records was more important than buying a better mixer for many people.

As mixers went, there wasn’t any better value for money than the Made 2 Fade GM-25 MkII. I used one of these for years until it eventually gave out. I got mine for 79 pounds including postage and packaging from a DJ supply shop that advertised in DJ magazine (then called Jocks).

It had a surprisingly robust build quality as people who still have these in their attics will tell you (lead wasn’t banned from solder until the early noughts and manufacturers who weren’t based in Shenzhen seemed to have a higher threshold of what they felt was acceptable quality). Mine survived being carted around in a plastic bin from venue-to-venue whilst my decks where coddled in bespoke flight cases. It has its power supply built into the case which meant that you didn’t have to worry about losing it, or worry about breaking the pin in a socket connecting an external PSU.

Made 2 Fade cut costs by cutting features; some of those features were extremely handy for DJs such as channel gain (how much amplification is supplied to the channel), eq dials (which come in handy when you are doing a running mix to smooth the base of one track out whilst bring the next one in) or channel metering (that would allow you to see relative loudness levels). Cutting features rather than trying to implement them half-heartedly meant that the GM-25 had a pretty good sound-to-noise ratio, which was another reason to put off trading up.

They still managed to not make the mixer feel too cheap so the cross fader (that allowed you to mix the sound of one record across to the other) was replaceable presumably as they felt this control would take the greatest hammering from DJs.

Rivals

There were other cheap mixers on the market like Phonic’s MTR-60, but Made 2 Fade came in and undercut them, by making careful design choices. Of course this didn’t stop the plastic handles on at least of the one faders coming loose and coming off, I put a blob of ‘Plastic Padding’ polyester resin over the top of the naked metal spike that protruded from the fader. Eventually more expensive models with more features including a simple digital sampler and kill switches where added to the Made 2 Fade range but these didn’t prove as attractive as the bare bones GM-25, why spend extra when you could upgrade to a Vestax/Gemini/Numark?

Vestax PMC-05

I aspired to own a Vestax PMC-05 with its eq controls, buttery smooth cross fader and its Made In Japan quality, but had to make do with the Made 2 Fade.

The Made 2 Fade was the ‘long bow’ or ‘Ford Model T’ of British dance music, the proletariat mixing tool of the average bedroom DJ who wanted to cut up some tunes, make it big, broadcast a banging set on pirate radio, or just throw a party for his friends(it generally was nerdy lads who spent too much time in record shops, though a lady friend of mine was well-known techno DJ back in the day). It was the mixer that launched thousands of dreams and provided the soundtrack to countless others.

However since it didn’t grace the big clubs and wasn’t used by Carl Cox, Paul Oakenfold or Sasha. It won’t be likely to written up by the likes of Bill Brewster, Greg Wilson or Dave Haslam – all of which have done a sterling job in documenting the DJ sub-culture.

More information

Technical considerations

I, Cringely – Speed Bump great article on the move to lead-free solder and the general FUBARage that it brings
Back To The Oldskool – forum thread on people’s first mixers
History of the scene
DJHistory.com – Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s site which hosts a wealth of DJ related content
Greg Wilson – a personal hero and a great ‘DJ as taste maker’
Dave Haslam – former Hacienda DJ (known for his eclectic Temperance sets including US house, rock, indie, hip-hop and Italian tracks) who then went on to document the history of nightlife with a number of books and broadcast projects. Haslam also played at lesser known but important Manchester clubs: Boardwalk and Man Alive

October 5, 2015