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.

  • Ogilvy social trends + other things

    Ogilvy social trends

    Marshall and James delivered their Ogilvy social trends presentation on a webinar. Included in the Ogilvy social trends presentation is

    • Disposable / transient content
    • Brand banter
    • Sub-dividing communities using greater ad targeting
    • Twitter zero as the organic reach on the platform plunges towards zero
    • Platforms battle for video dominance
    • Rise in privacy facilitating services
    • Digital and identity are blurring the lines between aspiration and self actualisation

    Here is this year’s Ogilvy social trends presentation:

    Vintage logo design

    Flickr user Eric Carl has put together an amazing album of vintage logo design from the 1970s and they are truly splendid in monochrome. They are like set of post modern mons – the iconic symbols that Japanese clans used to represent themselves. They also feel timeless rather than trend driven.

    Great to finally see something we’ve been working on for a good while break cover. I have been working on a global website redesign and digital strategy for the Family Brands unit at Unilever. This is their worldwide margarine (and related cooking ingredients including cream analogues) product portfolio of products. A second project that I have been involved in is a set of adverts that will be rolling out globally. This is debuting in Mexico. Unfortunately, I couldn’t enjoy it as the new, new thing beckons.

    David Tran is a Vietnamese man of Chinese ethnic origin. Sriracha sauce actually has its origins in Thai cooking where is also called man phrik. The Vietnamese use it as a condiment for pho and fried Noodles. Huy Fong Foods is named after the Taiwanese owned freighter that got Mr Tran out of Vietnam in 1979. It is called Rooster sauce because of the rooster on the bottle. The rooster is on the bottle because Mr Tran was born in the year of the rooster. 

    Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz | 16 Things looks at the trends shaping the companies that they invest in.

    Rendering fractals using CSS3 and HTML (without the help of JavaScript) | Snowflake – they had me at fractal.

    DLD15 – The Four Horsemen: Amazon/Apple/Facebook & Google–Who Wins/Loses (Scott Galloway) – his delivery is almost like freestyle rap. Galloway highlights real concerns about the business models of Amazon, Facebook and Google; which are destroying wider economic value.

    Amazon has decimated whole industry sectors: retail and retail real estate. It has tried to disrupt publishing and media production. Galloway’s book The Four is less engaging than his keynote delivery. More on The Four here. 

    To support the launch of the film Doraemon: Stand By Me in Hong Kong, a mobile merchandise shop was created that paid homage to the robot cat.

    Hong Kong like other Asian markets (Japan, Korea, Thailand) is a huge market for cute character franchise merchandise.

  • Group direct messages + more news

    Now on Twitter: group Direct Messages and mobile video camera | Twitter Blogs – playing catch up with OTT messaging apps with group direct messages.

    Media

    Disney’s Maker Studios Struggles to Migrate Its Audience To Maker.tv – CMO Today – can’t get the traffic off YouTube

    Online

    Mayer’s Yahoo Plan Could Affect Softbank Interests – WSJ – it depends on who Mayer sells to

    Eric Schmidt Just Admitted Google’s Dominance Is Under Threat: ‘All Bets Are Off’ (FB, GOOG, MSFT) – actually not as billed but an interesting more nuanced portrait of the current landscape  by Schmidt who has become the most acceptable face of Google leadership. More here

    Tumblr Launches An In-House Ad Agency That Pairs Creators With Big Brands | Fast Company – interesting move, shame agencies aren’t stepping up to the plate

    Security

    Army Communications In Pacific Stretched, Tested « Breaking Defense – interesting discussion about data networks issues

    Technology

    Google Joins Apple, Others Cutting Off Crimea, Blocks AdWords, AdSense, Google Play | TechCrunch – interesting to see how this rolls out from a tech point of view. Russia does have replacements such as Yandex in search, advertising and Android app stores

    Davos 2015: Tech giants risk reputation, warn business leaders – FT.com – this is less about the tech sector per se and more about lightning rods of inequality and economic disruption; of which the tech sector is just one. The bigger question is whether issues like the dark side of free speech and privacy start to spark with consumers?

    Wireless

    Mobile internet slower in Hong Kong than mainland, S Korea | Hong Kong Economic Journal Insight – and the service I enjoyed in Hong Kong was significantly better than the UK…

    The Real Story Behind Jeff Bezos’s Fire Phone Debacle And What It Means For Amazon’s Future | Fast Company – I don’t agree with some of the conclusions, but an interesting piece nonetheless

  • Li Ka shing + more news

    From ‘superman’ to ‘big tiger’, Li Ka shing loses favour with Beijing | South China Morning Post – interesting analysis of the changing sentiment of the Chinese government to Li Ka shing. Li Ka-shing has managed to walk his own path, even compared to other Hong Kong oligarchs. He was also able to play well with westerners. Li Ka shing was just just a man with a plastic flower factory and a headful of ambition until he persuaded HSBC to help him acquire property during the 1967 riots. HSBC bought into Hutchison Whampoa in 1979, got rid of the current taipan Douglas Clague. They then lent Li Ka shing the money to buy the business, including HSBC’s own 22% stake at a knockdown price of 639 million Hong Kong dollars. A large amount of money, but still less than the value of the assets being bought. Li has become even richer thanks to skilful use of the conglomerate discount phenomenon

    Consumer behaviour

    The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis: Drivers of Prediction Accuracy in World Politics – Journal of Experimental Psychology – interesting traits and teams rather than individuals tend to do better. It would be interesting to see how this affects the wisdom of crowds given they are a mass of individuals rather than a team per se (PDF)

    FMCG

    Most Energy Drink Companies Market to Minors, Report Finds | Time – this could be a ticking time bomb from a regulatory point of view

    Media

    Case Study: How Huawei turned its smartphone business around | Marketing Interactive – superlative headline but interesting overview of programmatic buying in China via iClick

    Millward Brown Digital partners with Snapchat | Research Live – interesting they can tell an ad

    Vinyl’s difficult comeback | The Guardian – interesting opportunity for manufacturing record press machines

    Online

    LIVEhouse.in – Online Broadcasting Service – really cool Asian content

    Security

    UK’s Cameron won’t “allow” strong encryption of communications — GigaOM – this is the most disturbing stuff I have seen and read in a long term, the Home Secretary is a political role by its very nature. It is not even an independent judiciary signing off. Secondly, given the poor understanding of technology by the body politic in the UK it doesn’t inspire confidence – if there is a back door for HMG, there is a back door for an abusive third party. Finally this is crush or encourage innovative start ups who focus on privacy to move offshore – Shoreditch to Berlin for instance. More related content here.

    Wireless

    BlackBerry Responds to Media Report – Press Releases – not talking to Samsung, it didn’t sound like it made sense to me

    Smartphones At Tipping Point In China | Young’s China Business – domestic Chinese smartphone market likely to contract 10 per cent over the next year – shipments of all types of cellphones actually plummeted 22 percent in China last year to 452 million units, led by a 64 percent plunge in 2G models and 46 percent drop in 3G ones. (Chinese article) China’s mobile users now number 1.28 billion, giving the nation a penetration rate of 95 percent. 

    Smartphone shipments didn’t fare nearly as badly as the older 2G and 3G models, but were still down 8.2 percent last year to 389 million units. That means that a hefty 86 percent of all cellphones shipped in China last year were smartphones, which were rapidly flooding the market as new players jumped joined the space and older ones ramped up production. 

    It’s worth noting that the 389 million figure is unit shipments and not actual sales. I suspect a big portion of those smartphones — perhaps as much as 20-30 percent — are still sitting in distributor warehouses and on store shelves as unsold inventory due to the market saturation – expect channel clearing sales or developing market dumping