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.

  • Geico advertising + more things

    Geico advertising

    What prompted me to write about Geico advertising was a stream of news from marketing services companies about the state of technology company advertising. At the time of writing Stagwell are just the latest marketing services firm after S4, IPG, Omnicom and WPP have pinned declining profits on a reduction in technology company advertising spend. Then this story broke about Geico advertising: Insurer Geico made more money after benching its famous gecko | Quartz – and my first reaction was that the wrong lessons might be taken away from this.

    Geico

    Geico advertising – a primer

    Geico îs an unfamiliar name to most people outside of the US. If you’ve read American magazines chances are there was a print ad or two in there with their iconic Gecko spokesperson. It’s a similar case on American television.

    Geico advertising and their Gecko are as familiar to Americans as the meerkats of Comparethemarket.com are to your average Brits.

    The truth about technology marketers vs. Geico advertising

    Having worked with technology brands on and off for the past three decades, I have enough experience to know that generally, they aren’t great marketing organisations.

    Coinbase’s Super Bowl ad drove traffic to a site that fell over.
    Geico reinforced brand equity in the insurance space and pointed out their 24-hour claims hotline (I imagine that this isn’t an exclusive feature, but you wouldn’t know it from the advert).

    Growth mindset ≠ marketing mindset

    As organisations, they have a growth mindset, but not a marketing mindset. Before the internet, this meant a powerful field sales force organisation and marketing meant a bit of branding / design work coupled with case studies for the sales people. With the internet came constant iterative ‘growth hacking’ on digital channels, that mirrors agile software development rather than the best practices of marketing science.

    There is a good reason why organisations like the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science are supported by FMCG manufacturers, luxury goods makers, media companies, marketing services firms and pharmaceutical companies, BUT has no technology company sponsors.

    The reasons are cultural in nature:

    • Engineering – if I haven’t heard of it or invented it then it’s not valid and you’re just a suit. At best great product is the marketing – and that’s great if you have a clearly differentiated great product which is self evident. The engineering mindset is also why they trust adtech and marketing automation services which outsource your marketing communications approach to a black box
    • Sales – marketing is just support. Which is the reason why my early clients (like old school Silicon Valley royalty LSI Logic) promoted long serving secretaries and administration staff into marketing roles
    • Even if they had a marketer who knew about Ehrenberg-Bass they wouldn’t be able to get in buy-in from the wider organisation to participate and they’d likely be fighting other dumpster fires elsewhere

    Secondly, their laser focus on data affects their outlook. To paraphrase the comedian Bill Hicks: they know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. Because they are only looking at short term data. Great marketing and advertising also has long term effects that both screws with the short term marketing data focus.

    Marketing and growth hacking are considered synonymous. It would seem ridiculous for me to to claim in any large marketing orientated organisation that sales and marketing are synonymous. The differences and complementary aspects of both would be well known. Yet in technology companies, this isn’t the case.

    By contrast Geico as a brand is an organisation who understood marketing. You make your car or house insurance decision at best once a year (though there is friction in making a change).

    The technology sector approach would be for Geico to bid on search ads and aggregators to acquire customers and then do direct mail or email when it comes to renewal times. But Geico advertising does something different. Geico advertising builds mental framework, so that Geico means car insurance and will be one of the brands that you consider.

    This achieves a few things:

    • You are less likely to move away from Geico, you may not love them, but searching for an alternative might be too much of a hassle.
    • You may be reassured that you have chosen ‘the’ car insurance
    • It helps new customers get over the ‘which car insurance company to choose’ decision
    • It helps with upsell on the products due to the reassurance of the brand

    Technology companies deal with these problems in a slightly different way:

    • Certification of engineering staff. If you are Microsoft certified or Cisco certified, you are less likely to use open source software or Juniper Networks products respectively. It would be against your self interest and the investment in terms of time and money that you have made in your self development
    • Contractual lock-in – self explanatory
    • Technology lock-in. You can put your data or programming code into a particular system, but its much harder and more expensive to move on to another system
    • Owning the entire technology stack. This is the approach that Adobe Systems have taken, gradually acquiring over the years the entire marketing, workflow and creative systems used by ad agencies, media agencies and their clients

    So why was Geico advertising spend cut?

    This is the crux of my point about how the wrong lessons might be taken away from the Geico advertising spend cut, with no ‘apparent’ impact.

    There are a number of good reasons why Geico made the cut in advertising spend:

    • There was a cut in insurance sector advertising overall, so that Geico maintained or even grew its relative share of voice while spending less. This should see it emerge with improved economic performance over time. Procter and Gamble became the behemoth it now is by INCREASING advertising during the great depression of the 1920s. So the idea of relative share of voice and its relationship to market share is older than I am. Further more research by the IPA has found that holding or increasing relative share of voice during a downturn has a positive impact for business performance over a five year period
    • Geico may have managed to make some efficiency gains, this is most likely to occur in brand activating activities

    There is also a bad reason: saving money in the short term. Kraft Heinz cut marketing to the bone under the guise of zero based budgeting (ZBB) – which made a mockery of ZBB as a concept. Kraft Heinz shares massively underperformed and were down 60% in the last 5 years, compared to the S&P 500 having gone up 69%. If Geico is following this route then it bodes ill for the long term performance of the business.

    Without us knowing the real reasons and focusing on the short term measure, it reinforces a growth hacking mindset.

    Beauty

    Beauty hotspots: Why global giants are circling Australian brands | Vogue Business – well developed brands, celebrity and influencer brands have less longevity and are over-priced by comparison

    Trends Shaping the Future of the Skincare Industry | Mintel 

    Farfetch to shut down its beauty business | Vogue Business – interesting e-commerce specific issues

    Business

    A Chinese Electronics Empire – The Wire China  – on Midea

    China

    The China Convergence – by N.S. Lyons – The Upheaval

    Chinese developer’s cancelled share placement fuels property sector woes | Financial Times – this is interesting as Country Garden is one of the country’s better run developers and hasn’t done as many things that could be considered hubristic in nature. And the second shoe drops: China’s Country Garden misses bond payments as turmoil grips property sector | Financial Times

    Anger in China over plan to use cities as ‘moat’ to save Beijing from floods | China | The Guardian

    China’s embassy to Russia criticises treatment of citizens at border | Reuters 

    Weekly news roundup: China’s strides and setbacks in semiconductor self-sufficiency and other top stories – interesting that China is going for self sufficiency across all aspects of semiconductors from raw materials to processes

    Reckoning in China: Behind Xi Jinping’s Firing of Top Beijing Officials | Daily Beast

    White House unveils ban on US investment in Chinese tech sectors | Financial Times 

    Chinese economy falls into deflation as recovery stumbles | Financial Times 

    China’s Plan to Rule the World’s Smart Devices, FCC Urged to Act | Newsweek

    Consumer behaviour

    Invasion of Food Delivery Robots is Driving People to Vandalism and Theft | Futurism – no opportunity is bringing out the worst in some people

    Hard times mean no sustainability premium in North America | WARC | The Feed – every single economic recession this comes around and marketers are surprised. Time to pay attention to what the longitudinal research data says. I really like the work that Gallup have done on macro trends and the American consumer, in particular their work on attitudes to the environment.

    Culture

    Remnants of curry dating back 1,800 years found on stone tools in Southeast Asia is oldest outside India | South China Morning Post 

    Economics

    Risk perceptions and economic activity in the United Kingdom | Bank Underground

    VC Optimism Returning But More Pain Ahead In Their Portfolios | Hunter Walk 

    Energy

    The growth of lithium-ion battery power | The Economist – hitting a natural limit of price / energy provided

    Gadgets

    Apple seeks to bolster expertise in generative AI on mobile devices | Financial Times

    Germany

    Bertelsmann Investments to plough $700mn into Chinese start-ups | Financial Times

    Health

    ‘Pokémon Sleep’ Review: Sleep-Tracking Game Made Me Into Snorlax – gamifying sleep. Pokemon Sleep has surged to 3.2M global downloads and an estimated $130k in daily revenue according to SensorTower data. The app ranked in the top 5 in the U.S. Games charts. It’s even more popular in Japan (the home of Pokemon), where it’s number 1 across the App Store categories

    MSLs drive 1.5x adoption in first six months | Klick Wire – launch tactic

    Hong Kong

    Bruce Lee’s legacy squares up to modern life in Hong Kong | Reuters

    ‘Long-distance’ is the new ‘soft’ | Big Lychee, Various Sectors

    Canadian Case Exposes Hong Kong Developer’s Corporate Ties to Chinese Criminal Underworld – OCCRP 

    How to

    INFER Public | The Pub Blog – Using AI to improve your forecast rationale 

    Japan

    FEATURE: Samurai and Son – The Oral History of SHOGUN ASSASSIN! – Tokyoscope has the inside track on the American version of Lone Wolf & Cub part two

    Luxury

    Bentley’s global sales drop 4pc in first half of 2023 | Luxury Daily 

    Marketing

    Using attention to scale creative excellence at Mars | WARC – Sales, distinctive assets, and attention to advertising are the go-to metrics to guide marketing decisions at Mars. Mars use Attention as a pre-testing tool, to inform creative choices in digital and also proxy in TV. Mars believe that an execution with a better attention score will travel across media channels better and will be a safer bet for you when you need to make a choice. Measuring Attention is a key element in helping us improve the creative hit rate. Advertisers should question how they measure consumer responses and focus on measures of real consumer behavior.

    Thinkerbell co-founders on life after PwC – by Tim Burrowes 

    Materials

    Musk still mulling massive Tesla plant for Indonesia | Asia Times – Indonesia is one of the biggest supplies of Nickel in the world and have been focused on exploiting it in a way that maximises the economic benefit to Indonesians

    Media

    Advertising has reached a new low in the age of podcasts | Financial Times and WPP & Spotify announce first-of-its-kind global partnership | WPP 

    Influencer Marketing on Instagram: Empirical Research on Social Media Engagement with Sponsored Posts and Sponsored posts and microinfluencers deliver greater engagement on Instagram | WARC – Sponsored posts of social media influencers (SMIs) outperformed their non-sponsored posts in terms of generating more comments and “likes” than NSPs. The average number of engagements for sponsored posts was 1,559.2, beating a comparative figure of 1,157.4 for non-sponsored posts. Median engagement totals for sponsored posts came in at 747, while the median engagement for NSPs stood at 401.

    Online

    China proposes tighter limits on children’s use of tech | Financial Times

    How effective is Russian propaganda? | Financial Times 

    LinkedIn Workplace Halts Services in China Starting Today – Pandaily – I was a bit surprised as I thought Linkedn had left a few years ago

    Security

    UK defence group BAE Systems lifts profit forecast as military spending soars | Financial Times and Britain’s investors shy away from UK defence companies | Financial Times 

    The untold history of today’s Russian-speaking hackers | Financial Times 

    Former U.S. Officials Urge New Export Alliance on China – EE Times 

    Microsoft downplays damaging report on Chinese hacking its own engineers vetted – this could go bad for Microsoft: US senator victim-blames Microsoft for Chinese hack 

    Five Eyes nations list 12 most exploited vulnerabilities • The Register – Fortinet products are coming off very badly in this list

    Fortinet’s security issues have aligned with a reluctance for customers to upgrade their business with the company

    Exclusive: North Korean hackers breached top Russian missile maker | Reuters

    On publicizing Chinese hacking success – by Graham Webster – really interesting observations here

    Drug-related killings add to instability in Syria’s south | Asia Times 

    Software

    Should an AI bot making $1mn really be the next Turing test? | Financial Times – also what does it say about being human?

    Zoom wants to train its AI on content from all user calls | Quartz – combine the legal overreach with concerns about Zoom’s connections with the Chinese government and you can see how bad this is likely to get

    Style

    Yeezy drops are still boosting Adidas profits | Vogue Business 

    Technology

    AMD Q2 – Building Momentum? | Digits to Dollars 

    Radar Trends to Watch: August 2023 – O’Reilly 

    White House unveils ban on US investment in Chinese tech sectors | Financial Times 

    Web of no web

    Taiwan’s satellite supply chain empowering international market entry

  • Chip War

    It has taken me far too long to finish Chip War and write this review, so apologies in advance. Chip War was one of the FT’s best business books of 2022. In reality it’s a book about history, that happens to feature businesses.

    Chip War

    The lens shaping everything else that I have written here

    I am a sucker for books on the history of technology and Chip War was right in my wheelhouse. It complemented, rather than overlapped some of my existing favourite technology history books like Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires, John Markoff’s What The Dormouse Said or most of Michael Malone and Steven Levy’s output to date.

    The author

    The author Chris Miller wasn’t a familiar name to me. Unlike Cringely, Markoff, Malone or Levy; Miller is an academic rather than a former journalist. Miller currently teaches international history at Tufts University. Chip War wasn’t his first book, his previous ones have focused on Soviet and Russian history. As a technology sector outsider, Miller’s Chip War has a very different tone my other favourite books from the genre.

    It also allowed Miller to view the history of semiconductors in terms of a global perspective, that I hadn’t previously seen done.

    On to Chip War itself

    Other reviewers have used words like ‘outstanding’ and ‘epic’ to describe the book – which while being a reasonable guide to overall quality and length of read aren’t really all that helpful. It took me six months to read as a casual book. This is partly down to a hectic work schedule and that its a long book. I suspect that some readers when they reviewed the book seem to have thought ‘long’ as difficult to read. It’s actually 351 pages ignoring acknowledgements and the footnotes at the back of the book. Being an academic Miller worked hard to source everything in Chip War.

    The book starts in the post-war period as the defence industry moves from being focused on hammering steel to developing smarter systems using semiconductors. That road takes the book past Texas Instruments and the early Silicon Valley of Bob Noyce and other members of the treacherous eight.

    The book also zooms out to cover the Soviet Union’s failed efforts to replicate Silicon Valley as well as domestic industrial espionage and the start of globalisation which begat the current industry.

    The Japanese challenge is covered in depth as is the rise of Korea including challenges that the industry faced in the early 2000s. The rise of Taiwan and its use of semiconductors as a hedge against invasion from the mainland. European tool maker ASML gets its own section, which is a case study in how to make a virtue of necessity. Finally it covers the technology conflict with China. Bring this up to date circa 2022.

    If you are student of Silicon Valley history, then Chip War is unique in the way it puts everything in context. There were some completely new parts to me such as the political role that Sony founder Akio Morita played in advocating for a robust Japanese semiconductor industry as part of reasserting Japanese importance internationally.

    You can get hold of Chip War here. More book reviews here.

  • Switching off + more things

    Switching off

    Switching off as a choice is a relatively new phenomenon. A few blogposts ago I talked about how consumer internet usage started for me 25 years ago. Back then going online was an active choice. In my case I would have to travel to an internet café. Later I would have to dial-in to an ISP or log into a wi-fi network.

    Confluence of always-on elements

    Wireless home broadband allowed seamless connectivity around the house or the workplace. The next thing that changed was laptop battery battery life improved to the point that one could realistically work for a 8 hours on writing or emailing at a conference or coffee shop without a power cable. Social media became a thing, first it was a positive influence, but gradually it had a more complex social impact.

    Finally there was smartphones. Nokia, BlackBerry, Palm and Microsoft smartphone attempts gave way to a duopoly of Apple and Alphabet’s respective eco-systems. I went back to an old presentation that I did a number of years ago. Here’s a chart from it, that I pulled together of publicly available active user numbers by time from December 1997 to April 2016.

    Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and Gmail users over time

    The dramatic take off in Gmail email accounts in 2011 and beyond is down to the rise of the Android operating system. By 2013, smartphone users were engaged by a series of compelling always-on applications to counter switching off.

    Strategising for a winning mobile social formula at IMM Conference, Hong Kong
    Ged Carroll for IMM Conference, Hong Kong (August 2013)
    Strategising for a winning mobile social formula at IMM Conference, Hong Kong
    Strategising for a winning mobile social formula at IMM Conference, Hong Kong
    Strategising for a winning mobile social formula at IMM Conference, Hong Kong

    Switching off became important. ‘Crackberry‘ – a light hearted take on smartphone addiction and an ability to turn off peaked as a thing as far back as September 2009 according to Google Trends. 12 months later the Crackberry book advised us on how to put down our smartphones. Four years later, the self-help books became more strident in their exhortations: Put Down Your Damn Phone Already: A (loving) rant about your obnoxious cellphone use being a case in point.

    The biggest concerns now, seems to be about two things where correlation if not causality supports beliefs about:

    From a professional perspective and increasingly a personal perspective, consumers have become smartphone human cyborgs.

    Class as a determinant of switching off

    Switching off is also about culture and behaviour. A discussion that I had with a friend about phones being turned off and put in a box before a night at the opera, reminded me of how ‘class’ in its widest sense can be one of the biggest determinants of switching off. You see it in homes that put phones away before a family dinner, or cinema-goers who are happy to turn their phone off before the main feature starts.

    The bulk of people may have the devices as always-on pacifiers. This quietens children and is seen as a continued source of confidence and validation rather than switching off.

    Secondly, we’re also seeing a small proportion of people choosing to use feature phones as a way of disconnecting. This might happen all the time or at the weekend, when they don’t want to be bothered by Microsoft Teams and WhatsApp messages.

    How not to influence behaviour

    EE Phonesmart – how not to design a PSA website

    China

    Politics crippling innovation: China notes, July ’23: on technological momentum | Dan Wang

    Culture

    Jamie Morgan on the next-gen of Buffalo kids – The Face – Buffalo will never die

    Economics

    How Saudi Arabia is buying the world – New Statesman – the unlikely links of Saudi Arabia and DC’s fictional country of Wakanda

    Energy

    Will there be enough cables for the clean energy transition? | Financial Times

    FMCG

    Why Rajiv Jain is betting on an Indian yoga televangelist | Financial Times – plans on growing market share rather than margin share for Patanjali Foods could put pricing pressure on Hindustan Unilever and Nestlė India

    Bubble tea, probably the biggest FMCG breakout in the past decade and its convoluted origin.

    How to

    Gwern on ‘How to search’ – how to make Google work harder for you

    Japan

    In France, Japonisme has turned into Japanmania – The Japan Times 

    In America, “Barbenheimer” is a success. In Japan, it’s a scandal.

    How homogeneous is Japan really? (repost) – by Noah Smith

    Korea

    Tech cold war: South Korea pivots from China to US | Financial Times

    Luxury

    Aspirational shoppers are cutting back. What next? | Vogue Business – also notable for a new acronym that I hadn’t heard before HENRYs (high earning, not rich yet)

    Media

    Streaming and podcasts are the most popular audio media formats | WARC 

    Online

    The world’s last internet cafes – Rest of World – Internet cafes were more than just places to log on. They emerged in the waning years of the 20th century — a post-Cold War moment full of techno-optimism. Sharing a global resource like the internet “was going to bring different people in different cultures together in mutual understanding,” historian and author Margaret O’Mara told Rest of World. It was an era in which, both physically and digitally, “people were moving across borders that before were very difficult, if not impossible, to cross.” 

    Security

    City investors putting UK security at risk over ESG, ministers warn | Financial Times – the capitalists won’t even buy the rope to hang themselves

    Software

    Bloomberg on ethics in technology companies and artificial intelligence.

    Technology

    SK Hynix and Samsung’s early bet on AI memory chips pays off | Financial Times

    Intel’s AI bullishness shows its anxiety on catching Nvidia | Quartz

    Telecoms

    Software engineers dedication to getting Taylor Swift Tickets – Blind – judicious use of VPN connection

  • The politics of Prada + more stuff

    The Politics of Prada

    The politics of Prada challenged what I knew about the luxury brand. I knew that Prada started off as a handbag company that then pivoted into apparel. I also realised that some Prada items probably borrowed from military clothing design and fabric technology, such as Prada’s iconic black Pocono fabric backpacks.

    prada

    This is pretty common across Italian design with Stone Island CP Company being prime examples. If you would have asked me about the politics of Prada, I would have expected it to be part of the wider anarcho-far left hatred of all prestige brands.

    I didn’t realise that Miuccia Prada’s clothing designs reflected her own left wing, pro-feminist politics. The connections of Prada with yachting has less to do with the politics of Prada and more to do with the passion of her husband and business partner Patrizio Bertelli.

    One forgets how politics in Italy, had elements of the far left with the Communist Party and the Red Brigades pitted against reactionary right including the Propaganda Due (P2) masonic lodge and the Bologna central station bombing on August 2, 1980. The politics of Prada is by its nature Italian. More related content here.

    Aimé Leon Dore x DJ Stretch Armstrong

    Aimé Leon Dore got Stretch Armstrong in for a set playing sublime vintage soul 45s.

    Scott Galloway on the intersection of economics and technology

    Professor Scott Galloway on the intersection of economics, social trends, consumer trends and technology.

    Iran-Contra affair

    The Iran-Contra affair was how the president Reagan administration, specifically ‘rogue’ elements within it like Oliver North and John Poindexter, came to swap heavy weaponry with the terrorist sponsoring government of Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages, and how money from these deals came to be diverted to a secret and illegal war in Central America.

    Sean Munger provided one of the best accounts of it that I have seen outside of the Congressional report.

    The most Hong Kong thing I saw all week

    HKIB News – a cable and online TV news channel featured a news story about the first trip of local bus company KMB’s electric double decker bus. At the bus stop was a mix of young and middle aged (mostly) male business enthusiasts. In Hong Kong, bus enthusiasts is much more mainstream in the UK. There are shops that sell die-cast scale models of buses in different liveries, so you can get an exact period-correct bus. Bus enthusiasm and the continued popularity of radio controlled car builds as mainstream hobbies were two distinctive aspects of Hong Kong culture for me.

    Much of this is down to the limited size of Hong Kong and the public transport infrastructure. Generations of small children have enjoyed some of their happiest memories starting and ending with a bus trip. Buses are the first line of public transport. Hong Kong, (and Singapore) have a good number of young men and women for which it is the dream career. Which is remarkable given that these are part of the developed world and have a good education system.

    Instead in the UK, you have a job that pays minimum wage that no one dreams doing.

  • LK99 & room temperature superconductors

    What is LK99?

    LK99 is some sort of lead phosphate compounds called lead apatite with small amounts of copper in it. Apatites are a class of mineral, found in everything from marble to bone and teeth enamel. In marble and other rocks apatites tend to be clear but soft crystals. However, these apatites usually are made of calcium or potassium rather than lead.

    The material was discovered by two people at Korea University in 1999.

    What’s happened about room temperature semiconductors?

    In March, a paper was put online by Korean researchers that proposed a theoretical model of room temperature semiconductors using LK99 as a material. A video was put online that is alleged to support a practical test of a room temperature superconductor.

    The theoretical paper was formerly published at the end of April in a Korean journal.

    In July, they put a paper online and submitted it for peer review claiming that LK99 had exhibited room temperature superconducting properties. EETimes Europe immediately picked up the paper and pointed out its current pre-publication, pre-peer review status. Early reactions to the paper from experts interviewed by Scientific American indicated a high level of skepticism.

    Some claims about about LK99, such as the material’s structure have been verified but at the time of writing the substantive claims of room temperature superconductivity have not been replicated.

    What’s a superconductor?

    A superconducting material allows electricity to pass through it without resistance. This will also exhibit magnetic properties as a magnetic field occurs at right angles to a flow of electricity.

    Superconductor

    Superconductivity usually occurs at temperatures near absolute zero.

    High temperature semiconductors

    In the mid-1980s, IBM Research got everyone excited when it did foundational work on creating special materials that allowed superconductivity to happen at higher temperatures. High temperature superconductivity meant that you could cool the materials with liquid nitrogen, rather than having to use liquid helium. So still extremely cold and often also under extreme pressure. The most common high temperature semiconductors operate at up to -163 centigrade, or 100 Kelvin. The jump from semiconductors operating at -270 centigrade to -163 centigrade bought a lot of hope at the time that a boundless future was just in front of us.

    Modern superconductors are used in hospital MRI scanners, which is where most people will get to see them. They are used in these machines to create powerful electro-magnets. High temperature superconducting materials have yet to be used widely in applications like this due to cost.

    Potential uses

    Cost effective superconductors operating at room temperatures open up a range of possibilities:

    • Much smaller and cheaper to operate hospital scanners
    • Improved efficiency for electricity generation and transmission
    • Improved electric vehicle performance such as practical magnetic levitation railways ushering in aircraft level speeds of travel
    • More efficient electric motors
    • Lower power consumption in electronic devices
    • Commercially viable nuclear fusion for power generation
    • Launching satellites via a rail gun rather than a rocket
    • Convention weapons of unimaginable speed and power

    If this sounds too good to be true, it might be because it is; or we can’t conceive of the technology to do it successfully yet. Think about how unrealistic an iPhone would have seemed to the boffins of Bletchley Park in the 1940s.

    If LK99 were real, it could herald in an exciting future.

    Best case scenario, commercialisation takes a long time

    Even if LK99 was proven to be a room temperature superconductor, it would take decades to make the technology commercially usable. For example, the forerunner of the modern lithium ion battery was invented by a researcher at Exxon in the early 1970s. They tried to commercialise the battery technology, but eventually stopped due to safety concerns. (Given that this was the 1970s, those safety concerns must have been real and reasonably harsh.)

    The Exxon work was built on by multiple universities including Stanford. In 1983, a Japanese team at a joint venture company between Asahi Kasei and Toshiba built an initial prototype, which they then modified and came up with a prototype of a battery close to what we use today in 1985. Sony went on to commercialise the batteries in 1991 and the Asahi Kasei-Toshiba joint venture did so a year later. Sony introduced lithium ion batteries on their Sony CCD-TR1 consumer camcorder in 1991. This was a small (allegedly ‘passport sized’ but more like a stout paperback book to read on holiday) high-end machine at the time featuring Hi-8 (high-band 8mm video recording).

    The Ericsson T28 cell phone was notable at the time for its use of a lithium ion battery when it launched in 1999.

    Worst case scenario

    LK99 adversely affects the reputation of Korea University, one of Korea and the world’s most foremost research universities. There is a lot at stake. You can find out more about materials here.