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.

  • Yahoo Found + more news

    Yahoo Found 

    Advertising Age has a case study of the Yahoo Found campaign that ran in London.The Yahoo Found campaign was interesting because it used the environment as an interaction with the poster executions to give it an experiential feel.

    The Yahoo Found campaign reasonated for a long time with consumers and we took found arrows on to the streets long after the poster campaign had finished to hijack the Dukes of Hazzard UK fillm premiere, SES London (with the help of Vegas showgirl outfits) and a Harry Potter book launch.

    Running a brand building campaign like Yahoo Found on a sustained basis takes a lot of cojones, especially in a corporate environment. Its a pity that Yahoo Found wasn’t exploited to its full potential.The problem that marketers now face is that brand activating tactics Google Adwords provide a safer option with PowerPoint friendly data that can be dropped into pivot tables and used like a crutch to support their decision-making in the face of a hostile management.

    What this doesn’t capture is brand equity through salience and mental availability which provides more diffuse benefits of preference over time.

    Influential analyst houses

    Interesting survey over at Duncan Chapple’s blog over which analyst houses have the most influence.Whilst the split may may change depending on what tech sector your client is in, its an interesting piece of research; particularly when you see the dominance of US focused players.

    And the fact that a good third of the most influential analysts are in the other category indicating a large amount of fragmented trusted expertise.

    EU roaming charges

    Meanwhile the GSM Association have a handy site that allows you to compare roaming charges when you visit different countries in Europe.

    I tried it using Orange post paid as my settings to have a look at different carriers. What I found interesting was that in the countries that I sampled (Germany, Ireland, Spain, France) there was not price differential between the carriers. Of course this was an unscientific test isn’t at all indicative of price fixing is it?

  • Linspire + more news


    Hyp2
    LLinOriginally uploaded by renaissancechamba    Linspire

    Linspire have finally released a free distribution of their Linux operating system. This is an interesting move, which could see Inspire moving away from being a z-list box shifter to being the iTunes of consumer software through CNR. There is lots of tired Gateway and Dell boxes out there that could be given a new lease of life by Linspire through the installation of Freespire provides a good way of removing and helping proof against malmare targeting the Windows platform.

    It would be especially attractive in wi-fi enabled homes were computer access is at a premium as kids and parents currently duke it out over two or more computers.

    For any tech-heads passing its based on the Debian distribution like Linspire.

    AOL

    AOL promises that it is releasing a MySpace product for the rest of us that will be ‘kick-ass’ according an AOL spokesperson quoted over on a Business 2.0 article at CNN Online. Looks like they’ve finally figured a way to leverage their huge instant messenger user base.

    17 inch MacBook Pro

    Apple have released a 17-inch version of the MacBook Pro, but it isn’t really news as the rumour sites had it down pat for a few weeks now. Over at Crack Unit Iain Tait has been talking about life with his new MacIntel companion.

    Yahoo!

    I have left Yahoo! after being made redundant and about to start a new role agency-side (which is both exciting and kind of scary all at the same time), I now feel that I can now say nice things independently about the Yahoo! family of products on here, without it being construed as the insepid scribblings of a paid shill. I used to be a European buzz marketing manager working on various bits of the business including Yahoo! Search, My Web, Answers, Delicious, 360, Flickr, Research and the technology development team which put me pretty much right at the centre of the web 2.0 vortex.

    You can find some of the good stuff that was happening here.

    Not so much a product big-up but Carole McManus – community manager of Y!360 in Sunnyvale has put up a useful posting on how to blog. Obvious I know, but some good tips on writing style and getting around writers block (also check out the comments section on the posting).

    Ok, a question to leave you with: how can the scribblings of an engineer like Robert Scroble or Jeremy Zawodny be considered to be great communication but a PR person’s postings be always viewed with suspicion (except when discussing the dark arts of misdirection and deception)? Answers on a comment below please.

  • WSJ Online tenth anniversary

    10th anniversary of WSJ Online

    The Wall Street Journal Online or as it calls itself the WSJ Online has been celebrating its tenth birthday with some retrospectives and future gazing.

    WSJ Online dot com disasters

    A couple of the articles caught my eye.The Best of the Worst by Kathryn Meyer (May 3, 2006) celebrates the suckiest ideas of the first dot com boom.

    CyberRebate

    CyberRebate did what it said on the tin; they charged you an outrageous price for an item and then promised you a rebate, they hoped to make money on the redemption drop-out – they were overwhelmed and drowned in a sea of debt.

    Digital currency

    Digital currency ideas (Beenz and Flooz) withered on the vine as they weren’t as universal as Mastercard or cash. PayPal survived because it kicked Western Union’s ass and we could all be credit-card merchants.

    iSmell

    iSmell was a device designed to release smells appropriate to the pages you surf (don’t even think about it, get your mind out of the gutter this instant) like some kind of b-movie experience enhancement craze of the 1950s.

    CueCat

    CueCat plugged into your PC (Windows only if you please) and allowed you to scan bar codes of magazines into your computer to get further information or content. This idea seems to have caught on in Japan with mobile phones and specialised software, so maybe they were too visionary?

    3Com Audrey

    The 3Com Audrey internet appliance was a great well engineered device killed by the ever decreasing price of PCs. I still rate its QNX-based OS and I like the product design on it.

    PointCast

    PointCast the push technology service that was a richer more engaging experience than RSS is today, but then I was sat at the end of a fat pipe whereas most users were on dial-up. Also marketers knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing used the service to carpet-bomb users with unwanted ads.

    Tech trends

    Tim Hanrahan’s piece on Tech’s 10-year Creep (May 8, 2006) brings out some interesting trends that have occurred. I have paraphrased and commented on his trends below

    Anytime, Anywhere: Push email and wireless internet access mean that getting online whilst traveling or wire-free on your couch or at Starbucks — is possible for $60 a month or so. However it eats into the work life balance.

    Think Better! Google basically.

    Putting Yourself Out There: Originally people liked their privacy, caller ID on phones was pushing the envelope in terms of social disclosure. Over the past five years people have gotten used to sharing personal information online. Chat rooms, forums, online dating followed by social-networking sites; to blogs and MySpace came to dominate. Easy-to-use tools, cheap to free storage and online social interaction brought out the pioneer spirit ‘Go web young man‘.

    The Post-Stuff World: Music downloads, ebooks, ripped movies. (But if its that post-stuff why is Amazon so successful selling books, everyone’s iPod is full of music ripped from CDs and people love their laptops, mobile phones, PDAs, crackberries, Nintendo and Sony handhelds). This techno-minimalism bollox didn’t wash with me.

    Free Information, Free People: People are exercising their free speech and there is a maelstrom of content out there that Technorati struggles to handle. The social web has replaced the techno web – (though when Soledad O’Brien hosted a show on MSNBC that featured a young Max Headroom-type avatar sidekick named Dev ten years ago (good gosh, was it that long ago?) was it precient of Second Life?) CNN now covers blog content as if it was matter-of-fact, though blogs often don’t have the same rigorous process behind them as well-written journalism.

    Picture of Soledad O’Brien courtesy of CNN.com. More related posts here.

  • Video conferencing + more

    Video conferencing

    A couple of interesting artifacts that I found online and wanted to share with y’all.First up, video conferencing, why is it so crap and what are you going to do about it?

    Ok, we’ve had video online, we’re now living in an age of pretty much ubiquitous broadband, why do we stop with using our VoIP client of choice and use video instead.Well there is the network side of things: IP networks provide a ‘best effort’ service so the signal may be come degraded. All the pixels will get to the other end eventually but they won’t get there in the right order and the latency of the signal will depend on the slowest part of network travel that they have to make through the internet ‘cloud’ no matter what kind of pipe you have between you and your local telephone exchange, wireless hub or cable television outfit. Look at video streaming, it has errors and flaws in its signal even on my 2MB pipe AND the signal is buffered to smooth out these glitches like a CD player. With real-time interactive video conversations that is not a technical option.

    Also you may not want to have the person see you as well as speak to you, imagine if you have a bad hair day or want to lie?

    The third factor is a much more basic human system and the best way of illustrating it is by looking at the picture above. Notice how you don’t have eye contact with the people that you have a conference with because the camera’s perspective is slightly different to the view you would have if it were a real-world conversation. Notice how the men on the left and right are looking above their screens and the ladies are looking below, this is just enough for you to notice and process at a low level. It doesn’t feel natural, the conversation won’t flow as well as a real-world sit down would because the eye contact feels wrong.

    This is why video conferencing can feel so wrong, even Apple’s attempt at correcting it with a small mirror picture (the one at the bottom) to see how you look to the callers feels wrong.

    Historically the way to do that is to have the difference between camera angle and the viewing angle of the screen as small as possible. This was achieved by using big TV screens with a camera on top and the participant perched at the end of a big conference table at the other end of the room. That’s why big oil companies and George Bush love video conferencing but you’re not likely to see it adopted en masse in UK homes soon.

    Its also not exactly the most elegant solution, which the reason why I was really intrigued by this Apple patent which I saw courtesy of those nice people at AppleInsider.

    Imagine where the screen viewing area was the camera with camera elements squeezed in between the pixels on your LCD. The back-light would provide the ambient light required for the picture, you an have eye contact with whoever you are speaking with without living in a mansion and having a conference table the size of a small yacht.

    In theory this principle would also work with on mobile screens (at a lower quality-level), televisions etc. On the scary side it would also allow the omni-present two-way tele screens for surveillance like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. More content here.

    Web 2.0 and the Enterprise

    News.com have an interesting article Web 2.0 meets the enterprise how companies like IBM and Visible Path are using technologies like social networking, RSS feeds and wikis to help large companies build IT systems. News.com make a big show of how these ‘consumer’ (their word, not mine) technologies are changing the enterprise software landscape.In addition, Forrester sent out an email newletter talking about how service-orientated architecture (SOA) (simply put: enterprise-grade web 2.0-type technologies) are having an accelerated take-up with happy IT directors to be found everywhere.

    The truth is more complex than the News.com story about how the kids are showing big business the way, the process is much more complex.

    AJAX is generally a hard thing to do well so it is interesting that Michael Robertson is selling AJAX-based web services through ajaxLaunch and looking to use AJAX as a way of providing applications and widgets on top of an OS. Its an interesting take from a business head on all the utopian dreams such as the network computing meme or Netscape’s ‘the browser is the OS’-hype back in the day and an ideal way for novices to get web 2.0 see his ‘everything is moving to the cloud’ keynote here which also has a good product demo (RealPlaya required).

    Nice definition of what AJAX means to marketing people – ‘rich web applications right to your computer’.

  • Veoh and misc. tech stuff

    Veoh Networks is a great company, though I haven’t worked out yet whether it is sailing too close to the wind or not. The company is funded by media conglomerate Time-Warner and Michael Eisner (the former ruler of planet Disney). The website looks like YouTube, but with some important differences:

    • Veoh lets you submit full-sized streaming videos
    • YouTube limits its users to 100 MB files.
    • Veoh can do 2 GB files distributed via a P2P-client available for Mac and that other platform

    I’ve been enjoying a selection of ‘so-bad-they’re-good’ 1970s martial arts movies off there. The Mac client is really easy to use. My main concern is how will the company make money in the longer term. I can see someone like TimeWarner using Veoh as a guinea pig to further is experiment with AOL and online TV. On second thoughts just enjoy it while you can! More media related posts here.


    I’m with Stupid    Apple has apparently moved away from using a PortalPlayer media processor in all its iPods and instead moved to Samsung for the next-generation of MP3 players. PortalPlayer is very exposed to the Apple business, with iPods counting for about 70 per cent of its sales according to a Reuters report that I’ve read. Its not healthy for PortalPlayer, hopefully the company will diversify its client base to become more independent.

    However Samsung as a supplier was also a dumb move for Apple. This is not a commodity product like flash memory where Apple can use multiplie suppliers and change at will, the media chip is central to the iPod functionality and experience.

    Does it sound like a smart move to work closely with (and educate in the art of engineering a killer MP3 player) a large ambitious, hyper-aggressive company that wants to eat Apple for lunch? It has been alleged that Samsung had meetings with creative agencies in London where the central theme was Kill iPod.

    You can chart the fall of the iPod empire from this moment on…