Ged Carroll

Category: telecoms | 電信 | 통신 | テレコム

I thought about telecoms as a way to talk about communications networks that were not wireless. These networks could be traditional POTS (plain old telecoms systems), packet switched networks including ethernet or some hybrid of the two.

I started my agency career working during the dot com era. What was happening in the broader technology space was one wave of technology cresting, while another one rose.

In the cresting space was:

Enterprise software (supply chain software, financial systems, database software, middleware software tools).

NIC cards (network interface cards, a way of getting your computer to be able to communicate with an ethernet network. It was a little circuit board that connected on to the mother board and allowed.

Mainframe and  mini-computers. It was around about this time that company owned data centres peaked.

In the rising wave was:

Servers –

  1. Unix servers and workstation grade computers were what hosted the first generation of websites. Names that did particularly well were Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle) and Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI). Sun Microsystems ran everything from investment banking models to telecoms billing systems. It’s hardware and software made great web servers. SGI was facing a crisis in its core market of 3D modelling due to Moore’s Law, but its operating systems was still very powerful. They managed to get some work as servers because people had them around in creative agencies.
  2. You also had a new range of servers on the low end. A mix of new suppliers like Cobalt Networks and VA Linux, together with existing companies like Dell who were offering Linux and Windows web servers that were really repackaged local area network file servers.

Enterprise information management software. The web posted its own problems for content management and publishing and companies like Captiva and Open Text rushed in to plug the gap.

Traditional vendors like HP and IBM rushed into provide a mix of software and hardware based solutions including e-business by IBM, which morphed into ‘Smarter Planet’

Telecoms companies – two things happened.

  1. Phone services were deregulated opening up former state owned incumbents to competition in fixed line and mobile telephony
  2. Data services really started to take off. Multinational companies like Shell looked to have a global data network for routing their calls over, so in many respects they looked like their own telecoms company. Then those data networks started to become of interest to the nascent internet providers as well. Mobile data started to gain traction around about the time of the dot com bust

So it made sense that I started to think about telecoms in a wide but wired sense, as it even impacts wireless as a backhaul infrastructure. Whether this is wi-fi into your home router or a 5G wireless network connecting to a fibre optic core network.

  • Pizza Hut Projector Box + more

    Pizza Hut Projector Box

    Pizza Hut Projector Box + Subtraction.com – interesting Pizza Hut projector box design by Ogilvy for Pizza Hut. You know that the image from the Pizza Hut projector is likely to be a bit like watching an old VHS pirated recording of a film. I would have serious worries about a smartphone being bright enough to work. But I can also see how it enable impromptu social watching of content on the Pizza Hut projector box. It also cements the mental linkage between pizza and watching a movie at home

    Business

    Growth accelerates at WPP PR and public affairs arm, but not in UK | PR Week – All regions, except the United Kingdom and continental Europe, were up. It is interesting that public affairs was highlighted as a growth driver

    Fetchr just got $11M to take conventional mail to United Arab Emirates | VentureBeat | Deals | by Sindy Nanclares – so the future of the web is horizontal stratification of concierge services….

    Design

    Why Are Design Firms Stagnating? | Co.Design – some interesting takes on the state of the industrial design sector

    Gadget

    Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback | WIRED – first of all, a nice piece of storytelling by Waggener Edstrom; secondly an interesting take on tablet and pen computing which in some ways hasn’t moved on in the past eight years or so

    Distribution challenges for China’s flatlining smartphone sector | TelecomTV – slower movement at the bottom of the market

    Luxury

    Sunglasses Shape Up | Business of Fashion – using design rather than logos to sell. Interesting take on Luxottica being crippled by being unable to take risk – hence boring looking Oakleys and not replicating the variations seen in Bausch & Lomb era Ray-Ban

    Marketing

    Land Rover Adventuregram (@go_for_a_drive) • Instagram photos and videos – interesting creative

    Online

    Freebooting: Stolen YouTube videos going viral on Facebook. | Slate – how Facebook could leapfrog YouTube on the cheap by building critical mass through piracy

    Security

    Hospital Medical Devices Used As Weapons In Cyberattacks | Dark Reading – Some of these devices are based on Windows, for example, Rios says, so they are often susceptible to Windows exploits. “There have been previously reported cases where these devices have become infected by run-of-the-mill malware.  While this malware isn’t custom-made for medical devices, it shows that the devices are vulnerable to exploitation,” says Rios, who is founder of Laconicly LLC.

    PRESS RELEASE: House Passes Massie Amendment to Strengthen Privacy and Security | Congressman Thomas Massie – “When our government weakens encryption software to spy on citizens, it puts everyone at risk.  Hackers can exploit weak encryption to gain access to Americans’ confidential health records and financial information,” said Congressman Massie. More on security related content here.

    Software

    Microsoft Thinks the Smartphone Is Over. It’s Wrong | WIRED – the smartphone isn’t over, but Microsoft realises that there isn’t room for another mobile OS – learning the lessons of OS/2, BeOS and Linux for desktop in the PC eco-system. This comes on the back of Jolla’s decision to focus on software and give up its own hardware business. It has most success selling a secure mobile OS to governments, rather than selling handsets to consumers. More wireless related posts here.

    Telecoms

    Don’t believe the spin BT will not manage EE any better than it’s current owner – Ian Wood quite rightly calls BS on the PR campaign that positions BT as a viable triple play based on its ability to get more value out of EE. If one remembers their history, BT used to own Cellnet and spun it in 2002

    Wireless

    Xiaomi, China’s New Phone Giant, Takes Aim at World – WSJ – interesting that Xiaomi isn’t compared to other domestic brands in this article

  • Data protection czar + more

    The Mark News | A national balancing act: security of a country and privacy of the individual – interesting read by Giovanni Buttarelli, the EU’s data protection czar. What’s interesting about his essay is how poorly European countries measure up according to their own data protection czar. That in itself is damning

    After 80 per cent circulation drop in ten years, NME print edition to go free | Press Gazette – interesting that it is moving to more of a lifestyle publication de-emphasising music; streaming has made music consumption less conscious

    McDonald’s hopes to bounce back with customised burger | Marketing Interactive – interesting that McDonalds are trying to go upmarket, interesting how they are having reengineer their processes. Will this go beyond Burger Kings  have your burger your way?

    Lunch with the FT: Pavel Durov – FT.com – interesting that he travels on a passport from St Kitts and that the Telegram engineering team only stay a few months at a time in one place. They use shell companies to hide what office space they use to shelter from ‘unnecessary influence‘. It’s like something out of one of William Gibson‘s later novels (paywall)

    China’s Developing Technology Sector | Stratfor – (paywall)

    Why China won’t listen to Western scientists about genetically modifying the human embryo – Quartz – inside China, there are people who are opposed to international standards, citing cultural differences. This force is actually quite powerful sometimes. More China related posts here

    Quintessence – Bitcoin: What you didn’t know but always wanted to ask – interesting references to Blockchain

    Biology of Distributed Information Systems: Strong Artificial Intelligence is Emerging as we Talk – interesting primer on the current status of AI

    The Servitude Bubble — Medium – lets reclaim the economy from the appholes – in the dot com boom the capital came from VCs, this time the capital comes from the sweat of the people at the bottom of the social pile

  • Nuon & other things

    VM Labs

    Remembering Nuon, the gaming chip that nearly changed the world—but didn’t | Ars Technica UK – it was interesting as a bet against commotisation of PC hardware rather like CDi by Philips by VM Labs. VM Labs Nuon processor looks more like a product of today as the pendulum in semiconductors has swung away from general purpose to tailored designs again. When computing power was the most important thing; general purpose made sense. The move towards computing power per watt changed the balance completely over time towards tailored semiconductors.VM Labs main problem was being ahead of their time.

    Ideas

    RISC vs CISC: What’s the Difference? | EE Times – interesting how architectures have become largely irrelevant over the past few years. It makes sense when one thinks about Apple’s move to Intel. It also says a lot for Intel’s potential opportunity in mobile applications; if Intel doesn’t manage to fumble the ball on chip design, or semiconductor fab process improvements

    Luxury

    LVMH diversifies into Chinese food as sales decline | WantChinaTimes – interesting move. Luxury goods were ‘tools’ of status as is food gifts and restaurants – smart lateral play by LVMH. More luxury related posts here

    Media

    Exactly what does Cannes celebrate? | canalside view – interesting prespectives on Cannes. Cannes comes across as a client knees up. It could be so much more by increasing the knowledge sharing at Cannes

    Microsoft Said to Exit Display Ad Business, Cut 1,200 Jobs – Bloomberg Business – one can only wonder what will happen in the phone business

    Online

    DuckDuckGo Blog : Play Ball! Live Scores for Every MLB Game – chipping away at Google piece-by-piece

    Security

    Sony Pictures: Inside the Hack of the Century, Part 2 – Fortune – a good reason not to register your Sony products because judging by this write-up of the Sony Pictures debacle

    These hackers warned the Internet would become a security disaster. Nobody listened. | The Washington Post – “If you’re looking for computer security, then the Internet is not the place to be,” said Mudge, then 27 and looking like a biblical prophet with long brown hair flowing past his shoulders. The Internet itself, he added, could be taken down “by any of the seven individuals seated before you” with 30 minutes of well-choreographed keystrokes (paywall) – more security related content here

    Technology

    OEM Conundrum – commoditisation, hyoer-competition

    Wireless

    EBN – Jim O’Reilly – Smartphone Saturation Becomes

  • An odyssey to get online

    I have gone through a number of journeys to get online. This year I will have been connected to the internet for 20 years. I actually had email even longer. Back in 1994, I was working on a temporary contact at a company called Optical Fibres – a collaboration between Corning and UK cable maker BICC. Even back then there was price pressure on optical fibre as globalisation kicked in, less than a decade later where I worked is now a greenfield site, half of which is included in the space for expansion of a Toyota engine factory.

    I had an email address that was a number.
    DEC ALL-IN-1
    It was attached to a DEC VAX ALL-IN-1 productivity suite account. I was able in theory to email anyone who worked at Corning sites around the world. But email was my only form of being able to get online..

    While ALL-IN-1 was able to support external (pre-internet) email networks like CompuServe, I only dealt with people internally. It was a step up from having to check the pinboards in communal areas and the sporadic internal mailroom deliveries.

    Having managed to get online, I sent my first spam email, when I tried to offload some Marks and Spencers vouchers that I had been given on to my colleagues, but that’s a story for another time.

    In September that year I went back to school, this time to university. Computer labs had changed a bit in five years or so since I left secondary education. The computers were on an ethernet local area network, this local network was connected to the nascent internet.

    I had an email address with a ‘@hud.ac.uk’ domain, but my name was still a number. My teachers didn’t use email as part of their teaching process then and you couldn’t submit your work via email. Email was a POP3 format. Given that it saved emails on the machine I spent an inordinate amount of time getting my own computer up for running on the college facilities against the rules.

    It involved a mix of software and hardware kludges, since I had to make use of the AppleTalk port on the laptop to somehow connect to the ethernet network at college.

    Internet access at college was quite liberating. I was able to do online research and cite online articles. I kept in touch with a couple of friends at college and university from home who also had email at the time: for free.

    I got a Yahoo! email address during my last year of college so that I had something which would last me beyond graduation.

    My year after graduation was largely lacking in connectivity. I hunted around for an cyber cafe which were starting to crop up around the place. I eventually found one around the corner from James Street station which I used to go to with my friend Andy on a Saturday. I would bring a floppy disk with my CV on to reply to a series of job ads from The Guardian, PR Week and Campaign. I showed Andy how to use Netscape during this time.

    The cafe atmosphere and dedication to good coffee was reminiscent of independent cafes today in London, I remember seeing a couple of multimedia art exhibits there occasionally – this was back when Flash was bleeding edge and promised a whole new world of visual stimulation.

    A move to London meant around the clock access to the net through work. I lived in a house of five Serbs and no phone line and smartphones were HP personal organisers that allowed you to clip a Nokia 2110 on the back or an infra red connection between an Ericsson SH-888 phone and a laptop or early PalmPilot device.

    I built up a collection of early house music sets encoded in Real Media files from an FTP site in Chicago hosted by the people who ran what become Deephousepage. At the time they used a faculty account at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which would have provided high quality free hosting.

    A lot of this material was legendary to me, only a small amount of it made it on cassettes as far as Liverpool in the late 1980s. 1980s Chicago was as distant to me as the Northern Soul scene in Wigan some 20 years previously.  My FTP client would run at work during the weekend, I would bring in a CD-R and get it burnt down during the week. I also did the same for the latest software that I used on my Mac.

    After 18 months of shared housing, I bought my own place to the north of London in the Home Counties, nothing fancy, but it was my own space and I could finally have a phone line. At this time, Freeserve was offering fixed price connectivity dialling into a free phone 0800 number. And I had my first email account at home.

    I had a Palm Vx PDA which allowed me to sync web content on to the device and read it on the way home .

    I moved job, wasn’t that keen on it and started to think about what was next and getting ready to potentially go freelancing.
    Jaguar
    The economy went into dot.com freefall and I finally upgraded my computer to a second generation iBook. I then upgraded that machine to OS X and the new operating system highlighted to me the need to go and start using internet broadband. Freeserve was my first choice of DSL provider, simply because it was easy to upgrade from my dial up connection.

    The internet suddenly started to become much more useful. Yahoo! Messenger and email kept me connected to my London-based friends when I walked out of the agency role I had into the world of freelancing.

    Around this time, I got my first smartphone, a Nokia 6600. I had tried using my Nokia 6310i phone as a wireless modem for my Palm PDA but it was a painful process. What moved things forward was the IMAP email account I got as part of Apple iTools. IMAP allows email to be synched across different devices.

    This was all still done over GPRS and later EDGE. 3G services were limited, crippled and the network reception was awful – truth be told it still is in many places. Truth be known things have improved incrementally.

    I went through a succession of Palm Treo and Nokia Symbian smartphones until finally moving to the iPhone. The killer application was an address book that just worked rather than corrupting my data or bricking the handset.

    Whilst the first five years I saw big changes in my wired netizen status, over the past five years my connectivity has changed little if at all. The key change being an iPad at home as an additional mode of access. I still use DSL, mobile internet which is patchy and upgraded equipment around the same essential paradigms. More online related content here.

    More information

    Quick History of ALL-IN-1 | Email Museum

  • China bubble + more things

    Stand Back: China Bubble Will Burst – Bloomberg View – I don’t think it will go pop, though it will correct, probably not this year. The China bubble has become an existential threat to global markets, because of the scale of the China bubble. At the end of the day, China’s retail investors are starved of investment opportunities, that is one of the factors driving the China bubble and it won’t change suddenly. More finance related content here.

    Apple News curation will have human editors and that will raise important questions | 9to5Mac – big implications for PR news stories and media exposure

    Western Firms Caught Off Guard as Chinese Shoppers Flock to Web – WSJ – over estimated bricks and mortar sales, but also resurgent local brands utilising online channels

    WSJ moves to a single global edition | Marketing Interactive – higher stakes for PR people and advertisers

    White hackers in China young and underpaid | WantChinaTimes.com – explains motivation for black hat activity beyond the intellectual challenge

    [WATCH] Google’s Amazing Location-Aware Search Finds Answers About Nearby Places – not terribly surprising definitely the direction that Google and others have been looking to go with location as a context to user intent in search for a good while

    8 Smart Folders You Need on Your Mac & How to Set Them Up | Makeuseof – handy way of getting organised on the Mac

    Alice Rawsthorn on the pros and cons of new digital interface design | Putting People First – interesting as it touches tangentially on dedicated purpose design and the faults of icons under glass and digital menu driven design

    Paul Ford: What is Code? | Bloomberg – interesting long form article

    Exclusive: Facebook earns 51 percent of ad revenue overseas – executives | Reuters – Facebook using specific methods tailored to the country including optimizing video and pictures for slower connections in India, where an ad product called “missed call” also helps customers avoid phone call charges. Many people in India dial a friend and hang up to send a signal without incurring charges. Facebook incorporated this system into its ads. A person can place a “missed call” by clicking on a mobile ad from Facebook and receive a return call with information, for example the score of a cricket game, sponsored by a brand.

    LG G4 Teardown – iFixit – beautiful inside and out reminds me of the Mac design approach