Ged Carroll

Category: web of no web | 無處不在的技術 | 보급 기술 | 普及したテクノロジー

The web of no web came out of a course that I taught at the La Salle School of Business at the University Ramon Llull in Barcelona on interactive media to a bunch of Spanish executive MBA students. The university wanted an expert from industry and they happened to find me by happenstance. I remember contact was made via LinkedIn.

I spent a couple of weeks putting together a course. But I didn’t find material that covered many of things that I thought were important and happening around us. They had been percolating around the back of my mind at the time as I saw connections between a number of technologies that were fostering a new direction. Terms like web 2.0 and where 2.0 covered contributing factors, but were too silo-ed

So far people’s online experience had been mediated through a web browser or an email client. But that was changing, VR wasn’t successful at the time but it was interesting. More importantly the real world and the online world were coming together. We had:

  • Mobile connectivity and wi-fi
  • QRcodes
  • SMS to Twitter publishing at the time
  • You could phone up Google to do searches (in the US)
  • Digital integration in geocaching as a hobby
  • The Nintendo Wii controller allowed us to interact with media in new ways
  • Shazam would listen to music and tell you what song it was
  • Where 2.0: Flickr maps, Nokia maps, Yahoo!’s Fireeagle and Dopplr – integrated location with online
  • Smartphones seemed to have moved beyond business users

Charlene Li described the future of social networks as ‘being like air’, being all around us. So I wrapped up all in an idea called web of no web. I was heavily influenced by Bruce Lee’s description of jeet kune do – ‘using way as no way’ and ‘having no limitation as limitation’. That’s where the terminology that I used came from. This seemed to chime with the ideas that I was seeing and tried to capture.

  • Taoism & social media

    I was watching this video and thinking about taoism and social media. The video is by Irish-Chinese film maker Edwin Lee on the refurbishment of of the Wong Tai Sin Temple in northern Kowloon and thought that it was an excellent metaphor for something I’d been looking to talk about for a while.

    Sik Sik Yuen is the Taoist organisation who look after the temple were faced with a challenge. They were renovating a hall of worship, but didn’t want to see their handiwork be adversely affected by the smoke of traditional prayer offerings. Their solution was an ‘electric’ temple that signifies the offering being accepted. The prayers are then burned in the traditional way by Taoist priests elsewhere.

    So what does taoism & social media have to do with each other?

    Well if you’re like me you’ll have heard a number of times that ‘we need to do something on <insert the social software platform of the day here>‘ or ‘we need to have a <insert owned social media platform here>‘.

    It’s hard to get people to think about things the other way around:

    • What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
    • Is it a new problem or an old problem?
    • If its an old problem, what is wrong with the old way? (If there is nothing wrong with the old way, apart from the fact that its old, is the realpolitik of the new worth it?)
    • How can you solve it and fit into the lives of the people who you are trying to solve the problem for?

    Don’t get me wrong, I am all for innovation and I am quite happy to sell someone the new new thing – particularly if I can use it as a case study to sell other people the new new thing at a later date as well. But a significant amount of the time innovation occurs for all the wrong reasons, delivering little and wasting marketing resources.

    Does your brand really need that latest, greatest Facebook commerce application or are their easier picking to be made optimising what you already have?

    Is there a better creative vehicle rather than social media for what you are trying to achieve; like creating some sort of real-world experience or web-of-no-web application to knit offline and online together?

  • The futility of QRcodes on tube

    Traveling on the London Underground ‘tube’ recently I have noticed that more and more adverts have a QRcode. But the trips also highlighted the futility of using a QRcode, particularly on many of the deep lines.

    I am not too sure if tube QRcode is a recent phenomena or that I have been paying more attention as a number of the projects that I’ve been recently looking at are about the ‘web of no web‘: the interface between the web and the real world. I am a big fan of progressive approaches to marketing, however, the more I thought about the phenomena, the greater the waste of time that it seemed to be:

    • Londoners often joke about the tube being like cattle trucks; in reality European Union regulations wouldn’t allow livestock to travel on a train with the conditions of the tube on a hot summers day. A combination of overcrowding together with the lack of air conditioning  means that some of the lines can be as hot as a walk in the desert. The over-crowding also means that would be hard to take a picture of a QR code. So whilst the advert may have a large reach, the realistic reach of the QR code call to action is a lot smaller
    • So you happen to be lucky in terms of where the crush places you and try to snap the QR code with your phone. You probably won’t be successful, tube lines aren’t known for the smooth ride of say the Paris Métro, so you will be trying to hold your camera still whilst the train carriage rocks and sways in front of your smartphone. Your phone won’t be able to focus and take a clear image of the QR code. That’s one of the reason’s why there isn’t a tube advert shown here to illustrate this post, despite at least three attempts over the past week to snap a picture of an appropriate advert
    • Unlike other mass transit systems in the likes of Singapore and Hong Kong, huge high-traffic sections of the lines are underground or in such a deep cutting that they are inaccessible to mobile phone networks so QR code won’t take the audience through to an appropriate web page, but instead prompt a ‘network unavailable’ message

    The futility of QRcodes on the tube shows that the media buyers, marketers and or designers don’t pay much attention to the context of their advertisement art work, which could artificially skew campaign objectives and measurement adversely. In order to combat ‘the futility’, we need to go beyond TGI data and media packs. We can start this process by keeping our eyes open to the world around us.

  • Facial recognition – ethics

    Former CEO Eric Schmidt made a big deal of facial recognition databases being the one technology that Google wouldn’t deploying as it is an ethical and privacy set too far. Face recognition is currently used in law enforcement situations from policing football matches to anti-terrorism detection and surveillance amongst crowds. Google does use a certain amount of face recognition technology in its Picasa photo-sharing application and has some patents on using facial recognition in a social network.

    Developments in face recognition technology are apparently taking place at a rapidly increasing pace according Schmidt, which means that even if Google doesn’t roll something out, others will, Facebook being the likely favourite.

    With geotagged images and video taken by smartphones, turning the world into a constantly surveiled system. There would be no privacy and few hiding places left. The idea of moving to a new town or city and reinventing yourself which young people do when they go to college or go and get their first job would fall at the first hurdle as your old life would be seamlessly sewn together to your new one online.

    The risk goes up considerably when you have battered spouses who have ran away or are looking escape a stalker.

    Google’s disinterest in face recognition could be seen as being more about dodging anti-trust regulations, particularly if this technology was merged with search. However once someone does it, Google will to be a reluctant but fast follower if it is to continue to compete in the online space, which probably explains why they bought PittPatt the other day and recently patented the use of facial recognition technology to pick famous people out of pictures (presumably to improve image search relevance). More related content can be found here.

    More information online

    One Counter To Schmidt’s Facial Recognition Claim | Stowe Boyd

    Google Acquires Facial Recognition Software Company PittPatt | Techcrunch

    Google warns against facial recognition database | The Telegraph

    Google Thinks Facial Recognition Is Very, Very Bad. Except Maybe For Famous People | Gizmodo

    Google debates face recognition technology | FT.com

  • Ron Conway + more news

    Ron Conway

    Ron Conway’s Confidential Investment “Megatrend” — “O2O Commerce” – for those of you who don’t know Ron Conway is a Silicon Valley angel investor who is hyper-connected and said to have the golden touch. Online to offline (O2O) commerce has been big in Asia where QRcodes provided the connective tissue between apps and the real world. QRcodes have struggled with adoption in the west, yet have been embraced in countries where mobile payments and smartphones co-exist for useful services. Ron Conway has been a feature of Silicon Valley since the early 1970s when he worked at National Semiconductor. He became a Silicon Valley legend by investing early on in companies such as Marimba, Google and Reddit. Marimba was a woman led start up that developed and marketed software change and configuration management solutions, which was huge at the time for corporates looking to have all of their computers running the most secure version of a software application or update network configurations. Ron Conway was one of the prime movers behind Angelgate; which discussed how to depress the values of investable startups in the face of competition from other investors. Due to his standing in Silicon Valley during the mid-1990s through to the 2010s, if Ron Conway offered a deal there would be strong expectations that you take it. Looking from afar, this felt more like The Sopranos than Sandhill Road.

    Beauty

    Plastic Surgery Among Ethnic Groups Mirrors Beauty Ideals – NYTimes.com – interesting divergence in consumer desires in the US

    Consumer behaviour

    It’s Not the Online Coupons. It’s the Psychology. – NYTimes.com – some people call it psychology, I’d call it targeting

    Economics

    Tyler Cowen’s Great Stagnation: The middle class is doomed. – Slate Magazine – and that’s just the case in the US

    Beijing Goes on the Hunt for Hidden China Bank Lending – WSJ – economists trying to get a better understanding of lending in the economy

    Finance

    UnionPay: China’s Unloved Monopoly – WSJ – saying that, I can’t remember people loving Electron, Switch or Maestro either

    Investors Ask, Where’s Home for Standard Chartered? – WSJ – this is more about a legacy of the empire’s trading history rather than business in many cases, though a presence in the UK is important

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong-Listed Luxury Brands Faring Best In Mainland China: More To Come? « Jing Daily – mid-market to high-end focus and attention to Chinese consumer needs

    Innovation

    Need a really stable portable clock? Think atomic – this is insanely clever, a chip-sized atomic clock

    Japan

    Yamagirl.net – a community site for the latest Japanese style trend: yamagaaru – mountain-loving girls. Basically fashion influenced by technical clothing. There have been lots of Japanese technical wear brands like White Mountaineering and Burtons collaboration with Hiroshi Fujiwara iDiom so it was no surprise that it extended into women’s style

    FT.com | Inside Business – Stigma of failure holds back Japan start-ups – (paywall) interesting article, completely at odds to what I would have thought given the stories about the founding of Honda and Sony – huge risk taking classic start-up archetypes a la Hewlett-Packard or Apple

    U.S. Cites a Top Chinese Web Site in the Sale of Fake Goods – NYTimes.com – singling out Baidu is like singling out Google

    Luxury

    Revisiting The Prospects For “No Logo” Luxury In China « Jing Daily – it will be interesting to see how long this takes to play out

    Ye Qizheng: Brand Acquisitions A Mixed Bag For Chinese Companies « Jing Daily – really insightful stuff here, expect Chinese companies to own a lot of troubled luxury brands

    Paco Rabanne dresses for Bric success | FT.com – interesting how the Puig Group seems to be focusing more on India than China

    Report: China to be Top Luxury Buyer by 2020 – WSJ – already overtaken Japan, only needs to overhaul the US. How much of the gap is due to Chinese buyers purchasing abroad to avoid sales tax and as part of general tourism?

    Software

    Elop is after me | Code diary – interesting how much of the Qt developer community want to fork the environment and move away from Nokia. This could adversely affect the plans to sell 150 million Symbian phones over the next couple of years

    Technology

    IPad and Other Tablets Make Push Into Corporate World – NYTimes.com – “Of course, I still have a PC,” Mr. Benioff said. “But I am using it less and less and I am using my iPad more.” He called 2011 “the year of the tablet” and added: “If you call me next year, I will say it is also the year of the tablet. And if you call me in 2013, I’ll tell you it’s going to be the year of the tablet.” Of course, I could be cynical (but probably right) and say this is because the productivity argument of enterprise software and PCs is tapped out

  • Li Ning & more news

    Li Ning

    Can Li Ning Hang Onto Its Investors? – Exchange – WSJ – Li Ning struggles to cross the chasm to become an international sports brand. Li Ning is named after its founder, a former Chinese olympian. The business started in 1989 and came to global prominence ambushing Nike and Adidas at the 2008 Beijing olympics.

    China

    China to Air Pro-China Ad in U.S. During Hu Visit – WSJ – surely the brief should have been placed with an agency that better understands the intended markets and has ‘consumer’ insight?

    Americans See China as No. 1 – China Real Time Report – WSJ – this perception is going to affect US foreign and defence policy

    A Walled Wide Web for Nervous Autocrats – WSJ.com – governments support open source software

    Design

    How TDK Upgraded the Old-School Boombox | Fast Company – interesting blend of insights and product design

    Innovation

    How Microsoft beat Apple to the Mac App Store by four years – and then dumped it | Technology | guardian.co.uk

    Luxury

    2011 Trend Watch: How Far Will Countries Go To Court Chinese Spenders? « Jing Daily – Japan, Korea and the UK going a long way

    Media

    China’s Youku.com Strikes Deal to Stream ‘Inception’ – WSJ.com – much more reasonable price points than are charged in the West. 5 Yuan is about the same price as buying a copy of Inception on DVD at a night market in Shenzhen

    Security

    BBC News – Thousands of stolen iTunes accounts for sale in China – what’s the betting that this is partly due to the Gawker attack before Christmas?

    Software

    Microsoft changes course in pursuit of iPad | FT.com

    Technology

    LG says WP7 hasn’t gone well so far, while Android hurts RIM more than iPhone | Technology | guardian.co.uk – ‘lower consumer visibility‘of WP7 is what they actually talked about

    Southeast Asian Nations Reveal ICT Masterplan, China Is of Little Help | Fast Company – China ramping up on cyber threats due to viruses and phishing attacks

    Telecoms

    Network neutrality: A tangled web | The Economist

    Web of no web

    New Contact Lenses With LED Displays is Must-See TV, Literally – ExtremeTech – awesome Terminator vision ^_^