Ged Carroll

Category: wireless | 無線 |무선 네트워크 | 無線

This blog came out of the crater of the dot com bust and wireless growth. Wi-Fi was transforming the way we used the internet at home. I used to have my Mac next to my router on top of a cupboard that contained the house fuse panel and the telephone line. Many people had an internet room and used a desktop computer like a Mac Mini or an all-in-one computer like an iMac. Often this would be in the ‘den’ or the ‘man cave’. Going on the internet to email, send instant messages or surf the internet was something you did with intent.

Wi-Fi arrived alongside broadband connections and the dot com boom. Wi-Fi capable computers came in at a relatively low price point with the first Apple iBook. I had the second generation design at the end of 2001 and using the internet changed. Free Wi-Fi became a way to attract people to use a coffee shop, as a freelancer it affected where I did meetings and how I worked.

I was travelling more for work at the time. While I preferred the reliability of an ethernet connection, Wi-Fi would meet my needs just as well. UMTS or 3G wireless data plans were still relatively expensive and slow. I would eventually send low resolution pictures to Flickr and even write a blog post or two. But most of the time I used it to clear my email box, or use Google Maps if I was desperate.

4G wireless services, started to make mobile data a bit more useful, even if the telephony wasn’t great

 

  • 2010: How did I do?

    About this time last year I wrote my 2010 predictions on technology, media, consumer behaviour and online:

    I see 2010 as a time when more people start thinking about how we deal with the trust-based issues that social media throws up… We need to think about the implications for etiquette, ethics and what will be the new social norms that we have to deal with.

    This is very much a work in progress (at least in the UK); where the NHS feels that it is acceptable to leak information about an audience’s health concerns with Facebook and politician Nadine Dorries felt it was perfectly acceptable to lie to constituents at least 70 per cent of the time on their social media platform

    From a government perspective all this self-organising power can be dangerous: people getting together and standing up to authority – we’ve seen it before:

    • Climate–change protestors
    • Poll tax riots
    • Illegal raves

    Each time, the government has brought resources and legislation to bear against them. I expect this to be at least considered in the next year.

    Well beyond shilling for the media industry with the Digital Economy Bill and the coalition government’s proposals against net neutrality to favour News Corporation prominent UK media companies, there was the Crown Prosecution Service and police’ increasingly hard stance with everything from jokey Twitter users to websites. More interestingly comes a request for Nominet to provide a mechanism that would allow police to close down sites by taking control of domains at will.

    The UK will still have analogue intellectual property laws for an increasingly digital world, I don’t see a dramatic change to correct this coming anytime soon.

    Jeremy Hunt confirmed that the government was going to leave the Digital Economy Act intact. However TalkTalk and BT’s requested judicial review may temper some of the more draconian parts of the Act.

    Social media will no longer be special but part of the normal mix.

    There was discussions at the open panels I attended at the JUMP conference about dropping the ‘social’ from social media as it is not anything special, but the glue that binds all the marketing communications and business communications processes together.

    Changes in marketing spend will come partly at the expense of search advertising.

    Google’s growth is slowing in search advertising and flattened in some markets. I think that this is why Google’s prediction that mobile is the next big thing and the big investment in Android. For a long time there has been a theoretical ceiling for Google’s earnings that include the following factors:

    • Maximum cost of acquisition that a company is willing to pay for a customer – this varies business-by-business
    • Maximum number of businesses that can benefit from search advertising. Your local 7-Eleven relies on impulse purchases so Google Adwords even on local search or mobile apps may not make a lot of sense. Other businesses maybe regulated out of it, or search may not fit into a brand’s profile
    • Number of markets that Google operates in. Google’s new frontier is barely online continent of Africa

    So it was no surprise that Google has set up a wealth of ventures to try and continue to grow. However the culling of these ventures and relentless focus on earnings indicate that Google is maturing as a business. Part of this is down to the fact that Facebook is now serving 25 per cent of display adverts in North America. Coupon services like GroupOn are probably eating into local search advertising budgets as well.

    The good news for the search engines is that consumers are much more open to a curated web via friends and authorative individuals, many of the concepts of social search will be ready for an early majority audience in 2010.

    What really wrong-footed me on this one is that I thought services like Hunch and Quora would come from the search engine companies, that this maybe the ace-in-the-hole Yahoo! may have had to reinvent search, which is the reason why they gave the algorithmic side of the business away? I didn’t expect Caterina Fake come back and put a new spin on the social search work that was happening at Yahoo! when she was there. It’s early days on this but Gifts.com seems to find Hunch’s work with them is delivering real commercial returns. Quora feels like the kind of product that Yahoo! Answers should have been, it will be interesting to see how they monetise the product in the future.

    I expect there to be an increase in social media rightshoring.

    Rightshoring didn’t take off in the way that I thought it might in 2010, this is maybe because of the recession has made the UK more viable, at least for the time being.

    Social media will be looked at to provide solutions to problems that businesses continue to wrestle with: from knowledge management to customer relationships and workflow.

    Altimeter Group has been doing a lot of work wrestling with the implications of social CRM as part of this process of using social media to solve business problems.

    One of the break out trends for 2009 was ‘the web of no web’ where a mix of QR codes and augmented reality allow consumers to interact with the real world with online information. This has a huge potential, but there are two key challenges, the most dangerous one being that someone comes up with a creative execution so bad that consumers reject the ‘web of no web’ concept.

    The web of no web has broken out in a couple of new directions in 2010. Firstly a much more serious focus on location with this year’s star Foursquare and the hangers on like SCVNGR and Gowalla. This isn’t a new area per se location has been incorporated into Twitter for a while and Yahoo!’s ZoneTag and FireEagle were doing this years ago, but failed to get sufficient traction. From a business perspective this has been partly driven by the coupon market as online and offline businesses discount to get consumers through the door – thank you financial crisis.

    A secondary aspect of these applications is that they are less draining on a battery than the AR stuff getting heat last year. Barcodes rather than QRcodes may make the biggest impact yet as ‘augmented retailing’ takes off, it is no coincidence that the latest eBay and Amazon US iPhone apps include a barcode scanning function to allow real-time real-world price comparison. What did 2010 in tech mean to you?

  • Deposit Files + more things

    Deposit Files – could be useful. Deposit Files is a WeTransfer competitor with much more flexibility. The premium version allows you to upload files of 10GB in size. So ideal for large video projects.

    Top 15 websites in Russia (Digital Knowledge Centre – Digital Intelligence)

    Shrib: A Simple Online Scratch Pad: Business Collaboration News « – interesting idea, potentially open to abuse though

    For social search, similarity could trump friendship – O’Reilly Radar – common interests rather than commonality

    How Facebook Connect Freaks Me Out – great points on Facebook by Danny Sullivan. More on Facebook here.

    IABUK : Steps to success – for mobile marketing

    Tablets Are Already Crushing Growth In The PC Market

    Windows Phone 7 Sales Eclipsed by Android – and Symbian – interesting anecdote, however WP7 was as much about getting Microsoft back in the game at all. A more worthy comparison would be WebOS

    In the smartphone market, Apple users remain the most loyal

    Simfy, the German Spotify, tunes into 16m-strong student network – smart move by StudiVZ

    How To Turn Google Translate Into Google Beatbox – absolutely brilliant

    Microsoft Sees Revenue Opportunity in Phone Patents | AllThingsD – interesting that they are even mentioning plan B

    Public Relationships: Social Media Consultant – Is there a market for this profession? – interesting take on things by Jeremy Woolf

    FMCG goods ‘recession-resistant’, says Unilever Asia president – Brand Republic News – developed world not likely to recover ‘any time soon’

    Does your Facebook campaign break the rules? | Econsultancy – lots of marketing campaigns breaking the rules, worthwhile monitoring competitors and grassing them up

    Morgan Stanley’s Legendary Tech Analyst Mary Meeker Moving To Kleiner Perkins – interesting move. Meeker maybe about Kleiner Perkins accessing large financial institutions pockets and relationships for M&A?

    Apple Lawyers Up for Patent Showdowns With Nokia, Motorola, HTC – BusinessWeek – legal battles in mobile escalates

    I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of E-Mail – more like decline in prominence but otherwise good stuff here

    Chanos vs. China – Fortune Finance – interesting opinion piece for and against the Chinese property market

    Poking, Tagging and Now Landing an M.B.A. – NYTimes.com – really surprised by the low completion rate quoted for online courses

    Why are men’s magazines being left on the shelf? – Press, Media – The Independent – interesting article. I buy magazines and media: just not men’s magazines. Esquire used to have great reportage but has gone off the boil. My current print diet is Wired US edition, Monocle (for the great reportage) and the occasional issue of an i-D, Vice, an audio engineering or DJ magazine

    CitizenMap | South China Morning Post – really interesting project to visually show news and readership feedback

    Reeder – interesting RSS client for iPhone and iPad (Mac coming soon) that syncs with Google Reader. It is also worthwhile looking at Newsblur

  • John Browett + more stuff

    John Browett

    It was a bad day for John Browett this week. A US technology site used the British word ‘shite‘ as a descriptor for Apple’s new head of global retail. It makes sense when you realise that John Browett, was formerly CEO of Dixons Retail – the people behind PCWorld and Currys. Currys and its sister company Dixons own brand products were long a textbook definition of the word shite; as was their customer service and whole retail experience. They were a shop that UK consumers loved to hate – so the association of John Browett and Apple was alarming. Whilst I was alarmed that the Apple Stores were likely to go horribly wrong there was something strangely gratifying seeing European English slang used on an American site.

    Design

    Tom Hovey introduced me to the work of the Dead Sea Mob – a collective of illustrators.

    Iittila Ultima Thule glassware – I first came across these flying with Finnair and they are a wonder of product design. Designed by Tapio Wirkkala in the 1960s after being inspired by the melting ice in Lapland. The surface patterns gradually change as the glass burns the surface of the wooden moulds. Iittila apparently spent thousands of hours perfecting the glass-blowing technique for these glasses

    IBM and Eames Office released a free iPad application Minds of Modern Mathematics that captures work that Charles and Ray Eames did in the 1960s. Mathematica: A World of Numbers… And Beyond was an IBM-sponsored exhibition. The app captures the artifacts and the history in a great interactive application.

    How to

    10 Free Data Visualization Tools « Social Web Thing

    URL Design — Warpspire

    Luxury

    How the celebrity gravy train is gathering pace | SCMP.com – product placement and spokesperson roles become more abstract in Chinese luxury market (registration required)

    Marketing

    Land Rover Edible Desert Survival Guide via The Inspiration Room – was a great marketing artifact developed by Y&R Dubai that reinforces the Land Rover brand story far more than Victoria Beckham

    Media

    Nielsen Numbers Glitch Results in Low Traffic Numbers

    Industry Reference: The Social Business Stack for 2011 (Slideshare) « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang

    5 Anti-Piracy Strategies Designed to Hurt Torrent Sites in 2011 | TorrentFreak

    Online

    blog · RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried – Mozilla and Google killing RSS in the browser. Google probably in favour of Google Reader. Mozilla’s reason is less clear.

    Google Keep is an interesting lightweight challenge to services like Evernote. It is a move way from from Google’s recent over-featured products like Google+.

    Doodod (pronounced Doodoh) is a small Beijing start-up doing some very interesting things with visualisation of posts and reposts on Sina Weibo.

    Technology

    Apple and I.B.M. Aren’t All That Different – NYTimes.com – classic bit of PR by IBM trying to tie their innovation message to the brand cool of Apple

    Windows Surface convinced me that Microsoft was going to attempt to drive innovation no matter what it cost their partner eco-system. This is likely to spell a faster cycle of innovation from rivals like Apple and Google. The wild card in all this process is whether it will kick-start innovation in the Android eco-system with over-laid UI, exclusive applications and more integrated software | hardware design. Things are going to get interesting

    Web of no web

    Apple Missed Getting Xbox Kinect Tech, Patents Smartphone Motion Gaming Anyway | Fast Company – interesting that Beracha rejected Apple as a pain-in-the-ass and sold the tech to Microsoft instead. Apple must be really awful to work with

    Wireless

    W+K Shanghai Guide for iPhone and iPod touch on the iTunes App Store – really cool.

    Did Angry Birds eat the iPad mags market? | FT.com – you heard it here first…

  • Size zero design

    Size zero design

    What do I mean by size zero design? If you look at the product design of Apple’s most-hyped products: the Apple MacBook Air, the iPod Touch and the iPhone all have one attribute: being thin. I am picking on Apple just because they have some high-profile designs feature it and Steve Jobs seems to obsess on it, but they are not the only sinners.It’s just that Apple happen to be taste-makers for other consumer electronics and technology manufacturers.

    Before size zero

    It used to be back in the day that things were about small. Owning a cellphone in the late 90s and early noughties saw my handsets shrink dramatically in size from 1999-to-2001:

    Handset                          Size                                             Mass

    I888                                130 x 49 x 22 mm                    195 grams
    T39                                  96 x 50 x 18 mm                      86 grams

    However there is a limit to how small a phone can get from a usability point-of-view. Secondly, more functionality meant more powerful electronics which gave out more heat and larger screens for email, web-browsing and other smartphone-type functions.

    Size zero origins

    There were hints of size zero design back in 1999 with the Palm V and Vx PDAs. These pioneered the use of glued one piece devices and a metallic slim look. In 2004 Motorola released the RAZR clamshell mobile phone and could be considered the inciting incident driving the current fad for size zero design. It had sales-floor sex appeal and stood out from the competition. In reality it was a crappy cell phone with poor battery life that felt wrong when you held it. But it became the best-selling clamshell phone ever. By contrast Motorola’s PEBL which was designed to give the consumer a more tactile experience was a more modest sales success, good enough for Motorola to make a second version but not enough to echo through the product design of the Motorola’s phone range.

    Handset                          Size                                             Mass

    PEBL U6                        86.5 x 49 x 20 mm                    110 grams
    RAZR V3                        98 x 53 x 13.9 mm                     95 grams

    The apparent lessons where not lost on the industry. Steve Jobs used to have a RAZR. Despite the fact that it was Sony Ericsson who was the handset manufacturer who led compatibility with Apple’s iSync software at the time. I had to buy adaptors from a German software company to get iSync to work with my Nokia devices. Jobs experimented with size zero design on the first iPhone and iPod Touch and then rolled it out to the MacBook Air. By the time that the iPad came about, size zero design was encoded into Apple’s tablet DNA.

    The MacBook Air is notable because unlike the iPhone, Apple did have a product to judge it against. Delving back into the Apple past products the MacBook Duo series of the early 1990s set an aggressive product design to match in terms of size and functionality. That the MacBook Air decided not to have a dock is a discussion for another time, what is more interesting is how the MacBook Air is actually bigger in every way except depth than the Duo series of devices.

    I call this obsessive size zero design because I believe that it is an unhealthy design language. Jonathan Ive’s recent work at Apple owes a lot to the works and thinking of Dieter Rams. How does these size zero designs stake up against Rams’ ten principles of good design?

    1. Good design is innovative.
    2. Good design makes a product useful.
    3. Good design is aesthetic.
    4. Good design makes a product understandable.
    5. Good design is unobtrusive.
    6. Good design is honest.
    7. Good design is long-lasting.
    8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
    9. Good design is environmentally friendly.
    10. Good design is as little design as possible.

    I think that the Apple’s size zero product range break rules: 2, 4, 6, 10.

    Good design makes a product useful

    Tell that to iPhone owners who are stuck with a device with an inadequate battery life. I can get just over one working day out of my phone if I nurse it carefully and use a mophie 3G juice pack air. The slimness of the product makes it awkward to hold and cuts down on the amount of battery that can be crammed into the case. Slimness was also responsible for the iPhone 4’s controversial antenna design.

    Good design makes a product understandable

    The iPhone 4 antenna debacle was partly down to people holding the device wrong, hardly an example of good design makes a product understandable.

    Good design is honest

    The first iteration of the MacBook Air has complex beveled sides to make it look thinner than it actually is.  Then there is the alleged gorilla glass failures on the back of the iPhone 4.

    Good design is as little design as possible

    Rams last principle is like a zen koan. On the one hand it could be talking about materials, on the other side it also means a lack of customisation and a lack of awareness from the user that the product has been designed. Instead it must be seen as the only obvious way that the design should have been done.

    Users of Apple iPhones and MacBook Air devices, by contrast are conscious of the products design. They are also conscious of the fragility of their devices, which is the reason why an eco-system in cases and protectors has been built up around mobile phones for the first the first time in a decade.

    In conclusion

    In conclusion, I think that size zero designs are leading technology product design up a blind alley, one that doesn’t benefit consumers in the longer term. Product usability has been sacrificed and the consumer is not free to alter any part of the device such as memory capacity the way they would with a normal laptop.

    All phone dimension data came from GSM Arena. More design related content here.

  • NFC + more news

    NFC

    Digital Evangelist: What would I rather pick up my phone or my keys as I leave my house? – Ian on NFC. NFC or near field communications. Like most technologies NFC has been a long time coming. It sprang out of work that was done around RFID (radio frequency identification), where a passive device is powered and communicates with a powered transmitter. Its the tag that’s in library books or items to prevent shoplifting.

    Standards for what we now know as NFC were set in a technical outline by Philips and Sony back in 2002. Two years later they established the NFC forum. A year later and Sony launches an NFC shell add-on for its Nokia 5140 ruggedised mobile phone. Nokia, France Telecom and Samsung experiment using NFC to pay for public transport and mobile payments. China Unicom rolls out NFC in public transport across Beijing and Chongqing. This year Nokia launches the first NFC compatible smartphone and Nice experiments with being a contactless city with bankcards and mobile phones.

    China

    FT.com / China – China launches own online mapping service – its a bit poor, but this is a first iteration. China has concerns about state secrets leaking out

    Batman Wins Chinese Lottery – WSJ – absolute genius, love it

    Consumer behaviour

    For Millennials, Brands May Be as Important as Religion, Ethnicity | Fast Company – wasn’t this the case for generation X and even boomers as well? Brett Easton Ellis built a writing career on documenting the brands of disaffected youth. Yuppies were status brand obsessives. William Gibson and Douglas Coupland fetishise brands or deliberately create a brand void in their works. The move from glasses to bottled beer in European bars and clubs was about the bottle label being a brand totem for the user

    Innovation

    Three Innovation Trends in Asia – Harvard Business Review – interesting article. What the middle-market segment looks like in different Asian countries is particularly pertinent especially as it gets hollowed out of the developed world

    Japan

    HISTORY of HEIBON PUNCH 平凡パンチの歴史 – fascinating cover designs. Heibon Punch was a homegrown Japanese men’s magazine a la GQ that finished in the mid 1980s. Love the 1960s jazz record series they put out with Quincy Jones

    U.S. Says Genes Should Not Be Eligible for Patenting – NYTimes.com

    Luxury

    New luxury trends emerge in China: News from Warc.com – maturing market?

    Great new fashion innovations for 2012 | FT.com – interesting ideas that seem to owe a lot to streetwear brands. Experiments in materials by Thakoon, DVF and Proenza Schouler are a chip off the old block from the work that Massimo Osti pioneered at CP Company, Stone Island the collborations with Sugergra and Levi’s. The multi-garment garment is straight from Acronym’s play book

    Luxury Gets More Convenient – WSJ – counter-intuitive. Koreans buying Gucci in the 7-Eleven

    Online

    Google Stop Indexing Blogger (Blogspot) Posts – need to get this sorted sharpish, at least they can’t be accused of being biased!

    Retailing

    Chinese Online Shoppers Have High Standards – China Real Time Report – WSJ

    Software

    Microsoft Launches Office 365, Bringing Millions Into the Cloud | Fast Company – it looks like Ray Ozzie’s work was done at Microsoft

    Technology

    Op-Ed: Optical Media Not Dead Yet – dead in technology circles a relative thing. Sony only stopped selling cassette Walkmans in Japan on Friday

    Web of no web

    Microsoft Buying Canesta to Bolster Gesture Technology – NYTimes.com – minority report here we come

    Wireless

    China Mobile: Not in the Comm Biz – WSJ – in the information services business apparently. Some good telecoms numbers here

    Project to Test Home & Electric Vehicle Network Standards for CO2 Reduction | NTT DOCOMO Global – really interesting project extending smart home thinking to a smart life