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

 

  • The Zetas & other news

    The Zetas radio network

    Radio Tecnico: How The Zetas Cartel Took Over Mexico With Walkie-Talkies | Popular Science – the scale and sophistication of this network was impressive. The Zetas was formed by a group of Mexican special forces operators who deserted who set up as a murder for hire for the Gulf Cartel in Mexico. Their numbers have been expanded from the civilian population. The Zetas broke away to form their own organisation in 2010.

    Consumer behaviour

    Kids still getting too much screen time, experts say – CBS News – we heard the same things about TV before I was born and all the way through my childhood

    Resonance | The four archetypes of Chinese shoppers. – Checkout China research

    How Working on Multiple Screens Can Actually Help You Focus | WIRED – contextual usage. More related content here.

    Culture

    Classic Song ‘Stems’ Inspire Remixes – WSJ – great to see Luxxury getting some respect. Previously this level of access was limited to DJ pools like DMC in the UK (paywall)

    FMCG

    Kantar: Chinese Consumer Goods Companies Take Share from Foreign Companies | China Internet Watch – interesting to see how western CPG companies like P&G and Unilever are losing ground in China

    Ideas

    Minds and Machines | Information Processing – the singularity is a long way off

    Legal

    CITIZEN EVIDENCE LAB | Turning Citizen Media Into Citizen Evidence: Authentication Techniques For Human Rights Researchers – interesting experience in media literacy and tips on spotting fake content that goes beyond Amnesty’s worthy if narrow purpose

    Luxury

    Juicy Couture Seeks Greener Pastures In Asia | Jing Daily – shuttering US stores and opening up mainland ones. Are Chinese tourists not buying mid-market luxury in the US?

    Chow Tai Fook builds loyalty through electronic stamps | Marketing Interactive – kind of, but not Tesco Clubcard for jewellery

    Marketing

    Li & Fung spin-off Global Brands wants China brands to compete globally | SCMP – (paywall)

    From the editor-in-chief: The death of PR agencies – as we know them | PR Week – no real surprises

    Media

    Tablet Magazine Ads Seen Garnering Recall Levels on Par With Print – but the reach of tablets is still lower

    Disney Picks 11 Tech and Media Firms for Startup-Accelerator Program | Variety – following other consumer brands like Unilever, Mondelez and PepsiCo

    MediaPost Publications Marketers Still Not Sold On Native Advertising 07/08/2014 – measurement and effectiveness

    Can Social Media Spending Fit Into a Simple ROI Formula? | SearchEngineJournal – looking at this data social web marketing isn’t working that well anymore

    Why the abysmal Transformers sequel is about to become China’s top grossing film of all time – Quartz – basically relevance

    BBC Academy – Journalism – great set of resources from the BBC

    Online

    360 Search Gaining Over 28% Market Share | ChinaInternetWatch – interesting that 360 is putting up a credible challenge to Baidu

    Technology

    VIA’s new Isaiah x86/ARM hybrid CPU outperforms Intel in benchmarks – but will it ever come to market? | ExtremeTech – it reminds me of the hype around Transmeta back in the day

    Metcalfe’s Law is Wrong – IEEE Spectrum – interesting essay

    Backlash stirs in US against foreign worker visas – looks like the tech industry’s dirty little secret could come home to roost

    Web of no web

    Bits Blog: Intel, Qualcomm and Others Compete for ‘Internet of Things’ Standard | New York Times – the problem will be Qualcomm’s take on intellectual property would be incompatible with the price point of ‘internet of things’ things

    Wireless

    China operators form €1.2bn tower-sharing venture | TotalTelecom – smart move, though probably not as profitable for Huawei and ZTE as it could have been..

    Ben Thompson: ‘Smartphone Truths and Samsung’s Inevitable Decline’ | Stratechery – whilst there is an obvious analogue with the PC which benefited only Microsoft and Intel respectively, Samsung’s scale puts it in a slightly different place

    Huawei D3 could be the world’s first flagship clone! | Gizchina.com – interesting assertion, particularly as Huawei is positioning itself as innovative. Also interesting that it was copying HTC

    Samsung Finds It Costly to Keep Up with China – Businessweek – Chinese firms treading on their turf

  • Watch Dogs hacks & other things

    Watch Dogs vs. real world hacking

    Great examination of how real-world hacking matches up with the game pay in Watch Dogs. In summary, it can be done but it isn’t as effortless as the game Watch Dogs would have you believe. This makes a lot of sense as months of careful organisation, network mapping, probing and phishing doesn’t make for great storytelling. If it won’t look good in a film, it probably won’t look good in a game. In this respect Watch Dogs is under the same limitations as hacking themes in 24 to The Matrix. If Watch Dogs spurs interest in hacking, that in itself could be a good thing, in the same way that the Sinclair Spectrum inspired a whole generation of British software developers. 

    Wandou Labs

    Wandou Labs put together a great presentation on how foreign apps compared to Chinese market apps. In particular Evernote is featured. I am surprised that there isn’t a product from the likes of Netease or Tencent the provides the same functionality as Evernote.

    https://www.slideshare.net/WandouLabs/wandoujia-mobile-search-index-2014-how-foreign-apps-are-stacking-up

    I love Baron von Luxxury’s remixes of 80s classics, the latest one that I have on heavy rotation is his reworking of Duran Duran’s Girls On Film

  • The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

    The Idea Factory reaches back to an age that is now alien to most of us. At one time the most complex devices that people generally had in their homes were a sewing machine, a piano or a mechanical clock or watch. Yet we now view clothes (particularly those from H&M and Primark) as disposable objects, have a limitless amount of media entertainment available at our finger tips and the complexity of a smartphone in your pocket eclipses the complexity of any device in a home just a few decades previously.

    idea factory
    Gertner tracks the rise of the American telephone company AT&T through its research arm Bell Labs. Reading the book, the first thing that strikes you is the immense complexity of the very young telephone networks with its complex mechanical switches, manually operated patch boards and strands of copper telephone lines stringing the country together in a way far more immediate than railway travel.

    Out of Bell Labs came a flurry of developments over just a few decades: the vacuum tube
    Valve or thermionic diode
    the transistor
    From Satori to Silicon Valley
    the laser
    A dress with lasers! (Designed by Hussein Chalayan)
    fibre optic networks
    Amazing table
    the CCD (charged couple device) which is the eye of video and digital cameras
    R2D2 bonds with a digital camera
    and the cellular networks we now take for granted
    Sonim XP3 unboxing and comparison
    What the book fails to answer is the very nature of innovation that Bell Labs was held up for. Is there an ideal structure for innovation? It seems to be the case that ‘it depends’ is the answer; the innovations seemed to come from brilliant individuals, small teams and herculean efforts.

    Robert X. Cringely in his book Accidental Empires talked about Silicon Valley really revolving around the efforts and successes of some four dozen people being at the right place and the right time. Gertner’s book implies a similar linkage bringing in a number of names familiar with technology history: Claude Shannon, William Shockley and Charles Kao.

    AT&T launched Telstar based on a range of technologies that had been developed over the previous decades at Bell Labs, from solar cells to vacuum tube-based amplifiers. The company had a tight relationship with the Department of Defence due to the amount of work it had done in the early cold war on radar and guidance systems. The satellite was launched aloft on a first generation Delta rocket, US military payloads now travel into space on a fourth generation Delta rocket.

    It was also apparent that innovation seems to have its natural time like the Technium of Kevin Kelly’s book What Technology Wants; indeed the history of the Bell Company had much to do with Alexander Bell’s dash to patent an invention that had also been conceived at the same time by another gentleman called Gray.

    There is an interesting case study in product development failure with a look at AT&T’s abortive picture phone service from the early 1960s.

    In comparison to Bell Labs early history the book moves at break-neck speed through the history of the labs after the break up of AT&T in 1984.  A few things that sprung  out of this:

    Lucent’s rise and decline due to vendor financing of telecoms equipment sales. It is interesting that Huawei arranges for Chinese state banks to put up the financing rather than putting up the money itself; but essentially sells on the same premise that made Lucent successful.

    The nature of innovation had fundamentally changed, there was now a core body of work that corporate innovation could draw on without doing the kind of unfettered research that Bell Labs had carried out and facilitated great leaps forward.

    If you are at all curious about the why of your smartphone, broadband connection or the underpinnings of the software running your MacBook then The Idea Factory is a recommended read. My one criticism is that the post-break up Bell Labs deserves far more exploration than The Idea Factory gives it. You can find more book reviews here.

  • Auditing in China & other news

    Auditing Chinese companies

    Democracy and auditing | China Accounting Blog – given that auditing big four are under pressure in China, this might have been an effort to curry favour. But the auditing firms have screwed themselves over in Hong Kong and other countries with this move in China. I could imagine that in the years to come, the lack of transparent auditing will hurt Chinese companies listing on other stock exchanges.

    Consumer behaviour

    The Rising Importance of Single Person Households Globally | Euromonitor International – interesting data points, I am waiting for food packaging to better represent this demographic

    Do Screens Make Us Stupider? Time for a Rethink of Reading | Discover Magazine – the challenge is that books might be written for a reason around learning, but are published to make money, unless there can be a special cognitive edition that makes even more money…

    [1406.2293] Gossip: Identifying Central Individuals in a Social Network – market research as a network analysis tool

    Economics

    Banks in China make as much profit as those in the US, Europe, and Japan combined | Quartz – by comparison the European banking system is a minnow and has horrendous losses

    FCMG

    Confectionery Trends and Innovations at the 2014 Convenience U CARWACS Show in Toronto – Euromonitor International – focus on sharing occasions is a marketing agency opportunity

    P&G’s Always celebrates the “Like a Girl” way of doing things | PopSop – interesting bit of culture hacking

    Legal

    APAC has highest software piracy rate – combination of being gadget driven and piracy is easy. More related content here.

    Luxury

    WeChat + Vivienne Tam = International Model Search 2014!| WeChat – interesting campaign for mass affluence brand. Tam is also trying to encourage usage of WeChat amongst English language customers, so I suspect that this is partly funded by Tencent.

    Marketing

    mirador – interesting application for analytics

    Study: Social Media is Not a Trusted Media Source for PR Pros | Convince & Convert – interesting-ish piece I guess

    Online

    Ikea built a website inside Instagram | The Verge – gimmicky idea that would work as a one-off

    Facebook tinkered with users’ feeds for a massive psychology experiment · The A.V. Club – and people will be surprised why? Good TV consumer product advertising is all about inducing anxiety with current states and promising some sort of emotional reward on purchase

    Software

    QuickOffice Will Be Discontinued | Google System – bad news for mobile workers

    Technology

    An Online Course For FPGA And CPLD Development | Hackaday – Reddit as an old time free university – but without the hippy politics

    Xiaomi founder Lin Bin reveals global ambition | Marketing Interactive – no real surprise, but interesting how they will expand the web services side of the Xiaomi experiences

    Wireless

    Huawei’s Honor 6 cannibalizes sales of its Ascend P7 | WantChinaTimes – poor product management or a larger sign of the smartphone as a commodity?

  • Android moves to life OS

    If you read the Telegraph online last Wednesday 25th or the Financial Times on Thursday 26th June,   you would have seen some great coverage about Google’s developer conference with Android’s move to become a life OS. There was also coverage about the corresponding rise of the Android economy in the UK. Like iOS and web development, software and services are now a major part of the creative economy.

    Google announced developments to move Android to being a ‘life’ OS rather than just a mobile OS.

    Android expanded to a true life OS across numerous hardware platforms:

    • Run wearable devices
    • Run applications within Google’s lightweight desktop OS chrome
    • Be a games console platform
    • In-car entertainment
    • Take another run at the smart TV market
    • Lowering the price-point of smartphones even further with AndroidOne

    All of which presents a range of interesting choices for the UK’s Android platform developers.

    What does this mean for app-enabled brands?

    Google has created more choice and there will be the inevitable surge of experimentation to figure out what works.

    The expansion of Android presents a more challenging time for marketers. There will be more platforms to develop for; since iOS cannot be ignored as a platform. There will be a corresponding complexity in the development of Android applications:

    • Increased application testing time
    • Increased application development
    • Increased application maintenance time to cater for new devices and firmware updates
    • Increased requirement for application marketing support to encourage app downloads and usage across platforms
    • Increased budgets will be required to support new platforms where consumers will start to expect to find brands they use

    There will be a corresponding increase in new risks that these applications bring which will require careful communications planning and preparation:

    • Software rendering hardware useless – ‘bricking’
    • New versions of applications no longer supporting older versions of Android / Android devices – particularly as different manufacturers update their hardware at different rates. Some cheap smartphones may not have any upgrade path. Now imagine this on televisions or car dashboards…
    • Hacking attacks | cybercrime
    • The withdrawal of a well-loved app
    • The poor reception of a newly-designed application

    Who will lose out?

    The most obvious casualty of this move is not Apple or Microsoft but the Java language that Android’s application language is very similar to. Java was touted in the mid-1990s as a write-once, run-anywhere development language and pops up in surprising places. A variant of Java ran most of the pre-iOS smartphone games. It provided a development environment for early web applications including those used in the enterprise. Java had developed a strong footprint in consumer electronics that Android is now looking to usurp.

    Microsoft would be more threatened by Google’s integration of its internet services into Android. Gmail has become a development platform in its own right and Google is providing enterprise users with unlimited storage for $10 a month. Whilst Microsoft has failed to build a serious mobile platform, its web services business has been growing rapidly to challenge Amazon. Every part of that business, from Azure cloud computing to hosted Exchange server functions, is threatened by Google’s recent announcements. Neither Microsoft nor Sony will be particularly worried by Google’s plans for an Android-powered games console, at least for now.

    Companies in the wearables sector are likely to face rapid commoditisation in hardware as Android makes it easier to design wearable hardware. The challenge will be if they can differentiate on superior industrial design and maintain a premium price, or move into providing web services that support compatible devices – a direction where Nike seems to be moving with its Nike+ Fuel Lab.

    The closer integration of Samsung and Google’s development efforts including the integration of KNOX, puts other Android handset manufacturers like LG, Sony and HTC at a further disadvantage.

    The integration of KNOX will also affect the core enterprise business of BlackBerry, providing yet another reason for not purchasing BlackBerry devices or server software.

    Who will benefit from this life OS?

    With such a wide range of devices that Android could develop for, software testing will become an even more daunting prospect than it is already when developing for Android smartphones and tablets. The question is whether the current range of testing tools will cover this new product set adequately or if there is an opportunity, particularly in the enterprise environment for new players?

    Designers are going to be tremendously important, as new versions of the Android software and new use cases pose a number of user experience challenges:

    • Redesigning current apps to match the new flat design of Android
    • Understanding user behaviour and designing compelling smart TV applications
    • Understanding in-car entertainment and designing intuitive, unobtrusive in-car experiences
    • Understanding wearable use cases and designing device experiences that consumers don’t want to put down

    A wider range of Android devices will mean a greater potential market opportunity for ARM-powered chips where they may be going into embedded systems previously powered by lower power X86 processors, PowerPC or MIPS RISC processors.

    Google is a technology company that makes most of its money from customer data and selling advertising space. The expansion of the Android ecosystem will present more advertising formats, inventory and more contextual data. This will be a boon for media buying agencies and potentially for the platforms that support programmatic advertising like DataXu, as the data will help support targeting in real-time bidding. More wireless related posts here.

    More information

    ‘Powerhouse’ UK leads Europe app development, says research | FT (paywall)
    Android TV hands-on: Google makes a new play for the living room | The Verge
    Google announces Drive for Work with unlimited storage at $10 a month | The Verge
    Google Opens Gmail, Making It More of a Platform for Developers | WSJ
    Google previews Android apps running on Chromebooks | TNW
    Razer’s making a gaming ‘micro-console’ with Android TV, available this fall | Engadget
    Google Introduces Android TV, Its New Platform For Smart TV Apps And Navigation | TechCrunch
    Google Unveils Ambitious Android Expansion at Conference | New York Times
    Nike+ Developer Portal