Ged Carroll

Blog

  • COSCO Shipping + more things

    COSCO SHIPPING Lines | Customer advisory on network breakdown within America Regions – Customer statement on how their business IT systems were (allegedly hacked and) shut down. COSCO is one of China’s state shipping companies. COSCO is also one of the largest owners of containers in the world. COSCO also owns OCS, the Hong Kong shipping line. More security related content here.

    ITV Self Serve – this could be the equivalent of 1980s era slideshow style cinema ads for your local Indian restaurant. I could see the benefits for estate agent chains, car supermarkets and local hotels. All of which will be reliant on powerful expensive intermediaries (rightmove, autotrader and booking.com respectively)

    Facebook Added Several Creative Tools to Its Ads Manager App – Adweek – reminds me a fair bit of percolate’s editing features

    Hollywood Marketing Firm Ant Farm Is Shuttering | Hollywood Reporter  – Omnicom, an advertising and media holdings conglomerate, is seeking to shed any venture that doesn’t have a substantial return on investment, or a 25 percent margin. “Omnicom is having a tough go, and they didn’t think they [Ant Farm] was core to their strategy,” said one insider.

    Why Monocle shuns social media in favour of going swimming with its readers | The Drum – contrarian strategy in action

    Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone (RACE) – Federal Business Opportunities: Opportunities – interesting project, there is a tension between this and the US law enforcement community’s concern about ‘going dark’

    China economic analysis by Martin Wolff | FT – mix of rising debt, slower growth and lower than needed domestic consumption

    Facebook stock plummets after warning of slower revenue growth – Axios – most of the growth now must be in the developing world

    Apple Is in Danger of Abandoning Creative Pros – ExtremeTech – “You will see us do more in the pro area,” CEO Tim Cook said back in early 2017 at a shareholder meeting, in a response to a question about the Mac Pro. “The pro area is very important to us. The creative area is very important to us in particular.” I still don’t doubt the company’s commitment. But I’m certainly disturbed by its inability to execute lately.

    Molecular clock chip promises improved smartphone navigation | eeNews Europe – huge for navigation and time stamped applications

    The man who invented the self-driving car (in 1986) – POLITICO – interesting reflection on where machine learning has been before

    There is no precedent—a president sides with America’s enemies – interesting if optimistic take on the rise of China. I think that the west’s beliefs have been shown to be malleable over the past couple of decades

    Understanding multimodality: An analysis of early JUMP users – drives overall app use, cannibalises short distance drives

    Before scooter shares, The Sharper Image was selling Razors to tech workers — Quartz – circular innovation in action. I remember the first person I saw with a micro-scooter was a German freelancer that we had in the office. It made him look like a knob as he tried to ride it through Covent Garden during the dot com boom. When working on Genie (a still birth mobile internet product that was extended out of a trial proof of concept) we had lots of them all over the office. The bag that the scooter came in was a solid cotton canvas duffle that I still have. As far as I remember I only took the bag and there was a load of these scooters sitting folded up and unloved in a cupboard in the back of the office when I left a year or so later

    WPP courts Chinese tech giants‎ Alibaba and Tencent over $2.5bn deal – if they wait until Brexit drops, Alibaba and Tencent could push through a tricky purchase easily

    The Chinese Communist party entangles big tech | Financial Times – there’s some antitrust arguments the west can easily make

    Multinational brands predict higher spend on influencer marketing | PR Week – not sure why at the moment, where is the business case?

    Amazon advertising is working directly with brands now, cutting out ad agencies – Digiday – this is similar to what Baidu, Sina and Tencent do in China.

  • The Heat & more stuff

    The heat. At least in Hong Kong I lived with air conditioning, but there is no respite from the heat in London. In my area of London there hasn’t been much of a breeze either, the heat has been inescapable.  At least my music needed to be cool, and I reached back to nu-disco and space disco over the past few years. If there was one tune of the week it was this on

    Watch Kraftwerk Perform a Real-Time Duet with a German Astronaut Living on the International Space Station | Open Culture – literally out of this world. Kraftwerk pushing performance innovation after five decades.

    Carver M-500t power amplifier at the top

    I still lust after Ferris Bueller’s Carver M-500t power amplifier (on the top in the screen shot above), E-mu Systems Emulator II sampler and his l33t maker skills. Check out this blog that collated all the immense taste that went into his bedroom design: TimLybarger.com: Ferris Bueller’s Bedroom

    Scooter is one of those guilty secrets with catchy melodies and nonsensical lyrics that confound comprehension for English speakers. It was unusual to hear ‘How Much Is The Fish ‘ played on the piano and its a pleasant surprise. Scheps is better known as a classical pianist in Germany and has brand sponsorship deals with Audi and Chopard – so a world away from the image of Scooter.

    Here is the original for comparison purposes….

    As a student of Silicon Valley history, I was aware of General Magic. It is now getting a well deserved documentary about it. General Magic tried to build the predecessor of the Palm PDA and modern smartphones, before the the internet wi-fi and very nascent cellular networks. I’d heard of some people using them as a desk phone replacement

    Here’s the trailer

    Here is the documentary’s website

    Here is a guide to their DataRover 840F. Check out the skeuomorphic interface that is reminiscent of Microsoft Bob. Stylistically the fonts, design details and Easter eggs reminded me of the early Macs that I used. This isn’t surprising as it was started by Mac veterans.  Why is General Magic important now? Like the later PayPal mafia the General Magic alumni have been all over Silicon Valley developing some the most successful products and services. More on technology here.

  • Kickstarter

    If you’re reading this blog, you will have heard of the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Kickstarter has become synonymous with crowdfunding and has become a verb. There are several crowd funding platforms out there including Indiegogo and China’s Demo Day but none seem to have caught the public imagination in the same way Kickstarter seems to have.

    Major companies like Sony have trialed offerings of products on crowdfunding platforms as a way of accessing market size and viability for new products. Bands from Public Enemy to unknown artists have financed their album recordings and production in a similar way

    Kickstarter failure rate

    I’ve personally subscribed to projects with very mixed results with Kickstarter projects that I have funded. My experience of my first couple of projects were very positive. My most recent experiences have been one of disappointment to the point that I no longer use it. They failed. There was production problems, the timelines over ran. And at least one of them looked as if they took the money and ran when the project seemed more difficult than they originally assessed it to be. 

    Therefore it was interesting to hear Kickstarter used in a different context, that reflects my experience with the platform.

    I like the Techmoan YouTube channel as a good deal of its content introduces retro technology, many of which is is equipment or media formats that I hadn’t come across previously.

    The channel host Mat used Kickstarter not as a brand, but as a verb to imply that a product was somehow inferior and lacking in quality. It has become synonymous with an amateurish effort. Just because technology and globalisation have democratised access to manufacturing; doesn’t necessarily mean better quality products. That can’t be good for the brand.

    This is on top of crowdfunding’s high degree of funding failures, product failures and increasing numbers of alleged fraud.

  • Crimson Hexagon + more things

    Facebook Suspends Analytics Firm Crimson Hexagon on Concerns About Sharing of Public User-Data – WSJ – Crimson Hexagon will likely get out of the penalty box soon, the co-founder works at a joint Facebook academic research partnership… Its also not that surprising what Crimson Hexagon did, given how crap Facebook is at providing data to social insights platforms like Crimson Hexagon or Brandwatch

    Congress is wrong to question Huawei’s academic partnerships | FT – op-ed by Eric Xu of Huawei, you could cynically interpret it as a plea for easier espionage and an interesting use of ‘freedom’ (paywall)

    INTERNET: Baidu Sambas Out of Brazil | Young’s China Business – There are lots of reasons for the inability of China’s Internet companies to succeed outside their home market. One is simply inexperience. But another is really the direct result of Beijing’s determination to set up what almost amounts to a parallel Internet in China that in some ways is identical to the global Internet but in others is very different. That strategy has helped to keep out most of the major global competitors in any meaningful way, allowing Chinese companies to thrive on their home turf thanks to their booming local economy. But that approach has also made these companies quite unprepared to compete globally, since they engage in many practices that are either unacceptable outside or simply undermine trust of local people. – China’s Galapagos syndrome: WeChat has NO end-to-end encryption, is censored worldwide for instance. Will only succeed in low risk categories – photo altering apps or casual games

    Why Hong Kong’s property bubble won’t burst anytime soon | HKEJ Insights – Hong Kong’s property market no longer serves only the city’s seven million people. We now must also serve a country of 1.3 billion with a growing number of rich people anxious to get their wealth out. Hong Kong’s red-hot property sector is a perfect place for rich mainlanders and international investors to park their money. Their hot money, combined with the local psyche that prices will continue to climb means the bubble will never burst. – You could substitute most of the world’s major cities as hot money from fast developing economy entrepreneurs and rent seek oligarchs park their hot money in property safe havens. Hong Kong isn’t going to see a tailing off of house prices until China deals with corruption.

    Amazon’s new Part Finder helps you shop for those odd nuts and bolts | TechCrunch – so cool,  I am just really scared that if I showed this to my Dad this ‘tinkerer’ element of his character would go into overdrive

    Publicis Groupe: First Half 2018 Results | Publicis Groupe – poor job done at controlling market expectations

    Android has created more choice, not less | Google Blog – yeah right. Basically we can’t get paid in data so pay us a licence fee. I wonder how much Google will have to pay to keep Google Search in the device if they do that. It could also create an opportunity for Oxygen, Yandex app store, Jolla and home grown distributions by the likes of Huawei instead

    Mark Penn on his update to MicroTrends

    Media – Twitter’s guide to getting the most out of the platform

    MEDIA Protocol – WTF

    Looking Through the Eyes of China’s Surveillance State – The New York Times  – I tried the glasses out on a group standing about 20 feet away. For a moment, the glasses got a lock on a man’s face. But then the group noticed me, and the man blocked his face with his hand. The minicomputer failed to register a match before he moved. Seconds later, the people scattered. Their reaction was somewhat surprising. Chinese people often report that they’re comfortable with government surveillance, and train stations are known to be closely watched

    Amazon crashes just minutes into Prime Day | The Drum – makes you wonder about AWS availability and uptime…

  • Overlord & things from last week

    Overlord is an amazing genre mashing film. It’s not probably the best film, but does look like lots of fun. Overlord is named after operation Overlord, the allied codename for the battle of Normandy during the second world war. This immediately places Overlord in the hard fought battle to go inland from the beachheads.

    Prior to working in marketing I spent a brief time in the chemical and petrochemical industries. It was a time of my life when I was disenchanted with a scientist future in deindustrialising Britain. Instead I sought to try and work out what I wanted to do with my life beyond DJ’ing and living for the weekend. I worked on materials that were three times as strong as kevlar. Yet even now kevlar, Dyneema (that I worked on) or engineering plastic PEEK are still far from the mainstream applications. We don’t have everyday lightweight composite family cars. Yet materials hype like that around graphene assume that the material will be immediately transformational. This is a great video on graphene hype.

    If you are tech-orientated this video by Dr Kaizhong where he talks about his concept of the digital universe is interesting. More ideas related content here.

    I got this via Matt’s great Web Curios newsletter. It is not everyday that you see a western pop video shot in a middle class neighbourhood and apartment of Beijing.

    https://youtu.be/lGAhjnHvrNE

    Ogilvy put together a summary of what they thought were key themes from Cannes.

    I am not a big fan of deadmau5′ overly compressed pop sounding blend of dance music, but this video is mental. If you are watching Tomorrowland festival’s live stream over the weekend, you might think that the artist is thumbing his nose at his fan base. The video seems to parody archetypes of his fan base.