Ged Carroll

Search results for: “"General Magic"”

  • October 2023 newsletter – 3rd time’s the charm

    October 2023 newsletter introduction

    As I write the October 2023 newsletter. it’s getting noticeably darker outside earlier, but the sunrises reward us with a wider variation of colours. And we all have Halloween to look forward to. This is the third issue and I am still finding my way writing these things. I hope that the third time’s a charm, but I will let you be the judge of that. You can read the earlier ones here.

    https://flic.kr/p/2pEXND8

    I looked into where the phrase ‘third time’s a charm’ came from. Apparently it comes from Old English Law, if a prisoner survived three attempts at hanging and survived, they would be set free.

    https://flic.kr/p/6HfrRi

    You can find my regular writings here and more about me here. Let’s get it started!

    Things I’ve written.

    • Climate despair – how NGOs and companies are failing young people in the way they talk about climate change and what they can do to change their communications to increase active participation in reducing the degree of climate change.
    • Technopolarity – how technology is subverting the power structures of elected governments and instead empowering the likes of Elon Musk.
    • Clustomers – how Intuit MailChimp’s ad campaign, whilst clever, might reinforce C-suite misconceptions around marketing and advertising

    Books that I have read.

    • These 38 Reading Rules Changed My Life – RyanHoliday.net – whilst its not a book, it does contain great advice for readers
    • Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. Fogg’s simple model for understanding individual behaviours has helped drive everything from health campaigns to online services. Tiny Habits how consumers and businesses can help foster behavioural change, one tiny habit at a time. More on my review of the book here. 
    • The long awaited Mick Herron book The Secret Hours did not disappoint. It’s from the Slow Horses universe, but not a Slough House story per se. More than a nod to Boris Johnson’s stint as foreign secretary and prime minister. I will leave it at that rather than give you plot spoilers.
    • China A History by John Keay. Keay’s book was recommended to me by a number of people. In 535 pages he attempts the impossible in terms of covering China’s history as a civilisation through the start of Xi Jinping’s first administration. It’s a dense read – it’s well written, covering the complexity of history well. The current communist government is barely a footnote (ok exaggerating a bit here), but it puts things in perspective.
    • Spain A History edited by Raymond Carr. The book highlights the notable trends, intellectual and social, of each particular era in its history. Roman rule created the notion of ‘Spain’ as a distinct entity. The chapters on the Visigoth monarchy, Moorish Spain, the establishment, an empire, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, all chart the cultural, political and economic arc of Spain. It then goes on to explore 19th century liberalism and the pivot during much of the 20th century towards authoritarian rule, followed by a return to democracy and onwards up to the 21st century. My favourite chapter was about the Visigoths, which was a period I didn’t know much about prior to reading this book – the author did a particularly good job of bringing the Visigoths to life on page. 

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Halloween. I have been looking forward to the holiday for at least a month. Growing up in an Irish household with rural origins, I had an appreciation of the changing seasons and loved the traditions around Halloween, especially tales of the fairy forts and the banshee. It’s also a big money earner, in the advertising world allowing for interesting tactical executions that couldn’t otherwise be attempted. Outside advertising, ignoring increased food sales, a third of consumers will spend 51 – 100 USD on putting together their own costume, or buying one off the rack. The most hardcore 10% of those surveyed admitted to spending 250+ USD.

    I was not into costumes, instead I look forward to the most is my Mum’s barmbrack. For the first time in a few years my Mum baked a few barmbracks and sent one of them to me. It’s a Halloween tradition. The barmbrack itself is a spicy fruited bread with a texture somewhere between brioche and and a pan loaf. Traditionally, the brack would contain a ring or trinket, which would turn up in a random slice.

    When I was small, commercial bakeries still used to have a an aluminium ring that looked like it was from a cheap Christmas cracker contained wrapped in greaseproof paper baked into the brack.

    barmbrack

    Downloadable recipe PDF here (Dropbox) or here (Google Drive) if you fancy baking your own over the weekend.

    While we’re on the subject of food, Hope & Glory’s collaboration between Lick paint and Heinz ketchup for a ketchup shade of wall paint creates talkability, though I wouldn’t be buying it for my own home.

    https://flic.kr/p/2p1jBHy

    Buoyant Bob – I am stil not sure if Buoyant Bob is a social object, a brand, both or something else. Buoyant Bob was a successful entry into the US cannabis marketplace. The brief in the campaign was to work around restrictions in cannabis advertising and show it as the most fun brand in the space. 

    Buoyant Bob was released as a single: retail takeovers, vinyl records at dispensaries, and fans sharing Instagram Stories using “The Man Who Got So High” all followed.

    OnlyWatch – an auction in Geneva in aid of research Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy features one-off luxury watches from all of the major Swiss timepiece houses. Some of the entries are unique colour ways but Bulgari went the extra mile with their Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Marble. Their watches are already well known for being some of the thinnest timepieces available. A tourbillion is a demonstration of the watchmakers art. The one in this watch is just under 2mm thick – that’s just over double the thickness of a credit card for a moving mechanical assembly. And then they managed to cover the entire titanium case and strap of the watch in marble and make a marble dial – without making the watch any bulkier than its usual ridiculously slim case. It’s not something I would wear even if I could afford it, but I am in awe of the ingenuity. 

    DSC01594
    Bulgari for OnlyWatch – Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Marble

    Finally Dentsu Health published a great must-read byline on how media and entertainment can aid health equality. More here.

    Things I have watched. 

    I got to see The Boy and The Heron early at the BFI London Film Festival. You won’t get any plot spoilers from me here. Official release is December 26 in the UK, December 8 in Hong Kong. It’s Studio Ghibli, what else do you need to know?

    General Magic – a great documentary about a Silicon Valley start-up of the same name.. Back in the early 1990s General Magic was as visionary as Apple and as hyped as WeWork. If you’ve ever worked with a start-up or care about technology give it a watch. More on my thoughts here.

    The Pentagon Papers – Despite this being a made-for-TV film, James Spader does a great job of playing Daniel Ellsberg; the RAND researcher to gave the materials to the media. In terms of pacing acting and storytelling, I would put this on a par with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman’s film adaptation of All The President’s Men. 

    Tampopo is a beautifully shot Japanese film with comedic moments that tells the story of a widow, her son and their ramen shop. More on what I thought of here.

    A relatively modern Halloween tradition in the Carroll family has been watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown – recommended for young and old alike. While my Dad and I usually end up watching The Crow later on.  If you want more classic horror, then you could do worse than watching the livestream by the Creature Features show.

    Useful tools

    ITV Adlabs and Magic Numbers recovery budget planner

    Pretty much essential to look at if you have responsibility for UK media spend at a brand. This allows you to examine various scenarios and see likely outcomes based on media spend. More here.

    Google bundles generative AI and LLM with search

    I downloaded Chrome especially to try this out, it looks a bit more mature than Bing’s initial integration of ChatGPT. Go here to give it a try if you’re a Chrome browser user.

    Post-It Z-Notes

    You’re workshopping something with clients or thinking something through on your own – Post-It notes are key. The own brand ones can vary from really good to useless, so spend a bit more and get proper Post-It notes. In fact, I’d advise that you go one step further and get Post-It Z-Notes. The notes alternate sides in terms of where the ‘sticky end’ is and if you lift them from the pad you get a ‘Z’ before they peel away. They come away effortlessly and work brilliantly if you have them in a desk holder.

    Foldable wireless keyboard

    At the start of my career, I used to have a Palm PDA ( personal digital assistant – think a smartphone, without the phone and communications bit). I also had a long commute to Luton on a daily basis. I got a lot of reading and writing done thanks to a ‘Stowaway’ foldable keyboard made by a company called Think Outside. The company no longer exists, but the desire to be able to turn my iPhone into a simple writing tool lives on. Recently, I have been using this foldable Bluetooth keyboard. It folds up, can be used on a train seat table or even an economy class aircraft seat and recharges easily. The keyboard isn’t the usual rubbery mess that you tend to get in a lot of these devices. It’s one fault so far is that it feels flimsy, but I have already got my money’s worth out of it in just a few months. I fire up the iPhone’s notes app and get to work. I can then edit and refine once I have a bit more time on my Mac at a more convenient time.

    The sales pitch.

    Now taking bookings for strategic engagements or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my October 2023 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. DON’T FORGET TO PUT YOUR CLOCKS BACK BEFORE YOU GO TO BED ON SATURDAY. Let me know what you think or if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues. 

  • Valley of Genius by Adam Fisher

    Valley of Genius by Adam Fisher promises to be ‘the uncensored history of Silicon Valley’ based on stories that founders and programmers told to each other. All of which begs the question how much is myth making and how much is true?

    https://flic.kr/p/2o8rBr7
    Valley of Genius front cover

    Getting to the truth

    Having worked for Silicon Valley clients and in-house at Yahoo!; I recognise that the truth doesn’t get out there and the myth making is largely self-serving. There is also a big question about how far the collective memory actually goes back.

    GF8 600 - 35 Carbuncled

    Secondly, the story of Silicon Valley has already been told a number of times, how will Valley of Genius compare to Dealers of Lightning, The Valley of Heart’s Delight, Where Wizards Stay Up Late or Accidental Empires in terms of telling the story of Silicon Valley?

    Finally, there is the challenge of how big tech companies have got so good at controlling their story in the wider world. Whether it was keeping close tabs on journalists like Fred Vogelstein found out while working at Wired magazine, through Frank X Shaw’s reputation for robust rebuttal, funded their own media outlets like Pando Daily and eventually disintermediated the media altogether.

    Adam Fisher

    Adam Fisher grew up in the Bay Area and became a journalist and later editor at Wired. He left there and freelanced for a number of publications, branching out from technology writing to other areas like travel and tourism.

    Style

    The most noticeable thing about Valley of Genius when you get into it is that there is no prose. It is all dialogue. Fisher has cut together segments of interviews to tell a story. Sometimes it feels like people around a table, other times it feels more disjointed.

    The book is described as an oral history and Fisher in his interviews describes the process as being like putting together documentary interviews.

    Fisher went out and interviewed many of the great and the good of Silicon Valley to get this material, however given some of the soundbites were things I had heard before such as Steve Jobs talking about a computer as a ‘bicycle of the mind’; I was not sure if these people like to self reference or if Fisher has interspersed his interviews with archival material. Right at the end of the book, Fisher comes a list of people by chapter and where he had to source secondhand quotes from.

    I’ve read a number of books on Silicon Valley over the years, so had a frame of reference and I had context, so I found Valley of Genius enjoyable to read. But for someone who is coming to the subject with just a cursory knowledge of Silicon Valley, there is benefits to having a guide. Reading the quotes without understanding the context, or having been to Silicon Valley still leaves you outside.

    I honestly don’t know if Fisher would have been a good guide, so him removing his voice from the book maybe less of a loss than we might think. But a new reader to the subject matter would benefit from a guide like Michael S. Malone or the insider snark of Robert X. Cringely (aka Mark Stephens). Fisher’s book Valley of Genius is a book for insiders and future academics who might be looking at the history of Silicon Valley in the future. According to Fisher, he managed to secure the last interview that Bob Taylor ever gave. Bob Taylor played key roles in moving Silicon Valley forward while in managerial positions at NASA, ARPA and XEROX PARC. In those interview quotes are more granular aspects of things, like Nolan Bushnell having a champagne party on the grass outside the offices of a recently bankrupt competitor, or that the video card to power the monitor used in Doug Engelbart measured about 3 foot by 4 foot in size.

    It’s also a very one dimensional view of Silicon Valley. It largely misses out hardware and hard innovation; which is problematic for a technology hub that is competing against China and India for that matter. There is no 3Com, Cisco or Juniper Networks. The hardware story is very much lacking, there is no Intel, AMD or Nvidia, Sun Microsystems or SGI. It is largely a consumer technology vision that writes out businesses like Oracle and Salesforce together with the characters that lead them.

    Plot line

    Valley of Genius ignores a good deal of early Silicon Valley, such as the the pre-war nature of Stanford, Varian, Bill Hewlett and David Packard’s garage start-up, Shockley Labs, the treacherous eight, defence contracting and the missile age.

    Mother of all demos

    Instead Valley of Genius history starts at 1968, when Dough Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute provides the Mother of all Demos to a mix of academics, government people from the likes of the department of defense and technologists.

    Engelbart talks about his developments in 1986

    He the talked about his career on the Google campus in 2007.

    Atari

    The story moves on to Atari and Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell was responsible for popularising computer games and arcade consoles. Bushnell was a bridge between the counter culture and Silicon Valley hustle. A few chapters later Valley of Genius also covers the acquisition and eventual (first) failure of Atari.

    Here’s Bushnell being interviewed for the 50th anniversary of Atari by IGN.

    Bushnell did a Google Talk a number of years ago as well.

    Xerox PARC

    PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) was a west coast R&D facility put together by Xerox to understand what the future of work would look like. They had already realised that it would be computerised. From PARC came modern computers, local area networks, file servers, laser printers and productivity software.

    Apple

    In separate chapters Valley of Genius covers Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s commercialisation of phone hacking tools, and the evolution of the Apple computer line up from the Apple II to the Macintosh.

    Retailer High Technology did the first adverts featuring the Apple II computer

    Which was a far more budget affair than Apple’s own launch of the Machintosh.

    The book goes on to cover the return of CEO Steve Jobs and the rejuvenation of Apple as a business including the iPod, iPhone and iPad through to the death of Jobs.

    The hacker ethic, or hacker culture

    The hacker ethic or culture, a digital equivalent of the person who tinkers away with things in a shed or garage has their own section. The section is atemporal in nature, which I can understand to a certain extent. Steve Wozniak came out of hacker culture, as have many software developers over time.

    Fisher focuses on what hacker culture is, rather than what it means (both good and bad). I would recommend Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution as a companion to this chapter in Valley of Genius. The copy I read years ago was published by Penguin, but O’Reilly have re-published it as the book this is part of myth-making and cultural norming in software development teams.

    The WeLL

    The WeLL was the proto-online community that is still going and features first generation digerati such as journalist Wendy Grossman, the founders of Wired magazine and cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling.

    Stewart Brand talked about the founding of The WeLL during a Google hosted talk

    The WeLL never scaled in the same way that we think about social networks now but it has quality discussions and is much kinder than Twitter or Reddit.

    VPL

    VPL was a failed start-up in the mid-1990s that set much of the expectations and tempo on VR to this day. You will most likely know it from the VR suit featured in The Lawnmower Man movie. I covered it in more depth in my metaverse discussion paper.

    General Magic

    Take a series of burnt out Apple employees and have them invent a predecessor of the net appliance or smartphone. That was General Magic and it was a glorious failure. Sarah Kerruish’s documentary on General Magic tells the story much better.

    Wired magazine

    Wired magazine gets its own chapter. it represented a way of melding culture and technology. I had read Wired before I had used the web, but it gave me a good idea of what to expect. But I don’t know if it is more important than ZDnet or other technology publishing houses. Valley of Genius goes on to celebrate Wired’s online endeavours including HotWired, Suck – a sarcastic version of Wired and Webmonkey – which taught a lot of people web development skills and probably doesn’t get the love it deserves in Valley of Genius. Mondo 2000, a rival to Wired in terms of setting the cultural zeitgeist for technologists also gets a chapter.

    Pixar

    Pixar as a Silicon Valley story is an accident due to two things

    • George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic being based in North California rather than in Los Angeles
    • Steve Jobs looking for a project post-Apple

    But it didn’t necessarily move Silicon Valley forward.

    Netscape

    The jump to Netscape as the first commercial browser makes sense. AOL, AT&T True Experience, CompuServe and Prodigy services were all driven by businesses outside the traditional Silicon Valley space.

    Bob Cringely, from what I guess was PBS’ Triumph of The Nerds

    At the time Netscape seemed as much about the crazy public valuation of the business which was emblematic of the dot com boom, as it was about the software that would kick off the open web. These kind of valuations re-emerged with businesses like Uber and WeWork.

    eBay

    eBay was the standout e-commerce play for Silicon Valley. Amazon was a Seattle company and so was an outsider in a similar way that Microsoft always had been. eBay was also founded by an ex-General Magic employee and so was part of Silicon Valley’s version of ‘Rock family trees‘. We see this even now with the ‘PayPal mafia’.

    Google

    Google changed the web experience that Silicon Valley had pioneered via Yahoo! and Excite. Brin and Page became a key point of focus in Valley of Genius. However, this ignores the complexity both around search and the development of foundational web technologies that other companies produced. If you are interested about the nature and history of Google, Steven Levy’s In The Plex is probably a better option to read.

    Google’s move to pay per click advertising gets its own chapter that greatly reduces the complexity of the real story.

    Napster

    Napster was the poster child of market value destruction and disruption that predated Uber and its ilk.

    Dot bomb

    The dot com boom can be charted from the last quarter of 1995 and reached its nadir in the last quarter of 2002.

    Eric Steiner tells his tale as the CEO of Inktomi through the dot com boom and bust

    Valley of Genius covers it in terms of its sociological impact on the Bay Area, as much as its economic impact. The reality is more complex, even the dot.com label attached to it is a misnomer. It encompassed telecoms, networking hardware, datacenters and more in terms of its impact rather than just e-businesses.

    Facebook

    While Facebook was an east coast invention, the movement of the company and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg west saw a cultural change in Silicon Valley that took it down a much darker patch. By comparison Twitter in its start-up phase looked more like Atari in terms of its counterculture influence.

    Future gazing

    At the end of the book there is a section on future gazing, which became what made Silicon Valley great. The business model was prioritised over innovation. Veteran journalist John Markoff even talked about how Salesforce had moved to a ‘vertical campus’ model with Salesforce tower. Which is how every other business in places like Singapore, Hong Kong and even Wall Street work anyway.

    There was a singular lack of reflection on challenges ahead or areas of introspection by the people telling these stories. If anything, that was what concerned me the most about the book. Innovation is at a technological, scientific and socio-cultural cross-roads and the inhabitants of the Valley of Genius apparently doesn’t have a clue. More on the book here. You can find more of my book reviews here.

    Extra content – Valley of Genius promotional tour interviews

    Panel hosted by Adam Fisher to promote the Valley of Genius book

    https://youtu.be/gmfB01vtrgg

    Leo LePort interviews Fisher on Valley of Genius at the time of its launch.

  • AT and T True Experience + more things

    AT and T True Experience

    AT and T True Experience sprang out of the the mid-1990s. At that time AT&T was thinking about how they could own the customer as the internet superhighway became a reality.

    David Hoffman

    David Hoffman worked on promotional videos for AT&T at the time including a video showing a service based on General Magic internet appliances for business, personal use and telecommuting.

    AT and T True Experience outlined in this video looked to be:

    • Customers relationship with the nascent web would be mediated through AT&T
    • AT&T also wanted to build an e-commerce shopping mall similar to what AOL later set up

    AT and T True Experience went on to join similar services like Apple’s eWorld, CompuServe and AOL in irelevance as the first generation walled gardens fell away.

    Business

    Marvell Industry Analyst Day – by Doug O’Laughlin 

    How World’s Top Shipping Company Became Hub for Drug Trafficking – Bloomberg – this seems crazy

    The tech ‘nepo babies’ are coming | Financial Times – SEC research found that seven or more years after listing, companies with perpetual dual-class shares underperformed. Still, founders continue to push for them

    How World’s Top Shipping Company Became Hub for Drug Trafficking – Bloomberg 

    China

    China’s Dangerous Decline | Foreign Affairs 

    Refreshing our approach? Updating the Integrated Review – Foreign Affairs Committee – China ‘a significant threat to the UK on many different levels’ and dependency should be curbed, MPs warn. While supporting a potentially risky shift in using stronger language towards the economic and military giant, the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) argues it must be backed up by action rather than “empty rhetoric”.

    COMAC’s challenge to Airbus and Boeing and the perils of forced technology transfer.

    Energy

    500kV Black Sea submarine cable to connect Georgia to the EU | EE Times 

    Health

    What are the ethics of AI reading animal X-rays? – Futurity 

    Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, Mounjaro, Wegovy gain popularity, effectiveness – The Washington Post

    Global forecast: Pharma and healthcare brands shift their ad strategies | Advertising | Campaign Asia  

    Media

    Wall Street Journal on how financial companies are now buying up YouTuber back catalogue content in the same way that they have previously bought up music back catalogues

    Online

    Disinformation research – Disinformation Counter | Hijacking & Weaponizing the Narrative: Disinformation Amid Rising Repression in East Asia by Tess Bacalla 

    The internet wants to be fragmented – by Noah Smith – this isn’t a new idea Forrester Research branded it the Splinternet and did a whole report on it back in 2010.

    Security

    China/US blacklist: chip designer Cambricon becomes tech war casualty | Financial Times 

    Technology

    Siemens ports Sokol Linux to RISC-V | EE Times – I think that there is a long slow pivot away from ARM processors

  • Toyota Hilux & more stuff

    Toyota Hilux

    This is spot for the Toyota Hilux was done by Saatchi & Saatchi New Zealand. I was reminded of how growing up in Ireland, people would pull up in their cars, vans, trucks or tractors like this and chat in the middle of the local market town.

    It touches on quirkiness, the diverse nature of use cases for the Toyota Hilux and social distancing.

    Big Car did a really good history of the Toyota Hilux. It is impressive how little the Hilux has changed over the years. It’s simplicity has made the Toyota Hilux a very reliable vehicle

    General Magic Personal Communicator

    Film maker David Hoffman, put together a super cut of film that he’d shot for US carrier about General Magic’s Personal Communicator.

    What becomes apparent is that mobile computing has got smaller, but conceptually hasn’t changed that much. Yes the literal ‘desk’ from General Magic seems a little strange. It was a software metaphor that Apple deployed on the Lisa workstation. It also feaArktronics Jane and Microsoft ‘Bob’ a year later in 1995.

    You can see thinking not that far removed from it in the early skeuomorphic designs in the early versions of iOS. (The notepad app had spiral binding and ‘textured’ paper.)

    General Magic’s icons are the predecessor of today’s emojis and stickers found in Messenger applications by the likes of Apple, LINE, WeChat, Kakao and Facebook.

    Electronic personal assistants, later became ‘software agents’ that went out on the early web. It isn’t that far from Wildfire, Hello Google or Siri.

    Brexit

    I am not a fan of John Major, but this speech has got a lot of good content in it, particularly on the subject of Brexit. More on his speech here.

    Markku Alén

    And lastly, just for the hell of it; vintage Chris Harris. In the cockpit with Markku Alén piloting a Lancia Stratos.

  • Paper phone experiment & things that made last week

    Google goes back to the future with its paper phone experiment. Its an interesting commentary on the questionable benefit provided by smartphones. Google seems to be partly convicted. The paper phone experiment goes back to device prototyping. Handsrping founders used to carry around a block of wood in the shape of the PDA that they wanted to build. I was also thinking about Dan Greer‘s views on complexity in technology and what he might have thought of the paper phone experiment.

    One-legged man’s Hallowe’en costume is the Pixar table lamp.

    General Magic was a much storied, but ultimately failed technology company. This documentary about it looks epic on the trailer. You can stream the full documentary here.

    Here is question and answer session from the Silicon Valley premiere of the documentary.

    General Magic came up a device that Sony manufactured for AT&T. It was a PDA like the Apple Newton, but designed around connectivity. It had a built in dial-up modem. It had vCard type functionality that allowed you build up your address book from your email contacts over time.

    Really interesting things here:

    • Techno-optimism needs to be tempered but still hopeful as an outlook
    • Ease to get to market now compared to back then
    • Technology industry is at an inflection point in terms of it does for mankind. As an industry it needs to get a better understanding and course track to go for a more positive future
    • The relative infancy of UX allowed for more trial and experimentation of visual elements

    Here are some users talking about how they use the General Magic device.

    DuckDuckGo launched a ‘terminal styled interface which I quite liked. You can try it here

    duckduckgo

    It isn’t only retro cool but pretty useful, and works really well on a computer that is using a dark mode theme to its operating system.  

    Elena Botelho discusses how the characteristics of successful CEOs differ from the popular narrative

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