Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Nudges + more things

    The Power of Nudges, for Good and Bad – NYTimes.com – how loss aversion and other behavioural traits  (or nudges) can be used as methods for social change and political change. These elements have already been used in UK government projects and the advertising world. They are the reason why games are addictive and so is swiping on Tinder. (paywall) – more on consumer behaviour including the impact of nudges here.

    Chat App Firm Line Focuses On Services After Adding Just 1M MAUs In 3 Months | TechCrunch – I don’t think that this is as bad as the TechCrunch seems to think. US focused services and China focused services are about the advertising eco-system and scale.  LINE hasn’t really tried to blow out the market penetration beyond Asian markets yet. It does really well in places like Thailand, Taiwan and Japan. It is also a media franchise rather like Sanrio, given the licenceable nature of its sticker characters like Brown. Also ARPU (average revenue per user) is as important as numbers – profit share vs. market share. This has been demonstrated in other sectors such as the smartphone market, where Apple has historically earned 70 to 90 percent of smartphone profits from just 15 percent market share.

    U.S. Technology Device Ownership 2015 | Pew Research Center – good data points on device usage by US consumers.

    Hong Kong pupils at risk of ‘becoming like Foxconn workers’ in education system, says former principal – it is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, that kids will be put in such a high stress position by the Hong Kong education system. The second reason is that Foxconn as become a verb for stressful conditions. That is damaging for both Hon Hai Electronics and their customer base. The idea of damaging stressful conditions being so tightly linked with the company name is damaging. It’s like a really bad version of ‘Hoover’ and vacuum cleaner linkage.  (paywall)

  • Beehives + more news

    Melixa | Innovative smart beehives for remote monitoring – beehives as smart cities for bees. I wonder if this is will do anything for colony collapse disorder (CCD) ravaging beehives around the world.

    Google combining Android and Chrome is bad for developers – Business Insider – my problem with tablets is their ‘lugablity’. I found the original iPad too big

    Microsoft has trapped its biggest partners between a rock and a hard place (MSFT) | BusinessInsider – “The Surface Book will have a harder time stealing away MacBook users,” says Linn Huang, an analyst for IDC. “The Apple brand has been sticky, and I don’t have much cause to think it won’t continue to be in the immediate future.” – whilst it might appeal to enterprise customers, it is also a big threat to existing Microsoft OEMs. There is a larger question about whether the touch interface is the right context for a lot of laptop work, which is one of the reasons why Apple has kept iOS and OSX separate despite their Darwin / BSD / Mach microkernel guts

    Why Windows XP Won’t Be Going Away Anytime Soon | Makeuseof – interesting challenge that Microsoft has in that its greatest competitor is is older products

    ‘Can’t hide it forever’: The model who became a meme – BBC News – I can’t see JWT coming out of this well

    Carrier DT Targets Startups After Europe Agrees Net Neutrality Rules | TechCrunch – inevitable based on the recent EU regulatory changes

    Nexus 6P Teardown – iFixit – interesting teardown, appalling repairability. More gadget related content here.

    Mead Johnson dives into parenting issues using WeChat | Marketing Interactive – influential parent campaign on WeChat

    BuzzFeed Press Blog – A cross-platform global network – interesting vision piece on the future of Buzzfeed by Jonah Peretti

    WeChat Still Way Ahead of Facebook | L2: The Daily – really good slideware on messaging platform

  • Learning machines discussion

    Why learning machines? Simply because I don’t want to get into an argument of what an AI actually is, so hence the title change – but interesting watching.

    The Churchill Club manage to get top drawer panelists for this session on learning machines

    • Yoshua Bengio, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, Universite de Montreal
    • John E. Kelly, Senior Vice President, Solutions Portfolio and Research, IBM

    The panel was moderated by long time New York Times technology journalist  John Markoff.

    Key takeouts for me were:

    Cycle since the 1950s of over-promising and under delivering that drove nuclear winters and booms. Current cycle goes back to the DARPA autonomous vehicle competitions of the past decade. Neural networks weren’t seen as ‘AI’, they went out of research fashion in the 1990s and research picked back up in 2005. Deep learning is basically layers of neural network – more layers = ‘deeper’. Deep nets are now the standard for learning machines. Object recognition improved in 2012 and both industrial and media interest took off.

    Performance has been helped by improved hardware, which has driven the breakthroughs.

    Learning machines still need a lot of human guidance, unsupervised learning isn’t doing as well. It probably explains why IBM has so many people working on Watson projects. This also explains why Watson is externally seen primarily as a ‘marketing concept’.

    Rate of change in semiconductors. Moore’s Law is likely to top out at 5nm. Carbon nanotube devices will be the new silicon in semiconductors. Quantum computing will drive performance in certain types of calculations by a factor of 20. Graphene is better for analogue devices, nanotubes are better for switching. The cost of transistors has stopped falling, which has an implication for new disruptive industries.

    We’ll get performance and density, the cost of which is more uncertain. Computing power is important for learning machine technologies. Power consumption (computing power per watt) is tremendously important. IBM Watson on Jeopardy used 85,000 watts to beat two 20 watt humans.

    Back propagation allows the use of lower power processors. Speech and vision are areas of a big push, but the most exciting area is language recognition and understanding with recurrent networks – implications for conversational interfaces and services.

    IBM think cognitive computing is a wider area than ‘machine learning’. Cognitive computing is what IBM think will transform ‘digital transformation’ through learning machines.

    AI has a definition problem due to fashion and academic quarrels.

    Watson was originally designed to deal with massive unstructured data rather than building an AI. Data was growing faster than IBM could develop for. Watson had a data centric focus. It sounds rather like the vision I once heard articulated for both Autonomy and Palantir.

    Consumers will see Watson as ‘insights’. Watson as a learning machine focuses on comparing and contrast to try and find patterns.

    Interesting that IBM went in so hard on healthcare as an example, given how they eventually retreated from the sector after scandals over unsafe diagnosis.

    UPDATE: October 6, 2020 – report on AI progress here.

    More technology related content here.

  • Social relationship platforms + more

    Most Marketers Don’t Use Social Relationship Platforms | Forrester  – I am not that surprised, social relationship platforms such as Hootsuite’s user experience isn’t exactly intuitive. They’re hard to use for the teams that I have worked with on campaigns and their pricing policy isn’t transparent. Instead it’s more like feeding your wallet through a salami slicer. Also with the changes in social platforms, social relationship platforms make less sense

    End of the Line? Messaging app in big trouble as active user growth stalls | Techinasia – really?

    Flipboard’s Fanfare Fades as Executives Exit, Sale Talks Stall – Bloomberg Business – the writing was on the wall with Flipboard back when I ran into some of their people in Seoul a few years ago

    Inside Innoway, China’s $36 million government-backed startup village – in just two years, Beijing city planners transformed a no-frills walkway in the city’s northwest into a symbol of China’s internet ambitions

    Mossberg: The Apple TV gets smart | The Verge – wait for the next version basically

    Hong Kong is the happiest place in China, according to WeChat posts – Hong Kong is home to the happiest people in Greater China, closely followed by Taiwan

    The Architecture of Communication: The Visual Language of Hong Kong’s Neon Signs | NEONSIGNS.HK 探索霓虹 – great article on decoding Hong Kong signage design

    (in)visible (de)signs | Designs that often go unnoticed – architecture of communication: the visual language of Hong Kong’s neon signs

    A movement in the making – Dupress – some nice slide ware on maker economy

    IBM to Buy Weather.com, But Not the Weather Channel – NBC News – surprised this didn’t happen sooner. Great case study for IBM, surprised if AccuWeather doesn’t receive offers after this

    The Cheapest and Most Expensive Places to Live in Luxury in Asia – WSJ – the cost of living in luxury has come down in Mumbai making the Indian financial capital the cheapest place in Asia to live it up, according to a new report that examines the price of top-end goods and services

    BMW Icons Guide. – I like the thought put into the icon design

    Taxi groups unite to fight Uber with $250m start-up – FT.com – interesting meta taxi app (paywall)

  • On innovation

    Before I start to reflect on innovation, let me tell you story from my my old agency days. Back in the day I used to work agency side on the Microsoft account. Unlike a lot of my colleagues who worked on it full time, my workload was usually tangental to everything else that I had going on. My senior colleagues had worked on the business for a long time and became what you might term institutionalised. They had a definite dogmatic world view, which I was wasn’t comfortable with as I felt it lacked the objectivity required to give good client counsel.

    That world view was baked into the descriptor of the agency, that we provided ‘innovation communications’, that is focused on communications programmes for innovative organisations. For certain people innovation became defined purely in terms of what Microsoft was doing at that time. For instance, winning a client that had a new business model would challenge mainstream ‘gourmet’ food brands like Kettle brand crisps (chips in US parlance) – saw colleagues berated over e-mail by senior leadership for bringing the wrong kind of innovation into their consumer brands part of the business.

    Businesses change, no more so than the technology sector and agencies with anchored positions are left behind in spite of their loyalty as clients need fresh ideas.

    Steve Jobs (WIRED Japan - August,1995).

    I was thinking about at their dogmatic view of innovation when I read this quote from Steve Ballmer talking about Microsoft’s landmark investment in Apple back in 1997.

    They’ve done a great job. They’re a company that’s done a great job. If you go back to 1997, when Steve came back, when they were almost bankrupt, we made an investment in Apple as part of settling a lawsuit. We, Microsoft made an investment. In a way, you could say it might have been the craziest thing we ever did. But, you know, they’ve taken the foundation of great innovation, some cash, and they’ve turned it into the most valuable company in the world.

    It probably would have been enough to make a couple of my former colleagues extremely uneasy to say the least, especially given Steve Ballmer’s hard charging reputation. One thing that Ballmer misses is that even though Microsoft couldn’t vote with those shares, it was potentially as well-made a deal as Jerry Yang buying into Alibaba – if Microsoft had held those shares for long enough. Regardless of this, the Office unit of Microsoft more than made up for this investment with the amount of profit they made over the next few years on versions of Mac Office.

    More information
    Steve Ballmer: Microsoft investing in Apple ‘might have been the craziest thing we ever did’ | BGR