Ged Carroll

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  • Sharing economy & more

    Leo Burnett on sharing economy

    Leo Burnett put together this great presentation on the state of the sharing economy (Airbnb, Uber, Lyft etc.) The presentation on the sharing economy is well thought out and handy to keep one side as a reference. More related content here.

    The Sharing Economy: Where We Go From Here from Leo Burnett

    Code Rush

    Code Rush – an amazing documentary on Netscape and its Communicator product: a mix of email client and web browser. Netscape Communicator was the first desktop email client that I used. I remember that we had it at work and then were put through the trauma of moving to Lotus Notes at work. Communicator had been the first email client to support HTML, so going to text only on Lotus Notes as a culture shock.

    At home I switched to Eudora until I eventually moved to mail.app when I set up an Apple services based email account.

    The Hundreds x Reebok

    The Hundreds X Reebok collaboration movie is a great trip back to the early 1990s and some serious sneaker love. The Hundreds may not be the hippest brand, or the one with the most hype. But they don’t just do clothing, instead the publish content that captures the culture of streetwear. Observers as well as originators and creators in the streetwear scene.

    Alan Watts

    The creators of South Park put together some great animation to accompany recordings by the philosopher and buddhist Alan Watts. Don’t worry it isn’t done a South Park style and Alan Watts voice is very soothing. Watts’ work was very influential from the 1950s and again in the 1990s as the interest was rekindled in Zen buddhist philosophy and practice.

    Video game music origins

    Finally, Red Bull put this great documentary together on the origins of video game music. The process that they used to compose the music is amazing. It shows how limitations can enhance creativity.

  • Qualcomm China problems + more

    How Qualcomm China Problems Could Hit Xiaomi – WSJ – likely to start Chinese device maker patent war. Qualcomm China problems are an example of China’s technology ambitions and China’s strategy of war by other means. Qualcomm China problems are likely to be the start of a gradual attempt at eroding Qualcomm’s innovation base. More on Qualcomm here.

    Bristlr is a Dating Site for Beardy Blokes and the People What Love ‘Em | Lifehacker – interesting specialist social networks offer highly targeted marketing opportunities. Not sure having a beard is a passion that people can form around, if nothing else it will appeal to hipsters

    A $30,000 smartphone with four wheels and a motor | Luxury Daily – interesting take on the modern car as a connected device that happens to be transportation

    Google is funding “an artificial intelligence for data science” | GigaOM – there goes SkyNet. Which fits close to their own needs for search engine needs

    Huawei and Inspur Electronics challenge Q3 server status quo • The Register – not terribly surprising post-Snowden. Inspur is winning a lot of high-end business from Chinese banks which will roll down their range as well

    Google Drive now lets you edit Microsoft Office attachments right from Gmail | VentureBeat – works back to feature parity with iCloud and Office 365. But its nothing like editing a document in a proper desktop client

    Bits Blog: China, a Fish Barrel for Cybercriminals | New York Times – using social engineering and the law of large numbers to commit fraud. WeChat also lends itself to fraud since its an app that can both message and send payments

    RIP Clip Art: Microsoft axes yet another foundational piece of computing history | ExtremeTech – the move away from clip art reflects consumer behaviour but does it have IP implications beyond the saving made in not licensing bad drawings?

  • Oddpost webmail

    Before Oddpost

    When you think about Oddpost, you have to cast your mind back almost two decades in 2002, the web was a very different place. In order for applications to do anything they would have to refresh the whole page. You couldn’t dynamically edit a document with other colleagues like you can with Google Docs for instance.  Which made applications like time tracking, or updating the basket on an e-commerce site a bit of a pain.

    The catalyst for change for app like performance in the browser was a webmail client called Oddpost.
    Oddpost RSS aggregator

    Oddpost.com

    Oddpost was different in a number of ways to anything else at the time. At first glance, it looked like a three pane desktop mail client, there was less navigation controls than your webmail interfaces at the time. Which heralded a very different design approach in subsequent web 2.0 companies. It is hard to articulate now, Gmail wouldn’t arrive for another two years and when it did it was invite only which meant that for the average Joe it took a while to come around. There was no download or application required to make it work (like a Java applet for instance). Oddpost, instead used technologies which are now humdrum, but a decade ago were the web equivalent of a revolution. Dynamic HTML, XML, and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) allowed individual elements of a page to be updated that provided a desktop app-like experience.

    Design

    Oddpost’s design approach didn’t lend itself to advertising that would slow down it’s dynamic interface and its method of updating components of a page rather than the full page adversely affected the page view metric advertisers cared about at the time. Storage was more expensive than it is now, so it made sense that Oddpost was a paid-for product.  In return for your subscription of $30/year got you a whopping 30MB of storage in your email box and an integrated RSS reader (rather like mail.app with OSX or Outlook with Windows).  In addition to the unique interface Oddpost offered support for both POP3 and IMAP standards which allowed access over an email client. IMAP allowed you to keep the files on the system providing you with a standard view using the web interface, your own computer, PDA (using Bluetooth and your cell phone as a wireless modem) or early smartphones like the Nokia 7650 and Nokia 6600 which came out in 2003. I was unusual at the time in having an IMAP email account, the entry cost for this service was purchasing an Apple computer.

    Oddpost was rough around the edges. It would be another few years before the metal lid of an Apple laptop would be as common as it is now, so it wasn’t as much of an issue that Oddpost only worked on Internet Explorer (version 5 or better) for Windows. The search functionality only did the headlines of messages not the body text. The company was eventually acquired in April 2004 by Yahoo! as it looked to bolster its position as an email provider against the then new Gmail service.

  • H P security research + more

    H-P Security Research

    The mystery of North Korea’s cyber threat landscape | H P Security Research – interesting whitepaper by H P Security on North Korea’s cyber warfare capabilities (PDF) – Not the most sophisticated but clever use of more limited toolkits according to H P Security. More security related content here.

    China

    Hardware never sleeps in China’s most exciting city | Techinasia– Shenzhen, in some ways I am not surprised

    China factory sector growth slows | RTHK – interesting that this is the official figure rather than the more volatile and less representative HSBC PMI figure. No real steer on seasonality at play however

    Consumer behaviour

    Muhammad is the most popular boys’ name in the UK | Quartz – the perils of research-led PR can be seen in the way the data has been interrogated

    TED Talks Aren’t Making My Generation Smart – They’re Making Us Stupid | VICE – yep

    60-70% of global consumers are “very positive” about private label products, Nielsen’s report shows – interesting move. Retailers brands are now the promise of quality and FMCG are commoditised? May make feature based marketing like Colgate-Palmolive look much smarter in retrospect

    Media

    TV 3.0 is already here – I, Cringely – how do telcos get rewarded?

    How Flash Games Shaped the Internet – The Atlantic – interesting essay which also explains the challenges that Windows 8 faced with one experience to rule them all

    Skeletor Is Waging a Twitter Takeover of @Honda. Here Are the Best Moments So Far | Adweek – love it

    Rentrak Completes Acquisition of Kantar Media’s U.S.-Based Television Measurement Assets – PR Newswire – WPP gets significant minority share in Rentrak. Interesting that the shares are restricted

    Technology

    Samsung readies its first Tizen smartphone for launch in India – cheapens brand perception of Tizen, but also shows how much leaner its code must be. Unfortunately Samsung has altered the UI from Meego so its just the same as Galaxy phones

    Manufacturers’ interest in EL as light source starting to brighten | Asahi Shimbun – it depends on the use case, but very interesting

  • Shenzhen ecosystem

    It is hard to believe that the Shenzhen ecosystem was built over just a few decades. Just over 30 years ago China moved from a period of cultural isolation to gradually opening up to the commercial world beyond its borders. The place to naturally start this was in Guangdong province close to the then British colony of Hong Kong. A small fishing village grew to become the workshop of the world. The growth of Shenzhen was driven by investment from multi-nationals and overseas Chinese. One of the earliest industrial areas was called Overseas Chinese Town or OCT. OCT has changed from manufacturing to retail and offices for the creative industries in the former factory buildings.

    Hong Kong had built up capability and expertise in light manufacturing and clothing from the 1950s through the 1970s. It is still important for supply chain intermediaries. This was the ‘golden age’ of Hong Kong. This is how many of the Hong Kong oligarchs made their first fortunes; which they then invested overseas, in China and into the Hong Kong real estate market.

    Globalisation had started after the second world war. But the opening up of China threw it into overdrive. Hong Kong industrials moved manufacturing plants for clothing, shoes, toys, plastic goods and electrical appliances to China.

    They were joined by Taiwanese electronics manufacturers and then multinationals from Europe, America and Japan. Hong Kong clothing manufacturers provided China supply chain expertise to western retailers like Walmart.

    The Shenzhen ecosystem was built on manual production. The deft fingers of Chinese women workers allowed a lot more precision than Japanese pick-and-place machines. Which meant a lot more flexibility in manufacturing using the Shenzhen factories. You wouldn’t have an iPhone if you used pick-and-place robots on the production line.

    Electronics manufacturing

    At first, these companies were used to fatten the wallets of customers who took on the marketing and distribution of electronics in the West. The dirty secret about many PC and laptop designs was they were standard underneath. Then this cost saving was passed on to the customer as people like Dell went for close to lowest price operator based on a direct mail / online direct ordering and cut out the channel.

    Finally that wasn’t enough, and most of the laptop and PC resellers make no money. Instead the main people to profit from these sales were Microsoft which licensed it’s Windows operating system and Intel which provided the majority of compatible micro-processors capable of running Windows-compatiable applications. In the PC industry there is usually just two or three profitable manufacturers and one of them is Apple. Historically it was Dell, then Hewlett-Packard and now it is likely to have be Lenovo.

    Shrinking PC-esque computing power into the palm of one’s hand was inevitable with the rise of flash storage and Moore’s Law facilitating power-efficient processors. The challenge is battery technology, packaging and industrial design.  Apple pushed the envelope with suppliers. Hon Hai and other manufacturers installed hundreds of CNC machines to fabricate thousands of metal phone chassis. These radical changes in manufacturing capability were opened up to lower tier manufacturers raising the standard of fit and finish immeasurably over a few years.

    Now Xiaomi and Lenovo product handsets that have better build quality than many Samsung and HTC handsets. The performance is good enough (again thanks to Moore’s Law) and the handsets run the same applications. Sony, HTC and Samsung handsets look as marooned as Sony’s Vaio PC range in the Windows eco-system.

    Shenzhen’s ecosystem has been a great leveller of manufacturing and industrial design capabilities with Apple at the leading edge of what’s possible from an industrial design and materials technology.

    More information
    Shenzhen Government Online – this loads slow like they are phoning the pages in from 2002, but is informative
    The smartphone value system – An earlier piece I wrote about the challenges of the Android eco-system