Ged Carroll

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  • NSA spying + more things

    Former MS privacy chief warned of NSA spying | Telecom Asia – The issue is that most privacy laws were drafted to cover communications, not computing and that technically it is possible to encrypt data and store it securely in the cloud. However, that is not possible if one wants to compute with that data – NSA spying is just the canary in the coal mine. What is being done on NSA spying today is also likely being done by the Chinese MSS, the main European powers, the British and the Israelis. Swiftly following them will be the UAE and Saudi Arabia followed by regimes across the world

    Here’s What Some Teens Are Using Instead Of Snapchat And Instagram To Share Pictures In Class – interesting that this is innovative and yet people have been Bluetoothing content for years

    Xiaomi Confirms It Sold 61M Phones In 2014, Has Plans To Expand To More Countries | TechCrunch – so Xiaomi is valued at roughly 750 dollars for each handset sold this year?

    Alcatel’s new Pixi smartphone can run Windows, Android, or Firefox OS | The Verge – interesting move, curious why SallfishOS isn’t getting any play

    How to get 35 million downloads in 7 weeks / The short head of Apps – part 1 | The Short Head – great data analysis on app downloads with data via Appbrain

    U.S.: No alternate leads in Sony hack – Tal Kopan – POLITICO – this is starting to get embarrassing

    ‘Monster Strike’ Gives Former Social Media Giant Mixi a Second Act – NYTimes.com – really happy for the people at Mixi, I thought their first mobile social network was a smart play, but you can’t fight Metcalfe’s Law

    montblanc timewalker urban speed smart e-strap turns a timepiece into a smart watch | Design Boom – interesting less in the ‘extinction of Swiss watchmakers’ which isn’t on the cards (by tech companies anyway) and more in the user context in the design, the information conveyed is discrete, glanceable and filtered only for the really important shizzle

    Only 5% of US iPhone users say they’re very likely to buy an Apple Watch – not terribly surprised suspect its more aimed at China, Korea, Japan

    Fintech Trends in China to Watch in 2015 | TechNode – P2P consumer lending and comparative shopping engines a la moneysupermarket.com

    Moth City – great digital comic

    Is Xiaomi developing its own operating system? | WantChinaTimes – interesting that this is focusing on low-end handsets and is seen to be a target for FireFoxOS rather than Android or SailfishOS

    One Of The Most Elaborate Alternate Reality Games Ever Is Launching In 2015 | ReadWriteWeb – really interesting idea

    At CES let’s just concede defeat for an open standard for IoT | GigaOM – no XML for the IoT?

    Huawei Smartphone Shipment Rocketed Over 40% YOY to 75M Units in 2014 | Technode – focus on cheaper handsets rather than trying to crack premium

    Leaked NSA Documents Reveal The Best Way To Stay Anonymous Online | Business Insider – but will that stack perform at a usable speed?

    LG brings LINE to internet enabled fridges, ovens, washing machines and more | SiliconAngle – what is the user context that this envisages?

    JR Rolls Beacon Navi for Tokyo Station | Wireless Watch Japan – interesting internal navigation application of beacon (low power Bluetooth technology

    Dark Mail specifications – step on the road to strong email protection

    Hands On: How Haptic Technologies Will Bring Touch to VR | Make Use Of – break out your Nintendo PowerGlove. More on haptics here

    China Blocks Access to Google’s Gmail as Ban Escalates – Bloomberg – just formalises what has been going on

    From Gongkai to Open Source | Bunnies Studios – really interesting examination of IP differences and opportunities

  • New Balance China & things that made my week

    New Balance China made a video out of what looks like a product photoshoot of different MT580 colour ways

    New Balance China like New Balance Japan seems to move to its down design language.

    I had fallen out of touch with podcasts since the demise of Lawrence Staden and Stephen Bell’s ‘Loz n Belly’ weekly commentary on economic issues a few years ago, but got hooked again when I was introduced to Studio 360’s American Icons programmes. If anyone has any recommendations for good financial and economic podcasts let me know in the comment box below and will give them a whirl.

    I thought it was just my perception that OS X had slowed down somewhat over the past couple of iterations, but this video gave me some food for thought.

    I am just a sucker for fractals. I spent far too much time in college in front of a Mac 7500 and a colour monitor going deeper and deeper into a Mandelbrot set, so this video really resonated. Play it on full screen, sit back and enjoy

    I have a boundless fascination of mechanical watches and this teardown of a Rolex Submariner brings home the miracle and beauty of their mechanical engineering. Rolex do slow and steady innovation in their movements. They also use a high degree of automation in the manufacture of their parts – all of which is done on-site. Rolex keeps is assembly process largely secret, but likely involves a high degree of precision assembly automation that would be more impressive than even Hon Hai Electronics efforts in China. You can take your Apple Watch and shove it. You can see more luxury related content here.

  • 2015 predictions

    It’s become a bit of an annual tradition on this blog for me to put together some guesswork on what is likely to be coming down the pipe over the next 12 months so here are my 2015 predictions.

    Business

    Sony Corp. cleans house with the management teams of its US businesses. One of Sony’s start-up bets (the e-ink watch, smart locks etc) comes good. Sony will still be supported by its Japanese financial services business.

    For years IBM has charged Huawei a fortune for consulting, telling Huawei the IBM way. In 2015, I could see the student becoming the master as Huawei sells into IBM enterprise markets in the developing world and possibly Europe.

    Shareholder activists don’t take a run at Google. Google is moving from a growth stock to value as search advertising revenue growth is declining. However the structure of Google makes life very difficult for the activists to gain leverage. Any activist that does take a run at Google would need to go to court to help dismantle the two-tier structure that handicaps the shareholder voting structure. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be shareholder grandstanding and public letters to the board. Google’s privacy and antitrust regulatory woes will continue to fester outside the U.S.

    As Fred Wilson over at A VC put it, the sharing economy is actually the rental economy, the digital economy equivalent of bulk breakage: breaking a larger container down to sell smaller, more manageable pieces to consumers for a profit. It’s disruption usually stems from breaking regulations: labour laws, public transportation regulations, laws governing guest house and hotels rather than innovation. It is likely to prey on the have-nots and is likely to see increased resistance. For me it is indicative of a move in founder culture, from the counterculture influenced start-ups of Apple’s era to a yuppie Patrick Bateman-like culture today. Expect more societal push-back as geeks become the new investment bankers in terms of being societal punch bags.

    IoT / wearables

    There won’t be an over-arching XML type bridge for the IoT. Battery life will limit the fantastic visions that pundit have for wearables and the internet of things.

    I would be surprised if we didn’t see some devices trying to power themselves by scrounging energy from wider electromagnetic spectrum (wi-fi networks, cellular devices, radio, TV etc).

    Consumer electronics

    We are going to continue to see baby steps towards more immersive experiences, as VR glasses slowly make progress in the marketplace. OLEDs would be an ideal application for VR glasses, particularly if they want to hold off smartphones in a frame. Content is likely to role out in a similar way to IMAX – visually stunning documentaries about space and nature alongside computer games. Content and gaming will be slow due to it being difficult to make. Storytelling in VR won’t be a problem solved in my 2015 predictions.  It will be interesting to see what James Cameron does with VR. There will also be some baby steps towards haptic feedback (think a better Nintendo PowerGlove).

    Despite The Interview, Hollywood still won’t do cinema / digital simultaneous releases, or global simultaneous releases for any content that wouldn’t have been direct to TV/video in an earlier age.

    Wireless

    The YotaPhone2 won’t get the customer base it deserves as it struggles against the superior marketing muscle of Samsung in the premium Android segment of the market.

    The Cyanogen distribution of Android won’t go anywhere fast due to its geographic exclusivity agreements with the likes of OnePlus and MicroMax cramping the style of handset manufacturers with global ambitions. This offers an opportunity for Jolla’s SailfishOS. but I suspect that my 2015 predictions will mark a high spot in diversity of smartphone brands. Instead we’re likely to see a thinning out of brands over the coming of years, slowly but surely.

    Google revamps the resources and process to get more Chinese smartphone manufacturers going through its official channels for compatibility (CTS) and have a Google Mobile Services (GMS) license. At the moment there are a number of Android handsets going into developing markets without these, which means Google is losing out on incremental licensing revenue. More wireless content here.

    Online/social

    There is a change of emphasis in business, social is no longer well, social. Businesses start to pull ‘social’ media back into business functions. An increased emphasis on paid media over earned engagement / community management and marketing automation makes social look more like electronic direct marketing.

    Asian platforms WeChat, LINE and KakaoTalk have led the way in both consumer and brand adoption. They will continue with a relatively slow international rollout. Facebook Messenger doesn’t seem to fill the same user context as these applications, is this an opportunity that a SnapChat or new player can fill?

    Things could get very interesting if WeChat or LINE professionalise their international marketing and start rolling out some of their more advanced features internationally such as integrating payments and m-commerce. They can’t do it by going alone, they would need to be good partners and deals like that take time to negotiate.

    I suspect that international e-commerce will have breakout years. Yesasia.com, Rakuten and Aliexpress have been percolating for years. Combine this with the valuation put on Asian e-commerce outfits, it would be quite easy to see how cost-conscious consumers in economically challenged Europe and the developing world may appreciate a new Amazon. Secondly, Chinese purchases of foreign goods are likely to expand further due to a rapidly developing logistics network within China, increasing international acceptance of UnionPay and a rein-in on more ostentatious tastes due to Mr Xi’s anti-corruption drive. Consumers will be looking for quality less overt luxury and premium products. Foreign travel for shopping will start to be scrutinised by the government and foreign shopping through intermediaries will become professionalised by the Rakutens of this world.

    We’re likely to see European states take a similar stance to India and China and more widely blocking sites for security considerations and media IP enforcement. Expect the UK and Australia to lead the way in terms of site censorship.

    What do you think about my 2015 predictions?

    More information
    Who is behind the e-paper FES watch? | WSJ
    Sony Qrio smart lock crowd funding page
    What Just Happened? AVC

  • What does technology adoption really mean?

    I ended up giving a lot of thought about the concept of technology adoption and what it really means. I have been spending a bit of time with the family over the Christmas period as the Carroll family CTO. Reading some of the statistics out there about technology adoption got me thinking whilst I was doing my role as CTO.

    In my role as family CTO I had my work cut out for me. My first task on Christmas morning was to recover their Apple ID so that the iPad could be used effectively.
    Old 2.0

    Their mobile communications needs pose a far thornier problem for me and I have been given some thought to my parents and their battered feature phones.

    The problem that I have is that its getting increasingly difficult to get them the kind of phone that they want:

    • Focused on voice
    • Really simple-to-use SMS
    • Good haptic feedback (just like what real buttons do)
    • Something that can be easily locked
    • Something that can be obtained SIM-free
    • Something that is physically robust
    • Something that I can troubleshoot easily

    It is a tough call. I have been down this route before. I gave them my old Palm Treo 650 a number of years ago and it got them thinking about digital photography, but it failed as a phone. It’s failures were:

    • Being too complicated
    • Providing too many choices
    • Having too confusing a keyboard

    The software was also buggy as hell, but I could trouble shoot any problems they had from my memory of using it a few years before they got their hands on it. The Treo 650 eventually gave up the ghost as the family digital camera, to be replaced by the iPad. My friends who have managed to get their parents using Weixin/WeChat on a mobile phone are not particularly good case studies for what I need to do. There is an absolute unwillingness to have phones with a data package: it is hard for them to understand the vagaries of the mobile phone company tariffs; email is something that they can pick up at home. They never hit the wall on their data allowance from the ISP so it never occurs as a consideration to them.

    There is also something about the iPad which means it is accepted as something different to a complex smartphone device and more accepted despite the similar pictures-under-glass interface.

    Instead a market stall provided a Samsung feature phone with a late Series 40-esque interface which pushes the envelope in terms of my Dad’s comfort level using it. Meanwhile my Mum soldiers on with an old Nokia. My immediate gut reaction is to go to eBay and pick up something like the Nokia 225 or a Samsung Solid Immerse GT-B2710 for the both of them.

    I know other people who have faced similar conundrums and have gone with a Windows Phone (it fails my spec because I wouldn’t be able to troubleshoot it for them), but the tiles front page presents what could be a senior-friendly experience in their eyes.  The shy and retiring Tomi Ahonen got hold of some Nokia data looking at phone activations and was both astonished and angry. Roughly a third of Nokia Lumia phones which went out form the factories were never activated. His theory was that a combination of high handset failure rate, unsold inventory from the messy switch over to Windows Phone 8 and possible channel stuffing might be involved.

    I don’t know what might justify a 26 million handset short fall, but I could imagine an appreciable amount of them might be due to people using a smartphone as a feature phone. Not having a data plan, being perfectly happy for a phone to be a phone. Is a smartphone still a smartphone if its used as a feature phone?

    Extending this analogy further, a large amount of ‘smart TVs’ are now being sold and being touted as the new, new thing in terms of internet eyeballs. Web TV isn’t particularly new as an idea, Combining the web in a TV format has been going since at least the mid-1990s when Steve Perlman founded what would later become MSN TV.

    We know that a large amount of homes are buying TVs that are smart, but how do they use them? Are they just using them for the delivery of Apple TV like services; a cable box over IP or are they doing ‘lean forward’ activity one would expect of a smart TV like email, Facebook updates and the like?

    I suspect most smart TVs are video delivery mechanisms and that’s pretty much it, are they then really smart? All of this may sound like semantics, but they could feed into the decisions of advertisers, in terms of platforms and creative execution. They are also likely to feed back into product management in the the consumer electronics sector, where TV makers enjoy (if thats the right word) razor-thin margins.

    From an information security point-of-view, how would you explain to smart TV owners with ‘dumb TV’ usage patterns that their set may be at risk of being hacked and how they should spend money to protect themselves. A worst case scenario maybe a Sony Bravia (or other manufacturers for that matter) bot army of TVs may never be shut down because consumer apathy to the perceived security risk.

    More related posts here.

    More information
    Bizarre Stat of the Day: Microsoft (and Nokia) have only achieved 50M Lumia activations? Seriously? Out of 76M shipments? What happened to the other 26M? Seriously! Tossed into garbage by retail? | Communities Dominate Brands

  • UK pirate notice programme + more

    MPAA Considered Pulling Out of UK Pirate Notice Program | TorrentFreak – Both Vaizey and Luke felt that if notices only started going out in the months preceding the May 2015 general election that would be an unwelcome development. A delay on notice-sending until the fall of 2015 was preferred all round – the UK pirate notice programme shows how media piracy is a vote-losing political hot potato. What the MPAA needs is a better idea, like what iTunes did for music piracy, rather than the UK pirate notice programme. More related content here.

    Personal tracking and online identity – 31C3 – from the CCC conference watch this and have a serious think about the quantified self etc. The security implications of this are quite frightening

    Xiaxue.blogspot.com – Everyone’s reading it.: The Big Gushcloud Exposé – interesting Singapore blogger ad network spat. Singapore has an odd bloggersphere due to its unique laws governing media. However, influencers have been quick to monetise their work with brands

    How the Graft Crackdown is Rippling Through China’s Economy | WSJ – (paywall)

    The Battle for Space | Slate – really interesting overview of space technology

    Apple expands its social presence with new iTunes Tumblr blog | 9to5Mac – social publishing

    The tao of Lei Jun, founder of Xiaomi | Techinasia – interesting business model. Software and services are the Gillette razors, the phone is the Gillette shaver handle. And Lei Jun comes across as a bit of a dick; ok a lot of a dick

    Morgan Stanley Analysts Try GoPro, Discover Their Lives Are Boring | WSJ – just brilliant content. Not everyone has a life worthy of the X Games, but does raise questions about the GoPro as a mainstream consumer product over the long term (paywall)

    Google eyes Android to be built directly into cars | Shanghai Daily – is it ready for this? More importantly, what will be the security and safety related safeguards, given that you need your brakes to work at all times?