Ged Carroll

Blog

  • John Legere on T-Mobile

    John Legere knows how to work his crowd, a technology CEO channelling Lenny Bruce with a mix of common sense and expletive strewn humour. Beneath that showmanship is an interesting analysis from the inside of what its like to run a modern cellular carrier business.

    Outtakes from John Legere

    • Interesting the way he talks about his clash of personality personality with  his parent company as John Legere vs. T-Mobile
    • At the time T-Mobile was winning share from Sprint, AT&T and Verizon
    • The video is on YouTube so may not be available for all readers.
    • Historically acquisitions was about spectrum, it now seems to be about industry consolidation
    • Legere on the difference of Global Crossing and T-Mobile. He was looking to adapt as a personality to his younger tech savvy consumer base. CEOs are generally a monoculture.
    • He uses social media for insights on customer experience and brand health
    • Customer care calls gives him a lot of insight about customer experience
    • All of the ‘Uncarrier’ positioning and moves were inspired by customer service calls and the experiences that customers have in the interactive voice systems. Uncarrier started with ‘how you buy’ and then went on to ‘how you use’
    • T-Mobile benefitted from being able to move fast and their competitors reluctance to change their services
    • Apple iPhone 6 ‘Bendgate’. It wasn’t a real story according to Legere and hadn’t dented demand for the iPhone on T-Mobile
    • Legere felt that the tasks he needed to address going into T-Mobile were: improving the network, getting spectrum, reinvigorate the T-Mobile brand and get the iPhone on T-Mobile.  Store traffic was incomplete, customers wouldn’t go to a cellphone store unless they had the full range of devices.
    • Before Legere arrived people wouldn’t even mention T-Mobile in terms of the data capability & network speed
    • Apple drove a lot of quality focus on Wi-Fi and VoLTE calling
    • Amazon missed out on its Fire phone (and later tablets). The company didn’t think about it in terms of service bundling with all the other assets like Amazon Fresh and Amazon Prime
    • On Windows Mobile – stop the charade that cellular networks are OEM manufacturers. Legere would have liked Windows Mobile and Amazon to be successful if customers want them

    More mobile related content here.

  • Boycott Kakao Talk & more things

    South Koreans boycott Kakao Talk social media service after president’s rumour complaints – alleged movement towards Telegram due to its reputation for security. Kakao is too useful software for everyday life in Korea for a complete boycott. Boycott Kakao Talk is unlikely to get traction, despite Korean consumers reputation for serious boycotts of consumer brands that haven’t performed. More related content here.

    Building an RSS feed with ScraperWiki and Yahoo! Pipes | Magic Bean Lab – Mat pulled together an RSS feed from Facebook’s new research portal, more about it in this link.

    Hackers’ Attack Cracked 10 Financial Firms in Major Assault – NYTimes.com – major US banks exposed. It won’t be long before it

    New Mac Botnet Leverages Reddit | Dark Reading – interesting control mechanism

    How Did the FBI Find the Silk Road Servers, Anyway? | Motherboard – interesting allegations in the article. Which begs the question, can the FBI be tried for perjury, if the article is true?

    Communities Dominate Brands: Survey of Global Market Today for Mobile Wallets and Mobile Money – In aftermath of Apple Pay launch – some interesting examples of mobile wallets and mobile money.

    Editing images of ‘hell’, in close-up – Correspondent – really interesting piece on media content covering Middle East in terms of the editorial process that is used

    Facebook & Skype Revealed as Most Popular Smartphone Messaging Apps | Park Associates – US-only data. One of the reasons that Facebook bought WhatsApp was to gain out of US relevance in mobile messaging apps. Skype’s VoIP capabilities has been disruptive  in mobile voice services businesses. T-Mobile’s European business tried to block it; Three embraced it.

    Terms of Service; Didn’t Read – do this now. An effort to empower consumers by letting them know what they are actually signing up to. Your average consumer would be surprised with what is being done. This is what gives Apple its space to focus on privacy orientated services

  • On smart watches, I’ve decided to take the plunge

    I have long thought on smart watches as a possible useful device. So I have decided to take the plunge into wearables. My previous attempt with the Nike Fuelband didn’t go very well as I seemed to break them with frightening regularity and never really learned much from the experience apart from Nike can’t build hardware.

    I haven’t gone with Samsung wrist watch, or the better looking Sony one. I will not be rocking a pre-release device from Apple. Instead I have relied on smart watches pioneer Casio, who gave us the Data Bank in the 1980s.
    blue G-shock
    Casio has built a low power Bluetooth module into a G-Shock that gets up to two years on a lithium battery and is still water resistant to 200 metres. Realistically I would be happy if I got 12 months out of it. It uses its Bluetooth skills to give you basic notifications around email, incoming calls and alerts across Facebook, Twitter and Weibo.

    At the mid-point in the price of G-Shock watches, it means that the upgrade path isn’t exactly painful. The G-Shock strikes the right balance between robust hardware and disposability required for technology improvements.  In fact, I’ve worn a G-Shock before when travelling to span timezones and as a timepiece that I won’t get too attached to if it gets stolen – the smart watch G-Shock has the advantage of my phone being on view less often, ideal for the crime-filled streets of Shepherds Bush or Shenzhen.

    I think the smartest thing about the watch is it’s deliberately limited scope to provide notifications. I don’t think that Casio has it perfect, in fact I can see how the power-saving function on the Bluetooth module is likely to miss messages; but I think that they are on to something with this approach – and so I am willing to give it a try.

    I am surprised that these watches aren’t being sold in Apple stores around the world given G-Shock’s brand presence in the street wear community. Maybe Casio hasn’t got their act together, or Apple aren’t particularly keen on the competition.

    Oh and I won’t look-or-feel like a complete dick wearing it.

    More information

    “Generation 2 Engine” Bluetooth® v4.0 Enabled G-SHOCK | Casio – yes their marketing sucks with a naming structure only a Microsoft product manager could love
    Comparison Chart of Mobile Link Functions – Casio

  • Why did Yahoo Directory closing become a big deal?

    Yahoo Directory is a bit like the shark. It has been around pretty much as long as the modern commercial web. Yahoo! was among the first online media companies. Whilst peers like Lycos and Excite disappeared Yahoo! managed to survive. The name Yahoo! is actually an acronym: Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. Yahoo! started as a list of interesting links to sites, these then needed to be categorised as it grew and the first iteration of Yahoo! was as a directory.
    yahoo
    Yahoo! then expanded its service offering with a portal, email, shopping, auctions, celebrity chats and specialist kids content. Directories were the forerunner of search as they provided editor-driven categories. In 1998, Netscape went into competition with Yahoo! with its own directory, which now exists as DMOZ – an open directory hosted by Aol and run by volunteer editors. DMOZ has catalogued 4,167,366 sites in over a million categories over 16 years. It became obvious that human editors couldn’t scale.

    Even when consumers went away to the search box of Alta Vista HotBot and Google, the Yahoo! Directory served a secondary purpose. As a repository of ‘screened and categorised’ websites algorithmic search engines took entry in a number of directories into account as part of their ranking for sites. Directories became important to search agencies.

    When I worked at Yahoo! during the start of the web 2.0 period, tagging and its role in social search was considered to be reflective of Yahoo!’s past in directories and offered a future that was not solely dependent on the dictatorship of an algorithm. Social search promised a blended approach.

    Over the past decade Yahoo! Search and Google both gradually depreciated the importance of a directory entry for search ranking as other signalling factors took over including social mentions.

    A lot of digital marketers have lived with Yahoo! Directory for a long time. The shutdown of Yahoo!’s original service comes at a turning point for the company. It looks as if Yahoo! is about to be torn apart as Wall Street tries to get it to liquidate its holdings in Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba; return the cash to them and pick over the rest of the assets like a dead carcass on the Serengeti.

    More information

    Progress Report: Continued Product Focus | Yahoo! Corporate Tumblr account
    The Yahoo Directory — Once The Internet’s Most Important Search Engine — Is To Close | SearchEngineLand
    Yahoo killing off Yahoo after 20 years of hierarchical organisation | Ars Technica
    Yahoo Directory, once the center of a web empire, will shut down at year’s end | The Verge

    More Yahoo! related content here.

  • Right to be forgotten + more things

    Google and the Right to Be Forgotten | New Yorker – gives a Europe is from Mars, America is from Venus context to the story. The right to be forgotten is based on the idea that once online things are up there forever. The reality is much more complex than that. Secondly, search engines only crawl and index an estimated 15 percent of the web, leaving 85 percent unsearchable and likely untrafficked.

    The Myth of the “Maxxinista” — Medium – I remember seeing baskets in Shenzhen for Woolworths as it then was complete with price reduced sales tags before they had even left the factory

    DOCOMO, SYSTRAN and FueTrek Form Joint Venture to Develop Translation Services | NTT DOCOMO – interesting move

    Twitter UK consumer behaviour infographic – data from Nielsen

    The Power Paradox Facing Xi and Modi: Seize Control to Give It Away | Caixin – interesting article in Caixin

    Hong Kong’s share of Chinese GDP | Marginal Revolution – interesting economic data given current circumstances

    Oil overflow: As prices slump, producers grapple with a new reality – The Globe and Mail – peak demand?

    #HeyASIO, forgot my Gmail login. Text me? | Sydney Morning Herald – good idea not to put your data centres in Australia

    Faith in ‘one country, two systems’ plunges in latest HK survey | WantChinaTimes – there seems to be a schism in the way Hong Kong has broken with China from a consumer attitude point-of-view

    Microsoft CEO Visited Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun, Mi Pad Windows Tablet Or Xiaomi Windows Phone?– doubtful given Xiaomi’s eco-system. Most likely knowing your enemy, looking for possible common ground and gaining insight through the eyes of others. It could be about Microsoft’s patent claims on Android or about web services for international markets – Bing as default search engine outside China for Xiaomi?

    ZTE’s ‘smart voice alliance’ to take on Apple, Google and Microsoft | WantChinaTimes – will ZTE be able to extend into services? More wireless related content here.