Ged Carroll

Blog

  • 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.

  • Yahoo corporate culture

    I bumped into some former colleagues over the past couple of weeks and the experience reminded me of a lot of the items in this post. We shared a common bond based on our exposure to the Yahoo corporate culture. Given the circling activist investors surround the current iteration of Yahoo! this maybe a capsule of a soon-to-disappear culture. Many of the things below are artefacts, totems of the Yahoo corporate culture.

    • You know that Yahoo! was the brand and a Yahoo was a person who worked for Yahoo!
    • You were told that you bleed purple. There were values that were ingrained into you
    • You understood the struggle of constantly moving budgets and spending a quarter’s marketing budget in three weeks
    • You have an address book full of friends and aquantances working at great companies in digital media. The business was a rotating door for talent, in six months you had a great Rolodex full of contacts.
      Yahoo! timbuk2 bag
      Your have an old brand Yahoo! laptop bag that just won’t die. Not too sure what they made those Timbuk2 bags from but mine is eight years old, well travelled and still looks new.
    • Friends introduce you to former colleagues you were less familiar with by including their IM identity as well as their name.
      Yahoo! star
      You still have a star kicking around in a box somewhere from when you packed up your desk one last time.
      Lost
      Your colleagues gave you a list of tchotchkes to get from the shop in building D if you went to the headquarters campus in Sunnyvale.

    You’re still using at least one of Jerry and David’s Christmas presents around the house.

  • Social media week & things from last week

    My week was dominated by Social Media Week. I got to see Battenhall’s opening presentation and catch up former colleagues from past agency and in-house lives. A lot of Social Media Week is useless, its like as if the industry doesn’t move on from the late 2000s. I was very disappointed that I didn’t get to see Ogilvy’s presentation on Twitter cards, which look extremely useful. So will have to make do with Slideshare:

    Twitter cards offer opportunities for marketing consent and building audiences. James Whatley’s presentation for Social Media Week covers the possibilities offered by Twitter cards really well. 

    American rock band The Eagles are known for being extremely difficult and unpleasant. As I was once told, if you were a festival organiser and where offered stage four cancer or The Eagles – the cancer is preferable. Don Henley and Glenn Frey were allegedly horrible excuses for humanity. The world is reputedly better off now that Frey is dead, after a decade and half of being seriously ill.

    For instance, it is impossible to clear samples or have their tracks played on television. David Letterman takes them to town. It absolutely destroys them. This clip was originally run in 2014, when Letterman was the host of The Late Show.

    JJ Abrams reinvigoration of the Star Wars franchise includes a Millennium Falcon with a Batman tumbler easter egg

    I love this advert for Hong Kong app / service GoGoVan; chock full of memes and Hong Kong cultural references.

    Finally Slate wrote a great ode to the font Futura.