Ged Carroll

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  • Tape pack

    Back in the day many computer games, audio books and language course used to come in a book sized moulded plastic sleeve lined with four or six cassette tapes called a tape pack. There would be a sleeve that would take a cover on the outside like a DVD film case (or a VHS film case before it). The boxes were pretty flimsy but they did better than the brittle plastic that went into cassette and CD album ‘jewel cases’.
    tape pack
    From the early 1990s through to the early noughties the tape pack took on a new cultural significance.

    Organisers of nightclub events quickly realised that consumers who couldn’t afford to attend every event could still be sold the evenings sound track on a series of tapes. Also people who had been often wanted to relive the night listening to the tapes on their Walkman, at home on the stereo, or as was usually the case on the car stereo. In the same way that I bought records by certain artists, remixers and record labels; club goers would by tape packs by their favourite DJs; given that a big name could play four sets on a Saturday night, they maybe chasing down £60 of tapes for that week.

    The boxes acted as a bill board for the club with flyer art on the front that parodied famous brands, were surreal or had fantastic themes with boasts of five or eight kilo-watt audio systems by TurboSound alongside details of the number of smoke machines and lasers in the club.

    DAT machines started appearing in the DJ booth. Even a wine bar that I played garage sets in on a Wednesday night had a HHb professional DAT recorder (that would have been at home in a recording studio as a tape machine for mastering albums) underneath the counter of the DJ booth.

    Tape packs were big money for club promoters and the independent record shops that supported the dance music scene at the time. tape packs jostled for shelf space behind the counter with racks of records. I am partly convinced that the C-90 cassette format was responsible for DJ’s working 90-minute slots at a club.  The tape pack started a long slow decline. The writing was on the wall with the rise of the super-club who looked to have a record label, alongside their fashion brand and club nights. DMC had shown the way with Mixmag Live – the first legal mix series.

    With the notable exception of the Ministry of Sound; the focus moved from the club franchise to the DJ; and DJ’s got their own production record deals with the dance imprints of major labels.

    Secondly, since recording a CD at first meant going into a studio, big name DJs used technologies like Digidesign’s Sound Tools and Pro Tools audio editing and production software to clean up their mixes, mould them and sound a lot better than they really were. These mixes has more in common with studio megamixes like Mirage’s Jack Mix series or and edit mixes a la Chris ‘Steinski’ Stein and Danny Krivits than DJing; but their superior flawless quality was more popular with consumers.

    The reason why this decline was slow was partly due to market forces; whilst the Discman replaced the Walkman as the personal stereo of choice; CD production took a long time to come down in costs to tape duplication and in-car audio still had a large installed base of cassette head units.

    In addition, early car CD units jumped and skipped tracks with every bump in the road and the cartridge units that held the CDs often scratched them. Fragmentation of dance music into different genres (and socio-economic classes of audiences if we’re honest about it) and in particular the reliance of happy hardcore and drum & bass relying on borrowing and shared sounds meant that tape packs lasted longest supporting these genres of music.

    Now these recordings are remastered by consumers into digital formats and shared or sold online. More culture related content can be found here.

  • Privacy policies + more news

    Google privacy policies

    Official Google Blog: Updating our privacy policies and terms of service – a confluence of events are affecting Google’s privacy policies. The fact that Google has over 70 different privacy policies implies a whole range of issues with version control and updating. Secondly there is the regulatory pressure to simplify privacy policies so that consumers can understand them if they read them. The consolidation of privacy policies also foreshadows a consolidation of services as well.

    Economics

    How China’s Boom Caused the Financial Crisis – By Heleen Mees | Foreign Policy – title is misleading as it was a factor, but needs more nuance. Low interest rates and the decline of middle class income led to a need for refinancing. Blaming China is simplistic – it was China, not the U.S. economy, that prospered on Americans’ spending binge. The world’s most populous country grew at double-digit rates for much of the 2000s. And while the U.S. savings rate hovered around 15 percent of GDP, China’s savings rate increased from 38 percent in 2000 to 54 percent in 2006. China’s savings are heavily skewed toward risk-free assets, perhaps because the Chinese are culturally more risk-averse, but also because the country’s financial markets are still underdeveloped and not fully liberalized. The large buildup of savings in China and other emerging economies (mostly oil exporters) depressed interest rates worldwide from 2004 on, as too much money was chasing U.S. Treasury bonds and other supposedly risk-free securities, driving up the price of bonds and driving down interest rates. Thus, by the time the Fed started to worry about rising inflation by mid-2004, leading the Fed to try to put the brakes on the economy, it was already too late

    Finance

    Saudi equities: a lifting of the veil? | FT.com – opens up market to direct institutional investment

    Innovation

    Fujitsu mobile phones boost diabetic support services ‹ Japan Today

    Japan

    Japan losing its manufacturing edge to South Korea ‹ Japan Today – lacks conviction so isn’t taking the risks that Korea will

    Korea

    Unpacking the Fourth Quarter Numbers at Samsung Electronics – WSJ – issues with profit margins abound

    Luxury

    Louis Vuitton Sets A New Standard In Federal Trademark And Copyright Law : Fashion Apparel Law Blog

    Media

    Copyright Industry Calls For Broad Search Engine Censorship | TorrentFreak

    Online

    I, Cringely » Absence makes the heart grow fonder and other weird thoughts – on SOPA protests

    Why the feds smashed Megaupload – interesting timing around SOPA | PIPA protests and the MegaUpload versus Universal Music dispute over the MegaUpload advert

    Retailing

    London department stores become the ‘Great Mall of China’｜WantChinaTimes.com – each Chinese shopper on average spent 2,520 pounds (US$4,000) in Harrods

    Technology

    ARM’s stiff upper lip trembles at Chipzilla’s Medfield | ExtremeTech

  • 2012 Chinese social web eco-system

    In many ways the 2012 Chinese social web is richer than our own with a fiercely competitive marketplace and rapid innovation taking place amongst more evenly matched players. Social networks are stratified more along demographic lines which are in flux as developments occur. The brightest star at the moment is Sina’s Weibo service, but its not the only one.

    Weibo has taken off in China in a similar way to Facebook, and has led Twitter in terms of rolling out innovations.

    A second aspect of the 2012 Chinese social web is that these platforms offer segmentation. They vary in terms of the age groups that group on different platforms. Kids up to college age on one platform. Adults on another. Lower tier (less economically developed) cities inhabitants use different social platforms to those in higher tier cities.

    Finally, there is a classic aspect of Chinese business. Once an idea has proven to be successful, lots of competitors will spring up. That is why in places like the UK you will end up with a number of Chinese restaurants open next to each other.

    This happens in the online sphere also. The 2012 Chinese social web represents this business cluster. The next stage will be for intense business competition to thin their ranks out over the next few years. Iceberg
    This infographic came from Sinatechblog.com.cn

  • Lunar new year culture clash

    Just before lunar new year an incident happened on Hong Kong’s MTR mass transit system between a group of ‘mainlanders’ and Hong Kong natives.

    So what drove this flare up around lunar new year? There are a number of points at which friction occurs between the two societies.

    The modern city of Hong Kong has largely been built on the rule of law. It has the second largest police force in the world in term of number of police per member of the population. The ICAC (Independent Commission Against Corruption) cleaned up Hong Kong bureaucracy for the past four decades to a standard that surpasses countries like the UK and the US.

    Hong Kong runs on rules that are designed to keep things civil but without the rigidity of say Singapore. China is a bit different. It has gone through enormous wrenching changes over the past three decades and societal norms and customs have struggled to keep pace. Wider altruism that was fostered during Mao’s era is frowned upon and there are legal implications around being a good samaritan that are an unintended consequence of Chinese case law. That doesn’t mean to say that the civic society doesn’t exist, but that it exists in a more laissez-faire environment which can be good in terms of less barriers and more experimental approaches to social problems.

    As a Chinese friend once told me:

    In the UK you can largely say what you like, in China you can largely do what you like

    This is a foundation for some of the very different world views. Then there are specific points at which friction arises, some of which is similar to the kind of inter-territory rivalry you see between London and other UK cities, or different counties in Ireland:

    • Perceived levels of sophistication and urbane living versus ignorance, a lack of taste and poor manners
    • Perceived focus on money and consumerism over everything else in life
    • Culture or the lack of it (language and food being the main fault lines)

    Some of which is legitimate, to name two:

    • Mainland Chinese desperate to ensure their kids have a Hong Kong identity using underhand techniques to have their children born in Hong Kong. One can understand the desire to do the best for one’s child, but I can also see the Hong Kong side to this as well. In addition, all of this running around cloak-and-dagger style adds additional risk and stress – which can’t be good for mother or child?
    • Over exploitation of Mainland tourists being forced to shop in certain stores and spend money. This is partly due the subsidised business model that tour operators used to get mainland Chinese to go on shopping trips to Hong Kong. The subsidy came from ensuring that they purchased from certain Hong Kong shops. It is similar in nature to the cheap or free holidays offered to sell timeshare properties in Spain and Portugal – immoral but the rational consumer would realise what they were likely to be stepping into

    Here is the video on Tudou without English subtitles:

    More related content here.

  • The future is divergence

    The future of divergence has been bubbling along for a while. I was chatting to my friend Ian over lunch putting the technological world to right over the hour or so that we had. That coalesced some of the ideas that I have been thinking about for a while and posted about in fragments on this blog at different times and has coalesced in this post: the future is divergence.

    So what about the future is divergence?

    I’d like to think of it as an executive summary for the attention deficit disorder generation who have been brought up on MTV, online instant gratification and the shallow intellectual depths of strategy by PowerPoint presentation.  I guess if I was going for accuracy rather than a snappy headline it would be something like: the future of consumer electronics is likely to be context-dependent divergence rather than the convergence strategies that they have pursued: mostly unsuccessfully.

    Why?

    First of all let’s think about convergence the way it is manifested currently. For the past decade and a half we’ve seen the internet pervade more aspects of everyday life. It is handy to have the same network protocols being used connecting everything together, its what happens when they are connected is what matters.

    If we look at different devices we can see a an evolution of products until one fires the imagination and things kick off. For instance mobile email went through a number of iterations before coming a ubiquitous consumer product. Mobile email started in the mid-1980s with the Ericsson Mobitex network which allowed for two-way paging across a reliable narrowband digital data network. it is still used for breakdown services in the UK and by emergency services in North America. Research In Motion (RIM) made its first BlackBerry handset for the Mobitex network in the late-1990s

    It took another two decades for mobile email to become ubiquitous. I have been using mobile email since 2002, firstly on a Nokia 6600 and currently on an  Apple iPhone. But what has happened is that I have two mobile devices. My phone which is a Samsung feature phone which does my calls and has a week long battery life and my iPhone which handles,  text stuff like email, my calendar and address book. My usage hasn’t converged into one device as the iPhone’s battery life and call quality isn’t good enough.

    Mobile email hasn’t made me give up my desktop email either, I prefer to do long form emails on my laptop at home simply because the writing experience on the iPhone is inferior. Instead of convergence this is an exhibit of divergent devices based on user context.

    I suspect that the phone as a phone factor maybe around for a good while yet; particularly when you look at the utility that people find with Apple’s Siri service or the Vertu concierge service; both of which are often simpler to use than an application or firing up a web browser.

    This divergence of context is one of the reasons why I am skeptical about so-called smart televisions. Our homes are filled with screens that delivers content. The mobile phone is most often used in the home within reach of a wired telephone. Tablets are often used to access the internet whilst watching television. There is a reason why this works currently. I can pick up or put down the internet and have an immersive experience on the television screen; the consumer electronics manufacturers hope that I will soon enjoy this not just in high definition but with 4K (the same standard as many digital cinema set-ups).So why would I want this screen with modules telling me about the latest happenings on Facebook or Twitter a la Pop-up Video? It makes absolutely no sense, yet this is the vision that consumer electronics companies and Google want you to buy into.

    Granted in certain circumstances information presentation of this type can be useful; in particular news television a la CNBC, Bloomberg TV and CNN; but most TVs are more likely to be sold on entertainment and sports.

    The thing was consumer electronics manufacturers like Sony had divergence and frittered it away. The Walkman, Discman, Trinitron televisions, Dream Machine alarm clocks, the ES range of hi-fi separates – all were divergent devices based on user context. Digital didn’t change that, it changed the connectedness of devices and convenience of receiving media. Strategists at the major Japanese electronics manufacturers got blinded by the technology rather than how consumers use products – even Steve Jobs got it wrong on occasion. More on Sony here.