Ged Carroll

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  • Data utopianism + other trends

    Four ideas including data utopianism, liberation from choice, context driven divergence and the soft innovation crisis have been kicking around in my head for a while. But the four ideas didn’t quite feel like standalone posts. Part-observation, part-manifesto make of the four trends what you will.

    Data utopianism

    There is a temptation to think that new developments will evolve in a manner that is entirely positive for society and data utopianism is no exception to this. However that generally isn’t the case, whether it was pricing information or online advertising; seemingly liberating technology actually is a power multiplier against the consumer. There is no reason to think that developments claimed to drive data utopianism like mobile contextual data or the quantified self will be any different.

    Yet there constantly exists amongst many of my peers a data utopianism that blinkers them to the ethical and process issues that need to be carefully thought through. That isn’t to say that I am negative on technological progress but mindful of the responsiblity that comes with it; on an individual and collective basis.

    Liberation from choice

    One of the standout successes in commerce start-ups this year has been careful curation. From Jason Goldberg’s Fab, Birchbox Inc, Frank & Oak to Bureau of Trade the e-commerce provider has become a curator. An arbitor of cool. The business has freed us from excessive consumer choice like a real-world personal shopper with hipster aesthetic. Choice is hard, it is overwhelming, it promotes disatisfaction as every option isn’t ‘the one’: the perfect set of jeans, the ultimate cup of coffee or the perfect gift.

    Context-driven divergence

    Over the past number of years we heard from technology companies about convergence. The companies that bought into this are suffering.  Japanese electronics firms particularly Sony bought into this vision and tried to implement it and failed miserably. Whilst its eyes was off the ball, it had its premium position in consumer electronics by just good enough products made by the Koreans and Chinese brands like Hi-sense.

    Japanese electronics companies are trying to get back into the game by attempting to square the circle between common owned data and contextual devices through looking at new ways to connect consumer electronics in a seamless manner. Yet the biggest consumer problem they face is that television is about tuning out whereas the computer and internet content is about turning on. Both very different contexts.

    The PC, which had historically been the ultimate digital Swiss Army knife is seeing declining sales with consumers as lightweight devices like tablets and smartphones replace them in communications and content consumption. I can’t remember the last time that I used Yahoo! Instant Messenger, but I use WeChat and Skype on my mobile pretty much every day.

    The soft innovation crisis

    Silicon Valley veteran Judy Estrin in her book Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy some four years ago highlighted that the US and by extension one could argue, the western hemisphere is being left behind in hard innovation. Instead of developments moving Moore’s Law forwards we have a social network that built on the likes of The WELL, Friendster  and MySpace. Even the smartphone is based on operating system computer science that can trace itself back to Bell Labs in the 1960s.  None of the user experience developments have moved significantly on from Doug Engelbart’s famous SRI demonstration in 1968 at the Mother Of All Demos.

    Products like Siri have highlighted the huge leaps forward that AI still needs to make some four decades after massive defence spending first started going into it.

    We have huge problems in energy:

    • Sustainable energy such as wind power and solar don’t work, tidal and wave power haven’t been commercialised
    • Nuclear power development has been limited, promising work on Thorium and fast-breeder reactors have gone nowhere
    • Nuclear fusion is still a pipe-dream
    • Semi-conductors haven’t moved on since significantly
    • Battery technology needs major leap forwards
    • Transportation still needs fossil fuels
    • Algae-based bio-fuels seem to have stuck in development

    All of these areas in isolation represent a soft innovation crisis and an opportunity, yet sufficient capital and will seem to be lacking. That Facebook has attracted more more money than the various private space programmes in the US is insane. More related content here.

    More information

    Slideshow: Japan consumer electronics showcases smart connectivity – EETimes

  • Instagram and Facebook

    I started posts on the Facebook acquisition of Instagram a number of times but got nowhere, so I thought I would collect up some of them thoughts and put them here. So here are some of those random thoughts:

    • Instagram and Facebook are very different types of social network. Instagram seems to tape into a latent passion for us to be creators, it came up with an application that flatters us into thinking that we may have a good eye for photography. Facebook is much more about gathering and sharing humint with their loose network, a poorly designed address book and an event organisation platform
    • Instagram and Facebook have very different design philosophies. Instagram is much more of a traditional web 2.0 firm. It’s product does one thing very well and makes the complex simpler for the consumer. Facebook’s user experience is well shit. This is probably for a number of reasons:
    1. Facebook has a culture were engineering trumps design rather than the two disciplines been seen as equal partners like say Apple
    2. Competition – Facebook has evolved from its original mission adding additional features as it was threatened by different platforms: notably Twitter. But the user experience hasn’t scaled as well
    3. Monetisation – Facebook has been working hard to monetise its business with its advertising units, but you need content to advertise against. Much of the design is about wringing content out of consumers (and then having the opportunity to sell inventory against it)
    4. Privacy – In order to get the humint to share with audiences, Facebook needs to strike a balance keeping the law and privacy advocates at bay whilst making it sufficiently difficult that consumers don’t lock down their data and consequently constrict advertising opportunities
    • An extension of the design difference between Instagram and Facebook makes me wonder about how long the Instagram talent will actually stay at Facebook beyond any lock-in period? I am making assumption that the deal was at least partly motivated by the Instagram’s team expertise in mobile service development and that would be dependent on retaining the talent.
    • Talent retention is also critical if Facebook acquired Instagram as a defensive play like it did with Octazen. In this case Facebook would be looking to lock up talent for as long as they could.
    • 1 billion dollars in shares isn’t as expensive as 1 billion dollars in cash; consequently the cost is probably relatively cheap for Zuckerberg. Think of it this way – how real is the money that you make when the value of your house goes up or down until you actually come to sell the house? Cisco was a past master at large share-only purchases when it was a hot stock. This hasn’t impacted Facebook’s cash-flow, but it has shaken the institutional investors looking at Facebook’s IPO. Again this doesn’t really matter to Zuckerberg because Facebook shares will sell anyway because of the heat around the company. Zuckerberg has less to lose than the Cisco team did because of the way that Facebook’s voting stock is structured allowing its CEO to retain power
    • It used to be that there were a number of start-ups whose business model was to sell themselves on to a large dominant industry player. Over time the industry player changed: Cisco, Microsoft, Google but the business model remained constant. I expect the new target acquirer to be Facebook as entrepreneurs and venture capitalists dream of a quick buck rather than building something great
    • 10 years from now, I still don’t know whether we will be looking back on the Instagram acquisition as being a similar folly to Yahoo!’s purchase of Broadcast.com now looks in hindsight. On one hand I feel confident because of the deal structure being in Facebook shares, and the price being small in comparison to the current notional value of the Facebook business. But for the reasons I have outlined above I am less convinced in terms of long-term fit with the business and relative importance of Instagram
    • Instagram were right to say yes. The timing couldn’t have been better, on the one hand in the short term Instagram is growing fast; its move on to the Android platform previously being an iOS-only application. In retrospect, this looks like Instagram moving from early adopter usage to early majority service users. At the same time a number of services are now integrating Instagram-type filters into their mobile applications, one of the examples I use is Tencent’s Weixin (WeChat) application, so it could be rapidly becoming a feature rather than a reason for purchase

    More related content can be found here.

  • Bob Barker interviews….

    Bob Barker is a client that I worked with on nascent digital work for RFI Studios. Bob worked as the CMO of Alterian. Alterian started off in customer experience management, they did a series of acquisitions when I worked with them including Mediasurface the CMS company. The company was acquired by SDL and some part of it was sold on to private investors.

    Recording
    Flip video camera

    Bob decided to delve into social media and understand it as a marketer. The Flip Video camera which includes basic software inspired him to do video content. Bob had a ‘Gorilla tripod‘ for the Flip and the lighting was just done with daylight. I did an interview with Bob Barker for his blog last week, you can read his take on things on his blog.

    I realise that we talk through a number of social platforms, so here is a list of what I use:

    • iMessage – though I have found it to be flaky
    • Skype
    • Fastladder.com for RSS feeds. I am currently experimenting with FavShare as a Fastladder client on my iPad and iPhone which started after my interview with Bob
    • Pinboard.in for social bookmarking
    • IFTTT to syndicate content
    • Microblogging: I use the Twitter client on my Macs at home, and m.twitter.com on my iPhone. I use Weibo’s iPhone client and WeiLark for the Mac to post on my Sina.com Weibo account, rather than Sina’s sluggish web interface
    • I use Kakao Talk and Tencent Weixin (WeChat) social messaging clients on my iPhone. The international versions of these tools don’t have all the features the local ones.

    I use a mix of technology:

    • MacBook Pro
    • Dell 22 inch widescreen display
    • MacBook Air
    • iPhone
    • iPad
    • Samsung feature phone with dual SIMs

    The video is on YouTube so may not be available to all readers. You can find Bob’s video channel here.

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