What lies ahead

By jeremy | January 3, 2022

What lies ahead?

That’s a dangerous game, in this era, as I suggested in 2020 (The Changes A-coming). But with an eye on the tech future, I thought I’d rummage around in the basement of gadgets, and content, and the mechanisms to both deliver content to gadgets and for the gadgets themselves to be something more, to see what might be around the corner. This is a longish one, for which I apologise.

On the one hand, devices during COVID have been a miserable failure. The Apple Watch was supposed to be our path to a self-measuring future but that has been something of a failure (Doctors say it’s time Apple Watch ticked all the health boxes. A lot of the blame seems to be placed at the feet of doctors, which strikes me as a cop out. If the devices’ success required changing the procedures, and expecting increase in the cognitive workload, of the most time-poor and under-resourced professions on the planet, then I think our breathless excitement at this new era of wellness and health might have been a bit more, well, breathy.

And don’t get me started on how we have failed to use our ubiquitous mobile devices to better manage COVID movements, contact tracing, travel and entry documentation etc. Well, actually, do, as I have already written about it (The Future of Pandemic Preparedness: Digital Health Passports for example). My general feeling is that the people who could have made a difference tended to focus on the wrong things (well the right things, but at the wrong time: decentralised identity, experimental technology etc) where the situation was desperately crying out for something practical that could be realistically deployed within a useful timeframe. I compared the challenge a year ago with that of attempts to deploy an e-passport here. Both pieces were commissioned by Roche Diagnostics but content was not edited or directed in a way I felt changed their intent, so I’m happy to keep my name atop them.

So yes, I don’t think the COVID era will be one to closely associate with leveraging personal technology for the benefit of the greater good. After all, these devices have been entirely designed to deliver a version of privacy that is at odds with one that governing institutions might get away with. Our devices are privacy conscious only insofar as they protect commercial and financial interactions. Apart from that they are specifically designed to ooze other forms of data, from location to apps used, search terms, etc. In fact, for Alphabet, Amazon and Meta, the devices in effect operate on a subsidy model, where the operating system, the device itself (think Kindle, Android devices) and the apps themselves are given away at or below cost because of the high value extracted from the user’s data being sucked out of the device.

For governments this would be a boon, if the user was as disinterested in the implications of this when it comes to government surveillance as she is for commercial surveillance. But COVID has shown us there is no social contract between government and citizen in most democratic states that would allow such information to be (directly) drawn from the device. So there has, so far, been no alignment of interests between companies, individuals and governments to allow our most prized possession to help us get out of this pandemic without lots of gnashing of teeth and wailing.

COVID though, has had an impact on our relationship with these devices. Mobile subscriptions – smartphone and feature phone – grew very little year-on-year in 2020, and in many regions of the world actually shrunk, according to Ericsson data (see above). It’s not surprising, I guess: for many of us, the relationship with our phone has loosened a little under lockdown. Or has it? On one hand, we’ve binge-watched ourselves to numbness, with Netflix, Apple, Amazon and others desperately trying to create enough content to keep us hooked. But on the other hand, a lot of the things that make a mobile device so compelling usually have lost their lustre, now that most of the time we’re stuck at home.

And so has evolution of the mobile device remained static? Well, yes, in a way. Accelerometers, biosensors, cameras, gimbals — all of the machinery that makes our device so smart, are relatively useless when we’re in one place. This is perhaps what makes Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a second life in his metaverse resonate more than it would usually: yes, we are beginning to hate our four walls, painful checks for and restrictions on travel. So even a legless torso and cartoon visage interacting with another might seem, well, worth a punt.

But I think that vision is dystopian, cynical and not where the interesting stuff is happening.

COVID has been about content, but post-covid will be about devices. COVID was about maximising the amount of immobile content — games, movies etc — but when we do break these chains, even if it’s pandemic->endemic state change, there is likely to be a relatively fast transformation of what we can expect our device to do.

The Eye of the Apple

Hear me out.

Predicting Apple’s next move is a mug’s game, but I’ll give it a shot. Part of my research work has involved looking at submarine internet cables, and there’s always one dog that doesn’t bark: Apple. Meta (declaration of interest: I’ve done some research work for them, indirectly), Google (commercial relationship in another area), Microsoft (ditto) and Amazon are all very busy in this space, essentially moving into owning as much of the delivery infrastructure as possible, matching the proportion of traffic they’re responsible for. Structure here means cable, data centers, hardware. It’s a remarkable shift in these industries that has gone little-noticed.

But even less noticed has been the missing player: Apple. As far as I can work out, Apple has taken no significant stake in any submarine cable venture or player; neither has it built a vast network of data centers. (It does have them, but not in the same number as, say, Google. Google has 23 publicly acknowledged data center locations; Apple has less than half that, and, indeed, stores increasing amounts of its data on Google’s servers (Apple Reportedly Storing Over 8 Million Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers – MacRumors).

But this is undoubtedly changing as it gets more into the content business. Apple has something called Apple Edge Cache where it offers to supply hardware to internet service provider (ISP) partners “to deliver Apple content directly to customers”. I won’t pretend to understand the exact arrangement here, but I think it’s fair to assume it’s a way for Apple to get their content closer to users, reducing latency, and a way for ISPs to demonstrate the quality of their service while probably reducing some of their international bills. Netflix and others offer something similar. Netflix: Open Connect and Akamai’s Network Partnerships.

But I don’t believe this is where Apple sees a road to the future. Indeed, though I do love some of the content on Apple TV+, it feels like a very traditional, backward-looking concept — all chrome logos and shadow, slick but somehow dated. I think the smart money is on converting the mobile phone, the watch, the iPad, the VR headset, into a (virtually) single device that interacts with its surroundings much more effectively, and in the process not only accesses the network but, in a certain way, becomes the network.

The Network is the Device

There are certain elements to this. We saw that Apple was deeply involved in the development of 5G — the first time, I believe, a device manufacturer had that much of a role, though I could be mistaken — and early last year posted job ads seeking research engineers for current and next generation networks (6G isn’t expected to be deployed for another decade, but these are generations of technologies, and like generations they’re more of a period than a date.) But I think this time it’s not going to be about 6G, more than it is about AppleG. More recently the same Bloomberg reporter, Mark Gurman, spotted another hiring spree, this time for wireless-chips (Apple Builds New Team to Bring Wireless Chips In-House).

I would agree, however, with Jonathan Goldberg at Digits to Dollars, who before Christmas picked up the Bloomberg story and ran further with it (What Are They Building in There? | Digits to Dollars). This is about vertical integration, he wrote, but it’s also about a lot more:

Beyond that, Apple has some very ambitious plans for communications and they are looking to drive the industry in their direction. They have set themselves some very interesting objectives, or at least left us with some big mysteries. What are they building in there?

I was intrigued enough to try to follow up some of those clues, exposing my lack of technical knowledge on the way. But thinking of it not from the point of the stack (the inner workings, the supply chain, the network connectivity) but from the user perspective, I think there are a few clues that give us enough to make some reasonable guesses:

Apple has filed patents that focus on communication between devices, that don’t involve connecting to networks. Most prominent are patents related to Apple’s project to build semi- and fully autonomous vehicles. Vehicle-to-everything (VTX) is a core part of the future of autonomous/semi-autonomous vehicles, because it makes no sense for urgent, data-heavy, ultrafast communication between devices (think car and streetlight, or car and bicycle) to go onto a network and then circle back to the other device. (Apple Reveals their work on Project Titan’s Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications System for future Autonomous Vehicles – Patently Apple)

This is sometimes called sidelinking, and is already a part of 5G standards. But for Apple it makes a lot of sense, if you move away from the notion of networks as synonymous with beacons, towers, backhaul, data centers and submarine cables. If your devices are everywhere, be they watch, glasses, computer, car, whatever, then doesn’t it make much more sense to think of them as the network? In the same way Apple moves its content as close to the edge of the network, why not think of Beyond The Edge — all those devices, which you control remotely via your increasingly unified operating system — as the network itself?

Smells and Radar

This requires what we think of as the device to take on some new powers and heft. Part of that is the ability to connect to other devices, but another element is to make it smarter. We have been somewhat groomed to get excited about incremental improvements in the iPhone, but in terms of what new things it can actually do, there’s been very little to cheer about for a decade. It’s been five years since I wrote Nose job: smells are smart sensors’ last frontier and there’s been precious little progress yet on adding smell sensors to consumer devices (I see my old friend and source on all things olfactory Redg Snodgrass has been through three job changes since I wrote the piece, which shows how long ago that is). But smell is a complicated thing, and likely the last thing we’ll see enough commercial imperatives to get it into a consumer device any time soon.

Before that a natural function for the device to have is radar. This is a technology that’s already 90 years old, but its use case for mobile devices has, until recently, not been visible enough to merit the miniaturisation process. That changed last year, with chipmakers like Celeno incorporating Doppler Radar with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth into its Denali chip. It’s perhaps not a surprise that Celeno is based in Israel. Apple Israel just happens to be looking for an engineer to focus on this very technology, among other things (Wireless Machine Learning Algorithms Engineer for sensing and localization – Jobs at Apple).

But what would you use radar for? It’s Apple, so I’m guessing it’s all about the user. The job ad mentions the successful applicant “will be part of an extraordinary group that pioneers various wireless technologies for localization purposes and for wireless sensing applications. You will work with different RF solutions, such as WiFi / Bluetooth / RADAR systems, to provide outstanding user experience for Apple users.” This is about sensing. The radar would enable our devices to do two things they’re not very good at the moment:

sensing where we are to a high degree of accuracy. Currently this is done by GPS, when outdoors and not hidden by trees, and by triangulation, via cell-phone towers or by Wi-Fi signals. Bluetooth offers a little more granularity, but these all involve signals interacting with signals. What if our devices could bounce signals off everything, and build a virtual map of our location, even inside a cupboard, and respond appropriately? What if our device could detect movement, posture, alignment, movement of a limb, or even breathing? The Celeno press release explores this a little: “[T]he added radar function enables presence location and even posture recognition for supporting additional useful applications in buildings and homes, including human monitoring, elderly care and fall detection.”
combined with Wi-Fi, whose packets it would leverage, the radar would give the device the ability, at least according to Celeno, “to “see” through walls without requiring line of sight and/or dependence on light conditions. In addition, the technology does not depend on any Wi-Fi clients, wearables of any kind and does not invade privacy.”

I’m always wary of use-cases that are associated with health-care, because so few of these things end up being used, and in reality there’s not a whole lot of money in that line of product. More likely, I think is that we see functions like radar, and LiDAR (which is already in the upper-end iPhones) being used to make our devices smarter and more aware, both of their surroundings, and of each other. Apple has done more than any other company to make our devices talk to each other better, but I still feel that features like AirDrop, frankly, suck.

A Conscious Instrument

But this is not just about sharing photos and stuff over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. This is about devices becoming ‘conscious’ of much more around them, and leveraging that to make themselves smarter and more useful. I think this is where Apple is going. They don’t care about 6G except insofar as it doesn’t dent their own plans. In their world there would be no carrier, no Wi-Fi sign-on, no SIM card, e- or otherwise. Instead the device would know exactly what the context is and optimise itself automatically. If it was a game, it would map the environment and build a peer network to bring whatever data and content was necessary from the edge to the AR-VR device(s). If it was a movie showing it would scour the walls for the best projection screen, download the data and share it among the devices so everyone could hear the soundtrack in their own preferred language.

That is just the obvious stuff. Apple is always conspicuous by its absence, so it’s interesting to see what they’re supposedly ‘late’ to. Bendable phones? Samsung and others have gotten big into this, but follow the trajectory of the technology and it’s clear it’s an old technology that is more akin to lipstick and pigs than it is to the bleeding edge. Apple is kind of getting into VR, but slowly, and probably wisely. I’m no fan-boy — I think they’ve made numerous errors, and I think they abuse their users that may come back to haunt them — but there’s no arguing they play for the long term. So I think the fact that they’re not getting into the infrastructure side of things as others suggests to me that they see the value, as they always have, in the provision of mind-blowing experience, something everyone on the planet seems to be willing to pay premium price for.

And that means, as it always has, stretching the definition of a device. And I think that means adding, one by one, the sensors and communications technology that enable the device to more intimately understand the user, their mood, their exact position, their habitat, their intent, and everything and everyone they care about. It’s always been about that. And I’d find it difficult to argue with it as a strategy.

Just the facts, ma’am

In Reuters’ case a separate marketing team was set up in 2017, and a service launched called Reuters Plus. In June 2018, the wording of the about page was as follows:

Just the facts
Since 1850 Reuters has provided society with the content it needs to be free, prosperous and informed. Today our content reaches more than one billion people every day and is distributed in 115 countries.
“We must continue to value facts and to recognise that trusted journalism – the kind we are committed to producing – makes a difference.” Stephen Adler, Editor in Chief, Reuters News
With feet on the ground in close to 200 international locations, Reuters is perfectly placed to tell your story to decision makers.

If I was a company looking to get my content on Reuters I might be forgiven for thinking this would be the way to do it. At the time Adler was the most senior practising journalist in Reuters, and the wording suggests strongly that Adler and his team of journalists would be involved in the process of telling the client’s “story to decision makers.”

To be fair, when it was pointed out to Reuters’ management that Adler’s name was being used in this way, the page was removed.

But the way these services are presented now is not a whole lot better. The website is now more deeply fused into the Reuters Agency website (which is the commercial part of Reuters selling content to media etc) and the service can be accessed from a menu alongside Reuters commercial editorial products (i.e., actual journalism).

The page itself states the following. I’ve italicised the areas where two separate elements are conflated — real Reuters journalism and content created for and paid for by a client:

The world listens to Reuters. That’s why when we tell stories for our partners – with a steadfast commitment to excellence, accuracy, and relevance – we create impact and provoke powerful responses.
Reuters content studio builds campaign content that helps you to connect with your audiences in meaningful and hyper-targeted ways. From full-service content creation to editorial event sponsorships, coupled with our unique content distribution capabilities, we tell your stories in a way that audiences have relied on for 170 years.
Elevate your campaigns with Reuters quality: Covering everything from written articles, videography, broadcast content, photography and events, our multifaceted approach to content creation is rooted in award-winning expertise and a commitment to the heritage of storytelling.
We combine inventive content creation with the science of data-driven strategy to make your stories work seamlessly across our premium platforms and social media channels and engage the right audiences.
Benefit from the power of Reuters: Reuters has always stood for trust and integrity, and we remain the world’s preferred source for news and insights across evolving platforms, channels, and media.
Our unrivaled insights into the big picture – globally and regionally – and the finest details across every industry and agenda, ensure that every story we tell is accurate, up to date, and sought after by audiences worldwide.
That’s why when Reuters tells your story, you can be sure that it will reach the right calibre of audience and provoke the response you need.

In fact, I felt that the lines between Reuters Plus (now called a “content studio”) and the journalism part of Reuters were even more blurry. Not one sentence in the above blurb is designed to clarify that the content being produced by Reuters Plus is entirely separate to Reuters’ journalistic content. Even the terms get blurred: The word ‘partners’ was used to describe customers both of editorial content (journalism) and sponsored content (not journalism as journalists know it). It has also added other services to the mix that further blur the lines. Under a page called ‘sponsorship’ other services are offered, including event sponsorship and ‘editorial franchises’. (Sponsored content has also now been quietly renamed “sponsored articles”. )

Trust me, I’m a journalist, sort of

In short, I noticed no attempt to disabuse the customer of any belief that they were in essence paying for a Reuters journalist to write a positive story about their company/institution/government and pushed to all Reuters’ media customers and channels alongside Reuters’ real journalism.

And this is in essence the bait-and-switch taking place. I’m not suggesting Reuters is the sole culprit here; nearly every major mainstream media platform does this, but as a consultant my interest lies primarily with the client, and I feel there’s a lack of understanding (some say a wilful lack of understanding) of what is really happening here.

Trust me: no Reuters journalist, editor, writer, reporter, whatever, will be involved in helping you find a compelling angle for your content. The writing will likely be farmed out to a freelancer, or an in-house writer (here’s a recent ad from Reuters Plus for a ‘custom content writer’; notice the requirement does not prioritise journalistic experience as much as branded content: Candidates should have Have 5+ years experience in branded content writing or journalism. The kicker: one of the perks of the job, the ad proclaims, is the chance to

Work alongside Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists and a team who provide unmatched, award-winning coverage of the world’s most important stories

If working alongside means (possibly) being in the same building, then I guess that is a perk. In my experience there is zero contact between the marketing teams involved in the production of sponsored content and the (real) editorial teams in Reuters, or elsewhere. And that’s how it should be: journalists should not be aware of any commercial or other relationships between the company they work for and the companies, governments and individuals they write about. Implying there is only damages the editorial function.

Journalism for most of these traditional platforms (WSJ, NYT, BBC, AP, Reuters etc) is not particularly lucrative, and it was probably inevitable that they would have to rent out their most valuable asset — their masthead — to generate some cash. The problem is this: most of it is done without the knowledge or approval of the journalists working for that masthead, and things go wrong when they do. Reuters has gone through quite a few about-turns when journalists get wind of these rentals, like this one, in 2014. Understandable: at best these rent-outs undermine journalism because it not only dilutes the brand, but encourages companies to think, “I don’t need to talk to the journalists who ask difficult questions; I can just buy some space and say what I want.”

And that’s the rub. Companies have allowed themselves to be misled into thinking this content they’re paying for is

a) going to appear alongside the platform’s own content, and to be largely indistinguishable from it and

b) somehow their content will be as widely read as the platform’s own content.

Neither is likely to be true. If you’re relying on a marketing team and a content-writer to come up with something as snazzy as a piece of real journalism, you’re overestimating interest in your product/company and underestimating the effort put into real journalism.

Reality and Obscurity

So my advice — and once again, I’m declaring an interest in trying to rethink content produced by companies and institutions, so of course I would say this — is to think hard before committing funds to sponsored content in channels like these. There are some which work hard to deliver quality content, but never at any point in my experience as a consultant has the process come close to matching the rigour and effort involved in real newsrooms to ensure the content is really, really good, and is compelling enough to stand alongside original journalism.

Because that’s what is being sold here: the notion that your content will be as compelling as the rest of the content on the platform, because it’s gone through similar processes which will ensure it’s as widely read — and trusted — as that other content.

The reality is that in most instances this is simply not the case.

So what’s the answer? I’ll go into some case studies of alternatives in future columns, but for now, here’s a checklist when you’re considering commissioning sponsored content:

go in with a clear idea of what you’re really getting for your money. Don’t think in terms of trying to promote some grand vision or new product line; think in terms of what might be of interest to a reader: What would capture their attention, and provide real, original insight?
demand to have handling your content someone who is experienced in real journalism, and encourage them to speak their mind. Let them guide you in determining angles, because their instinct about what people want to read will be your biggest asset;
demand to know who will be writing the content, and demand that person be an experienced (real) journalist;
keep the channels free of any input from marketing or other spin. Resist the urge to add specific product mentions or jargon; Don’t tweak the text just for the sake of it; respect the writer’s knowledge about what works and what doesn’t;
be proud of what you’ve done, but done be under any illusions that this somehow replaces being open to real journalists who want to talk to you. Sponsored content is not an alternative to a well-staffed and experienced PR function; if it’s good, the content should spark greater interest among journalists in what you have to say.

Vertical histories

By jeremy | September 8, 2021

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How we shoot and watch video is changing, and with it the way we engage with the world

The two iconic images of the fall of Kabul involve a C-17 taking off from Hamid Karzai Airport. It’s as searing as the helicopter perched atop an apartment complex in Saigon, a stream of Vietnamese climbing the ladder to the roof in the hope of getting aboard:

Hubert Van Es / United Press International, the roof of 22 Gia Long Street, Saigon, April 29 1975

In Kabul, 46 years later, we have something similar, but now the photographer is not a UPI photographer called Hubert Van Es, back at the office developing film:

If you looked north from the office balcony, toward the cathedral, about four blocks from us, on the corner of Tu Do and Gia Long, you could see a building called the Pittman Apartments, where we knew the C.I.A. station chief and many of his officers lived. Several weeks earlier the roof of the elevator shaft had been reinforced with steel plate so that it would be able to take the weight of a helicopter. A makeshift wooden ladder now ran from the lower roof to the top of the shaft. Around 2:30 in the afternoon, while I was working in the darkroom, I suddenly heard Bert Okuley shout, “Van Es, get out here, there’s a chopper on that roof!”
I grabbed my camera and the longest lens left in the office — it was only 300 millimeters, but it would have to do — and dashed to the balcony. Looking at the Pittman Apartments, I could see 20 or 30 people on the roof, climbing the ladder to an Air America Huey helicopter. At the top of the ladder stood an American in civilian clothes, pulling people up and shoving them inside.
After shooting about 10 frames, I went back to the darkroom to process the film and get a print ready for the regular 5 p.m. transmission to Tokyo from Saigon’s telegraph office. In those days, pictures were transmitted via radio signals, which at the receiving end were translated back into an image. A 5-inch-by-7-inch black-and-white print with a short caption took 12 minutes to send.

It’s beautifully framed, the chopper and the building, with its tiny shack on the roof, the empty space in the upper right of the screen, the eyes drawn up the rising tide of humanity towards the diplomat in his shirt sleeves, either reaching to help or reaching to hold back, we are unsure. We want to know what will happen — will they all make it? (No, Hubert says, this was the only chopper to land on this roof; those not able to get aboard waited for hours in vain.)

In the chaos that was Kabul Airport, 2021, it was ordinary Afghans shooting video, sometimes shortly before their own death, and that made the experience much more visceral. Part of the reason, I believe, is because the videos, like most mobile videos shot nowadays, were shot in vertical (‘portrait’) mode. (I don’t mean to demean the trauma of that situation, and what is still taking place in Afghanistan. I hope I can show that the format of such videos have helped shock us out of our torpor and, hopefully, made us empathise more with the many who either failed in their bids to leave, or died doing so.)

I was watching the key day unfold in real time on Twitter, so many of the videos lacked context, made me feel nauseous at the tragedy unfolding, and the inevitable deaths that would result. All of these moments were shot in portrait mode (I’m not going to be able to cite the sources of these videos, I’m afraid, but if anyone knows who to credit please let me know).

This first video was of young men chasing, and some clinging, to a C-17 as it gathered speed on the runway. One video, extraordinarily, was shot by one of the young men:

From another angle, back on the runway, shot by someone who didn’t make it or didn’t try, we look at the airplane gaining height:

Then another video, minutes later, shot from possibly the airport perimeter, shows the C-17 rising into blue sky, apparently an image of safety, of rescue:

Until we look closer, and realise that there are one, two specks falling from the airplane, and we realise they are the young men we had seen moments before.

For me these are the images that I will never forget, not least because they were shot by participants in the tragedy, a fumbled few seconds of footage, human beings drawn to document what they saw and what they were going through.

Then there’s the other iconic image, one perhaps more akin to Hubert’s Saigon picture: The distance shot of a C-17 making the necessarily steep climb out of Kabul:

A U.S military aircraft takes off from the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Aug. 30, 2021. (AP Photo/Wali Sabawoon)

This image is in some ways more memorable, more iconic. But I noticed that The New Yorker’s João Fazenda had chosen to recreate the image in a more vertical format, emphasising the incline of the plane, and what it had left behind:

João Fazenda, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine

I dwell on this because I’ve been exploring why most of us now so readily embrace vertically shot video, which, let’s face it, is lousy to watch except on a phone. But this isn’t 2012 anymore, when a faux public service video begging people not to record video in vertical format went viral. Since then we’ve, if not embraced the format, at least got used to it.

In fact, there’s an interesting body of academic and artistic work exploring the rise of vertical. Vertical Cinema as a genre had its own first premiere back in 2013 and has since had festivals and showings most years since. National Geographic released the final episode of its “One Strange Rock” documentary in 2018 in vertical format for Instagram (NatGeo has 183 million followers on Instagram and releases regular vertical versions of its programs.)

The literature points to the somewhat narrow way we look at what is an acceptable format. The reason we are used to landscape/horizontal/postbox views is because, back in 1930 the U.S. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science got together to create a standardised horizontal frame for showing in cinemas. The only ratios under consideration were 4:3, 4:5 and 4:6, and they rebuffed an argument put forward by Sergei Eisenstein, a Russian film-maker, to consider a square so as not to ignore the cinematic and creative potential of height as well as width. Instead they were more interested in making money, and a flatter, wider format suited the cinemas, theatres and dance halls of the day, where movies would be shown. So they agreed to keep the 4:3 format that most silent films had adopted. ¹

There were two significant outcomes from this: the first was that henceforth the only discussion about extending the format was about width — think CinemaScope and Panavision in the 1950s — reemphasising the dominance of horizontalism. The second was that televisions would follow suit, adopting the same proportions so they could faithfully present movies when they were shown on TV.

So it’s not surprising we should be used to the format. And there are ergonomic arguments to be made for landscape mode too; we tend to see horizontally, using our peripheral vision which extends to the sides (what is called far peripheral), less to the top and bottom.² But there are also lots of ways that we don’t think in landscape mode: we read most books in portrait mode, we often take photos of people in portrait mode (hence its, er, name) and some of us are known for tilting our monitors to better write and edit the documents we create that run top to bottom.

But there are other arguments why the vertical revolution has some staying power — and potential. One is simply practical: People hold their phones vertically 94% of the time. As long ago as 2016 90% of iOS apps were fixed in the vertical position. And that was all before TikTok. Now everyone, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube, offer a vertical mode of recording and watching videos.

What I didn’t find in the literature was much about how the vertical mode has shaped us and the way we use video. Rafe Clayton suggests that this is a ‘moving image revolution’ which is clawing back control of content from the likes of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue. I don’t quite buy that. Yes, this is a user-content generated shift, but that doesn’t mean the format and medium are not, or won’t be, co-opted — as can be seen by the development of ads and content by those self-same corporate types.

But I do think something is changing, and has changed. It’s not altogether desirable, but it’s definitely noteworthy. For one thing, the vertical format has changed the nature of the relationship with our devices. When the camera is on us, the relationship is altered. When we tilt the device to record ourselves in horizontal mode, it is a deliberate act of creating something for publication, broadcast; it has a self-reporting feel to it. When we keep the device in its normal position, we are adopting a more natural pose, less obviously self-conscious; more, I would argue, confessional. We are looking at ourselves (it takes a deliberate effort to look into the camera to hold the ‘audience’s’ gaze rather than look at ourselves) so we are, effectively, looking at ourselves in a mirror, and therefore everything we do after that — speaking, singing, dancing — we are at once doing for us: dancing as if there’s no-one else around, as it were. But we also know that the video is likely to be watched by someone else. So we have found an odd place for ourselves, like the tape-recordings of old that we’d make, diary entries that are self-conscious about who may see/read them, but also, inevitably, opening up.

The clearest example that springs to mind is Jennair Gerardot, the protagonist of the excellent podcast Bad Band Thing by Barbara Schroeder. Barbara explores some of the selfie videos that Jennair made ahead of the murder-suicide that is the subject of the series, when Jennair confesses her darkest thoughts and anger — we hear but of course don’t see some of the videos, but Barbara describes Jennair as looking intently at the camera, often crying and distraught, at other times practical, even as she tries to find a way to take her own life. All of this is hidden, for the most part, from her husband, as she plans her revenge with outward calm. This intimacy with the device, as if it were a friend, pet or priest who listens silently and sympathetically, suggests a deeper relationship with the camera and our phone than we may thus far have acknowledged.

Certainly there’s no shortage of selfie narcissism on display via this medium. People like joeybtoonz catalogues this on his Youtube channel, which has more than a half million subscribers, and you can’t help but look at some of his subjects and think they could do with some psychological help. But I think that’s too glib a conclusion to draw. We wouldn’t have considered writing a diary, or recording our days into a tape recorder as necessarily narcissistic. And while the visual aspect has definitely made us extremely self-conscious about how we look, to the detriment of other aspects of our lives, the portrait-mode self-video has also allowed us to communicate more intimately with those we want to communicate with, framing us and excluding the extraneous.

Where once we would record our self-videos in landscape to emphasise where we are, now many of us tighten the focus by keeping the device upright, pulling ourselves closer to the camera and breaking down the barrier between us and the viewer. Of course that also shuts us out from those around us, but there are two sides to everything. I think what we’re really seeing is what Neal Gabler has called the “mediated self”. The idea was conjured up in 1998, before the iPhone and indeed camera phones, but the idea is that we increasingly feel things don’t happen unless we record them. As Kathleen Ryan explains in applying Gabler’s idea to vertical video, we video in portrait mode because we derive pleasure from shooting video, and the device feels more comfortable vertically, more natural. “Horizontal shooting minimizes the seductive experience.” (The use of selfie-sticks, of course, is a thesis in itself.)

Go back to those days in Kabul and to the other side of the device. While it is sometimes frustrating to watch something in vertical mode, because we lack context, it also somehow and sometimes works better, pulling us into the immediacy and intimacy of the situation, where the screen is layered rather than sliced up. Here are some other examples from that week, showing the chaos around one of the gates, where those trying to get access to the airport were crammed between wall, open sewer and road (and where a suicide bomber struck). All are screen grabs from videos either circulating online or from the excellent Australian ABC documentary on the fall of Kabul:

Somehow the vertical frame makes these videos much more affecting, as if you yourself are there, just a few inches away. And each shot, by bringing the foreground so close, and adding the background, frames the scene in a way that a horizontal shot might not — or which our eyes, used to such framing, might feel less associated with. We are forced to focus on the subject, to feel their predicament. This is how Gabriel Menotti puts it:

Even in amateur videos, the portrait orientation never seems to result from the sheer negligence of the filmmaker. On the contrary, it conveys their effort to achieve the best visual composition possible given the recording situation. As the definitive fulfillment of handheld camerawork, the vertical video expresses not a disembodied, all-seeing eye, able to conform the world to the frame, but rather expresses the embodied filmmaker, placed within the same world that is being recorded, precariously handling the camera. Thus tailored for the depicted scene, the use of the vertical format is not wrong in itself.³

I can’t disagree with that. Even in such dreadful moments — possibly because of such dreadful moments — the phone becomes a device of record, shot in vertical mode because that’s the natural way to hold the device, and because after all, the shots are ultimately all of people — friends, family, a crowd, a shoe, a woman screaming behind a gate, a Talib firing into the air, a mother clutching her baby and crouching to avoid gunfire. Between them and us are only inches. We are there with them. And above us all, only sky.

Clayton, Rafe. “The Context of Vertical Filmmaking Literature.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, January 21, 2021, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2021.1874853. ↩
See Ryan, Kathleen M. “Vertical Video: Rupturing the Aesthetic Paradigm.” Visual Communication 17, no. 2 (May 2018): 245–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357217736660. ↩
Menotti, Gabriel. “Proporção ‘Errada’ de Tela.,” no. 35 (n.d.): 20. ↩

beware the theatre of digital first

By jeremy | July 14, 2021

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Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow (an naxi, Flickr, public domain)

I’m a big fan of digital challengers to old technopolies — I’ve moved everything I can from big telco to MVNOs, big bank to neobank, cable TV to Netflix and its ilk, from big taxi to ride hailing. But there are plenty of challenges.

One of them is this, highlighted by Chris Skinner on his blog. He argues, rightly, that you need to build from a position of trust when it comes to banking. This is particularly acute because you’re talking about things like money. Yes, the old banks have been great at creating what we might call ‘trust theatre’ — big imposing granite pillars, people walking around in uniform, familiar logos everywhere, not a hipster in sight. And we know how quickly those granite pillars can seem like a bad joke. But at the end of the day we know they’re regulated, that there is at least some process behind the facade, and that our money is as safe there as anywhere else.

Wise, Revolut and others have charged in, and done very well by offering services we really should have seen a decade or more ago from our digital banks. With Revolut, for example, I can give my daughter a debit card and see what she’s spending, what she’s spending it on, and generally give her a better sense of what money is than I had at her age. And it works well.

But of course, I’m not going to put any real money in my Revolut or Wise account, not yet, anyway, because they have not won my trust. And that is a hard thing to do. It’s not that I trust Big Bank, anymore, but I trust the regulators enough to feel that that is a good enough brake on Big Bank from stealing more of my money than they do already with hidden charges. (Bitter? Moi?) And yes, Revolut and Wise are regulated too. But it hasn’t been tested. And the lesson we’ve learned from any startup with an app and money is that we’re still in the dark ages, where nothing is written in stone (or granite).

Some of us are still shaken by the demise of bike-sharing companies, one of which disappeared overnight with most of our deposits. If a firm like that can make $10 million disappear overnight, then couldn’t financial startups do the same thing? Probably not, but for many of us, one digital wallet in an app is the same as another, in terms of security, whether it’s a fly-by-night bike company or a Fintech company. Sad, but true.

So Chris is right in saying we need to start with trust first when it comes to digital finance companies. But it also applies to other kinds of digital first companies too. I have moved all my mobile phone accounts over to virtual operators (MVNOs, mobile virtual network operators, which are basically companies which buy capacity from a real telco, and then package it up under their brand.) I am tired of traditional telcos, and 24 month-plans, so for me anything is better than the old guard, especially ones that involve easy onboarding. but I can see problems, and smell a lot more.

For one thing, the urge is always to add more customers, and to try to slice and dice services until you get a compelling mix. By definition, then, you’re focusing more on new customers than traditional ones, and while that’s fine, you need to be sure that by adding new customers and services you’re not making things worse off — comparatively speaking — for existing customers. In my case, I was initially OK with having three separate accounts and to install separate apps on all devices (and move a SIM card for my mobile wifi dongle to a phone so I could install and maintain that account) but I did so because I was told that soon they would have family accounts, and that all this could be done under one roof. When that did happen, it turned out it only worked for new accounts (more or less) and so not only didn’t benefit me, but also disadvantaged me as an existing customer.

And that’s the thing. When you prioritise the new customer, you’ll inevitably lose some of your existing customers. That easy onboarding is also easy off boarding, and so I’m off to the next MVNO as soon as I can. Coupled with this is the other ‘theatre’, which is customer service. Customer Service Theatre is when it’s easy to talk via chat with a company, but where you’ll always get someone calls Brad, who is clearly copying and pasting template responses, where he’s totally focused on making me happier etc, but where there’s no substance behind it. Either Brad hasn’t been briefed, since he works 1,000+ km away, or is outsourced entirely, or he just lacks the authority to make decisions beyond the most basic. If you mistake that for customer service focused not on happiness but on fixing something that is broken, then you know you’ll have problems. Not in year 1, necessarily, but by year 3 or 4.

And so here’s the thing. Netflix is easy come, easy go. It’s pretty straightforward stuff, doesn’t require much customer support — I’ve not used it once in 6 or 7 years. But anything involving something more specialised, such as money, or internet access, or food, or any kind of specific item you’re purchasing, then you need to win over trust. And that means, depending on what you’re selling, having proper customer service with experienced handlers with access to engineers, and the ability to make decisions, and you need to keep a laser eye on your existing customers and to ensure that the quality and breadth of your service evolves to meet their evolving expectations. Don’t assume their goodwill is something that will last.

If I had to boil it all down, I’d say: If anything you’re doing smacks of Theatre, then fix it. Or those people who arrived first may leave first. Noisily.

why big-name apps are stuck in the core

By jeremy | May 18, 2021

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photo by Walter Smith, 2004 (flickr, CC)

There’s a graveyard somewhere with the word Core on it. Relying on a core function is a killer. Think Dropbox. Twitter. Whatsapp. Evernote. All apps heading for Core Graveyard.

Here’s the thing.

In the old days the way to get your app noticed was to offer something no one else did, or did as well/cheaply. This was what everyone told you to do, right back to the idea of the mousetrap. But these days, because business models mostly revolve around freemium and subscriptions, this doesn’t work anymore. And it’s killing a lot of good products because they can’t navigate beyond from their core function without damaging the very thing that people like them for.

Take Evernote. The name is a great name because it describes what people like it for. You can take a note and save it forever. Or you could think of it as a verb, be forever taking notes. But to get people to take notes forever, or keep them forever, you need to offer it for free because there are, at least now, so many other players offering the same thing. So the story of Evernote is one of a company desperately looking to add some additional value to the product to justify charging for it.

The result: they have destroyed what drew users to it in the first place (I’ve been a user since at least 2005.) Evernote has added pretty much everything it can to the core functionality, including physical notebooks you supposedly scan (offering very little you couldn’t do manually as well if not better), but nearly every new feature gnawed away at the core, making the app less efficient at doing what made it appealing in the first place. If your unique selling point is being able to take notes easily, quickly and retrievably, then logically it follows that everything you add to the process actually detracts from its value.

Evernote is now a shadow of its former self. (Check out this Reddit thread for some of the recent pains expressed by users.) But you could have chosen any such thread from the past eight years or so and seen the same problems.

The same story can be repeated with many other apps and services.

Dropbox was once literally that, a digital box you could drop things in to share with others. Now it’s a bloated mishmash of features including an editor, a password vault, eSignatures and a file browser, but doesn’t do the basic syncing thing half as well as other tools, or as it used to. (It’s frustration with Dropbox that is prompting me to write this note.) Dropbox was once the obvious choice for anyone wanted to share files or sync files between computers.

And indeed, here’s the rub. It’s obvious these companies have determined, probably with the help of consultants (yes, I know, I’m one) to try to map out greater territory by defining the function of the app within a broader space. So Dropbox has persuaded itself no longer to focus on the rather prosaic process of sharing files and folders, but on ‘collaboration’. Evernote, similarly, tries to emphasise its place within collaboration, by encouraging users to create and edit files with others inside its (wait for it) ecosystem.

Collaboration is fine, but you need to make sure you’re doing the basics first. Collaboration is not why people use, or used to use, these products. Users wanted to do something quite specific, and were drawn to the app to do that specific thing. They’re not (necessarily) interested in the broader scope, indeed it’s likely they’re already doing that via other apps, but want another product to do some aspect of it that isn’t working well, or at all. But by imposing these new features on the user, they degrade the (wait for it) experience, and make the user less likely to stick with the product if one with a better functionality comes along.

Indeed, the reasons why the likes of Telegram, Quip, Slack and Zoom have all made inroads is that they do one key thing better than what exists: chat, writing documents, team chat and video calls/conferencing. It’s not that these functions weren’t available before these players appeared, it was that no-one did them well. They were either part of a separate suite, or there were things wrong with them because the developer wasn’t laser-focused on how well the tools worked. Quip did a better job than Google Docs; Slack did a better job than the likes of Yammer; Zoom did a better job than Skype.

Let’s all play

You can play this game with more or less every app you come across that isn’t focused in its approach. Twitter is now offering Twitter Blue, a subscription based service which, among other things, allows you to (drum roll) undo a tweet! Yes, if you pay you can actually ‘undo’ a tweet (I understand that this likely means not deleting a tweet, but of delaying the posting of a tweet). Great, so now you basically have to pay to think twice about dashing off a tweet.

Twitter’s appeal was a way to communicate one to several (ok, eventually many) with as little friction as possible. Coupled with that was the ability to see easily, with as little friction as possible, what others were saying — to everyone. Indeed, Twitter is a great example of how an app/service/product is moulded, not by the developers, but by the users. Much of what we think of its core functionality — hashtags, direct messages etc — were added by users, which were eventually adopted by the developers. Twitter has ever since tried to tinker with that model to generate revenue: the default view of tweets now is actually not whom you’re following, or at least not just whom, but tweets that algorithms think you’d be interested in. You have to alter the default to get a chronological list of tweets from people you’re following. Choose that and you’ll notice, from time to time, that Twitter will switch back to the default. In other words, the core function of Twitter has already been undermined in the interests of the company.

Whatsapp is another case in point. Whatsapp enjoyed massive adoption because it provided a useful service — free or cheap SMSs, if you want to put it bluntly. Whatsapp denied that at the time — I interviewed the CEO in 2012, and they were quite upset that this was the thrust of the resulting piece — but I know, I was there, or rather my Indonesian friends were, one of the first countries to really adopt the service. At the time Whatsapp hoped to make money by charging for it, via a subscription at a very cheap price ($1), in the second year. The number of users would have easily given them enough to keep the service going. Of course it didn’t turn out like that, and we’ve seen Facebook crawl through a number of hoops to find ways to monetize the service (by mining the data within.)

It’s true that Whatsapp has evolved hugely since the early days, but in the exact same trajectory SMS did, indicating it is still really just an SMS killer: think groups, think multimedia messages, think desktop app for composing and reading messages, think company communications with users etc. The bottom line: Every effort to move Whatsapp out of its core functionality and more into a data lake or part of a (wait for it) ‘family’ of apps are steps that undermine its core value.

Beware Superappitis

So what does this mean for the future?

Well, to me it’s clear that anything that can be defined as a single, important function that is not already part of a broader app or service should be marketed that way, priced on the assumption that it brings immediate value to the user, and should not be allowed to have extra ‘value’ bolted on to it.

There is a corollary to this. If you think you can add extra substantial value then do it, but don’t ever let it compromise the core. So Dropbox can offer editing services so long as there’s no extra steps, no larger download, no nagging windows to your app’s core value.

And if you’re offering, say, a banking function (transfers) then it makes sense to offer other banking services atop that once you have that core function working well, and that you make sure it’s always easily done, with minimal steps. TransferWise, now Wise, is adding features while at the same time ensuring transferring money is still as easy and cheap as pie.

But don’t let those new functions get in the way. A good example of this failure is Grab, a Southeast Asian ‘superapp’ (be scared whenever you see that word) which started out as offering easier ways to order taxis (it was originally called GrabTaxi.) It now offers all sorts of bells and whistles, and ordering a car, its core business is now a slower, more cumbersome process than it was. Even the map showing where you or your car is is largely covered by an ad, offering insurance for greater peace of mind. The service itself is still good, but the experience of ordering it is not.

Economic imperatives underline these moves. But they needn’t. Such distractions arise from a failure to define the purpose of the app or service. What itch is it, exactly, that you wanted to scratch with this? Failure to frame the USP in this way will always lead to tears or (eventual) bankruptcy.

The world of software is full of small, modestly successful apps that deliver individual functions that make paying for them worthwhile. I’m writing this on Drafts, an excellent app that does one thing: lets you compose stuff and then send it to pretty much every place you want (email it, add it to a calendar, tweet it, save it to Dropbox etc.) Yes, other apps let you do this, but this what the app focuses on doing, and doing it easily and well. The name captures the purpose of the app, and that’s all you need to know.

Single-celled future

I am a big user of apps. My instinct, honed by decades in front of computers, is that there are some things that an app can do better. Screenshot? There’s an app for that which does a better job of the purpose I’ve defined. I want an app to remember everything I’ve browsed for the past month, quarter or whatever, whichever browser I use. The answer: HistoryHound. Does it all, for a few bucks. An app which lets me save everything simply and in a way that makes it easy for me to find. The answer to this used to be Evernote, but not anymore, it’s (at least for Mac users) DEVONthink. What changed? Well DEVONthink just kept going trying to figure out how to make the process as effective as possible. Evernote meanwhile added too many bells and whistles, complicated and inconsistent changes to the interface, many of which got in the way of users. DEVONthink isn’t particularly user friendly, but it is effective and efficient. I now have sent to DEVONthink in four years of use about 10 times the stuff I sent to Evernote in 10 years of using it.

But who wants all these itty bitty apps that only do one thing? True. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But the big underlying shift, and a reason why I think the future is in small, single-cell apps is because they can be connected to each other via APIs, application programming interfaces, that essentially allow the apps to talk to each other. Drafts allows you to export your writing to other apps, but it also connects you to WordPress, or Dropbox, and to tweak that connectivity. If two apps or services you like don’t directly connect to each other, you can use third party services like Zapier. The only limit is your willingness to tweak a little, and your imagination.

But I also think it’s telling that there are still a lot of artisanal developers still around, still producing these apps. And app stores like Apple’s make it much easier to find them. And then there are players like Setapp, a sort of app aggregator for iOS and the Mac, which consciously tries to gather together a suite of apps that fit most of the niches that you as a user might need, via a $10 monthly subscription, irrespective of how many you use. I asked them why some apps disappear from their list: they told me some go because they are sometimes abandoned or the vendor parts ways. But then Setapp tries to go find a similar one. It’s not for everyone but to me it’s a godsend. Often I’ll find one of their apps does exactly what I’m looking for (Prizmo, for example, lets me capture some text on screen and copies it as text, even if it’s in an image, Permute lets me convert any multimedia file to another format, World Clock Pro shows me times in other timezones whatever the time is at home, Dropshare lets me share individual files with other people much more intuitively and quickly than Dropbox.)

Apps for every occasion

You could argue these are all esoteric functions that not everyone wants. That’s true. But this is how every app and service starts. The usefulness of Twitter wasn’t all that evident to those of us who first saw it. Whatsapp made sense to people living in places where SMSs were a significant expense. Dropbox came into being because people had trouble sharing files. The point is not that the function is esoteric. It’s whether the app or service or product can be defined as fulfilling a purpose. If you can define that and define it clearly, then you’re halfway there. It could be backing up your files. Or being able to walk along looking at your phone and seeing ahead via a transparent background using your back-facing camera. Or an app that tells you when your friends have been vaccinated and so are safe to have dinner with. Or an app that can tell you what lightbulbs you’re using, whether they’re about to break, and what is the cheapest way to replace them. Or an app that identifies whether the snake on your balcony is poisonous or not. Or an app that can tell you when you’ve given too many examples in a piece and how many readers have likely stopped reading. You get the idea.

We took a wrong turn when startups were encouraged to ‘growth hack’ and focus only on number of users, not whether the functionality matched the needs of those users. Sure, we all want to build the next viral sensation, but there’s a lot of other things we use our devices for, and someone needs to build for them.

OK my focus and word-counting apps are telling me to finish this. So I will.