Bullywood v. TikTok?

So this time, India decided to ban TikTok permanently*, depriving the Chinese platform of 17% of the world population, and of a nation that will never reach herd immunity when it comes to dance and music.

The 59 Chinese apps banned by India

India will survive: it's much easier to replace an app with tens of existing rivals than, say, to dump Huawei for another 5G provider.

TikTok will survive, but that sets a disturbing precedent. Somehow, ByteDance has been exposed to this kind of risks ever since they swallowed Musical.ly two years ago, and many consider TikTok as a Trojan Horse for Beijing more subtle than WeChat. So when it spread even faster than coronavirus*, calls to flatten the curve multiplied. And when Zhang Yiming hired former Disney streaming boss Kevin Mayer to lead TikTok and to become ByteDance's COO, some saw it as - beyond the obvious reach for proven talent - a telltale sign that some sort of sheep's clothing was required to better face upcoming legal battles over US national security. Obviously, proposing distinct platforms for the Chinese market (Douyin) and overseas isn't enough.

The weeks and months to come will test many nations, players, and sectors as TikTok extends across new territories and verticals (health, education...). ByteDance could prolong its success with other assets such as Xigua Video, an even more direct competitor to YouTube: with its limit of 60' loops, TikTok itself can't go further than 2 hand washings, and you can imitate Twitter and double your core limit once, but your concept has to keep some consistency. Of course, along the way, ByteDance will further perfect its already impressive A.I. know-how (something among others that Vine didn't have).

Can TikTok's momentum be broken by this single setback? No. But if the US or the EU start weighing in, things could change.

One thing is sure: India is changing. And even before this episode, Narendra Modi was benchmarking China for online censorship***. This is not just about banning 59 apps from a coopetitor nation, but in the process, about rounding up all players in a most pervasive, theoretically open ecosystem.

mot-bile 2020

* along with 58 other apps, starting with WeChat 

** mentioning killer apps during a lockdown sounds obscene because it is, but TikTok and Zoom purely seized the moment
*** see for instance "India Proposes Chinese-Style Internet Censorship" (NYT 20190214)

Coronavirus and the end of herd impunity

Location based tracking apps, electronic ankles, drones... all technologies are being used to enforce lockdowns, quarantines and curfews, to search and destroy any will to ruin the common effort to flatten those damn curves.

At the herd level, our usage patterns brought precious insights about how both viruses (COVID-19 and STUPID-20) spread, most notably people flocking away from big cities to speed up curves across rural areas (Orange found that 17% of Parisians left the capital in the final hours before lockdown), or spring breakers sharing the fun during their spring breakout back home (see Tectonic's viral tweet below*):

When it comes to tracking individuals, Korea set the new standards very early with these alerts blaring on your phone each time a new case of COVID-19 pops up near you. You can't see the full individual's name but you know their age, their address, their nationality, and their exact path over the previous days. When on quarantine, you're tracked by GPS (three Vietnamese students were caught cheating in a Gunsan park - the truant officer found out that they left their phones home), you have to send every day your self-diagnosis on two different apps (one for the Ministry of Health, another for the Ministry of Interior), and you have to share your morning and afternoon temperatures by SMS - mercifully it's not intrusive to the point they send a drone to do it themselves.

And most of us are okay with the new safety-privacy trade-offs, because nowadays security means actual survival. Same thing with visual contacts. As we're deprived of basic liberties during confinement, we're willing to open our doors far wider than we would normally to co-workers, distant contacts or even total strangers. Somehow, as we grow our personal spheres, we're enabling more people to extend their reaches within them, break into our homes, Zoom into our interiors. Somehow, this virus has become the mother of all Troyan horses.

And when this pandemic is over, we probably won't return to normal. We won't mind when our operators charge us $5 a month for SD cards (as in Social Distancing), we won't flinch when they send electric shocks each time we come within 6 feet of other passers-by. 

As long as they let us graze on the greener side of the electric fence.


mot-bile 2020


* ICYMI

Want to see the true potential impact of ignoring social distancing? Through a partnership with @xmodesocial, we analyzed secondary locations of anonymized mobile devices that were active at a single Ft. Lauderdale beach during spring break. This is where they went across the US: pic.twitter.com/3A3ePn9Vin

— Tectonix GEO (@TectonixGEO) March 25, 2020

CES 2018: tighten your 2.5 ppm helmets

So you came back from Vegas with your LG bendable OLED screen (needed to wrap those smart gimbap rolls), your Hushme mask (needed to give Hannibal Lecter a call), and your Plume Labs Flow (needed a cheese grater that doubled as a air quality monitor).

Hushme mask (gethushme.com) allows you to mask your voice using various sounds (Minions, R2D2, rain, wind...).

Plume Labs Flow (plumelabs.com)

And you wonder what CES 2018 will bring you next year. Here's an exclusive preview of the 3 gadgets that will define the event:

• Xiaomi 2.5PPM Helmet: after purchasing Plume Labs and Hushme, the Chinese manufacturer created an air filtering mask with an airbag that inflates around your head as soon as nanoparticle levels hit the roof. In this safe bubble, the air is pure, your eyes don't hurt, and no one can hear you scream. 
• Alphago D-Bunk: this cloud-based A.I. service boosts your messaging and SNS apps, and sorts fake news from verified stories. Or at least it used to until Russia hacked it.
• Samsung Gear Fit Cuffs: clip the smartwatch on your left wrist, the other end of the handcuff on your right wrist. It beeps and flashes LED rainbows as soon as LEE Jae-yong moves 200 ft away from his cell.

mot-bile 2017

No Singularity Without Transparency

I was planning a post on singularity when this form came up ahead of a Singularity99 event. I might as well put down my answers there:

Q - Will technology create or destroy jobs?
A - Technology redefines employment. You won't employ a person, but hire skills, connections, shares of time and people. Jobs will be more contextual, evolutive, shared. There will be fewer permanent jobs, which doesn't necessarily mean that fewer people will have a job.

Q - Relation between technology, developement, unemployment:
A - Technology, as an accelerator and a revealer, accelerates unemployment, exposes discrepancies.
Some jobs are naturally made irrelevant or obsolete, new ones emerge, but we're reaching the point when the old employment model itself is obsolete.

Q - Is it the same as previous industrial revolutions, will new jobs compensate for the lost ones?
A - This is a more fundamental revolution than the previous ones.
The question remains what and where will be the added value of humans, but will we still be looking for the optimal return on investment, or at long last consider a sounder trade off?
Instant players will destroy jobs, humanists will work on a more sustainable, fair, open, shared platform.

Q - A.I., Deep learning, etc a threat to humans?
A - Since the stakes (economy, social trends, politics, environment, ethics...) and the complexity are maximal, so is the risk of seeing a minority trying to control key entry points.
The only answer is transparency: an open debate on the risks and opportunities, on who's doing what, on who's behind which initiative. Anyone can contribute on any issue, each decision can be monitored.

Also:

. There is a need for monitoring, regulation, ethics, but innovation demands reaching beyond limits. The 99% must act as moderators, not as censors. It is essential to not kill the game, but also to expose unfair play.

. High frequency trading proves that the frontier between intelligence and stupidity isn't that clear. As a reminder, here's my definition of both, along with other terms:




At a personal level, I don't want an enhanced brain. 

I have the right to remain stupid, and to write silly stuff about hacked transhumanism, such as my old "Rise Of The Nork Zombies".


mot-bile 2014

CES 2015 - Sensors and Sensibility - Internet Everywhere, Everyware, and Everywear

This excuse for a blog is starting its Season XI, at its own pace - about a post a month, far from the twice-a-week-routine of its heyday.

And as usual, the new year resonates with echoes from Vegas glitz and the CES.

So far, nothing disruptive, only recurrent stuff looming on a less distant horizon. No brain implants, mind you - Apple won't release iSingularity before a while, but driverless cars (Audi A7, BMW i3...), pervasive sensors, drones, cameras, and virtual reality, and an internet that keeps going everywhere, everyware, and everywear.

Samsung promises IoT on all its devices by 2017, and Tizen on its TVs as early as next month. But still no TTM for Tizen on smartphones.

Intel showed its RealSense 3D sensors, and smaller players their latest face-recognition-enabled cameras, ideal for a family, household, or small community/company: ArcSoft's Simplicam can deal with up to 10 regulars, and Netatmo's Welcome (TTM Q2 2015) can extend its reach through "Welcome Tags". Look how the Simplicam exsudes bigbrotherian power, where welcome plays on a rather 'air freshener' mode (netatmo again on the glam side of the force - remember last year's JUNE? - see "CES 2014: Beep Beep Goes Bling Bling"):

Welcome by netatmo

Simplicam by ArcSoft

Interesting to see how marketers try to give different flavors to similar enablers or functionalities. Camera-wise, for instance, the Narrative Clip 2 proposes a GoAm answer to GoPro - or is it dull vs bull? If this clipable, mini camera can also record everything as you go, it is marketed like a simple diary for ordinary people. Low expectations as a new driver for innovation, I like that.

And yes, we've got the unavoidable collection or more-or-less-pseudo-healthy wearables. At least, from the outlook, Withings's Activite Pop won't appear too obsolete next year, because it pretty much look like a normal watch:



NeuroMetrix's Quell aims at actual medical cure: this Bluetooth wrap-on sends neuro-signals to relieve pain.

But the winner of Day 1 remains Emiota's Belty, a Bluetooth belt that adjusts to your eating record. A must for anyone willing to cope with European austerity measures.

emiota's Belty - austerity rules!

mot-bile 2015

5 trends for 2009 ?

. more concerns about health with the rise of femtocells
. vertical concentration in the media
. more big names (Yahoo!, RIM...?) change hands, more manufacturers go bankrupt
. DoCoMo goes shopping to pave the way for an international launch of LTE - Japan Inc follows suit thanks to a strong Yen
. a 3.0 FCC chairman with a web pedigree

A killer application indeed

(answer to the question is mobile broadband the 3G killer application ?*)

Killer application indeed. For the network too. And next for the consumer ?

The two main reasons why such connectivity is not improving as fast as it should :
- MNO profiles : risk of cannibalization of other golden geese in their portfolios (ie fixed accesses)
- infrastructure : peak usage has always been an issue in the wireless industry, but add broadband internet to it and you do have a problem

A third factor may rise soon : health. Femtocells + long sessions = trouble ahead.

* telecoms.com blog.

Belle Labs and niche marketing

Nature remains the best innovator.
In Florida, Belle, a 3 year-old and well trained bitch, saved her 34 year-old diabetic master thanks to two disrupting technologies : licking (her master's arm to check the level of sugar in his blood) and toothing (punching "9" on her master's handset to call emergencies - not with the paw but with a not-even-blue tooth).
Try doing this to your girlfriend if she faints on the beach this summer : the baywatch squad will knock you rabid you flat in a second - besides, your insurance doesn't cover handset bites.
We thought we knew everything about canine mobile connectivity*, but now we've got to get ready for SMS spamming from Lassie herself... niche marketing indeed.
Bunny tip of the day : don't you dare activate Playboy Mobile in the UK unless you can outrun greyhounds.

* in Japan, you can communicate with your dog and know where it is without leaving your office - hell, there are even dog-human translators out there !

Nano vs Micro - The Other Yellow Peril

China's Desert Storm op is a total success : Korea was caught by surprise and had so shut down key production lines for a few hours. Unlike plasma screens, semicons were preserved thanks to outstanding confinement procedures.
The Empire of the Middle struck its neighbor's silicon core with silicon. Sand, to be more accurate. From the Gobi desert, as usual ; these yellow fog days are happening more and more often and because only the smallest dust travels all the way, both humans and machines fear for their lives.
Last week-end, the volume of dust went over the 2,000 microgram per cubic meter mark. Instead of enjoying the scents of the capital's trees magnificent blooming, Seoulites had to cover their face.
So much for my cultural lag : I had just landed in Incheon after a few days in Dubai.

The ultimate wireless killer app ? Ask Stephen King

Since you are a cellular network operator, worrying about health issues is part of your daily job and responsibility. You also have to cope with irrationality and urban legends but come January 24, 2006, you will regret those peaceful days.
The launch of the year has of course something to do with entertainment but not with TV. Yet.
Stephen King is releasing "Cell" on January 24, 2006, and you don't want to consider that a minor event. We're talking millions of fans reading about a genuine killer application : over the air signals that turn your dear customer into something even scarier than a churner. You'd better prepare your hotlines for this crisis.
Otherwise, the King of ARPU (Average Reader Per Universe) could become your worst nightmare.