renaissance chambara | Ged Carroll culture/design/digital/eastasia/ideas/insights/marketing/socialengineering

Wrap upAt WahacatechmemeShenzhen property prices in City AM newspaperEjector seatOakley store sculptureEjector seat

Chinese social web eco-system infographic | 中国网络生态系统

In many ways the 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.
Iceberg
This infographic came from Sinatechblog.com.cn

The Mohawks interviewed by Mark Rae (Rae & Christian)

Having grown up on the golden era of hip-hop and having a love of breaks in general I knew The Mohawks, in particular their late sixties track The Champ as a break from the likes of Afrika Bambaataa, Big Daddy Kane, DJ Shadow and just about anybody who was of note during that time. Even jazz legend Miles Davis sampled it for Fantasy on the Doo Boop album.  It was up there with The Winstons Amen Brother, James Brown’s The Funky Drummer and Lynn Collins Think in terms of the impact it had on sampling.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that The Mohawks were a band of British session musicians. There are some interesting comments in the interview:

The video is on YouTube so may not be visible to all readers.

Links of the day | 在网上找到

A MYSTERY IN SUNNYVALE: Who The Heck Hired Scott Thompson?

G-Shock prototype phone hides its craggy looks at CES, only fears your stares – Engadget – there is something a bit 1990s sci-fi about this design that I really like

Apple CEO Tim Cook Touches On Kindle Fire, Android, Windows Phone | Fast Company – cannibalising low-end sales

How House Of Mikko Analyzes Women And Recommends Beauty Products | Fast Company

Chinatowns Decline As Asians Head to Suburbs | channelAPA.com

danah boyd | apophenia » How Parents Normalized Teen Password Sharing

Steve Jobs Had Grand Plans For iPhone Camera | WebProNews

Trust in Asia Pacific – Sixty Second View

Panasonic Develops Backup Power Supply Using Electric Double-layer Capacitor — Tech-On!

Yahoo In Context: It’s Declining While The Online Ad Market Keeps Growing | paidContent – its all that great work that Carole Bartz did

Deloitte study finds that Facebook has an overall economic impact of €2.6 billion in the UK – News Release | Deloitte UK – or please don’t crucify us for our privacy sins. Next The Sinaola Cartel and Acccenture demonstrate the economic benefit of the cocaine trade to Europe

China breaks 30-year tradition with Davos – FT.com – it’s stupid holding it this close to lunar new year

Plastic memory firm signs partners for printed systems

Epeus’ epigone: Google Plus admits they want fake names

A ‘window’ into the future with new interactive screens | JWT Intelligence

Rob Manuel » Blog Archive » In Praise of CDs – on digital artifacts

Felix Salmon: How Sharing Disrupts Media | Wired.com

RIMM: Wunderlich Drops Coverage; No Visibility – Barrons.com

I like: Julien Denoyer customised Moleskine cahler pads | 我喜欢的产品设计 Julien Denoyer customised Moleskine cahler pads

Madrid-based artist  Julien Denoyer customises thin Moleskine pads with client unfriendly slogans that ache being on a desk. You can get hold of these here.
BMF

Hong Kong 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.

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:

Some of which is legitimate, to name two:

Here is the video on Tudou without English subtitles:

State of The Union: insights into Obama re-election campaign

In a couple of hours Barack Obama goes out live on television across the US to give his State of The Union speech were he sets out what his agenda is for the next 12 months. This one is key because it is his opening salvo in the forthcoming presidential election.

The Obama campaign put out a training video on YouTube explaining how to run a State of The Union watching party, where people host a group in their own home, debate what they would like to see in the speech and then watch it together. As an outsider I found certain aspects of it fascinating:

Links of the day | 在网上找到

Fashion gets a digital game-changer | FT.comTokyo Girls Collection have been there so much earlier

Britain Adds More Spectrum for Olympics-Related Wireless Crunch – AllThingsD – expect the wired networks to get fried as well

Facebook to become the newest target of hacker group Anonymous [video] – can’t say I am particularly saddened by this

Thou Shalt Covet What Thy Neighbor Covets | Fast Company

Asiajin » Yahoo! Box: Yahoo! Japan’s Online Storage Service Tops One Million Users

Technology That Can Help Scale A Customer Advocate Program

RIM Up 4%: CEOs Yield to Siemens Vet, New Chair; Lazaridis to Buy Stock (Update) – Barrons.com

A VC: A Post PIPA Post

INSEAD Knowledge: When Spending Hurts – status is still important to consumers, even in straitened times

YCRFS 9: Kill Hollywood – or building films in the better way, consumed in a different way that completely bypasses the studios. There is still a place for compelling stories

Data point: Consumers say they want an unfiltered lens | JWT Intelligence – reading the results serendipity and a bit of tailoring

News feeds become better reads | FT.com

Nokia sells over 450 patents to a patent troll

Microsoft gets about $27 for each Windows Phone ZTE makes – SlashGear

China market: Online shopping trade value over CNY773 billion in 2011

Are You Hitched? – what about the context of LinkedIn data with a dating site?

Grocery group to slash cost of basics | Irish Examiner – interesting that Musgrave are going toe to toe with Aldi and Lidl

Mega Echelon Option – Cryptome has a very politically skewed but interesting piece alleging that MegaUpload was done in with the help of the intelligence community

I like: CLSA Feng Shui Index

Hong Kong stock broker CLSA has made a bit of a tradition publishing a tongue-in-check look at the financial year ahead to coincide with the Chinese new year. This year is the year of the black water dragon and the 18th edition of the index.
clsa

Happy lunar new year! | 新年快乐

A brief post to wish all of the readers a happy and fruitful year of the dragon.
Chinese Dragon

I like: Star Wars Uncut

A crowdsourced version of Star Wars Episode 4: A new hope – made by fans from around the world in 15-second sections.

More Information at Star Wars Uncut.

Links of the day | 在网上找到

Nike: Leveraging Online Video to Attract Female Chinese Consumers | The China Observer

Monocolumn – Singapore needs to think fast to retain investment [Monocle]

Dying industry – apparently modern smartphones are clobbering the market for shanzhai developers

International Reaction to Megaupload Indictment: This Means War

I, Cringely » Absence makes the heart grow fonder and other weird thoughts

HuffPo Partners With L’Espresso For ‘L’Huffington Post Italy’ | paidContent

Apple And Google Seek To Defy 10-Year Smartphone OS Life Cycle – Forbes

AKB48 monthly newspaper on sale ‹ Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion – I like the idea of the group engaging with their fans through a newspaper and is sufficiently counterintuitive to work. I did find one comment nailed it for me “Awesome!.. 50 year old perverts will be happy about this.

Dragon breathes fire into new year spending spree | SCMP.com – (paywall)

Why the Huffington Post UK failed – The Kernel – classic mistake of transplanting an American idea into a European context with no adaptation

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

Technological change: The last Kodak moment? | The Economist

Browser sizes – versus how many percent of web visitors could see the page as designed

TelecomTV | Under-the-floor activity: is that the sound of value tunnelling its way out?

Kodak Transparency: Exposing Bad News in a Positive Light on Social Media – very similar to JetBlue’s direct communication to consumers in a crisis situation

Larry Page Is Super Excited To Announce That Google+ Has 90M Users [Update: Engagement+?] | TechCrunch

venomous porridge – The Unprecedented Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA – very dodgy law

I like: Dotz cord identifiers | Dotz 电缆标识符

Like most people I have a rats nest of power cables and connectivity going on behind my computer and hi-fi set-up so knowing what goes where would be a relief. Dotz cord identifiers stuck me as being a particularly elegant solution to this debacle.
Dotz
They clip around the cable securely with a label and you could colour match either end as well. You can find out more on their site.

The future is divergence | 未来是分歧

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.

So what about the headline?

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.

 

Links of the day | 在网上找到

Revamp for HK stock exchange | SCMP.com – plans to spend HK$2 billion to upgrade its system and introduce yuan-denominated commodities and derivatives trading (paywall)

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

US Online Advertising Spending to Surpass Print in 2012 – eMarketer

Apple introduces us to Siri, the Killer Patent – Patently Apple

Introducing New Apps for Timeline | Facebook

Empowered – Do people care about the data you collect? – now more than ever they do

Home | Data Without Borders

How does an early-stage investor value a startup? | the drawingboard [dot] me

Weber Shandwick – Seventy Per Cent of Consumers Avoid Products If They Dislike Parent Company, Weber Shandwick Survey Finds – not terribly surprising

Microsoft Pri0 | Nielsen: 1.4 percent of those who recently bought smartphones chose Windows Phone | Seattle Times Newspaper

Confessions of a Publisher: “We’re in Amazon’s Sights and They’re Going to Kill Us” | PandoDaily

Apple PCs Ease Into Corporate Market – WSJ.com – (paywall)

The secrets Apple keeps – Fortune Tech – if this doesn’t hammer Apple’s recruiting efforts I don’t know what will

More US Consumers Choosing Smartphones as Apple Closes the Gap on Android | Nielsen Wire

Wiring the open-source enterprise – McKinsey Quarterly

Infographic: The (new) best time to post to social media | Articles

iPhone share among recent smartphone buyers nearly doubles in Q4, Nielsen says

Epeus’ epigone: Translation from sanctimonious bluster to English of Chris Dodd’s statement on the internet blackout protests

Spot – twitter visualisation tool

How China’s Boom Caused the Financial Crisis – By Heleen Mees | Foreign Policy – title is misleading. Low interest rates and the decline of middle class income led to a need for refinancing. Blaming China is simplistic

danah boyd | apophenia » We need to talk about piracy (but we must stop SOPA first)

The long road to BlackBerry 10 | The Verge

Can the naysaying and give Jerry Yang his due – CBS News

ZTE sees China, U.S. key smartphone markets | Reuters

AppleInsider | NPD data suggests ‘soft’ sales of 4.9M Macs in December quarter

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