Now on Twitter: group Direct Messages and mobile video camera | Twitter Blogs – playing catch up with OTT messaging apps

Mayer’s Yahoo Plan Could Affect Softbank Interests – WSJ – it depends on who Mayer sells to

Mobile internet slower in Hong Kong than mainland, S Korea | Hong Kong Economic Journal Insight – and the service I enjoyed in Hong Kong was significantly better than the UK…

The Real Story Behind Jeff Bezos’s Fire Phone Debacle And What It Means For Amazon’s Future | Fast Company – I don’t agree with some of the conclusions, but an interesting piece nonetheless

Army Communications In Pacific Stretched, Tested « Breaking Defense – interesting discussion about data networks issues

Google Joins Apple, Others Cutting Off Crimea, Blocks AdWords, AdSense, Google Play | TechCrunch – interesting to see how this rolls out from a tech point of view. Russia does have replacements such as Yandex in search, advertising and Android app stores

Disney’s Maker Studios Struggles to Migrate Its Audience To Maker.tv – CMO Today – can’t get the traffic off YouTube

Tumblr Launches An In-House Ad Agency That Pairs Creators With Big Brands | Fast Company – interesting move, shame agencies aren’t stepping up to the plate

Eric Schmidt Just Admitted Google’s Dominance Is Under Threat: ‘All Bets Are Off’ (FB, GOOG, MSFT) – actually not as billed but an interesting more nuanced portrait of the current landscape

Davos 2015: Tech giants risk reputation, warn business leaders – FT.com – this is less about the tech sector per se and more about lightning rods of inequality, of which the tech sector is just one

Here is a collection of things that have made my day over the past week or so

I am a big fan of Studio Ghibli – a kind of Japanese thinking mans Disney Studio. One of their alumni Yoshiharu Sato has branched out and produced this amazing advert for a Japanese alcohol brand with a strong theme of nostalgia.

Before Christmas Fox Studios had used LinkedIn to launch the latest in the ‘Taken’ series of films with Liam Neeson’s character Bryan Mills riffing of his ‘particular set of skills’. Well we now know who won the endorsement from Bryan Mills and here it is.

The Prodigy are back and their latest track Nasty has a psychedelic urban fox video to accompany it.

INK Hotel in Amsterdam have used storytelling to create a unique recruitment video, labouring heavily the cast metaphor that service industry businesses have adopted a la Disney.

CAS software company Autodesk have an artist-in-residence programme called Pier 9, and created a great video about it.

From ‘superman’ to ‘big tiger’, Li Ka-shing loses favour with Beijing | South China Morning Post – interesting analysis of the changing sentiment to Li Ka-shing

Smartphones At Tipping Point In China | Young’s China Business – domestic Chinese smartphone market likely to contract 10 per cent over the next year – shipments of all types of cellphones actually plummeted 22 percent in China last year to 452 million units, led by a 64 percent plunge in 2G models and 46 percent drop in 3G ones. (Chinese article) China’s mobile users now number 1.28 billion, giving the nation a penetration rate of 95 percent. 

The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis: Drivers of Prediction Accuracy in World Politics – Journal of Experimental Psychology – interesting traits and teams rather than individuals tend to do better. It would be interesting to see how this affects the wisdom of crowds given they are a mass of individuals rather than a team per se (PDF)

LIVEhouse.in – Online Broadcasting Service – really cool Asian content

Case Study: How Huawei turned its smartphone business around | Marketing Interactive – superlative headline but interesting overview of programmatic buying in China via iClick

BlackBerry Responds to Media Report – Press Releases – not talking to Samsung, it didn’t sound like it made sense to me

Millward Brown Digital partners with Snapchat | Research Live – interesting they can tell an ad

UK’s Cameron won’t “allow” strong encryption of communications — GigaOM – this is the most disturbing stuff I have seen and read in a long term, the Home Secretary is a political role by its very nature. It is not even an independent judiciary signing off. Secondly, given the poor understanding of technology by the body politic in the UK it doesn’t inspire confidence – if there is a back door for HMG, there is a back door for an abusive third party. Finally this is crush or encourage innovative start ups who focus on privacy to move offshore – Shoreditch to Berlin for instance

Vinyl’s difficult comeback | The Guardian – interesting opportunity for manufacturing record press machines

Most Energy Drink Companies Market to Minors, Report Finds | Time – this could be a ticking time bomb from a regulatory point of view