renaissance chambara | Ged Carroll

Samsung Galaxy sofware features not good enough for users, study says | BGR

Calvin Klein asks users to flash their underwear online | Marketing Interactive – this could go so wrong

The Wearable Wheel | Visual.ly – interesting but a bastard to read

Lightweight 3D Printed Breathable Cast with Ultrasound Therapy – I so wish I had this when I broke my arm

The eurozone’s creeping danger | HSBC Global

Bad news for Samsung: 85% of people in Philippines willing to buy homegrown smartphone brands | Techinasia - good news for prospective tier 2 manufacturers in Shenzhen who would be doing the badge engineering work on to reference design for Filipino brands

Users Actually Seem To Like Facebook’s Auto-Play Videos | FastCompany - not that convinced

WeChat surges past Weibo as China’s top social sharing platform. | Resonance China – not terribly surprising Weibo is so last year

Squeeze on international-school locals | SCMP – I don’t understand why schools are so expensive in the first place, and if I had a kid starting them off in school I would want to put them into the local school system to learn Cantonese and Mandarin (paywall)

This Bank Ad Hilariously Mocks Google Glass | TIME.com – Google Glass is now the comedy equivalent of the Mother-in-Law

One in 10 Brits admits to lying pretty much all the time | Quartz – great PR story. How else do you build an empire over a third of the world by guile?

How Bad is China’s Moral Crisis? | New Republic – not convinced given that western society tends to view things in black and white and traditional Chinese morals tend to be more nuanced and contextual

In America, Spending Cuts Are Driven by the Rich | Mother Jones – no real surprise, given that research showed that they thought taxes were fair and the rich thought that they were excessive

Here’s why Apple will bring iTV to China first | Quartz – really? – not so sure. Media is a strategic industry and online video is coming under increasing regulation as the Chinese government tries to ensure the continued relevance of state-run channels

How Luxury Can Move Ahead In China’s Tricky E-Commerce Market | Jing Daily

Sony 4K Ultra HD Media Player – FMP-X10 Review – Sony US – I wonder about the kind of broadband and infrastructure required to support a 4K Apple TV style device

High-Efficiency Hiking: What the Heck Is Ultralight? – Core77

Why more governments should offer their citizens a one-in-a-million chance to win | Quartz – China does a similar thing with restaurant receipts, though some restaurants will offer you a free drink or dessert to get out of giving it

Jing Daily: 9 key ways Chinese consumer habits are rapidly changing right before our eyes

#OwnTheMoment – handy forward events calendar

The downsizing of brand building | Guardian Professional – PRs should read this article and burn its words into their hearts

Fear and loathing at the cinema: new films reflect modern tensions in Hong Kong | South China Morning Post – (paywall)

What is Baidu & How to Advertise on Baidu | Reload Digital

I heart cherry blossoms, the rise of Japan’s petit nationalism | The Japan Times

Direct selling companies see phenomenal growth in China | WantChinaTimes – Nu Skin apparently grew 10-fold in a year, it also looks like a potential car crash

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens – Gilens & Page – (PDF file)

Thousands of Chinese spent their “best years” making Nike shoes and now have no pensions | Quartz

Among Venture Capital’s Largest Exits, Consumer Tech Dominates | CB Insights

Chat Wars | n+1 | Apr. 19, 2014 – interesting reading to compare and contrast with the current OTT messenger race

Ideological Segregation Online and Offline | Quarterly Journal of Economics by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro (paywall)

LeBron James Is Lovin’ McDonald’s — in China | Time – tapping into Chinese love of basketball to pimp burgers

A Third of Americans Think Technology Is Going to Ruin Their Lives | Motherboard – and they are probably right

Youku Tudou, Huawei Launch Internet TV STB | Marbridge Consulting – (paywall)

Amazon partners with Samsung to launch custom Kindle e-Book service for Galaxy devices – looks like Flipboard didn’t get the deal it wanted…

Japan’s indigenous stealth fighter to fly this year amid arms race worries | South China Morning Post - many of the technological advances that Japan had shared with its ally on the FSX later appeared on US aircraft – US defence complex ripped off Japanese technology (paywall)

FDA Publishes First Piece of Long-Awaited Social Media Guidance: Focus is on Accountability

Brits consume more MDMA than energy drinks, survey finds | Dazed

Global Views on Morality | Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project – really nice interactive infographic

Rolex Gets a New CEO Jean-Frédéric Dufour – Gear Patrol – these are big shoes to fill, I just hope that Mr Dufour doesn’t decide that luxury equals fashion and starts cycling Rolex models like SKUs at H&M

Big Data is the new Artificial Intelligence | I, Cringely – interesting and disturbing all at the same time

Tesco hit by further sales decline as it turns to digital Clubcard and social network | Brand Republic – why would you want to join Tesco’s social network?

How Paul Smith Stands Apart In China’s Ultra-Competitive Retail Market | Jing Daily

China Inc joins the big league in oil and gas services | SCMP – (paywall)

This Is How Travelers Are Using Their Smartphones And Tablets — And How The Industry Is Adapting

How Advertisers Are Using Snapchat, Kik, Tango, Line, WeChat | Digital – Advertising Age – campaigns on the platform

PWC: 14% Chinese Shopping Online Everyday | China Internet Watch

Tencent to Launch Self-service WeChat Ad Platform | Marbridge Consulting – (paywall)

Generation Z | Charlie Stross

Jing Daily: ‘Brand-tagging’ mobile apps: China’s next selfie sensation

Inflation in Europe: The Price is Wrong | INSEAD

A new way to make brands | Wolff Olins

‘Baby surprise’ tourism promo video could have been done better: STB | Straits Times – video aimed at one market gets slammed elsewhere around the world

Daring Fireball: No One Said Following Is Easy – what John Gruber misses is that Nokia’s Symbian phones also had touch for instance the Nokia E90 Communicator had both a qwerty keyboard and resistive touch screen

Europe’s Eurosceptics more united than many think: poll | Reuters – this is going to go horribly wrong

China Leads the Way in Average Household Spending | Euromonitor International

A Taxonomy Of The Collaborative Economy –And What Brands Are Doing About It. | Jeremiah Owyang

Behind the Machine’s Back: How Social Media Users Avoid Getting Turned Into Big Data | The Atlantic

First BRICS. Then PIIGs. Now, The Formidable 5 | The Financialist

The usual list of things that made my day this week. I have made a point of excluding Heartbleed related content just because it is so depressing. Instead I give you:

What seems to be a mix of hacking, techno-political comment and locative art; Watch Your Privacy app for Google Glass acts as a kind of  dynamic ‘dead spot’ map showing CCTV cameras and other public surveillance systems based on OpenMap data.

Bob Hoffman’s ITV Spotlight keynote at Advertising Week 2014 on The Golden Age of Bullshit which was designed to spur debate on the failed predictions of advertising experts over the past decade, with particular focus on the social media marketing of brands.

Kids React To Walkman. What was interesting about this is how the children struggled to understand the industrial design since they were so used to the pictures under glass metaphor of the modern smartphone.

At the other extreme is this video made by German watchmaker NOMOS Glashuette showing the process that goes into making one of their watches, which is I found breathtaking.

I love this film about Neal Unger, a 60 year old man who is a self-professed beginner at skateboarding. His tao of skateboarding is very interesting; where he is talking about being in the moment. It reminded me a lot of what I liked about the process of DJ’ing or scuba diving back in the day before I came to London.

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Watch Your Privacy

Swedish city introduces payment by hand scanning – The West Australian - having your biometrics be used as authentication, I am sure that there ethical issues with this

(Re)defining multimedia journalism – Medium

Freescale and ALU show off small cell SoC – Rethink Wireless

Why Asian American kids excel. It’s not ‘Tiger Moms.’ | Washington Post - (paywall)

Burberry’s flagship Shanghai store facade responds to weather changes – Brand Republic News

The outlook is bleak. So let’s not go there. | Excapite

The Future of Social Media ROI: From Likes to Relational Metrics | INSEAD

Bang & Olufsen narrows operating loss as Europe improves | Reuters

The future of retail in 5 charts | Digiday

Was that expensive Chinese New Year campaign worth it? | Marketing Interactive – really good tips on running an international marketing campaign

McDonald’s, Coca-Cola champions offline interactions with BFF meals | Marketing Interactive - interesting online to offline move

Triumph of the Drill: How Big Oil Clings to Billions in Government Giveaways | Mother Jones

Alimama Challenges Google In Big Data Marketing — China Internet Watch

A Survival Plan for the Wild Cyborg | Slate

Television Advertising Continues To Reign Supreme | AdPulp - not terribly surprised if one looks at a prominent FMCG brand business like Colgate | Palmolive the overwhelming majority of their advertising spend is television

Qualcomm, MediaTek in Two-Horse Race, Says CLSA; Game Over for BRCM, Etc. | Barrons

The Box Blog » Announcing Box Open Source - good for OSS movement

How Does Facebook Handle Graph Search Queries In A Timely Fashion? | AllFacebook - interesting primer on Facebook’s back-end technology

Wolff Olins Global CEO Karl Heiselman Leaves to Join Apple | Advertising Age - interesting that Apple is hiring so many digital agencies. AKQA is particularly interesting given its longstanding relationships with Microsoft and Google

Need for speed: Testing the networking performance of the top 4 cloud providers | GigaOm - I was one of the original non-US beta testers for WeberWorks – an online environment / workflow tool for doing and running PR programmes with real-time reporting and the thing that kept killing my usage of the tool was network latency, it was like working in treacle. Interesting to see GigaOm bringing this up as a key performance indicator

Global wearable device shipments to triple in 2014: IDC | WantChinaTimes

QQ reaches 200 million users - surprising how it’s still climbing in the face of WeChat

WeChat Campaign in China Offers Glimpse into the Future of Communications | Hoffman - nice case study on integrating WeChat into online and offline campaign elements

Beijing’s first 24-hour bookstore turns first page | WantChinaTimes.com - I wish London still had the 24-hour Borders on Oxford Street

Digital Intelligence :: Online ad revenue overtakes TV for first time in US

China Mobile Browser Industry Analysis in 2013 | China Internet Watch

Bits Blog: Amazon Buys ComiXology | NYTimes.com - well that’s the comic industry screwed then

Another Chinese Counterfeit Product: Social-Media Followers | Advertising Age - One Asian ad exec who asked not to be named described buying fake fans to give an ego jolt to a new venture in China. The rate, he said, was about 5 U.S. cents for a zombie that’s just a name, and 16 cents for higher-quality fakes with some content on their profiles. In addition to zombie fans, there’s a market for faux re-tweets and comments too

Wonga faces social media storm after forcing Twitter to remove satirical material | Brand Republic – cack-handed handling of satire that would have gone way over the heads of the working poor that Wonga preys upon has as its customer base

Top 100 UK advertisers: BSkyB increases lead as P&G, BT and Unilever reduce adspend | Brand Republic

WeChat opens its image-recognition tech to the public | VentureBeat

Nike+ Fuel Lab opens to expand fitness tracking platform to third parties starting w/ RunKeeper, Strava, MyFitnessPal | 9to5Mac

Chow Tai Fook loses lustre amid poor sales in Hong Kong and Macau | SCMP

China Third-Party Online Payment Market in 2013 | China Internet Watch

Alternatives to Paid Search on Baidu | L2 ThinkTank

32% of men using VPNs to access the internet – GlobalWebIndex – it seems really high

On Beacons and proximity | BBH Labs

Slideshow: 10 Things I Saw at Bluetooth World | EE Times

Sony Curves Images Sensors & TSMC Stacks Them | EE Times - interesting design moves

China’s Quest for ‘MIPS in Wearable’ | EE Times – interesting move, China considers the broader internet of things to be strategically important wearables are just part of it

U.S. teens prefer Instagram over Twitter, Facebook - no real surprises here

Mandarin Oriental readies its photo-sharing social app | Marketing Interactive

Chinese Exports and Imports Unexpectedly Fell in March | NYTimes - the significance of the data for the Chinese economy was clouded by uncertainty over the extent to which exporters and importers were timing shipments to profit from currency market shifts (paywall)

Japanese company invents “Spring Santa” – We love the concept, but it’s actually a little creepy… - social gifting concept in Japan

1 million preorders of new HTC flagship phone on Chinese sites | WatchChinaTimes - not a bad start at all

Apocalypse Now in Hong Kong | WSJ - interesting new film (paywall)

Sneakernomics: When Will The “Sneaker Cycle” End? | Forbes - not so sure about never, but interesting read

Samsung Gear 2 Teardown – iFixit - interesting teardown

Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen: How the Digital Age Is Rewriting the Rule Book on Consumer Behavior | Stanford Graduate School of Business

Ok so this is actually a day late, but here are the things that have made my day this week.

I love this spot for Thai life insurance that has been doing the rounds on Facebook for a week or so

Oreo partnering with a gourmet food truck operator to come up with new creative ways of using Oreos and trying to engage audiences on the Oreo Tumblr account

A custom-made arcade ride and Oculus Rift glasses provide this awesome hacked together Tron lightcycle gaming experience. The game itself came from from Overflow Interactive

Starck Design came up with functioning libary designed around flight cases for troubled regions that I think would be awesome as office furniture or as a home work space.

Finally the new Liverpool kit launch had pre-occupied the office this week and was a multi-channel effort with experiential, PR and online channels all being used to build an event that reverberated around the world

4 reasons why Asian tech companies are using flash sales to sell their stuff

Nobody Cares What You Think Unless You’re Rich | Mother Jones

Jing Daily | China’s Sketchy ‘Daigou’ Luxury Market Is A Hotbed For Fakes

Microsoft Ventures GM: ‘There will not be a WhatsApp-style acquisition again’ | VentureBeat - a bit harsh, I don’t think that you can categorise WhatsApp as pre-revenue or a dogs shit company – but the valuation is indicative of bubble behaviou

Here’s Google’s Smart Plan To Sell Its Computerized Glasses To Businesses (GOOG) | Business Insider - I would still be unhappy seeing Google Glass in a frontline customer services role like Virgin Atlanti

Jing Daily: How Lane Crawford’s ‘unique’ business model defies China’s anti-graft drive

Jing Daily: Zaha Hadid’s next high-profile China stop: Macau

How Real-Time Does Real-Time Marketing Need To Be? Sysomos Blog - according to marketers surveyed. It does beg the question what does real time marketing actually mean to them first of all

Mobile adspend doubles to break £1bn barrier, says IAB report

Samsung S5 Teardown: Loaded With Sensors | EE Times

Five examples of how marketers are using iBeacons | Econsultancy

China Email Marketing Industry Report in 2013 | ChinaInternetWatch

Watchmakers woo women to boost flagging sales | Reuters

Bosch Plans Connectivity Push to Challenge Google’s Lead – Bloomberg

STB defends promotional video for Filipinos | Marketing Interactive - how much do you localise a campaign when the content ends up online whether you want it there or not?

INTERNET OF CARING THINGS | trendwatching.com - emotional design

German companies and China: Mittelstand and Middle Kingdom | The Economist

Twitter CEO’s China Visit Is Interesting, but Not for the Reason You Think – China Real Time Report – WSJ - looking for Chinese innovation to emulate

Is Qualcomm losing its edge in the application processor market? | TechRadar - interesting that this question is being asked

How mobile is contributing to show rooming | Marketing Interactive

‘No Pain’ McFlame fronts social campaign for Zippo | Marketing Interactive

As competition heats up, retailers urged to innovate | Marketing Interactive

Asian Champions of Design: Tiger Balm | Campaign Asia - strident classic design that it seems to shy away from on new products (paywall)

The Army v. The Press | Time.com

Beware of Normcore | Slate - desperately wanting to be average

Users Engage with Major Social Networks Predominantly via Mobile | comScore

How to tell if a merger rumor will come true – Quartz - or how good are journalists?

Toyota is becoming more efficient by replacing robots with humans | Quartz

David Beckham Wants to Launch a Clothing and Lifestyle Brand | Vanity Fair - interesting that Li & Fung are being linked with this

Mobile adspend rockets in Korea | WARC

SK-II promotes pop-up skincare studio via geo-targeted mobile ad

Michael Kors Beating European Brands on Their Home Turf – Bloomberg

Airbnb Becoming a Stronger Competitor to Hotel Brands | L2 Think Tank

54% of tablet users share their device with others | GlobalWebIndex

Are Mobile Operators Asking the Right Questions of their Subscriber Big Data? | Euromonitor Internaitional

VAT on telecoms, broadcasting and electronic services to be charged at rate of consumer’s country not that of supplier from 2015

Media Publications Database | We find the best Media/Advertising publications for you. – great research resource

Nearly half of Arab youth keen to embrace modernity | Burson-Marsteller – presumably in conjunction with PSB

Home · enyojs/mochi Wiki · GitHub - design resources on user experience by the WebOS design team

The NSA Archive | American Civil Liberties Union - Snowden leaks become searchable

Microsoft’s open sourcing of .Net: The back story | ZDNet

Qualcomm’s newest mobile chips offer a clear glimpse at 2015′s killer gadgets | VentureBeat

The Art of Generating Market Research Insight – Euromonitor International - reg wall for whitepaper

B2C Customer acquisition costs 2014 | Smart Insights - information from DMA

Data point: Beacons, retail apps and targeted messaging | JWT Intelligence

Mobile Growth Opportunity for China Beauty Brands | L2 Think Tank

Mobile phone maker ZTE announces direct sales platform | WantChinaTimes.com

Hubspot, Marketo, Eloqua: New data shows marketing automation market share in unprecedented detail | VentureBeat

Economic View: Automation Alone Isn’t Killing Jobs | New York Times - complex interaction of technology, education and market demands (paywall)

On The 20th Anniversary – An Oral History of Netscape’s Founding | Internet History Podcast

The Richest Rich Are in a Class by Themselves | Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Developing Asian Manufacturing Capacity from a China Operational Base | Little Red Blog

Writing on the wall | The Economist - China’s uniquely open approach to graffiti art compared to the repressed west (paywall)

Demystify Alibaba’s Money Fund Yu’E Bao — China Internet Watch

Which Activities are Getting Sportswear Consumers off their Couches? – Euromonitor International

Asia’s Messaging Apps Like WeChat and Line Follow Similar Path – WSJ - going on Nokia’s Android handsets

For older Americans, tablets and e-readers are the new cell phones with huge buttons - More Americans age 65 and older own either a tablet or an e-reader (27%) than own smartphones (18%)—the reverse of the proportions for the general public, according to the Pew Internet Project’s latest study on how people access the internet.

Talk gets cheaper | The Economist - Of the 1.2 billion smartphones that will be shipped this year, almost half will cost less than $200 and one-fifth will cost less than $100

Are single-page apps becoming the norm? – Software Development News - thanks to Javascript

Perovskite, a New Meta Material, Turns Light Into Power, Lasers | EE Times

New DARPA Office Merges Biology & Technology | EE Times

THE INTERNET OF EVERYTHING: 2014 [SLIDE DECK] SAI – Business Insider

Analyst: I’m In China, And iPhone 5S Demand Is ‘Disappointing’ People (AAPL) | BusinessInsider - Chinese brands demand catching up on Samsung and Apple

Google Keep OCR | Google System - so useful

iiMedia Research: China Social Sharing Report in 2013 — China Internet Watch

The radio trumps online services for music discovery | MacNews – I guess record companies need to bring back the art of plugging

Do People Complain More On Twitter Or On Facebook? | Forrester Blogs – the sample size is small but it is interesting since it challenges the social customer service truism that Facebook was generally positive and Twitter was the place consumers raged

Consumer Behavior Data Could Put Predictive Analytics in Government Crosshairs | Adweek

Survey Shows Twitter Users Find Ads On The Network Irrelevant, Random | MarketingLand – there are limitations of this kind of research but the data is interesting nonetheless, a greater degree of matching context would increase performance rather than being seen as interruption marketing

STUDY: Senior Citizens’ Use Of Facebook, Other Social Networks Slowly Climbing | AllFacebook

Samsung Claims Progress on the Next Wonder Material – Digits – WSJ - Graphene for flexible displays (paywall)

Public Wi-Fi speeds to get a boost from Qualcomm’s new antenna technology | PCWorld

Apple, Crown Castle, Splunk: Gaggle of Internet of Things Players in Morgan Stanley Report | Tech Trader Daily

Dayre.me - mobile blogging / Tumblr like platform

A Korean TV Show Caused a YSL Lipstick Shortage – The Cut

European Parliament passes strong net neutrality law, along with major roaming reforms – GigaOm

NASA Spinoff Database - database of space age stuff

Matt Cutts Explains How Google Separates Popularity From True Authority | Search Engine Journal

2014 China smartphone market and industry – Digitimes - China market to reach 422 million smartphones in 2014, with 278 million units contributed by China-based smartphone vendors. The continued expansion by international vendors Samsung and Apple will push up their sales to almost 144 million units, accounting for nearly 4% growth from 2013 (paywall)

Ssshhh! Secret and Whisper get cloned in China - it will be interesting to see how these get harmonised by the Chinese regulatory system

Chinese mobile phone users have a sneaking suspicion they’re being ripped off – Quartz - the complexity of wireless economics

Google distances itself from the Pentagon, stays in bed with mercenaries and intelligence contractors | PandoDaily

Siri’s Psychological Effects on Children | New Republic - interesting ethics questions touched on as well in terms of how we relate to technology

Why Microsoft Is Giving Windows Away on Small Devices | Recode - because Android’s chink in its armour is tier-2 handset manufacturers on razor thin margins making no money and getting no cooperation from Google

Google Plus adds view counter to profile pages | Marketing Pilgrim - something to take account of when thinking about influence

The Next WhatsApp? | Forbes - nice overview of WeChat, Momo et al

China already makes up 60% of E-commerce spending in Asia.

GWI Commerce: the latest figures for buying online – GlobalWebIndex

16-24s least likely to use search engines – GlobalWebIndex - tend to engage more with than other ages with Q&A sites, suggests that search has to work on context and user intent more?

Hong Kong government spending millions developing apps that no one downloads | South China Morning Post