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.
This infographic came from Sinatechblog.com.cn
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 musicians had made no money from the sampling of the tracks (I guess its likely that the record labels and publishing companies keep royalties received to themselves)
As session musicians, the tracks were created on an industrial scale going from session-to-session churning out recordings
The Champ was recorded in one take which is unusual for a studio recording
There is a nice circular reference in that The Champ references Otis Redding’s Tramp
Their discussion on how technological change has affected music creation over the past four decades
The video is on YouTube so may not be visible to all readers.
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.
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:
Perceived levels of sophistication and urbane living versus ignorance, a lack of taste and poor manners
Perceived focus on money and consumerism over everything else in life
Culture or the lack of it (language and food being the main fault lines)
Some of which is legitimate, to name two:
Mainland Chinese desperate to ensure their kids have a Hong Kong identity using underhand techniques to have their children born in Hong Kong. One can understand the desire to do the best for one’s child, but I can also see the Hong Kong side to this as well. In addition, all of this running around cloak-and-dagger style adds additional risk and stress – which can’t be good for mother or child?
Over exploitation of Mainland tourists being forced to shop in certain stores and spend money. This is partly due the subsidised business model that tour operators used to get mainland Chinese to go on shopping trips to Hong Kong. The subsidy came from ensuring that they purchased from certain Hong Kong shops. It is similar in nature to the cheap or free holidays offered to sell timeshare properties in Spain and Portugal – immoral but the rational consumer would realise what they were likely to be stepping into
Here is the video on Tudou without English subtitles:
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:
The whole concept of a meet-up in my house for a political event was something I found a bit uncomfortable, but it seems to be part of American culture
The amount of software the campaign uses to support these events and harvest prospective voter contact details out of them
The primary goal seemed to be to garner contact details for email and SMS purposes – a prospective voter acquisition strategy
It was also a learning organisation; looking to get lessons learned from the sessions on how they could go better in the future
They made a point of de-emphasising social media as a tool to garner invitations and encouraged people to reach out in person or on the phone instead – which I thought was interesting. Social media was a channel, but not the primary one
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
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
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.
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.”
Why the feds smashed Megaupload – interesting timing around SOPA | PIPA protests and the MegaUpload versus Universal Music dispute over the MegaUpload advert
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.
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.
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.
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)
renaissance chambara | Ged Carroll - Created by Ged and offered to surfers (or whatever folks do on the 'web now) under a BSD licence. From a technology perspective this site is powered by WordPress and supercharged with caffiene. It looks minimalist, yet aesthetically pleasing thanks to a slightly tweaked version of DePo Skinny Theme designed by the talented Mr Powazek. The site is hosted on a grid service by the clever people at (mt).
