renaissance chambara | Ged Carroll

China’s cigarette output soars despite tobacco controls – China’s anti-smoking efforts in the past decade have failed to limit the explosive growth of the country’s cigarette producers, according to a new report.

Hongkongers feel more ‘negatively’ towards mainland Chinese than Japanese, survey shows – relatively positive view of the Japanese isn’t surprising when you look at how Japanese style and products are consumed in Hong Kong. However when this headline is read through a mainland perspective it becomes more confrontational

China-EU Bilateral Investment Treaty: Can It Be Achieved? – Analysis

HKMA warns against use of Bitcoin – The Hong Kong Monetary Authority says the virtual currency, Bitcoin, cannot be considered as a means of payment or an electronic currency. The statement comes a day after the mainland ordered banks not to deal in Bitcoin.

China’s favorite basketball star unveils the Nike Kobe 9 Elite shoe – Nike is so beholden to China for sales

Is the yuan going global, or just masking more shady Chinese banking? – An obscure trade report about China is raising eyebrows about the swift rise of the country’s currency. After accounting for a mere 1.9% of financing for global trade in January 2012, the yuan now makes up a whopping 8.7% in October 2013

Moody’s to Apple: Don’t Listen to Carl Icahn – avoid “significantly more debt” or “face heightened credit risk”

Why Microsoft needs three—or more—operating systems | Ars Technica

Moore’s Law isn’t making chips cheaper anymore

Philips & Samsung among firms in EU raid – Philips and Samsung Electronics said they were among the companies visited by EU officers this week on suspicion of breaking competition rules.

Facebook Admits Organic Reach of Brand Posts Is Dipping | Advertising Age – buy more ads

Mobile Tracking at Dealerships Drives Consumer Data to Mazda | Advertising Age

You have too many chat apps. Can Layer connect them? | The Verge – Jabber for OTT?

See you on the golf course, John, Cisco is in trouble – I, Cringely – intereasting analysis

8 Brands Rocking Snapchat | Mashable

RIM oral history

Hong Kong consumers spend on luxuries rather than personal vehicles

Disney revives MVNO

Facebook admits organic reach is low

Facebook revamps power editor

Chinese government says Bitcoin can’t be used

Really nice bit of creative for LINE – amazing Thai advert

Apple finally signs deal with China Mobile, just in time for there LTE-like network

Socialize: November 2013 | Common Sense

What are Danish Consumers Doing Online?

Shipping containers | The Atlantic

Xiaomi – iPhone is still best phone on the market

Google Puts Money on Robots, Using the Man Behind Android – NYTimes.com

Landor’s 2014 trends forecast – WPP

Giant electronic hands let runners high-five people online

Where are the market researchers on Cameron’s trade delegation to China? | – How digital research methods can overcome challenges to researching

Making Mobile Ads That Work – Harvard Business Review  – when mobile ads actually work

Dating agencies to help Hong Kong’s career women find a husband | South China Morning Post – damn some of this is brutal

News: Mobile Trends to Keep In Mind | Monday Note – some nice slideware fodder

Cheap Central Bank Money Contributes to Dangerous Bubbles – SPIEGEL ONLINE – Spiegel predicting another crash

Xaxis and 24/7 Media make media buying platform behemoth – programmatic buying yada yada

Graphene in Telecommunications | Ericsson Labs

Teenagers say goodbye to Facebook, adding street cred to WeChat – not terribly surprising, Facebook has had its weaknesses baked in from early on

Chinese authorities conduct unannounced inspections of Bloomberg News – Term Sheet – Bloomberg has made a right mess of things

Judge: MPAA can’t call Hotfile founders “pirates” or “thieves” at trial | Ars Technica

Mobile Shopping Trends in the UK – comScore, Inc

How the world will progressively look weirder to us – big data begats big noise

Hong Kong’s Troubling Shortage of Men – Atlantic Mobile – from the little I have seen this is down to a two factors: Hong Kong has an aging population and the tension between tradition and western lifestyles. Many women are much more empowered and want more, by comparison men look for more traditional attributes in a woman

Lessons on radical innovation from Bell Labs, the grandfather of inventiveness – why hard innovation no longer happens in the west

Social Business and the McKinsey 7S Model – not terribly surprising

BCG Index Documents The Power Of Brand Advocacy

Yahoo Acquires Natural Language Processing Company SkyPhrase To Help Drive Intent Identification | TechCrunch

China To Account for 30% Global Smartphone Market in 2017 — China Internet Watch

Apple Gets “Significant Bounce” On 5c, 5s iPhones; Android Still Trumps With 71% Share Of All Sales (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

Tom Daley uses social media to come out, and bypass media and PR | The Wall Blog

Secret Weapon in Mall Battle – NYTimes.com – mobile applications

W Hotels: Social media done right | Rapt Cat – nice case study here based on the experience of Yi Chen

Techies vs. NSA: Encryption arms race escalates

Korea Insights Data Download | InMobi – interesting report on Korean movie going habits (reg wall)

Windows 8 falls to 6.66% share as Windows 8.1 hits 2.64%, but combined the duo barely grows to 9.3% – PC platform maturation, touch lack of a compelling reason to upgrade?

prosthetic knowledge — 252 Byte Demos of P01 Visual coding experiments… – inspirational

Nobel prize winning economist warns against US bubble

App Publish | Mobile Advertising – InMobi – simplified app store

Black Friday 2013 Report – IBM – PDF

Wolfram’s next thing – sentient applications

New Linux worm targets routers, cameras etc

The fall (and rise?) of Yahoo!

Could Social Media Storytelling Help Apparel Retailers Stave Off the Discounts This Christmas? – Analyst Insight from Euromonitor International

Samsung’s ads are working, but not as well as it wants – Relentless advertising has helped Samsung take top spot in the global smartphone market, but it’s also given the company another title: it’s one of the biggest ad spenders around

Renren announces third quarter loss – reduced revenue from advertising and gaming, down some 5.6% year-on-year

Bigger (Data) Is Not Always Better – In2

R Kelly sets up ‘Black Panties hotline’ to promote new album – Callers can sign up to receive eight messages a month from US R&B star – old school marketing channel

Samsung execs to discuss ‘crisis awareness’ at huge company meeting. – Samsung’s management team is meeting from December 17th through the 20th to discuss its plans for the next year, and one of the main topics is “crisis awareness,” ZDNet reported. – PR opportunity?

Mac vs Chromebook: Google employees instructed to use OS X computers | BGR

Harvard Materials Scientists Invents 3D Printing Tech for Batteries – A materials scientist from Harvard University named Jennifer Lewis and her team have invented a new ink and printing process that allows or the manufacture of 3D printed batteries at room temperature. The scientists say that the tech is still at an early stage, but shows promise.

How Important are the MINT Countries to the Global Economy? – This acronym stands for Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey.

India probing Ericsson over essential patents – India’s antitrust regulator has launched a probe into Ericsson over allegations the company is making excessive royalty demands for standards-essential patents.

You lost the love…. are mobile operators the new banks in terms of branding

A Beautiful Mystery - IDEO’s Spark app

Remote gambling in Singapore facing heavy restrictions - Online and other remote betting activities within Singapore will be illegal, subject to “specific exemptions”, under plans to be drawn up by the Government in the country.

Yahoo! Hong Kong Deals Most Popular Coupon site in Hong Kong, Groupon and Taobao Juhuasuan show strong growth - The coupon sector in Hong Kong has seen a healthy growth of 14.7% from 1.24 million unique visitors in April 2013 to 1.42 million unique visitors in September 2013.

Seattle Diner Booting Customers For Wearing Google Glass – Forbes

Samsung’s marketing splurge doesn’t always bring bang-for-buck | Reuters

Slide fodder: APAC internet penetration and social-media use – Campaign Asia

Samsung’s massive ad spend | Open (minds, finds, conversations)… - compensating for maturity in smartphone design and differentiation

Why a plain packaging U-turn from UK.gov could cost £3bn a year - According to friendly “leaks” passed to newspapers overnight, the government may force cigarette manufacturers to sell their wares in plain packaging after yet another review, despite rejecting the policy earlier this year.

Ministers will order ISPs to block terrorist and extremist websites | The Guardian - Great Britannic Firewall

Great Japanese burger wrapper design

270 million Android users in China

Xiaomi sold 150,000 handsets in 10 mins on Weixin

Microsoft admits it has ‘too many operating systems’ - Likely will merge Windows RT and Windows Phone

ISPs should block ‘pirate’ websites, says European Court of Justice - Advocate General Cruz Villalón hints at the future

Samsung’s curved Galaxy Round smartphone fails to sell - Firm can’t raise a glass, no one is buying a Round

Latest global comparison of household Internet speeds | Trends in the Living NetworksTrends in the Living Networks

How To Mail Hard Copies When Traveling Without a Printer

China launches antitrust probe into Qualcomm | Telecom Asia

British Airways brings British etiquette to China – Mumbrella Asia

There will be almost 200 million mobile augmented reality users by 2018 - putting pressure on battery technology currently solves by external battery packs and in-car charging

103 Compelling Social Media And Marketing Statistics For 2013 (and 2014) – Business 2 Community - slidefodder

My good friend Stephen Holmes is looking for a middleweight designer for his agency near Old Street: it’s a small operation that works with some large brands.

Here is the full spiel:

Middleweight Graphic Designer
Bloodybigspider is a small design agency in East London working across a huge variety of local and global campaigns, both digital and print. We’re looking for a middleweight designer to join our small team and help out with our ever expanding work load!

You’ll need to have:

• Strong portfolio of design across branding, literature and digital
• Hawkeye for detail
• 3 years+ agency experience
• Strong CS skills
• Client facing experience (there’ll be phone calls and meetings)
• Ability to manage your own time / prioritise workflow across multiple projects
• Ability to work on your own and in a team
• Ability to prepare artwork for print and check proofs
• Initiative and common sense and be a self starter

It would be great (though not essential) if you also have:

• Basic HTML
• AfterEffects

In return, as a small agency, we can offer an opportunity to really make your mark and step up in terms of responsibility and projects – some of which you’ll be running.

Salary
£27 – £30K DOE

To start as soon as possible

Portfolios under 5MB

* Thanks but no agencies please *

Drop them an email talent@bloodybigspider.com

Why Intel wants to be everyone’s chip maker - interesting analysis

Brands need to reassess Gen Y - focus on experiences, not really surprising given how many ‘objects’ have been obliterated by digital economy

Unnamed US officials speculate on Snowden’s ‘doomsday cache’ - feels a bit like spin, we’ll never know though

Safeplug delivers Tor-in-a-box for anonymous web surfing | SiliconANGLE - interesting accessible Tor, will this get around the Firefox vulnerabilities that government agencies have used to crack Tor?

Luxury Brands and the Lure of Social Media – Euromonitor International

ROLEX Facebook page - really nice terms of service that the brand shines through

Consumer Appliances 2014 Edition – The State of the Market – Euromonitor International

Tackling the Potential Christmas Spending Slump

High Protein Trend Set to Revive Peanuts – Analyst Insight from Euromonitor International

50 ways that you know you are generation-x, in no particular order:

1. You were afraid of a hole in the ozone layer before climate change became the new green cause
2. You hear the word portal and think of an early website with a cluttered layout like a broadsheet newspaper from companies like MSN, Yahoo! and Excite rather than a round window with a nautical theme or the PC game
3. You can remember when your cellphone was smaller than your current iPhone
4. You can remember feeling sad when the local HMV | Tower Records | Fopp closed down
5. One of your coolest friends worked behind the counter in an independent record or comic shop
6. Bill Gates is the ex-CEO of Microsoft, not a global do-gooder
7. You can remember when Sony and Nokia were cool
8. Morrissey is up there with Plato
9. The M in MTV stood for music
10. You can remember when the Argos catalogue was a cornucopia of consumerism
11. You remember reading American Psycho and sharing which page you were able to read up to with friends before having to give up on the book
12. The first time you heard of Calvin Klein was as a punchline in Back To The Future
13. You still call a Snickers bar a Marathon on occasion, ditto Starburst and Opal Fruits
14. You ‘got’ the Rutger Hauer Guinness adverts
15. There weren’t comedians before alternative comedians like Ben Elton
16. You can remember when watching TV meant four or less channels
17. You can remember the wonder of the internet before the spam became overwhelming
18. When you see Guy Pearce in a film, you still think of his character Mike Young; a friend of Scott and Charlene in Neighbours
19. You were blown away by the first series of This Life; it really spoke to you
20. The truth is out there still; Edward Snowden’s allegations sound like a plot from a lost series of the X Files
21. You find yourself asking when did Lego get so expensive?
22. You can remember River Island when it was Chelsea Girl and Concept Man
23. You can remember the static build-up on the front of the TV when it had been on a while and then turned off and watching the dot in the middle of the screen fade to black in a darkened room like some impromptu nightlight
24. You had considered booking a last minute getaway in Spain at some point because of the amazing offer you had found on Teletext
25. Everyone you knew had Dire Straits Brothers in Arms in their CD collection, even if they hated Dire Straits. There was some dark conspiracy involving black helicopters in how the discs made their way into every home
26. You owned a ‘Groover’ Hoover logo t-shirt at some point
27. You’ve had someone come up and offer you money for your decade old Adidas Superstar reissues from the early noughties
28. You customised your instant messenger client with AIM buddy icon packs that brands used to provide as a download alongside with screensavers and wallpapers. My personal favourite was the swirling cow in the tornado offered as a free download to promote Twister when it was released at the cinema
29. You’ve owned an Ericsson mobile phone
30. You can remember when petrol stations sold four-star leaded petrol, older people can even remember the  five-star leaded petrol that stopped being sold sometime after the 1973 OPEC oil embargo
31. You wore a Swatch watch and thought it was cool, you may have even splurged for a Swatch internet time (@time) watch later on
32. You’ve got the original 1994 version of Renaissance: The Mix Collection by Sasha and John Digweed. You may even point out by how the 2004 re-master of the album was ruined since it no longer features the Qat Mix (by Sasha) of M-People’s How Can I Love You More? If you actually went to Renaissance at the Venue 44 in Mansfield you are probably hoping blurry photos of you in a Versace shirt, leather trousers and a pair of Red Wing engineers boots never make it online
33. You know the weak spot of Global Hypercolour t-shirts, contrast coloured arm pits
34. You’ve used an AOL install CD as a coffee coaster
35. You know Graffiti
36. You paid (or dodged) poll tax
37. You felt discriminated against by the government because of your love of repetitive beats
38. You own a Ministry of Sound mix CD collection in a hard back book type case
39. You used to read Select magazine
40. You’ve used Wella Shockwaves ‘wet-look styling gel’
41. You tried to get a Magic Eye poster to work but all you saw was a fractal mess
42. You bought a copy of NME with a flexi-disc on the front
43. The first Tolkien film you’ve seen was Ralph Bakshi’s animated version of The Lord of The Rings
44. You can remember when the first McDonald’s opened in your town and served root beer. Secondly, when you asked for a Coke you were told ‘that’s McDonald’s cola’
45. Bod, Auntie Flo, PC Copper, Frank the Postman, Farmer Barleymow, Alberto Frog and his Amazing Animal Band – need no explanation
46. You liked the Beastie Boys before their seminal Paul’s Boutique album
47. Audio on the move meant Walkman and a selection of carefully curated mix cassettes
48. The line ‘Get on down and party’ meant that you had caught the opening credits of Dance Energy with Normski
49. It’s still weird catching Janet Street-Porter of ‘yoof TV’ fame on Loose Women whilst channel-hopping
50. You’ve used a television without a remote control