Ged Carroll

Month: February 2010

  • Palm troubles

    First of all some disclosure: I worked on the Palm account at my agency some ten years ago now and got to work with some of the smartest people in mobile device technology, notably the company’s chief competitive officer Michael Mace as an occasional media spokesperson back when his pictures had him with a Magnum PI-style moustache.

    At the time I worked on the account the company was riding high on the PDA boom, but the seeds of its current problems were sown back then.

    Even after working on the Palm account, I was a Palm customer. I had a Palm Vx which I used to death (quite literally) and spent a fortune on accessories including a Rhinoskin titanium slider hard case and a ThinkOutside portable keyboard. After that  I had a number of other Palm devices: a m515, a Tungsten3, a Treo 600 and a Treo 650.

    The last device left such a bad taste in my mouth because of an address book full of duplicates and corrupted data that I migrated to Nokia E-series devices, which provided a superior experience to the Treo 650 despite serious software stability issues.

    The company has been buffeted by critics over the years, many of them well-meaning.

    With the arrival of Jon Rubenstein to give it flare and product smarts and a matching injection of new money into the company, there was every chance that Palm could reinvent itself.

    Unfortunately it didn’t, and the company is now reaping the fruits of mediocre labours.

    To be honest the signs where there that the new product line wasn’t great and I wasn’t surprised:

    The communications-related signs are particularly damning as they indicate that at least some insiders at the company may have realised that the product despite the hoopla was not ready for primetime.

    Palm Pre

    The second good sign of a bad device is when after a decent amount of time virtually no one that you know owns one. I only know one person: the fashion-forward Rise co-founder Paul Allen; however on this occasion the Palm Pre has turned out not to be a fashion classic and more like a gadget equivalent of MC Hammer’s parachute pants.

    Interestingly, in his letter to Palm employees, Rubenstein puts much of the weight of corrective action on working short-term tactics with carrier partners to create demand push with no clue about what execution improvements in terms of product redesigns and quality improvements (if any) would be coming to shore up a poor customer experience. More gadget related content can be found here.

  • China South City

    China South City is a complex just outside Pinghu, Shenzhen that allows manufacturers to showcase their wares. Think Hannover Messe but as a full-time stand. It is populated with paper salesmen, pallets of raw plastic from chemical companies, fabrics companies and factories that churn out garments and accessories.

    China South City - Shenzhen

    Many of the halls look like Smithfields market on steroids, but the newest building which opened up a couple of months ago here looks like the mother-of-all-shopping-malls lies empty.

    China South City - Shenzhen

    Is this multi-storey behemoth a white elephant? I don’t know, if they can keep it open long enough I think it will fill up with vendors over time. In addition to the real-world options for networking and customer education, China South City also provides an online marketplace for the firms similar in nature to Alibaba.

    The real-world world meeting option allows customers to find out about the tangible qualities that a web page can’t tell you with sufficient precision. How doe the leather in the handbag feel, what is the tension like in stitching between two fabric pieces. Allowing the two parties to meet in the real-world helps engender trust so that repurchases could happen online inside. I was pretty impressed by this multi-channel offering.

    ‘Ren chi’ is a Chinese phrase that my friends used to describe the deciding factor of the complex’ likely success -it roughly translates as ‘people energy’. The property developers seem to be very conscious of this so are opening up the centre to tour groups despite the fact that the centre is wholesale. The exhibition hall onsite serves as a sports centre for the locality and spare car park space has been turned into basketball courts to keep young people in the area and top-up the ‘people energy’ deficit.

  • Internet experience in China

    If you are like me you probably have some favourite platforms that you find useful for your online life. This is a list of what I found worked and didn’t work from my internet experience in China. I thought that it would be handy to know, so that if you were visiting you could put surrogate services in place to continue your online life.

    Works well

    • Flickr – both Uploadr and the site work just as well as they work at home
    • Delicious – again just works as well as you would expect it to at home
    • Google – seemed to work fine, though this may change because they haven’t been the best corporate citizen in China recently. Interestingly, typing Google.com took me directly through to the US site rather than their usual trick of geo-targeting and loading up their local country portal instead – which is a source of mild irritation when I am travelling
    • Google Analytics – dashboard worked as promised
    • Feedburner – worked as good as usual. The 120-odd drop in subscribers on the day I arrived in China I put down to my content being uninteresting as it picked right up again the following day
    • Pretty much all the major IM platforms worked well: I use Skype, Yahoo! messaging, AOL Instant Messenger, GTalk
    • LinkedIn – worked fine
    • Last.fm – worked just as well as it does back home. I scrobbled and listened to music from Shenzhen
    • Web radio – I logged on to RTE to keep up with the latest news and current affairs closer to home with no problem at all

    Patchy performance

    • Foursquare – whilst I could select Hong Kong as a city, it found it often difficult to register with a place as it struggled to match location with ‘geo-coding’. A bit disappointing to be honest with you. I did use it successfully in Shenzhen where I found free wi-fi. Your mileage may vary

    Didn’t work

    • Twitter – I found myself using instant messenger much more, to compensate for the way that I use Twitter as a communications tool. I use a multi-platform instant messaging client called Adium and had no problem with Yahoo! Instant Messenger, GTalk, Skype, .mac | MobileMe messaging, AOL Instant messenger out here so workarounds for communication are really easy
    • Friendfeed – to be honest I only looked at this because I thought I may be able to catch up on a few Twitter feeds
    • Facebook doesn’t work, but my account is a zombie account anyway with content being fed in from other places like Twitter
    • Bloglines – I would recommend downloading an RSS newsreader client and importing your OPML file to temporarily replace using Bloglines. I missed my RSS reader far more than the more banal communications of Twitter

    Internet experience in China: performance

    Generally sites can be a little slow and occasionally you need to use the refresh button. Traffic gets very slow indeed on Sunday evenings.

    The Chinese are enthusiastic adopters of the ‘net and families often log-on to watch a film or TV programming on a Sunday evening – during this time, website load times noticeably increased and I found video Skype calls worse than useless. So let’s hope that BBC iPlayer doesn’t get too popular in the UK, otherwise reality TV shows may cause the ‘net to grind to a halt. More China related content here.

  • Impressions of China, from Shenzhen

    My first impressions of China are tied to a single number. China has a current economic growth rate of 8 per cent.

    8 per cent growth

    Even if the UK economy were overheating in a boom, it would be barely running at 3  percent growth. 8 per cent growth creates a huge amount of activity.

    It is something that would be more familiar to our industrial age forebears who would have experienced similar growth in the likes of Birmingham, Detroit, Manchester or Yokohama. I saw building sites working around the clock and infrastructure being thrown in at a speed that would inconceivable in the UK.

    The comparison to Victorian Britain also bears up in terms of the emergence of a middle-class and a large working-class population for whom getting a good job is extremely competitive.

    In many respects the middle-class Chinese has more in common with their American counterparts than Europeans. Home-grown mini-vans beloved of ‘soccer moms’ are popular on the roads and I saw more Buick and Cadillac saloons here than I have seen anywhere else outside the US.

    This viewpoint has probably been reinforced by the fact that Shenzhen, like Los Angeles, is such a car city. The city authorities are addressing that at the moment. However, these surface impressions of China belie the fact that Chinese middle class still earn less than their US counterparts and have to save half their money to deal with future health costs.

    The city of Shenzhen are putting in four mass transit lines at once: for a comparison London took over three decades to get the Jubilee Line in place.

    I got to try the mass transit system which has already been put in. It is of a similar standard to rail systems in Singapore and Hong Kong. The ticket system is completely paperless with single tickets looking like an old-time milk bottle token that dairies used to issue to customers as a payment system. There is nothing old school about these tokens as they seem to be RFID tags.

    Impressions of China Dream, from the perspective of the middle class

    A quick scan of English-language books for sale revealed an interest in finance, stock-picking, management – particularly Peter Drucker and quality improvement / process improvement – the Juran Institute works and The Toyota Way seemed to be pretty popular. All of these books give impressions of a China dream that is based on the kind of hard work and getting ahead that would have been familiar to Americans in the immediate aftermath of world war 2.

    I have been staying in a condo which would not look out of place in Mountain View or San Mateo.

    Again surface impressions of China may lead to false assumptions about consumption. The growth of Shenzhen is also very Chinese, you may shop at a 7-Eleven and sip a latte at Starbucks, but there are very few recognisable names in neon at the top of the skyscrapers – the only ones I saw were Hyundai and Samsung. Traffic is much more chaotic in terms of the way people drive than we are used to in the UK. Electric scooters are popular and are lethal, hard to spot like a bicycle and silent.

    Alongside the growth is coming reinvention. In a set of TV factory buildings; an area called OCT-LOFT is being developed as a mix of galleries and workplaces for the creative industries. A few hours people watching in the spacious Starbucks down there saw a plethora of Mac laptops open and busily working away on the free wi-fi: kind of equivalent to the Truman Brewery in London.

    If the West deludes itself that China can make stuff, but can’t do the knowledge economy then it is in for a rude awakening. Although Shenzhen is the world’s workshop, there is a transition going on to higher-value products and services.

    I got a change to talk to a local web developer and could see the sophistication of this market catching up the UK digital sector sooner rather than later. Couple this with China Telecom offering business web hosting at 200 Renimbi per year and you get a sense that things could move on here very fast.

    A thirst for technology

    Looking around the markets here, there is a thirst for technology similar to what you see in Japan. Mobile technology was particularly popular, there were handsets on display that I previously thought were Japan or Korea-only models with large swivel TV screens on the handsets.

    I used a PAYG SIM by China Mobile which provided me with both a Chinese and Hong Kong number. Mobile devices have also become a luxury totem here with Vertu and Porsche Design devices displayed alongside the latest models from Nokia.

    Value proposition

    Chinese consumers are not all about price. Yes Chinsese consumers like free stuff, gifts and status recognition through VIP loyalty schemes and experiences. However impressions of China consumers are changing from price to a more complex value proposition. There are many foreign-made products as well as foreign brands on sale in the department stores. Ones that I immediately noticed were:

    • Zwilling – the German manufacturer of quality kitchen knives, personal tweezers and nail scissors
    • Carrera sunglasses and goggles
    • Victorinox Swiss Army Officers Knives
    • Ray-Ban sunglasses
    • Porsche Design

    Whilst China may embrace many aspects of the market economy, the government is very good at putting in infrastructure for the greater public good such as art galleries and public parks. It is amazing how green the place actually is. For every Shenzhen, there is a rust belt down in Hubei province with a dark dystopian vibe. Impressions of China from Shenzhen have to be tempered with a knowledge of the hinterland. Shenzhen is a special economic zone. It is part of the vanguard of where China wants to go. It is at the top of what China hopes it can direct into trickle down economics.  More posts on Shenzhen here.