Cross border NFC services + more

6 minutes estimated reading time

DOCOMO and KT Agree to Launch Cross border NFC Services— To develop international services building on partnerships with key players — | Press Center | NTT DOCOMO Global – interesting move, I wonder if the big five wireless companies in Europe (Telefonica, Vodafone, France Telecom, Three, Deutsche Telekom) can do something similar in terms of cross border NFC services? If they did, what impact would it have on mobile payments adoption and traditional credit card payment platform usage? Would existing career billing systems be able to cope with the volume of payment transactions from cross border NFC services?

Nigo Talks About His Sale of Bape » Kineda – woah interesting feedback. BAPE without Nigo at the helm is like Stüssy without Shawn. Out of the Japanese brands only BAPE managed to get western sizing right. Looking forward to Nigo’s next thing. More on the luxury end of fashion here.

How To Tell a Story Through Photos – aimed at prospective photojournalists, but ideal for PRs

Major retailers ditch the Amazon Marketplace | Econsultancy – shame, Marketplace is one of the reasons why I shop Amazon

Microsoft’s Bing Gains Search Market Share in January | AllThingsD – explains Google’s imminent weather report

Chinese men: saviors of the It bag? | FT.com – very different consumer patterns

Timeline: Facebook’s Stormy Relationship with Privacy | PBS – evil.

To Understand Your Market, Harness The 7 Elements of Customer and Social Data « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang – if you only click on one link out of this lot make it this one

Asiajin » Facebook Japan Takes Hard Line, Banning Pseudo Names And Requires ID – Facebook doesn’t get Japanese consumers

Eureka lost: How the Internet has destroyed the thrill of the hunt. – By Matthew J.X. Malady – Slate Magazine

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop rallies troops in brutally honest ‘burning platform’ memo? (update: it’s real!) — Engadget – I am not sure moving platform is the right one for them. A third party platform will hollow the value out of their margins. Double down on MeeGo instead? Nokia watcher Tomi Ahonen poured cold water on the accuracy of the memo and offers his own opinion

Sanders Shoes – Sanders & Sanders Ltd is liked by Shawn Stüssy and Mark McNairy

Carl Zeiss to look at 22-nm circuit connections – nano-manufacturing

BBC Research and Development: Orchestrated Media – Beyond second and third screen – interesting concepts that agency planners are going to have to get to grips with

Mulberry / Love Blossoms – really nice Valentine-themed digital campaign

Responsible Staffing and Resourcing in Social Media | Ed Lee – good points on the realpolitik of a business versus the pervasive nature of social media

De-Finnistration: Nokia to shift HQ to US? • The Register – ok, the US is only 8 per cent of the world phone market in terms of value. Not sure an over-focus here is smart

Not all iPhone apps work on the Verizon iPhone — fragmentation looming? | ZDNet – may also be due to the fact that CDMA can’t do data and voice at the same time…

What Does Reported Sharp-CMI Alliance Mean? — Tech-On! – consolidation in LCD panels as markets mature and become commoditised whilst the cost of improving production and screen technologies becomes progressively more expensive

Not A Faster Horse » PR creates Ideas That Grow – does advertising repeat, or if its done well does it riff off the one theme the way PR campaigns coalesce around key messages

Shrinking International News Output of UK Papers Creates Opportunity for PR Pros « BusinessWired – Business Wire Blog – not sure about the conclusions, but the research is nice

Early Facebook execs back AI startup Vicarious Systems | VentureBeat – AI again, ex-Numenta people involved. Seems to be similar kind of work to what Virage tried a decade ago or more

China devotes its energy to green development – likely to develop a technological over the west

Biting into exabytes – huge data backup

Trunk.ly | Home – kind of like Pinboard.in

The era of cheap capital draws to a close | McKinsey QuarterlyThe global economy will soon have to cope with too little capital, not too much. And worries about hot capital moving too quickly into emerging markets could soon be replaced by an era of financial protectionism—in which governments restrict outflows of capital as a defense against rising interest rates for corporations and consumers

3 Sources of Conflict in Remote Teams, and How to Avoid Them: Online Collaboration – good set of tips

Promotions lose favour | Warc.com – wondering whether the consumer behaviour pattern seen by CPG manufacturers will evolve into a similar pattern for businesses like GroupOn? – Offer fatigue

Nofollow Link Attribute – So How Does Google Treat It (& Do We Need to Care?) | Search Engine Journal – interesting paradox between the nofollow tag and social media

Estée Lauder targets China: News from Warc.com – interesting move since most of the noise hasn’t been from mid-market brands yet. However health and beauty is a very competitive field

Here’s Why Groupon Was Forced To Run A Super Bowl Ad – low customer loyalty and low barriers to entry

Patterns of Temporal Variation in Online Media by Yang & Leskovec (Stanford University) – interesting correlation between the process of the news media’s agenda and the way Twitter hashtags operate. Memes have similar dynamics across very different media vehicles. Blogs tend to have longer lasting influence than news coverage

Google: “Expect Some Big Changes Here Very Shortly” – big algorithmic changes, what we used to call at Yahoo! a weather report. The fact that they are flagging it means it may be traumatic for SEO at least for a little while

HTC Invests In Multimedia Delivery Platform Company Saffron Digital – HTC building an eco-system for Android phones beyond the hold of Google

Asiajin » AKB360: Experience The Town On Your Desktop Anywhere – think Google earth versus QuickTimeVR interior shots

How US Government is using security researchers | VentureBeat – interesting article on Feed Over Mail technology

Before you can pay with phones, near-field communications needs better security | VentureBeat

Web-Based E-Mail Is Losing Popularity – NYTimes.com – due to mail applications

Yahoo Is Said to Move Toward Personalized Content – NYTimes.com – so its going to be a portal company for non-PC devices? How very 1999

How to Break into a Mac (And Prevent It from Happening to You) – lock down your firmware with a password

Software firms cotton on to the value of social media | New Media Age – this is more about continuing the upgrade ‘crack’ for IT managers in enterprises rather than pushing social further into enterprises in a lot of cases

Leading mobile developer: “No more free apps” – a sign of things to come? | Mobile Industry Review – interesting take on the app economy from a developer perspective

Disney Looks to the Cradle to Expand Business – NYTimes.com – taking product placement to it’s logical conclusion

AOL to Buy The Huffington Post – NYTimes.com – recursion. Steve Case merged AOL with Time Warner media. Time Warner spins out AOL, which then builds a media conglomerate

Egypt’s Internet Blackout Cost More Than OECD Estimates – Forbes – gives some good insight into how interconnected the world commerce system is

It is the structure of social networks that shapes influence… and the structure is changing | Trends in the Living Networks – some interesting ideas here

Criticism of imitation Sunday Tribune masthead – RTÉ News – Irish Mail on Sunday used a Sunday Tribune as a wrap on its own paper