Galaxy Gear
No shanzhai Galaxy Gear smartwatches – Shanzhai is the innovation / counterfeit ecosystem in Chinese manufacturing. They make fake iPhones and feature phones with a built in razor, or modelled after a Coke can. So why should Samsung be worried about a lack of Galaxy Gear clones? Shanzhai manufacturers have many faults, but you can’t fault the way they have their finger on the pulse of consumer desires for the latest gadgets. There is no Galaxy Gear because there is insufficient consumer interest for Chinese manufacturers to want to pirate them
Beauty
Nu-Skin reacts to ‘brainwashing’ report – disclosure I advised the Nu Skin team at my agency
China
Opinion: Rethinking “Made in China” « Gear Patrol
Consumer behaviour
MediaPost Publications Trust In Government ‘Decimated,’ Business Now Leads 01/20/2014 – seems to be across countries
Economics
Is China’s Slower Growth Good or Bad News? – WSJ
Ethics
Government sugar tsar works for Coca-Cola and Mars – not terribly surprising
Finance
WMPs in China pose challenge for ICBC – WMP (wealth management product) – different types of securitised debt, in this case it looks similar to a junk bond. Many of these are being used to fund China’s real estate bubble. This sounds like a slow disaster in the making. The Chinese government will be able to unwind it when it goes wrong, but there will be pain and western investors involved will be screwed
How to
Discoverly provides unified access to LinkedIn and Facebook
Ideas
Innovation
IBM Turns to Semiconductor Packaging Post-Moore’s Law | EE Times
10 Things I’ve learned at the d.school so far – need finding is the critical first step that leads to problem solving
Luxury
Indian luxury business underwhelms
Marketing
Liushen focuses on heritage to attract younger consumers
Pivot Your Content Mindset: From Marketing to Distribution [Infographic] | – context and away from traditional PR strengths
MediaPost Publications Paul Donato And The Final Frontier 01/19/2014 – merging of intelligence technologies and market research. It can be done, but should it? Is it an inevitable aspect of the technium?
Survey Data on the Growth/Shrinkage of Web Marketing Channels in 2014 – Rand’s Blog
Media
Verizon buys OTT TV assets from Intel
Online
News Feed FYI: What Happens When You See More Updates from Friends – Facebook Newsroom – marketers need to change their approach
Facebook plans suite of standalone mobile apps for 2014 | The Verge – interesting move away from their general purpose network approach
China’s Twitter is bleeding users – The Tell – MarketWatch – how many of those accounts are real accounts?
More Than 11 Million Young People Have Fled Facebook Since 2011 – Skeptics of Facebook’s business model have long pointed to anecdotal evidence that the social network is losing its luster with teens as evidence that the firm will ultimately be unable to justify its $140 billion valuation. However this signal is lost in the noise of increasing members from emerging economies as the rest of the world comes online
Retailing
How Amazon. Avoids Wal-Mart like reputation
The Tipping Point (E-Commerce Version) | Jeff Jordan or the technium blitzes large parts of the retail sector
A Sneaky Path Into Target Customers’ Wallets – NYTimes.com
JD.com launches mobile messaging app – Tencent going into logistics and payments in WeChat for in-app e-tailing, Sina partnering with Alibaba to do social commerce over Weibo – the messy world of online media and e-tailing in China
Security
A disaster in the making: 95% of ATMs still run Windows XP – quelle surprise
Smart devices hacked into botnet – fridge sends out spam emails
Software
When Apple reached parity with Windows | Asymco – its speculation
Web of no web
MIT’s cool new transparent screen tech could mean better heads-up displays
Baidu’s image-recognition software isn’t perfect, but it’s super smart and will make you laugh
Mobile Opportunity: Google the Conglomerate: After Nest, No Industry is Safe – Michael Mace on Google
I, Cringely The Internet of Crap – I, Cringely
Is your car spying on you? – yes it is, welcome to the inevitable march of progress aka the technium
Wireless
Here’s Why Apple Is Putting So Much Emphasis On Selling iPhones In China
30% of post paid Verizon customers have a feature phone
A smart form for the smartphone? – the “smartphone” is a term we are all very familiar with; first coined in 1997 by Ericsson