B52 upgrades + other news

6 minutes estimated reading time

B52 upgrades

B52 receives first tech upgrade since 1961: Now with color screens and wireless networking – this is a credit to the engineers that designed and manufactured to the B52. The longevity there was something dieselpunkish about mixed analogue and digital controls that appeals to me though. The B52 was originally designed as a nuclear bomber, but has only been used in action with conventional weapons. The B52 served in Vietnam, the first Gulf War, Afghanistan and Iraq. The B52 may serve for close on to a century in the US Air Force

Bombs away
Boeing B52 H

Business

Dutch Lady reaches out to employees to push its brand | Marketing Interactive – interesting smart FMCG strategy

BAD CLOUD | Will McInnes – am sure we can all relate to Will’s experience

Real Estate Tycoon Sees Titanic Moment for China’s Housing Market – China Real Time Report – WSJ – he made these comments in what he believed was a Chatham House style setting

China

Guangdong to loosen hukou household registration system for millions of migrants | South China Morning Post – presumably to help stem some of the migration of factories inland. Good to see these people getting some government respect though (paywall)

China clamps down on US consulting groups | FT – as the likes of McKinsey maybe passing on commercial secrets to the US government

Chinese brands in world of their own | South China Morning Post – amazing to see the rise of Tencent

Consumer behaviour

BlueFocus: China is changing not slowing | Marketing Interactive – investing in big data, mobile, video makes sense. I thought e-commerce was an interesting area to choose, especially given China’s unique landscape

Jet setting as a Brand in China | L2 ThinkTank – interesting consumption pattern

Carnival’s CEO Explains the Cruise Industry’s Biggest Problem | BusinessWeek – interesting consumer perception conundrum

Design

Electro-Optic Camera: The first DSLR – really interesting history

Japan

If you encounter a natural disaster in Japan, you can connect to wifi using SSID “00000JAPAN” – way ahead of emergency planning elsewhere

No Time to Text? Say It With Stickers – NYTimes.com – LINE doing well in LatAm and Asia

Korea

Kakao And Daum To Merge, Creating One Of South Korea’s Largest Internet Companies | TechCrunch – this is a really big deal in South Korea. Daum is big in areas such as mobile search and social networks, KakaoTalk has gained ubiquity amongst Korean phone users and made a profitable business from games and stickers. I wonder what Tencent’s share will be in the combined company?

Kakao-Daum – The Next Big Thing From Korea? BeTech – some of the best analysis I have seen about the Daum Kakao merger

Legal

China to clean up instant messaging services – Chinadaily.com.cn – rumour spreading and fraud

Honda’s Super Cub now protected under 3D trademark registration | AkihabaraNews – allows trademarks of iconic shapes

Luxury

Comptoir des Cotonniers’ 20-Second Shopping | L2ThinkTank – really nice pop-up execution

Media

Influicity Launches YouTube Influencer Marketplace – the phrase influencer marketplace made me feel uneasy

Watchmen writer Alan Moore unveils comic book app and open-source toolkit Electricomics – really interesting media experiment by Alan Moore

Omnicom Strikes $230 Million Two-Year Mobile Deal With Twitter | Ad Age – this is all about access to information

It’s alive! What NPR learned from turning its @nprnews account from a bot to a human | Nieman Journalism Lab – interesting experiment in bot versus human curation on a Twitter feed

U.K. police try (and fail) to shut down largest torrent search engine on the Web | VentureBeat – interesting editorial by VentureBeat, I would have expected this more from the likes of Cory Doctorow or Laurence Lessig than a business publication

Online

Comcast promised poor Americans cheap internet, but most of them didn’t get it | Quartz – the money quote for me “The Internet today is like electricity. If you don’t have it, you’re screwed.”

Digital Intelligence :: Marriott offers loyalty points for social shares – loyalty points for advocacy

Retailing

Amazon Deserves All of Its Bad PR | Valleywag – any article that starts with the Lovecraftian sobriquet ‘ the Cthulhu of retail’ has to be read

JD.com Has been Added onto WeChat as the Shopping Channel | Technode – Tencent is the largest shareholder of JD so this makes sense. Mirrors what Alibaba did with Weibo

Tokyo Girls Collection in Fukushima’ brings big smiles to battered Tohoku | Asahi Shimbun – an interesting move given the mix of real-world event and m-commerce that TGC is. Nice to see that they will have made money and done good

Security

Everything Is Broken — The Message — Medium – interesting essay on computer security

Australian Apple iDevices hijacked, held to ransom | The Age – using passwords from recent data breaches. Interesting Australian focus

Schneier on Security: TrueCrypt WTF – fascinating commentary discussion on TrueCrypt

U.S. Companies Hacked by Chinese Didn’t Tell Investors – Bloomberg – which is pretty shocking. They would have at least been at a disadvantage trading with Chinese state-owned companies and the disclosures may have impacted goodwill as partners would be concerned about what information was disclosed. I would have thought all of this would have been meaningful to the share price?

Software

Playing the sales game: Do game releases actually increase console sales? | ExtremeTech – working with small data sets but interesting

Jolla’s Small-Scale Approach to Tackling Android | CCInsight – interesting analysis of Jolla. Will Sailfish really be able to go up against Cyanogen etc?

Technology

The History of the Modern Graphics Processor – TechSpot – interesting story, particularly how cyclical the market was

Microsoft’s golden era in China coming to an end | WantChinaTimes – Microsoft will not only lose government purchase orders, but will also lose the central enterprise purchases and OEM market–the three major revenue sources for Microsoft in China – according to a Chinese newspaper, if true then this clobbers Microsoft in China

Web of no web

Watch Skype translate a video conversation in real time | Quartz – you know that time when you first saw the internet and it was a thing of wonder, rather than where you go to work? That’s how I felt when I saw this, mixed up with feeling dirty realising that Skype is actually Microsoft

Can the Nervous System Be Hacked? – NYTimes.com – Johnny Mnemonic anyone?

Wireless

New video shows you everything cool about the LG G3 in only 2 minutes – they had me at lasers

Am I Crazy For Wanting A 4-Inch iPhone 6? | BusinessInsider – good points in terms of usability. It does beg the question do consumers actually want a phone anymore? I suspect some of them do, but handset manufacturers tend to disagree if one where to believe the big screen trend