Performance per watt & other things

4 minutes estimated reading time

Performance per watt

Is Moore’s Law Less Important to the Tech Industry? – NYTimes.com – the problem is that it’s hard to focus on performance per watt and define the difference. Software has as big an issue on performance per watt Way before this, the speed bumps were having less and less impact, partly due to poorly written software, you actually saw the lengthening of the product upgrade cycle on PCs years ago when people wouldn’t upgrade from XP and internet-enabled machines where perfectly adequate even when they were six years old (paywall)

Business

The US’s western states are guzzling water so fast they don’t realize they’re running out | Quartz – Bectel et al would probably be a great stock buy around about now

China Manufacturing Gauge Rises to 18-Month High on Stimulus  – Bloomberg – interesting since this data is focused on private sector SMEs, rather than SOEs (state-owned enterprises) that have benefited from government stimulus

China Voice: More Internet companies should go abroad – Xinhua – these firms face limited (but growing) regulatory barriers in their overseas expansion while foreign firms effectively blocked from the Chinese Internet, especially as it becomes clear that some really are viewed as national champions. I wonder if results outside China will be harmonised as well?

Consumer behaviour

Apple’s iPad Problem | Slate – and those that do have a third device don’t need to replace it that often, especially since the iPad seems robust and perfectly adequate doing what it does, so the replacement cycles will be slower

What Type of Sharer Are You? Improve Your Social Media With Our Quiz – the study is link bait but they do have some good links to interesting academic research

Design

Yves Béhar sells his design agency to Chinese PR firm BlueFocus | VentureBeat – BlueFocus is looking more and more like the kind of fully rounded business Martin Sorrell should be worried about

Daring Fireball: More Amazing Xiaomi/Apple Design Coincidences – John Gruber’s Jobs-esque dis ‘Xiaomi copies with some degree of taste; Samsung has no taste‘.

Indonesia

Indonesia 101 | PixelBits – great rundown on Indonesia from a start-up perspective

Legal

China regulator determines Qualcomm has monopoly: state-run newspaper | Reuters – from Bill Bishop’s Sinocism newsletter – how do Qualcomm’s planned China royalty rates compare with those it charges in Japan and Korea? And is the possible fine assessed against China revenue or global revenue? I have heard it might be the latter, which could be significantly larger than what shareholders expect

Qualcomm delivers blowout Q3, but cuts outlook over China woes | ZDNet – The Chinese government regulatory issues were well known if not well understood, however it was interesting that some Chinese clients feel that they don’t need to pay Qualcomm….

How the Hammer Falls as China Nails Corruption – Caixin – interesting that the investigating body site is seen as a source and the audience goes there directly disintermediating news outlets

Marketing

Facebook Downplays Billion-Dollar App Ad Business | Re/code – the number of apps on there is quite scary

Waggener Edstrom launches WE Infinity analytics platform | PR Week – how does this match against Vocus etc – more related content here

WhatsApp, The Anti-Marketing Growth Phenomenon – GrowthHackers – its more like the product being the marketing rather than ‘anti-marketing’ per se

Online

Google has run away with the web search market and almost no one is chasing | Quartz – not terribly surprising, search is hard and it is difficult to move a customer away unless you have something radically better

Chinese Social Media Shrinks by 7% During Internet Crackdown – China Digital Times (CDT) – As Chinese authorities stage a crackdown on “rumor mongering” — the number of people visiting social websites dropped by 20.4 million, or 7.4 percent, to 257 million. How much of these were real accounts and how much were bots?

Retailing

Top Retail Websites’ Load Times Still Slowing | Marketing Charts – this beggars belief

BBC News – Five ways Aldi cracked the supermarket business – some of these things like store layout and bursts of unusual items are similar to Morrisons and Kwik Save

Security

Monetising user information without the privacy outrage – canvas fingerprinting

Forensic scientist identifies suspicious ‘back doors’ running on every iOS device | ZDNet – you can probably bet that this is also true in other devices

Technology

U.K. Cabinet Office Adopts ODF as Exclusive Standard for Sharable Documents – ConsortiumInfo.org – Microsoft would have been pissed a few years ago, now with the new management in place, who knows

Web of no web

Razer Integrates WeChat into its Nabu Wearable, Says Should Hit U.S. for Under $100 | Re/code – really like the messenger link and cross platform nature, now if they could make it more reliable than Nike’s Fuelband (on my second one in four months)