Monster Hunt & more news

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Monster Hunt

China’s highest-grossing film of all time Monster Hunt flops in US, takes in $21,000 during opening weekend: Shanghaiist – interesting that they didn’t bother to put some marketing wallop behind Monster Hunt, they had enough time to do a good English dub (great way to get Asian Americans on board) and push it out to a more general audience in the US. It would have been a great China soft power vehicle. Instead a China soft power opportunity was lost.

Then there is the other view, that Monster Hunt performed to expectations. There is a possibility that its Chinese ticket sales were inflated. I and others that I know have gone to see a western film on more than one occasion in a Chinese cinema. The ticket is rang out as a local film and then the screen number is crossed out and the western movie screen number written on by the assistant.

Secondly, Monster Hunt didn’t spawn a Toy Story-esque merchandise avalanche in China and other Asian markets. Which indicates it wasn’t that much of a cultural moment and ergo, not as successful as one would believe. More China related posts here.

Consumer behaviour

Blu-ray Isn’t Going Anywhere – Park Associates – interesting demographic pattern of ownership – “Owners have higher incomes than the overall broadband household population as well as a strong preference for the highest-quality video.

Hillary Clinton is losing young voters to Bernie Sanders. | Slate – not scientific but interesting. It also gives an interesting viewpoint on Corbyn’s political chances.

Design

Arriving at San Francisco – interesting delve into Apple’s new system font. Unfortunately I can’t download it in a format to use it in documents

Gadgets

StarTech Unveils Dual-Display Thunderbolt 2 Docking Station with 12 Ports – AnandTech – this looks like all my peripheral prayers were answered. I ended up with two of these. They work well for handling by two Apple Cinema displays

Ideas

Who Killed Nokia? Nokia Did | INSEAD Alumni Magazine – Despite being an exemplar of strategic agility, the fearful emotional climate prevailing at Nokia during the rise of the iPhone froze coordination between top and middle managers

Why Yahoo Couldn’t Adapt to the Smartphone Era – The New Yorker – the irony is that they got on mobile services early. Yahoo! Go had been launched when I was there at the beginning of 2006. It was a one stop shop to search, access email, share photos on Flickr, get news and access Yahoo! Finance. Christian Lindholm was at Yahoo! back then. He was the director in charge of the S60 operating system interface at Nokia prior to

Innovation

LLVM Patches Confirm Google Has Its Own In-House Processor – Phoronix – interesting that they have a custom processor, it is related to their internal network infrastructure

Media

Why Jeep’s $10M Super Bowl Ad Only Used a Third of the Screen | WIRED – interesting example of online considerations driving TV creative decisions – mobile devices

Telemundo to Build New $250 Million Miami Headquarters – The Wrap – which indicates how big the Latin media market is

On the hypothetical eventuality of no more free internet – FT – interesting discussion of Internet economics and how it relates to  the commons (paywall)

CBS Says Super Bowl 50 Broke Streaming Records With 3.96 Million Unique Viewers | TechCrunch – which is still relatively small compared to broadcast TV audiences for major events such as this

Online

Akamai earnings call hints at Apple CDN – Business Insider – not terribly surprising, Akamai has strategic partnerships with Apple rivals as well. Akamai earnings hint at the service’s ubiquity

Security

US intelligence chief: we might use the internet of things to spy on you | Technology | The Guardian – not terribly surprising, each technological frontier represents opportunities and IoT won’t be any different in that respect. The very pervasiveness of IoT is what makes it such a security risk

Singapore

Come to Singapore! The Sights (And Branding) Are Lovely | WIRED – it feels very Monocle-esque content on Singapore

Web of no web

This Google app could forever change the way you travel – Google’s translation app has a new feature that will come in handy for travelers. You point your smartphone’s camera at a sign printed in a foreign language, and Google’s translation technology