Month: May 2016

  • Mobile searches + more

    Saying a third of mobile searches are local, Google brings “Promoted Pins” to Maps – but still no development platform for third party integration. Google Maps is still behind Baidu Maps in this respect. But the pivot towards local mobile searches offers opportunities for many small and medium sized businesses. More on where 2.0 related topics here.

    Samsung will no longer make Android Wear devices, all in with Tizen OS [Update] | 9to5Google – as Benedict Evans said: Samsung is (probably) giving up on making Android Wear watches. The Apple Watch is only a partial success so far, but Android watches don’t seem to have worked at all

    I, Cringely Apple and Didi is about foreign cash and the future of motoring – I, Cringely – as ever thought-provoking, Bob Cringely’s take on Apple’s Didi investment

    EXCLUSIVE: The Dirty Advertising Practices of the Industry’s Biggest Brands, Bloggers — The Fashion Law – the legal challenges for influencers of becoming native advertising formats

    Anti-EU Campaign Offers A £50 Million Prize For Whoever Can Predict Euro 2016 – BuzzFeed News – smart data capture. Likely to skew male

    Spotify Now Lets Brands Sponsor Its Popular Playlists | IPG Lab – history repeating as consumer brands used to sponsor radio programmes like P&G’s recession era ‘soap opera’. It will be interesting to see how much traction this it gets

    BNP Paribas in partnership with Luc Besson’s next movie, Valerian and the City of a thousand planets – really interesting execution from a French bank BNP Paribas. Valerian is a classic French comic space opera based on comics by Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières

    Secrets of WeChat and Weibo Feed Stream — China Internet Watch  – (paywall)

    Hoffman Fabrics | Stussy – great background on the Hawaiian shirt, my favourite picture has Tom Selleck as Magnum in the background

    PDF Decrypter Pro (Windows & Mac OS X) – Remove PDF owner password and restrictions – Download FREE – handy app to have on tap. the native macOS Preview app, or trying to hack the file on ColorSync will only get you so far

    PayPal is shutting down its Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and Amazon apps | The Verge – its an Android and iOS world. This isn’t a good environment for carriers

  • Gawker-Peter Thiel in context

    Why do a post about the Gawker-Peter Thiel court case?

    Because the Gawker-Peter Thiel court case marks a step change in Silicon Valley culture and will likely change media practices in new media companies.

    What is the Gawker-Peter Thiel court case?

    Silicon Valley veteran financier Peter Thiel was behind the financing of a court case that Terry Bollea “Hulk Hogan” filed over a sex tape. An extract of the video was published by Gawker Media.
    Hulk Hogan
    What Bollea did was stupid. As a veteran celebrity he must have realised that any kind of compromising position would be a tempting pay check for even his closest friends. The behaviour ran of the risk of endangering any commercial endorsements or media deals that he may have had in place. Usually commercial deals of this nature come with a good behaviour clause – I’ve had these clauses in every celebrity and influencer endorsement I’ve been involved with.

    Bollea does have a family who would be caused considerable embarrassment by his actions. And it could be argued that secretly filmed sex between two consenting adults isn’t really newsworthy or pertinent for public consumption.

    Gawker Media did what growing media empires have done in the past  and conduct ‘yellow journalism’.  Content of a puerile or sensational nature had been the stock in trade of William Randolph Heart, Joseph Pulitzer, Rupert Murdoch or William Aitken (Lord Beaverbrook). It isn’t morally defensible and it isn’t clever, it is an indictment of the audience.

    Gawker did do the public a service, shining a torch on Silicon Valley in a way that hadn’t been done since the early days of InfoWorld’s Notes From The Field column and the book Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date. The problem was that both of those were pre-smartphone and pre-Internet era portraits of the ‘Valley; back when it really did have foundries manufacturing microprocessors.

    As an external observer and someone who has done PR for similar companies in the past. I would argue that the relationships between journalists and the Silicon Valley technology beat had become sufficiently docile that media didn’t provide the reader with insightful analysis of what was really going on.

    It is the kind of relationship that the US military struggled to have in Iraq and Afghanistan through the embedding process. Instead of MREs and sharing the emotional highs and lows of action; San Francisco journalists got executive access and invites to the same social mixers and conferences.

    Valleywag shook up media practices. Although editorial teams won’t admit it; the likes of Recode, TechCrunch and The Information took note.

    Peter Thiel is the most interesting person in the cast of the Hulk Hogan court room drama. Thiel is known for his wealth and unique take on libertarianism. I won’t go into is Thiel right or wrong as none of the parties including Mr Thiel deserve our unreserved sympathies.  It all just makes me want to re-apply hand sanitiser before using the internet.

    What I find most interesting about Thiel’s actions is the way it signifies a cultural shift in Silicon Valley that I have talked about for a good while.

    It is hard to believe that within living memory San Francisco was a port city with fish canneries that attracted drug addled misfits drawn by everything from its freewheeling culture and access to drugs. The Santa Clara valley to the south was fertile farm land that grew apricots and prunes. Fruit brand Del Monte started right here. The area grew up as Stanford University and the scientific developments of the late 19th to mid-20th century science revolutionised the US military.

    Silicon Valley had a reputation for doing things differently. The mix of academia, counterculture and defence expenditure created a unique culture that evolved over time. The collegiate work environment founded by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard had much to do with their background in education at Stanford. The HP Way, a set of values guided the company for over 60 years until Carly Fiorina’s tenure as CEO.

    Bob Noyce came to Silicon Valley to do pioneering work at Shockley’s lab. Unfortunately, Bill Shockley’s poor people management meant that Noyce became a last minute member of the traitorous eight and went on to found Fairchild Semiconductor and then Intel. In both of these businesses he founded a relaxed culture that was decades ahead of its time and similar to a modern day worker. If you work in a ‘cube farm‘ rather than offices – you can likely blame that on Noyce. His culture influenced interior design and did away with corner offices.

    Whilst the enterprise software businesses like Oracle and chip companies like AMD mirrored the hard driving sales teams of their East Coast counterparts at IBM; many Bay Area companies were made of something different. Counterculture had seeped into the industry. The hacker culture of sharing software and the transformative nature of technology brought forth the Home Brew Computer Club and a missive from a nascent Microsoft CEO complaining about early software piracy. Steve Jobs had talked about how his LSD experiences had helped him do the things he did at Apple. Wired magazine was founded by former hippies like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly. There was a very good reason why The Grateful Dead were one of the first bands with a website.

    I interviewed with a H-P employee back in the late 1990s who told me how had bought his ‘dancing bears’ tie and Jerry Garcia mouse mat from dead.net

    The hippies in Silicon Valley brought their ‘back to the land’ ethos and doing their own thing. It is a form of libertarianism, but not one that Thiel or Uber’s Travis Kalanick would likely recognise as their own.

    This was the libertarianism of the pioneer who ventured westward or the outlaw biker gang that yearned for the same freedom. The key difference is that the hippy technologist build their frontier to carry onwards, not having to worry about the Pacific ocean and instead going to new realms in code and network infrastructure.

    The counterculture ethos could be seen even in web 2.0 products like Flickr which freely allowed customers to move their data or build their own apps on the APIs that the development team used.

    Facebook is a marker in time for when the cultural tone of Silicon Valley changed. The hippies were out and the yuppies had taken over. Brogrammers and zero hour working for ‘Uber for’ applications that provide labour as a service.

    The Gawker court case marks a similar milestone event in Silicon Valley culture. Thiel’s actions brought a number of his peers out in public to support him. Silicon Valley stops sounding like yuppies and more like the titan’s of the gilded age that would brook no disrespect and governed riches in the face of massive inequality. The Bay Area version of the American dream is dead for the secretaries and engineers who will no longer become financially independent on share options.

    Customer service, once seen as a a way into start-ups is now a purgatory. I used to have a client in the late 1990s who worked their way up through a chip company from being in admin when the business was a new start-up to running marketing communications and PR across EMEA in the space of 10 years or so. That progression just wouldn’t happen now, the gilded class have their compliant (if at times resentful workforce) and now want a more respectful media.

    The seeds of destruction are already sown for the gilded class. Innovation has moved East to the other side of the Pacific. Baidu is likely to be a leader in deep learning, driverless vehicles and innovation. The leading drone brand is DJI based in Shenzhen – rather than being designed in California and just assembled in China. Networks infrastructure leader Huawei are showing the kind of smarts marketing Android smartphones that Silicon Valley hardware makers would have had a decade ago.

    Tencent has shown how dangerous it could be with the right marketing smarts. It already has as good software design chops as the Bay Area. Facebook Messenger bots have been on WeChat for years. If you haven’t done so give WeChat a try, just to see what the application looks like.

    A compliant sycophantic media won’t help the gilded class build the financially successful future Silicon Valley in the same way that an inquiring body of journalists could do.

    More information
    The changing culture of Silicon Valley
    Barbarians in the Valley
    From satori to Silicon Valley by Theodore Roszak
    A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
    Tech Titans Raise Their Guard, Pushing Back Against News Media – New York Times
    Those Entry-Level Startup Jobs? They’re Now Mostly Dead Ends in the Boondocks — Backchannel — Medium

  • Competition in logistics + more

    Failure of competition in logistics market – The EU thinks this website is the key to fixing its weak e-commerce market — Quartz – surely there is some arbitrage play for ‘trumpeting’ deliveries in and out to take advantage of lowest cost parcel routing? Given the amount of parcel carriers why is there a failure of market competition in logistics. I suspect that gathering data on this by the EU is the first step; in a similar way to what happened on mobile roaming rates. More Europe-related posts here

    WeChat failed to go global | Techinasia – the thing I took away from this foreign campaigns was how similar they were to what I would have expected a foreign company to do in China. I suspect that they weren’t localised enough and Tencent didn’t think about a compelling hook

    Housing crisis in China’s ‘Silicon Valley’: Huawei, other hi-tech giants head for cheaper cities as rising costs deter talents – also provides opportunities for start-ups to take up staff that don’t want to make the move

    Nokia could cut up to 15,000 jobs | Telecom Asia – not surprising there would have been a lot of overlap between them

    Adidas to Return Mass Shoe Production to Germany in 2017 | Business of Fashion – isn’t likely to be traditional adidas models like the Gazelle or Superstar as designs are adapted for the robot production line that Adidas intends to use

    Why Huawei is suing Samsung over cellphone patents – Recode –  the amount of redactions in this document is interesting. The optics of the court case are trying to position Huawei as an innovator. Huawei will win in the Chinese court filling. The US one could be more interesting. If Huawei is considered to be abusing its position it could find itself in an EU court case though

    A new study shows how government-collected “anonymous” data can be used to profile you — Quartz

    Even Apple is acknowledging that the “iPads in education” fad is coming to an end | Quartz – which has to be worrisome for tablets in business surely?

    Why Big Apps Aren’t Moving to Swift (Yet)

  • 100 soundscapes + more things

    The 100 Soundscapes of Japan: A list of Japan’s greatest natural, cultural, and industrial sounds – this is the kind of project that the web was made of. It’s an inspired piece of work. Not to over-egg it but these 100 soundscapes are amazing. More Japan-related posts here.

    Burberry explores Mr. Burberry’s narrative via GQ films | Luxury Daily – its a smart time for Burberry to use this to work out a new brand positioning in the light of changing luxury market dynamics and its brand consolidation for Burberry Britain etc.

    I am a sucker for 1990s style CGI animation which seemed trippier and full of promise for an immersive cyber world that we would be able to one day jack into. This feels like it could be straight out of something like Lawn Runner Man or a vintage SIGGRAPH demo reel.

    This pre-film trailer for Regal Cinemas in the US is a classic example  of this. Play it on a big enough screen and it swallows you up without the need for 3D glasses. I remember watching Independence Day at a cinema and coming out with aching from having continually bracing myself from the action on screen. This video has a similar effect. This immersive perspective has changed as mobile devices have become more important.

    WHER: 1000 Beautiful Watts—The First All Girl Radio Station in the Nation—Part 1 by The Kitchen Sisters on PRX – really interesting documentary on the US’s first all-women radio station. Some of the interviews are shockingly sexist in a way that couldn’t happen today. Even the title 100 Beautiful Watts – why is this necessary given its discussing audio? It’s irrelevant to the medium of radio? Despite these comments don’t let me put you off enjoying it

    We know acne, we don’t know teens. – YouTube – nice bit of honest marketing by Clearasil. We were all teens but every generations experience is a bit difference. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes as Mark Twain reputedly claimed.

  • Consumer Packaged Goods innovation

    Consumer packaged goods innovation – CB Insights put together an interesting presentation on the changing landscape of the consumer packaged goods sector.

    The key takeouts for me were:

    • The similarity to the technology sector in terms of startups developing a brand and selling out to a bigger firm
    • A key part of what they are buying is brand building – an activity that the likes of P&G and Unilever have excelled at in the past. Historically new product launches in CPG has a low success rate. Many brands have been going for decades. The startup acquisitions allow the Unilevers of the world to buy successes and change their portfolios faster
    • Start-ups and partnerships focused on process improvements across all business functions from supply chain management to the final interface between customer and product prior to purchase. Success and institutional heritage have baked processes and infrastructure in existing businesses that might hold them back looking at new channels. When I worked on an assignment at Unilever there were best practice guides for everything. These guides were smart and well written with lots of good heuristics in them. But you also had to complete an eight page form to get a search run on a social listening platform
    • Premium is defined around consumer values towards the environment rather than ‘luxury’. In this respect the CPG market kind of feels like the early 1990s in laundry products. Ecover started to get prominent place in UK supermarkets. You saw a good deal of product innovation from P&G and Unilever. You had liquid laundry dispensers that went in the tub and were supposed to reduce the amount of water used in the wash. However, pragmatism overran environmental concerns during the recession and supermarket’s own washing powder started to take off. Major brands were accused of brand washing