In The South China Sea; Hayton sets an ambitious goal for himself to try and unpick the claims and counter claims on territory in the area. It is a massive convoluted story that encompasses colonial powers, oil companies and a plethora of Asian countries.
In the end no one comes out of it with glowing colours. China is easy to paint as a villain and it has played to type. But other countries and major powers have made constant mis-steps and it has become an intractable problem. The more hawkish may see the inevitability of war with China.
On the Chinese side, it makes sense for them to escalate a fight with one of their neighbours; as a Chinese idiom puts it ‘kill a chicken to scare the monkey’ and distract from the pain of change at home. The history is wrapped up with rising nationalism and aspirations of China and its neighbours.
From the American perspective, it makes sense to have the war with China further away from the Homeland, so the South China sea rather than the Pacific ocean.
Hayton doesn’t take a standpoint one way or the other leaving the reader to decide.
From a reading perspective, the tangled nature of the claims makes the book more difficult to read in small bursts. I tried reading it as a commuting book and it took a while to get it done.
Montblanc launches connected pen and paper | Luxury Daily – interesting move by Montblanc. The technology for connected pens similar to what Montblanc is doing has been around for a while. However it is interesting seeing a luxury brand like Montblanc enter the field. Montblanc has also done interesting things in wearables as well.
A great documentary on the (little known in the UK) early 1990s US rave scene that blossomed on the west coast and gave us the likes of Hawke, The God Within aka Scott Hardkiss, Onionz and the like.
Design
The last day of hot metal press printing at the New York Times
Now for a more disturbing piece of technology, that my colleague Matt shared with me: OfferMoments looks like a privacy nightmare a la Minority Report. I found this a disturbing 90 seconds of viewing as marketing walks all over privacy in an unprompted very intrusive manner.
15 years ago on September 11, 2001 I worked agency side in Haymarket in London’s west end for Edelman. It was a normal day. Well as normal is it gets when you are in the middle of the dot com bust fallout. It was a mix of mobile businesses trying to ride the mobile internet wave and service providers for the soon to launch 3G mobile networks. Alongside this was helping dot com businesses try to find their place in the new world.
My job meant working on communications programmes for the European subsidiaries of technology companies. This was to reflect a ‘business as usual’ face to their customers. This allowed the European subsidiaries to keep their businesses largely intact so that they could be sold off to help bail out the financial hole that the US parent company had made.
The businesses had grown on generous venture capital payments, share placements and bank loans. The dot com bust suddenly meant that there was a surplus of servers, network switches, bandwidth, commercial space and Herman Miller Aeron chairs.
Due to the nature of the business I worked closely with colleagues on the finance team because I spoke ‘geek’ and understood how screwed these clients happened to be.
The financial and corporate teams worked for a number of clients, notably Cantor Fitzgerald. They were to lose two thirds of their personnel by the end of the day.
It was early afternoon, when I realised that something was up. We had TVs around the agency that often weren’t on. This time they were all turned to Sky News, which was running the footage. After the troubles and bombings in Beirut, it wasn’t a complete surprise to see another landmark attack – at least at first.
Once the scale sunk in, then the realisation of how different the world was going to be after September 11 started to dawn on me. More related content here.
In a now annual ritual its 2016 Apple event held on September 7 left me a lot to reflect on.
Style
The presentation was telling a hard story to an audience that were likely to be underwhelmed. Phil Schiller rather than Tim Cook carried the most difficult parts of the keynote.
The piano finish device was an obvious attempt to provide a style angle to the new iPhone and mask the aerial sections. However it is a class action waiting to happen as it will dull over time with micro-scratches
The story that the audience was told didn’t feel right. Lets talk about the headphone jack. The double camera only appears in the Plus, so the requirement for room isn’t a credible argument on its own, other vendors have managed to waterproof handsets with headphone jacks. I suspect that Apple isn’t sure that its backing the right horse. Its the least aggressive change they’ve made in a while. The inclusion of an adaptor shows that their user aggression still isn’t as high compared to when they got rid of: SCSI, Apple Desktop Bus (ADB), iPod 30 pin port (still pissed about that one), AppleTalk, floppy disks or optical disk playback and storage – I suspect that they are fearfully waiting to see what the pre-order numbers will be like and they should be. A straw poll of AdAge readers (core Apple user demographic) showed overwhelming disappointment
There is a lot of really nice features in iOS 10 – I’ve been using it for a while, why didn’t they make more of this and macOS Sierra?
Substance
Innovation in the smartphone category has flattened out. The iPhone 7 provides reasons for laggard iPhone users to upgrade, but nothing for 6 and 6S series users. There are few if any innovations for the likes of Huawei to ape in their new models
Innovation in smartwatches has plateaued. Apple is coalescing around fitness and dedicated products are much more cost effective for consumers. In China Xiaomi’s fitness band sells for about £15, for many consumers it would be enough. Fitbit is doing well – Apple’s wrist computer (alongside Samsung Gear etc) looks like a sledgehammer to crack a nut
Apple have done nothing to address the latent demand for new laptops amongst consumers (I am still happy with my 13″ Retina MacBook Pro). There was no replacement for the Cinema display (again, I am happy with my current set-up, but where is the pro-user love)
Apple abandoned its flirtation with luxury by discontinuing the gold Watch. They are still holding out to be viewed as stylish by doubling down with Hermes and a white ceramic device – it would work on the opposite wrist to a Chanel J12
It was curious that Apple moved away from talking about security and privacy; the collaborative document working using iWork which could be seen as a potential attack vector on to the desktop. The Air Pods that sync seamlessly with a device without visible security precautions. iPhone security was addressed in the James Corden car karaoke skit at the beginning of the show rather than woven through the materials.
The speech about the app store was to try and bolster developer support, I suspect that services will shore up the Apple financial numbers over the next 12 months
The Nike branded Apple Watch was part of a broader move reposition the Apple Watch 2 as a fitness device and probably the biggest transition of the 2016 Apple event.
JTB, Panasonic, Yamato eye paperless luggage transport service for tourists | Japan Times – this looks awesome. Yamato Express is a logistics company that will do everything from parcel delivery to helping you to move house. The Yamato Express business philosophy is embodied by our symbol of a mother cat carrying her kitten. Yamato Express look to deliver the same level of care to every customer relationship – and believe in our responsibility to contribute to their customers’ wellbeing and prosperity. I have experienced their service in both Hong Kong and Japan and Yamato Express is a level above UPS, Fedex etc.
Yamato Express logo showing a cat carry its kitten. The implication is that they take the same care
Japan’s message to the UK and EU – Japanese ministry of foreign affairs – interesting technical document that highlights how fucked the UK could be, this outlines the red lines that drive Japanese companies out of the country to another EU country instead. Unfortunately it will be too subtle for UK politicians (PDF) More Japan related posts here.
Media
Yes, the News Can Survive the Newspaper – The New York Times – One day many decades hence, when your grandchildren ask you, “Grandma, what was a newspaper?” you can direct them back to Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2016. Because it may well go down as the day the American newspaper as we’ve known it moved out of intensive care and into the palliative wing on its way to the Great Beyond
The Twilight of Fox News – The Atlantic – interesting demographic cliff challenge, I would imagine that newspapers face a similar if less extreme challenge?
Will Amazon Kill FedEx? | Bloomberg – reminds me of Alibaba in China. The key difference is Amazon’s belief that they will always have the cheapest capital
Details Emerge On China’s 64-Core ARM Chip | NextPlatform – ARM as RISC server processor. ARM is more optimised as a client processor, whilst the power reduction focus is good, this isn’t necessarily the slam dunk that it appears on paper
Alcatel’s standalone VR headset is a tough sell | Engadget – really smart product design in terms of weight distribution. I suspect a good deal of the issue is access to compelling content and that consumers have been educated to do everything on/with their smartphone
Wireless
Total Recall | CCS Insight – Samsung’s Note 7 battery issue will be forgotten (like Dell and Sony’s laptop battery issues in the past). They will take a bit of a hit on their quarterly results, but business insurance will probably cover it
