Month: July 2019

  • Illegal spy camera + more things

    Illegal spy cameras are still easy to find in Shenzhen’s gadget paradise | Abacus – this will make you very paranoid. The size of the devices now mean that you can have illegal spy cameras everywhere. Smartphone adoption has driven the quality of small cameras up and their size down.

    Jollibee acquires US-based Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf | Marketing | Campaign Asia – this is huge. Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf is a credible Starbucks competitor with a substantial footprint and great tasting coffee. It has a substantial presence in the US and Asia, with a particularly big footprint in Korea. Korea is one of the major coffee consuming nations in Asia.

    Inside Amazon’s pitch for new audio ads in music on Alexa devices | AdAge – Amazon sells 15 and 30 second radio type adverts. It looks like a modern version of Rediffusion style radio that piped content directly into consumer homes in the post war period. Cable radio used to be a thing in the United Kingdom Barbados, Malaysia, Malta, Singapore and Hong Kong….

    Forever 21 Sent Some Customers Atkins Diet Bars And People Are Very Angry | Buzzfeed News – I wonder what persuaded Atkins to come to Forever 21 with this tie-up. Is there something in their customer base demographic profile that isn’t obvious to me? I could see why at first glance Forever 21 could have seen the product drop as a ‘delight’ for customers. But in retrospect the sensitivity is understandable. It is also interesting how Forever 21 took the brunt of consumer displeasure on what was a co-promotion with Atkins.

    Extinction Rebellion breaks into fashion in Stella McCartney sustainability campaign | The Drum – Extinction Rebellion gets co-opted by fashion brands. The FT have an interesting interview with Greta Thunberg about how XR and he wider climate change protest movement spiralled out of control

  • Celine + more things

    Work & Co.’s clean looking website for Celine. Its a beautiful piece of luxury orientated user experience for Celine. It was founded in 1945 by Céline Vipiana. Celine was originally a made-to-measure children’s shoe business. In 1960, the brand decided to pivot, focusing its business on a ready-to-wear fashion brand for women with a sportswear approach. The brand offered a range of leather goods such as bags, loafers, gloves and clothes. By the 1970s Celine had boutiques in Switzerland, Monte Carlo, the US, Canada and Hong Kong. They were bought by Bernard Arnault in 1987 or 1988 around about the time that he took over at LVMH to build it into the world’s largest luxury conglomerate. More luxury related content here.

    I have deliberately ignored a lot of the brands trying to cling on to the proverbial vapour trail of the Apollo space programme; but this video caught my eye because it showed the amazing engineering chops of Sony. Just look at the detail-orientated design. You can understand why Sony was held in such high esteem as a brand when you watch this video.

    Dentsu (the agency network formerly known as the Dentsu Aegis Network) released its CMO survey (registration wall). From the almost 40 pages of content, one paragraph struck me as being the single most important take out:

    CMOs are often simply not incentivised to deliver long-term change. In terms of performance metrics, they’re primarily accountable for growing the customer base (see Figure 3), while medium/ long-term brand health and digital transformation are way down the pecking order. Coupled with the fact that, in many markets, CMOs often ‘enjoy’ the shortest average tenure of anyone in the C-suite (around three and a half years in the United States, for example) there is little reason for many CMOs to look beyond the near-term.

    2019 Dentsu Aegis Network CMO survey (sample size 1,000 CMOs)

    If you take into account the relatively short tenure of CMOs, it looks like a toxic brew for businesses in the medium to long term.

    It’s like as if this opinion piece was written with marketing in mind…. Watermelons vs. Sesame Seeds | World Bank.

    Interesting academic research paper that reflected on the triad actions against Hong Kong’s civil society and democracy movement in 2014, which seems sensible to revisit. Resurgent Triads? Democratic mobilization and organized crime in Hong Kong – Federico Varese, Rebecca WY Wong, 2018  

  • Secure empty trash + more news

    How to replace El Capitan’s missing Secure Empty Trash | Macworld – SSD as security risks. This is because sold state drives can only be read and written to a limited amount of times which poses problems when you want to do three or more overwrites on a regular basis as part of the secure empty trash process. The irony being that hard disks despite their many faults are more secure. More on SSDs here.

    Fake Everything 2019 Update – 50 odd examples of how the online advertising marketplace is thoroughly corrupted. This is well worth a good read if you have anything to do with digital marketing. This should bring up questions around efficiency and effectiveness. Unfortunately this seems to have been supplanted by the cult of disruption above everything else.

    Internet advertising to grow at slowest rate since 2001 dotcom bust | Media | The Guardian – deceptive visuals, but interesting analysis. We’re now in the tyranny of high numbers. The sheer size of numbers required to drive percentage increases mean that growth had to slow. You also have concerns about the data supporting online advertising media planning and measurement due to ad fraud (see the Fake Everything 2019 update above this as a good primer). In addition, there is now data available that underlines concerns about having a more balanced media mix in play. More on online advertising here.

    AR/VR early stage valuations soften, leading to investment and acquisition opportunities | VentureBeat – China investing more in VR and AR than the US. These investments seem to be focused exclusively on domestic market requirements.

    Hackers breach FSB contractor, expose Tor deanonymization project and more | ZDNet – interesting that Tor networks have been breached. Tor was developed by US defence department grants to provide secure internet communications for people living under repressive regimes.

  • New MacBook Pro – some thoughts

    My old MacBook Pro, which had seen me through a lot of work had been starting to show its age, so I changed it out for a new model. The process has been challenging at times so I thought that I would write about the good, the bad and the weird parts of this experience.

    My new machine has taken a size bump to 15.4 inches. The largest MacBook I’ve had in the best part of ten years. The reason for the size bump was to try and retain a working days worth of battery life. From a size perspective the 13 inch machine suits me better but battery performance seems to be in retreat.

    Preparing the machine

    I had the opportunity to make a controlled move to the new machine, so I cleaned a lot of the data from the old computer. Trying to deal with as many duplicate files as possible.

    Once this process was done I used Apple’s migration tool. This moves across data effortlessly. I’ve done this a number of times since running MacOS X back in 2002. This had to be done over wi-fi as connecting the two machines via an ethernet cable would be problematic.

    Preparing the hardware

    I am a big fan of Incase’s hard shell that clips on to your laptop. It protects it from coffee smeared tables and the odd light prang. This is then covered in stickers like it has been bombed by a crack team of Japanese school children.

    Untitled

    So why do I have a sticker covered laptop? A good while ago I had a client at a major telecoms sector company try and swipe my laptop in front of my eyes.

    “Oh, I thought it was mine” they said whilst ignoring the Lenovo peeking out of their laptop bag.

    Opening the shell up I fit a TechPrivacy web cam privacy cover. They look very thin and are fragile during the fitting process, but once on your laptop work perfectly and don’t impede closing the laptop up fully.

    I use a torch to work out where the camera is and run FaceTime to check that I am not impeding the camera or the camera power light.

    These new Macs are known for their keyboards. They feel unresponsive to a touch typist like me and seem to be prone to the ingress of any foreign matter. Keyboards are horrible grotty things swimming in dead skin, hair folicles and food crumbs. I can’t do much to make the keyboard feel better, but I have fitted a MOSISO Keyboard Cover to provide a bit of protection.

    Finally, I topped this off with an Amazon Basics neoprene laptop sleeve. MacBook Pros are a hassle to repair, even with AppleCare+, the sleeve is a small investment.

    Powering up

    I have series of chargers including an in-car charger and airplane seat charger designed to work with American market airplanes that I have accumulated since my first Intel MacBook Pro back in 2006. Some of the cables have a silicon holder and MagSafe 2 connector attached.

    I have breathed a sigh of relief many times when my power cable has been snagged and not taken the laptop tumbling on to the floor with it. All of which are now useless given Apple’s move to USB-C. Unfortunately USB-C is not snag proof like the earlier MagSafe power connectors. Thankfully, I can still use the extension cables that I have. Apple doesn’t include them in the box with the laptop any more.

    Some third party designers have trialled products that mix the best of USB C with a MagSafe like connection. Apple’s current solution feels like a petty and backwards step.

    Making a connection

    I mentioned early on that I couldn’t do an ethernet-to-ethernet connection for the data migration to my new laptop. The problem is that the new MacBook Pro only has five connection points. Four of which are USB C and the fifth is a 3.5mm headphone socket.

    You need dongles for everything:

    SD Card reader – you need a dongle for that. Apple has one that it will sell you.

    USB connection, for when you want to connect your iPhone to your MacBook Pro…

    HDMI connector – Choetech’s product seems to be well made

    VGA connector – Amazon Basics have connector that’s relatively good value and seems to be as well made as it’s Apple cousin

    Thunderbolt 2 to USB C. Connecting to Thunderbolt 2 devices is a whole new world of pain. Apple’s own adaptor works inconsistently. Given that my home set up runs on two hubs connected to two Apple cinema displays all over Thunderbolt 2, this was critical for me to have work. In the end I found that StarTech’s adaptors whilst ugly, work a treat.

    This means that as a mobile worker going in and out of agency spaces like I’ve been doing, you need a few hundred pounds worth of add-on dongles and power cords to get anything done. My laptop starts to look like a white legged arthritic spider rather than the slick working machine I previously enjoyed.

    For mobile working, I’ve just started trying out a Pioneer Multiport adaptor that does VGA, ethernet, a single ethernet port and HDMI. It’s not particularly elegant but is also pretty cheap.

    A migration that hits the pocket and your time

    Migrating to the new MacBook Pro machine has been a major investment in peripheral hardware and a time suck in order to tune the set up to work properly. There has been much to say about good design.

    Good design (with a huge debt to Dieter Rams):

    • Is innovative (but doesn’t idolise innovation)
    • Makes a product useful (out of the box)
    • Is aesthetic (balance, good tastes and proportions)
    • Makes a product understandable (it just works)
    • Is unobtrusive (doesn’t call attention to itself in operation)
    • Is honest
    • Is long-lasting (consumption is an experience of layers with new and old products in a user journey)
    • Is thorough down to the last detail (and delights the user with that level of thought)
    • Is environmentally friendly (not wasteful, designed for the long haul, user serviceable)
    • Involves as little design as possible (Economy of experience, for instance not having a laptop’s ports hidden behind doors. it just is. This is as much about the metaphysics of quality intrinsic in the product as anything else)
    • Is knowing when to say no (or yes) – not having an FM radio on the iPhone or iPod. But having ports people would actually use on the new MacBook Pro
    • Is function first, form second (a build on making a product useful first, then aesthetically pleasing)

    The MacBook Pro fails on many of these attributes.

  • Chip implants + more stuff

    Swedish people are getting chip implants to replace cash | NY Post – is it just me who thinks that this might not be the smartest thing to do? Chip implants are the stuff of conspiracies. And the mind boggles what kind of new crimes that this might inspire.

    Israeli group’s spyware ‘offers keys to Big Tech’s cloud’ | Financial Times – affects Facebook, Amazon, Apple and more. Guessing that major state actors can also do this already. Private companies like NSO basically democratises this for countries that don’t have this capability inhouse, including some of them that authoritarian in nature

    Individual Beyond the Personal | Ogilvy Consulting – Global Strategy and Innovation – interesting take on AR/VR level immersion

    Salesforce talk about a vision that’s way beyond narrow machine learning skills to something that looks much more like general purpose AI. We are told by experts that general purpose AI is still decades away. Consequently I can’t work out if this is long term concepting or snake oil….

    ‘Cordless’ Dyson fan advert falls foul of watchdog – BBC News – really interesting judgement. I think the ASA is right, but there are implications for future demonstration visuals of products

    Black Pastors Group Petition Nike to Drop Colin Kaepernick – Footwear News – ok this is going to get interesting. More on Nike here.

    Juul CEO: “I’m Sorry” for Teen Vaping Epidemic – “First of all, I’d tell them that I’m sorry that their child’s using the product,” Burns told CNBC during an interview for an upcoming documentary on the rise of vaping in the U.S. “It’s not intended for them. I hope there was nothing that we did that made it appealing to them. As a parent of a 16-year-old, I’m sorry for them, and I have empathy for them, in terms of what the challenges they’re going through.” – Good design attracts users of all ages….