Telecoms industry looks to Apple for 5G ‘tipping point’ | Financial Times – even with the launch of Apple’s 5G-enabled iPhone — there is as yet no “killer app” that will immediately transform the way consumers use their smartphones; creating a 5G tipping point. – I don’t think its about consumers, I think it makes sense in the enterprise. The lack of killer applications in the consumer space reminds me a lot of 3G. And I don’t believe that Apple is the harbinger of a 5G tipping point
Why a new generation of challenger brands need to rethink how to challenge | A Little West of Centre – Blands. That’s what Ben Schott, writing for Bloomberg, coined them. And what a coining it is. The new generation of humble, conscious, in-it-to-sell, underdog companies, sporting D2C models, consumer champion narratives, minimalist aesthetics, affordable luxury positionings and post-choice selling techniques (this is THE mattress, that is THE toothbrush).
Indonesia’s central bank hints burglary in e-wallet player – consumers should look at the track record of providers before using them to save large amounts of money. Indonesia’s total e-wallet transaction value size is expected to reach US$15 billion by 2020, according to a recent report by The Asian Banker
Problem Solved #13: A lesson in tackling bloody taboos from Bodyform | The Drum – the result was to present the viewer with flame-engulfed apartment of a perimenopausal women; a monster ripping at an endometriosis sufferer’s uterus; a ‘flood gate’ moment following an unexpected sneeze; a woman who has chosen not to have children; and the often-turbulent journey of trying to conceive
Diane von Furstenberg: Interview | Vanity Fair – The iconic wrap dress, designed in 1974 and sold more than 15 million times since, made von Furstenberg an overnight sensation and began a dialogue with women that she has maintained ever since, in a large part through admirable philanthropic efforts, including the annual DVF awards. Now she’s taking that dialogue to the podcast, a medium she champions for its value in shifting the focus away from appearance.
Shenzhen — Justin McGuirk – pretty much nails how I found Shenzhen over the decade that I visited regularly. More on Shenzhen here.
Shenzhen/Huawei: the other Bay Area | Financial Times – The impression of military manoeuvres by alternative means was reinforced by Tencent, another Shenzhen resident. It was among big Chinese social and video platforms including iQiyi and Weibo, that simultaneously cancelled the livecast of Apple’s iPhone 12 launch
Apple Captures 66% of the Smartphone Industry’s Profits in Q3 leaving all of their Competitors Combined in the Dust – Patently Apple – it is becoming a challenge for Chinese smartphone brands to increase their smartphone ASPs and margins due to a combination of longer consumer holding periods and Apple lowering pricing on some key SKUs, which has limited the headroom that Chinese vendors had used to increase their ASPs – in the long term Huawei having to be vertically integrated all the way up the stack could be to their benefit
Gildo Zegna: tailoring masculinity for changing tastes | Financial Times – luxury goods industry is feeling the heat of technological disruption, social upheaval and identity politics. Furthermore, within the high end fashion industry few items of clothing are facing more pressure from falling consumer demand than the one that made the Zegna family rich: the traditional men’s suit. “The big challenge we face is a rethinking of masculinity,” he says. – I think streetwear is interesting because of the reassurance it provides on masculinity. The basics of streetwear go back to the mid-century sports basics. The hooded top, jeans, t-shirts, plaid shirts, Letterman jacket, track jacket etc
A Surveillance Net Blankets China’s Cities, Giving Police Vast Powers – The New York Times – Chinese authorities are knitting together old and state-of-the-art technologies — phone scanners, facial-recognition cameras, face and fingerprint databases and many others — into sweeping tools for authoritarian control, according to police and private databases examined by The New York Times. Once combined and fully operational, the tools can help police grab the identities of people as they walk down the street, find out who they are meeting with and identify who does and doesn’t belong to the Communist Party. The United States and other countries use some of the same techniques to track terrorists or drug lords. Chinese cities want to use them to track everybody.
Is LVMH’s Digital Transformation Working? | Luxury Society – “Over the last few years our market has become highly fragmented,” it added. “Customer journeys and purchasing habits have become more complex. Now, in addition to magazines and other traditional media, our customers – especially young people – use a range of digital options to stay informed, communicate with friends and shop. Brand awareness and customer engagement are built on these many different touchpoints.”
Internesting focus: Samsung 5G, machine learning and other emerging technology – Samsung pledges to invest $22B in AI, 5G and other emerging technologies – SiliconANGLE – plan to invest $22 billion in emerging fields such as artificial intelligence over the next three years. The effort will be driven primarily by the conglomerate’s Samsung Electronics Co Ltd arm, which makes its popular mobile devices. Last quarter, the handset maker saw profits decline for the first time in nearly two years due to stagnating smartphone sales. Investing more in emerging technologies could help Samsung generate new growth on the long term – the Samsung 5G and machine learning problem is the Chinese government and the limitless resources it will put behind Huawei and their peers. More Samsung content here.
Save Sarah Jeong! And Kevin Williamson, Quinn Norton, and Joy Reid Too | WIRED – my comment: I agree that Ms Jeong has a right to an opinion. She has a right to a bad day. However when she weighed into the Naomi Wu / Vice Media dispute; her contribution damaged some of the feminist and progressive viewpoints that she herself supports. As an international Wired subscriber I find it difficult to support her particularly aggressive form of American privilege. Ms Jeong used her skill in rhetoric to hide her lack of expertise in the legal and online social environment of China.
‘Hipster kryptonite’: will CDs ever have a resurgence? | Music | The Guardian – interesting read. I have listened to CDs and have them, but preferred to DJ with vinyl for tactile reasons. The article fails to ask whats next. We’ve got a generation coming through with Spotify with a more passive, casual relationship to music that we haven’t seen before. There has always been people who liked music but bought few if any recordings. We haven’t seen it on the scale that we see with the Spotify generation. Music becomes a utility like water, electricity or mobile data. Since music tends to be about playlists now the artist’s brand becomes less important. Festivals provide the buzz of live music for generation Spotify but they can dip in and out moving from one tent to another. They won’t support live acts in local concert halls, go to local clubs to support local DJs or have eclectic musical libraries
The UK Top 40 will never be the same | British GQ – For a stream to qualify as a sale, it has to play for at least 30 seconds. Most listeners will abandon anything too jarringly different before then, so there’s an incentive for artists to draw on a small pool of bankable writers, producers and styles. “I call it the shit-click factor,” says Masterton. “If a record is too challenging, then people will say, ‘What’s this? It’s shit,’ and click onto the next one. There used to be room on the charts for something dynamic and exciting such as the Arctic Monkeys. I can’t see the circumstances right now where that could happen.”
Rock is the new jazz and vinyl’s misleading revival: 5 things I’ve learned as Guardian music editor | The Guardian – Technology has vastly increased what record companies know about listeners and their listening habits, just as it has increased what newspapers know about their readers and their reading habits. And the results of this – on both parts – can be pernicious. At our end, it’s the reason why we get complaints about endless stories about Adele and Beyoncé and Kanye West. Why do we run them? Because people read them. Whereas very few people read stories about the latest underground band we want to rave about. And in music, that knowledge has resulted in commercial music, more than ever before, being made to a formula
Trivago Surpasses Billion-Euro Mark as Tech Investment and Advertising Pay Off – Finance.co.uk – The company also stated that increased expenditures in advertising had helped to improve revenues. Schroemgens informed reported that advertising has been a help for the company learn more about their customers. “We do a lot of quite extreme tests because the more extreme we do it, the more information we get,” said Schroemgens, in reference to the near wall-to-wall advertising campaign of Trivago on the London underground that features “the Trivago girl”, actress Gabrielle Miller. – In a digital world mass media still works. Trivago is particularly interesting when you think about the amount of established online travel players
Tom Scott talks about the ethics and perils of doctored videos due to face swapping. Porntube and Twitter have already outlawed it, but I think that we’re only at the beginning of the ethical morass that’s about to unfold
Why mobile operators want your second SIM card slot | HKEJ Insight – Hong Kong is hyper-saturated. Apple missed out by not having a dual-SIM offering. The problem with a lot of non-Hong Kong carriers is they would be struggling to innovate on the service that they offer due to generous data packages
Hong Konger Andrew Tse explained the complex history of Eurasians in Hong Kong and the role of compradores. Eurasians were the offspring of Europeans and middle Eastern Jews with local women.
During the 19th century, Hong Kong was segregated. Mixed race couples couldn’t marry. Eurasians didn’t easy fit in with either the Chinese community or westerners. This segregation also had its advantages. Information didn’t flow between the communities.
Eurasian families looked more towards the Chinese community and over time built up status within it.
The compradores were people who acted as an agent for foreign organisations engaged in investment, trade, or economic or political exploitation. They even helped finance deals when there was low trust. The compradore was a valuable person for western trading houses based in Hong Kong and the families built multi-generational wealth.
After the second world war, Chinese community understanding of English increased with education. China became closed off with the civil war and Hong Kong itself became a manufacturing hub. With the rise of Hong Kong manufacturing there would be a further decline in the need for compradores to help navigate business deals. Hong Kong also had the common law legal system for contract disputes. The compradore role faded away. Instead of becoming compradores, Eurasians worked within the major companies rising to senior positions. Mr Tse’s own career in the aviation sector is empirical evidence of their success.
They became prominent business people and philanthropists in their own right. The Tung Wah Group of Hospitals benefited from their philanthropy. Tung Wah Group of Hospitals is the oldest and largest not-for-profit organisation in Hong Kong.
Over time, mixed race marriage was no longer restricted and Hong Kong had its native-born entrepreneurs like Li Ka-shing to govern the old Taipan businesses like Hutchison-Whampoa.
A century after the Eurasian community had first formed in Hong Kong and became compradores their identity was still a sensitive subject. Peter Hall’s book In The Web that outlined this history was restrained from being published until after the death of certain prominent community members who didn’t wish to be ‘outed’ as Eurasian.
As a synopsis of the book puts it:
Peter Hall’s book, ‘In the Web,’ brings to light the mysteries that lay behind his family and the other Hong Kong Eurasian families intertwined with it. Because it attempts to lift the stone firmly left in place for over a century, this work will not be welcomed by those who prefer conjecture to be left to outsiders.
Hall himself came from a Eurasian background, was interned by the Japanese and worked for prominent property developer Hongkong Land.
The prominence of the Eurasian community has dissipated, for a number of reasons:
Some of them moved overseas, in common with many richer Hong Kongers in the run up to the handover.
Some family lines have became re-assimilated in the Chinese community.
Many of them died defending Hong Kong during the Japanese invasion.
Branding
Q&A: Juanita Zhang on How Chinese Brands Can Win Globally | Branding in Asia – One critical insight is the power of unapologetic differentiation, especially as Chinese brands move beyond the ‘outbound 2.0’ era. The initial wave of success often rode on e-commerce efficiency, providing commodity-level products and leveraging vast data insights. However, we’ve observed that many brands then dwell too much in ‘end-user insight,’ optimizing for existing demand rather than proactively building aspirational gravity. The brands that truly succeed don’t try to be all things to all people; they identify a unique, compelling value proposition and own it fiercely.
McDonald’s US sales drop by most since height of pandemic | FT – Kempczinski said his company had surveyed consumers in top global markets about their views on the US, American brands and McDonald’s.While there had been no change to public opinion on the McDonald’s brand, he said more people signalled they would be cutting back on buying American brands. The surveys also revealed an 8 to 10-point rise in “anti-American sentiment”, he said, notably in northern Europe and Canada.
The Death of the Amex Lounge: Why the Upper Middle Class Isn’t Special Anymore – There’s something happening to the upper middle class in the United States that no one is talking about. They are going through an existential crisis. I first noticed it at the airport. A line 20 people deep for the American Express lounge. Then, once you get inside, more lines for food/drinks and not an open chair in sight. Then I saw it in the housing market. I have friends with $10,000+ monthly mortgage payments on modest homes. Ten grand a month and they still don’t own a mansion. Today, buying a 3-bedroom apartment in Jersey City (where I live) would cost me anywhere from $9,300-$14,000 a month (all-in). I could rent the same unit for around $6,000-$7,000 a month.
Ethics
The 50something man has a PR problem | Influence Online – “Ageism is the last ‘ism’ we need to tackle. Anecdotally, I’m hearing a lot about the 50+ demographic struggling to find new roles because employers perceive them as being so old that they can’t learn new skills or that their tech isn’t up to scratch. All their knowledge is being lost – and because AI is replacing entry-level jobs – there’s a lack of new people coming in to learn from them. Acknowledging ageism exists would be a great start…”
Finance
Buy now, pay later, in debt forever? – The Face – or how generation Z credit rating is being impacted by Klarna, Affirm et al which are the digital equivalent of the ‘tally man’ of the early to mid 20th century. Reading all this reminded me of working at MBNA as a student and hearing people’s horror stories as they tried to transfer over scorecard debit to pay it down at a more rational rate.
The story of Nongfu water is the story of the wild, wild west of Chinese business. The health claims still shock me, despite everything I knew about the Chinese market.
What Is “Broke Man Propaganda?” | Cosmopolitan & Yes, it is classist to dehumanise ‘broke’ men | Dazed – “Poverty is not the fault of the poor,” she continues. “I find it very cruel to talk about John – a character who loves Lucy, a beautiful character being played beautifully by Chris – in such cruel terms as ‘broke boy’ or ‘broke man’.” She goes on: “I think that is a very troubling result of the way that wealthy people have gotten into our hearts [and convinced us] it’s your fault if you’re poor, or you’re a bad person if you’re poor. So, it doesn’t make me laugh, actually. It just makes me feel very concerned that anybody would talk about my movie and my characters [like that], and think about it in such classist terms.”
Poblacion is the old part of Makati, the central business district of Manila in the Philippines. I have been to Makati for work in the past and to my regret missed visiting Poblacion.
Otherwise Makati is full of anonymous office blocks, business hotels that look the same the world over and Starbucks coffee shops.
