Ged Carroll

Category: china | 中國 | 중국 | 中華

Ni hao – this category features any blog posts that relate to the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese communist party, Chinese citizens, consumer behaviour, business, and Chinese business abroad.

It is likely the post will also in other categories too.  For example a post about Tong Ren Tang might end up in the business section as well. Inevitably everything is inherently political in nature. At the moment, I don’t take suggestions for subject areas or comments on content for this category, it just isn’t worth the hassle.

Why have posts on China? I have been involved in projects there and had Chinese clients. China has some interesting things happening in art, advertising, architecture, design and manufacturing. I have managed to experience some great and not so great aspects of the country and its businesses.

Opinions have been managed by the omnipresent party and this has affected consumer behaviour. Lotte was boycotted and harassed out of the country. Toyota and Honda cars occasionally go through damage by consumer action during particularly high tensions with Japan.

I put stuff here to allow readers to make up their own  minds about the PRC. The size of the place makes things complicated and the only constants are change, death, taxes and the party. Things get even more complicated on the global stage.

The unique nature of the Chinese internet and sheltered business sectors means that interesting Galapagos syndrome type things happen.

I have separate sections for Taiwan and Hong Kong, for posts that are specific to them.

  • BlueFocus + more news

    BlueFocus

    BlueFocus FY 2014 profit up 62.8% | PR Week – Sir Martin Sorrell will be concerned. BlueFocus is at the centre of a high growth market. BlueFocus has access to cheap capital due to its high share price on the Shenzhen stock exchange and it demonstrates the kind of dynamism that WPP no longer has due to its physical size.

    Consumer behaviour

    Founding Fuel Hunting with the hounds – Indian consumers, by and large and across product categories, gravitate towards lower prices and more features instead of passionate brand loyalty

    Design

    The Story of the “Save the Memory Project” | Ricoh Global – impressive dedication and process

    Economics

    4 steps to getting your business model ready for emerging markets – interesting that The Economist’s tongue-in-cheek Big Mac Index is used as a serious pricing reference point in this article

    Finance

    80% of Bitcoin is exchanged into and out of Chinese yuan | Quartz – capital flight or something more criminal in nature?

    Gadget

    Why I changed my mind about the new MacBook | VentureBeat – nice run down on the MacBook’s limitations

    Keacher.com » How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the web – interesting article, especially since he has to use at least two pieces of external tech to pre-process required applications to develop a web connection and render the web content itself. It puts into perspective how powerful a smartphone is. More technology related posts here

    Legal

    German duo to be caned, jailed for spraying graffiti on Singapore train | South China Morning Post – and they weren’t good graffiti artists either. Singapore has public spaces laid aside for graffiti

    Luxury

    How Jony Ive made Apple a luxury goods company – Business Insider – interesting technology is a substitute product for luxury sector goods argument made at the end of the article

    Marketing

    Tinder Users at SXSW Are Falling for This Woman, but She’s Not What She Appears | Adweek – sci-fi film Ex Machina uses a bot on Tinder to market the film at SXSW. More marketing related content here.

    Software

    iPhone 6s specs rumors: SiP processor reportedly in the works | BGR – computing power is likely to be below what an iPhone 6 would need, but interesting

  • Apple Spring Forward event

    Apple Spring Forward event

    I started this post a few hours after watching Tim Cook and company launch a number of product revisions  under the title of Apple Spring Forward. The most anticipated of which was the Apple Watch. I was in full Post Traumatic Apple Event Disorder mode. I have collated some of my thoughts about the event below and tried to order them into some sort of cogent narrative.
    Apple TV connections

    AppleTV

    The reduction of cost in Apple TV hardware at the Apple Spring Forward event was an interesting move. Apple has decided to go for market share rather than margin with the device and the incumbent HBO Now service might be just the catalyst to drive adoption. That Apple is leading with a HBO streaming service tends to imply that Apple has likely given up on trying to build its own ‘cable channel over IP’ offering. It does raise another interesting question about how other studios will want to handle their content in iTunes or via a an app similar to BBC iPlayer. Apple is passing on to consumers the cost benefits of using the older silicon design that powers the Apple TV. It also means that the Apple TV is the least powerful computer in Apple’s product range – including phones and tablets. The AppleTV is an egalitarian device rather a luxury brand product and a vote against widespread 4K adoption; unless the price discount is making room for a premium 4K capable device at a later date?

    Social Enterprise

    Apple’s moves at becoming a ‘social enterprise’ were interesting. For an organisation so polished at presenting itself to the outside world, the ResearchKit announcement and the case study with Christy Turlington felt awkward.  ResearchKit was delivered in a flat manner and didn’t explain how the product fitted in with Apple’s position on user privacy. Turlington’s appearance was like a particularly sycophantic Charlie Rose interview. There was a lot to talk about without having to ‘over-reach’ for celebrity endorsement.

    Apple needs to work harder picking the spokespeople to burnish its reputation, the nature of the projects and the deliver to be less cringeworthy. The very nature of the product and design story means that Apple already has a certain amount of implicit moral imperative and the company should be more in-tune with that.


    Apple Watch app
    Apple Watch

    I am deeply conflicted by a lot of the discussions around the Apple Watch, for a number reasons:

    I haven’t used an Apple Watch, but watching others use it in the demos made me think that it is fiddly and dare-I-say-it: hard to use. It could be un-Apple in nature

    Scott Galloway points to the Apple Watch and describes Apple as having transitioned to a luxury brand. The Edition watch maybe a luxury product, but not all of the Apple product range are luxurious – the AppleTV at a new price point of $69 implies ubiquity. This maybe a specific choice to get scale for the media content that other luxury Apple devices need to function. Just in the same way that quality newspapers couldn’t survive solely on sales to luxury consumers. What does this mean for those Apple customers who use the the devices as professional or creative tools?

    Much of the debate revolves around what luxury consumers want by people who can’t afford to buy the Edition version of the watch. Do the kind of luxury shoppers who wouldn’t care about a $13,000+ watch have a smartphone, or a smart person to organise their lives? An astute reader of Popbitch will soon realise that the celebrity accessory to have is a personal assistant, not a bejeweled Vertu. Secondly, not being available is a luxury as privacy and time are the preserve of the reach in an always-on world

    Many of the more positive predictions depend on the Chinese luxury market. The luxury market is changing in China. Luxury goods are used as tools in China; if you look successful, you are more likely to be successful in a culture that relies on high-touch personal relationships to facilitate business. However, consumers are becoming more sophisticated and moving away from at least some of the gaudier products. The Middle East may be a more opportune market for Apple.

    A second use case in the Chinese luxury market is that of a compact storage of value for capital flight or making a payment. The culture of payments for favours is being clamped down on my the Xi administration which has been made visible by a 20%+ drop in luxury watch sales. I don’t know the way plutocrats would likely jump on the gold Apple Watch.

    ‘Apple Watch is just an iPhone remote control‘ Craig Johnson senior analyst at Piper Jaffray – heard on Bloomberg TV. ‘Luxury watches are a store of wealth, an Apple Watch isn’t‘. Which is probably true for many people on Wall Street, but may not true for the truly rich.

    Apple MacBook

    The MacBook carried the biggest dissonance for me and was arguably the biggest disappointment of the Apple Spring Forward event. For long time Apple customers, MacBook means entry level laptop. They used to come white polycarbonate shells that matched the iMac G4 and Apple eMac. Instead the MacBook seems to reflect status:

    • A price point above the MacBook Air, but less powerful and less adaptable
    • Good battery life, but underpowered for many tasks
    • Three finishes including a gold colour that screams status in the iPhone line
    • A single port which made many of geek friends freak out with anger. The morning after one of my friends posted on Facebook about the single port: I am still angry. I use a Retina MacBook Pro at work and suffer from a lack of ports for external drives (including an optical drive), Ethernet, a secondary display and a card reader for multimedia work. The MacBook has a single port which replaces the MagSafe with a USB connection. For business users or creatives the machine is gloriously impractical and destroys their investment in things like the Apple Cinema display. I currently an Apple TV and have tried to screen-cast over Wi-Fi to it for presentations, it doesn’t like video at all. When I travel I usually present, for business users who travel regularly like me the MacBook feels like a pig-in-a-poke. Is the MacBook then decided to be a luxury consumer device?

    The trackpad which is being rolled out across other Apple laptop models looked attractive to me. The next generation of keyboard seems to be less convincing. I suspect its attractiveness will be inversely proportional to your touch typing speed due to the lack of haptic feedback from shorter key travel.  Despite the price point difference, I suspect that the MacBook is actually designed to cannibalise some Apple iPad sales as an executive toy – I don’t know whether it will.

    That’s my take on the Apple Spring Forward event, but I would be interested on your take on it.

    More information

    Post Traumatic Apple Event Disorder
    On Smart Watches, I’ve Decided To Take The Plunge
    The Watch Post
    Size Zero Design | 厌食症设计
    Questions I Have About Apple’s Business | Apple 业务挑战
    CES Trends
    Waking from an Apple Watch hangover « Observatory
    New Apple Stuff and You | The Wirecutter

  • Robot nation in China factories +more

    China’s Factories Are Building a Robot Nation – Caixin – it is amazing how manual things like smartphone manufacture is. Apple moved production to China because pick and place ‘robotic’ automated machines had been used in phone manufacturer, but couldn’t handle the jewellery like manufacturing. Pick and place had been used in Japanese consumer electronics manufacturing since the early 1980s. We’ll see if the China robot nation works out in manufacturing. More related posts here

    Google and Apple may be forced to pay more tax in Russia | Gigaom – it makes sense

    Pablo by Buffer – Design engaging images for your social media posts in under 30 seconds

    Satya Nadella is cleaning up Microsoft’s ‘dirty little secret’ (MSFT) | Business Insider – the challenge is how do you give enough cloud away to encourage trial and adoption. It was easier with package software or OS where you just targeted C-suite and management consultants. I don’t think is necessarily that negative a story for Microsoft

    Vince Vaughn and Co-stars Pose for Idiotic Stock Photos You Can Have for Free | Adweek – genius collaboration with iStockPhotos

    Fund that hasn’t picked a stock in 80 years beats 98pc of peers | SCMP – Voya Corporate Leaders Trust Fund

    What Is the Future of Chinese Trade? | Yale Global – interesting analysis of the Chinese economy

    Brands must target digital strategies to local culture in Japan | Luxury Daily – great insights from L2

    China manufacturing shrinks again in Feb. | WantChinaTimes – partly down to the timing of spring festival

    Chinese shoppers are angry that their luxury Japanese toilet lids are made in China | Quartz – which says a lot about ‘brand China’ for its own consumers

    AirCloset is a subscription fashion box startup with a twist | Techinasia – interesting wear-and-return model

    Panasonic Developing ‘VR Goggles’ – Nikkei Technology Online – interesting that they can be worn as glasses implying a major reduction in weight in comparison to competitors

  • 8K resolution & other things

    NHK unveils 8K tech | TelecomAsia – of course the challenge is having a TV big enough to make 8K worthwhile. 4K is the height of digital experience at the moment. If you go to watch a film in the West End on a digital projector, you will be watching 4K rather than 8K images. Secondly pixel density like 8K is only one aspect of image improvements. Others including high dynamic range images that are brighter and clearer. Finally the controversial double frame rate of 60 frames per second. This is supposed to provide smoother movement, but has proven to be a divisive experience with cinema audiences. Particularly when it was used on Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. More related content here.

    China

    Foreign manufacturer exodus from China | Quartz – however a lot of business isn’t moving because of the depth of expertise and clusters of related businesses that they rely on. This has been a bit overwrought and there is also further inland opportunities

    Consumer behaviour

    Where’s Britain spending? Barclaycard – interesting Q4 data (PDF data)

    Culture

    An Everton Fan On Why Scousers Hate The National Team – Sabotage Times – the complexity of national identity played out on a small scale

    Finance

    Hong Kong’s unwanted HK$1,000 banknote is the money launderer’s medium of choice | SCMP – intersting that cash usage has increased by 6 per cent in real terms. Something to ponder on in the face of cryptocurrency and electronic payments

    FMCG

    Krispy Kreme ‘KKK Wednesdays’ Facebook ad – Business Insider – I can’t believe that they went there. You would be hard pressed to make this up.

    Ideas

    London is changing – interesting experiment by Central St Martins

    Japan

    Press Releases : DOCOMO and ZENRIN DataCom Develop New Indoor Navigation Technology | NTT DOCOMO – really interesting move on indoor where2.0 services between DOCOMO and ZENRIN DataCom. I know that a wide range of vendors from aerospace and defence giant EADS to Ruckus Wireless that have explored this area over the years

    Luxury

    Wine fortunes take off for labels featured on inflight menus | SCMP – inflight cuisine is a great marketing opportunity for wine brands

    Media

    YouTube makes a move against brand-sponsored videos | Digiday – this is huge for the likes of PR agencies and networks like Nuffnang

    Online

    spaceprob.es catalogs the active human-made machines that freckle our solar system and dot our galaxy – beautiful site

    Introducing TweetDeck Teams | Twitter Blogs – tries to win back users with Tweetdeck Teams against Hootsuite

    Apple – Press Info – Apple to Invest €1.7 Billion in New European Data Centres – data centre for Athenry, County Galway, hopefully the area will get a backbone upgrade to match

    Security

    Pages – Update on the SIM card encryption keys matter | Gemalto – Initial conclusions already indicate that Gemalto SIM products (as well as banking cards, passports and other products and platforms) are secure and the Company doesn’t expect to endure a significant financial prejudice – if the hack was that obvious surely it would have been picked up before now and of flagged? If the security services dd their job well there would be few fingerprints

    The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle | The//Intercept – that completely screws Gemalto

    Software

    Avicii and Other DJs Produce Hits Using Pirated Software | Torrentfreak – interesting connection to Universal Music’s Per Sundin

    Web of no web

    Daring Fireball: Thinking About the Split in Apple Watch Sales by Model – basically the WSJ numbers are rubbish, especially with luxury consumption down in China

    Why the Internet of Things matters – and what it means for marketers everywhere | Percolate – (PDF)

  • A Twitter experiment on fake followers

    In 2013, I worked with a number of companies and executives that has used services to inflate their Sina Weibo accounts standing with fake followers.  (In case you haven’t heard about it, Sina Weibo is a Chinese micro-blogging service). Often this was seen as a cheap way of getting an ego-boosting metric on their account or showing a positive delta relatively cheaply.

    The idea of follower count as a measure of worth can be seen in real life. Look at the front cover of magazines and the value of a celebrity is often measured in the number of followers that they have.
    Untitled
    Take this Elle magazine cover and interview with Kim Kardashian. Kardashian’s social media presence is as much a mark of status as a Hermès Birkin bag.
    ingrid's birkin
    However with Birkin bags going for as much as £55,000 online (holds head in hands and rocks slowly back-and-forth), getting fake followers on social platforms like Twitter might be a bit easier. If Twitter isn’t your thing, there are a number of suppliers of fake followers for Instagram, fake YouTube subscribers and fake Facebook likes too.

    I want to reiterate this here, acquiring fake followers is a cross-platform issue, Twitter is just a handy canary in the coal mine. The reason for this is the amount of tools that are are available to measure Twitter as a platform and the prevalence of its use amongst media elites.

    Looking at the variety of fake follower services, it seems to be a thriving business. A quick search on buy twitter followers cheap gave me over 31,100,000 results according to Google, and who am I to argue with their maths?

    De Micheli and Stroppa estimated that fake accounts used as fake followers accounted for 4 per cent of the Twitter user base, whilst Twitter claimed that the number was 5% in the S-1 document it filed prior to its IPO. The estimates of fake accounts on Sina Weibo are thought to be as high as 30% of the user base – it is hard to tell because Chinese Weibo consumption tends to be largely passive using it as a news stream rather than a ‘social’ channel.

    Politicians and celebrities have both been caught out using fake followers to bolster numbers (presumably to add credibility to their social presence).

    So what are the benefits and how does it work?

    I added 55,000 fake followers on Twitter, so that you don’t have to.

    The process itself is really easy. The fake follower services generally accept payment by PayPal and have easy-to-use e-commerce services. The followers are generally delivered over two-to-five working days.

    First I tried buying a big batch of followers, 50,000. The supplier delivered 56,000+ followers, but the number declines by about 100 followers over a week or so. This number seems to be pretty consistent. I can’t work out if this is just a common business practice or a part of Twitter’s ongoing conflict with fake accounts.

    The purchase didn’t:

    • Move my Klout score
    • Improve the quality or number of organic followers that I received

    I made a second purchase with a different vendor for 5,000 fake followers. This was delivered over five days, again an extra 10 per cent of followers were added on the top by the vendor and a similar decay pattern of about 5% of the followers occurred. This small increase had more of an effect on Klout causing a temporary bump in the score.  It has a more pronounced effect on Sysomos authority measure bumping my authority from 7 to 9 out of a possible 10.

    It didn’t improve the volume or quality of followers that my account got organically.

    With both vendors at least 5 per cent of the accounts that they used seemed to real people’s dormant accounts that had been co-opted into the fake follower game. There obviously seemed to be a market in taking over accounts that had been dormant for over 12 months. None of the fake follower accounts were set to private – this could factor into developing a heuristic for looking at fake follower accounts?

    My overall conclusion on the fake follower business is that it almost purely about personal vanity rather than gaming a system. More related content here.

    More information

    Pay up and embrace Twitter’s fake followers | Marketing Week
    Fake Twitter followers: An easy game, but not worth the risk | The Next Web
    How the market in ‘fake’ Twitter followers works | Yahoo! News
    Rihanna Loses 1.2 Million Instagram Followers After Spambot Purge | Gigwise
    Instagram makes teens and celebrities angry by killing millions of spambots | The Verge
    Twitter and the underground market by Carlo De Micheli & Andrea Stroppa at 11th Nexa Lunch Seminar, Turin, Italy (May 22, 2013) – PDF
    Inside a Twitter Robot Factory | WSJ
    Twitter Admits 5% Of Its ‘Users’ Are Fake | Business Insider
    I Bought 10,000 Fake Twitter Followers. Why Didn’t Klout, Kred (or Others) Notice? | Ignite Social Media