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.
Pipes – Yahoo! Pipes analogue, lets just hope that they haven’t captured the ‘flakey’ experience. I often remember hearing Yahoo! Pipes being compared to owning a British sports car. Instead I would prefer that Pipes provide the Mazda MX5 (Miata) experience where you get the experience but none of the broken ass crap of owning an MGB
Business
Is 2017 the beginning of the end for the app economy? TheNextWeb – not exactly the beginning of the end. More like a new normal – one thing that’s missing is the importance of building inside existing app eco-systems such as WeChat, Facebook Messenger etc. Whilst WeChat have made headway with mini-apps it will be interesting to see if Facebook can duplicate their success.
Korea
Why young South Koreans are turning away from religion | Arts & Culture | Al Jazeera – a certain amount of this turning away is geography. Korea had a mix of buddhism and Shamanism historically. Buddhist monasteries and temples were often in the mountains close to nature. Shamanism depended on closeness with nature – so again being out in the middle of nowhere. You throw in the move to cities, the break down of familial connections through distance and time poverty. More on Korean related topics here.
Does Slack allow your boss to spy on you? — Quartz – yes, but only with output rather than outcome-focused measures on productivity. It will reinforce the practices of poor managers rather than help make good managers
An all-compassing phrase that I’ve heard being used by Chinese friends Hēi kējì in Pinyin or black technology. It’s been around for a couple of years but recently gained more currency among people that I know.
It is used as a catchall for disruptive / cool innovative products. What constitutes ‘black technology’ is subjective in nature but generally Chinese would agree on some examples such as:
Magic Leap
Microsoft Holo Lens
Bleeding edge silicon chips with an extraordinary amount of memory or machine learning functionality built in
Tesla self-driving cars
Magical quality
The key aspect is that the product as ‘magical quality’ in the eyes of the user. Technology companies have tried to use it in marketing to describe the latest smartphone and app features like NFC, gesture sensitive cameras and video filters. Your average Chinese consumer would see this as cynical marketing hype. Xiaomi had been guilty of this over the past couple of years. Chinese netizens aren’t afraid to flay the brands for abusing the term black technology.
As technology develops, the bar for what represents black technology will be raised higher.
Manga origins
According to Baidu Baike (a Quora-like Q&A service / Wikipedia analogue) it is derived from the Japanese manga Full Metal Panic! (フルメタル·パニック! |Furumetaru Panikku!).
In the manga black technology is technology far more advanced than the real world. An example of this would be ‘Electronic Conceal System’ – active optical camouflage used on military helicopters and planes in the manga. It is created by the ‘Whispered’ – people who are extremely gifted polymaths who each specialise in a particular black technology.
In the manga they are frequently abducted and have their abilities tested by ‘bad organisations’ who support terrorism. Whispered also have a telepathic ability to communicate with each other. If they stay connected for too long there can be a risk of their personalities coalescing together. Similar content can be found here.
Apple has finally found someone to support HomeKit • The Register – there have been smart home standards before HomeKit. I can also understand why there is a wider leeriness around Internet of Things due to the privacy implications, built in obsolescence and dependence on the cloud. But HomeKit does provide a more secure solution that seems to be less dependent on the cloud than Google and Amazon options out there. More related content here.
Magellan’s Hamish Douglass says Uber is a ‘Ponzi scheme’ | Sydney Morning Herald – I can see the point that Mr Douglass is making. More rose tinted observations might point to the similarity with Amazon; however even Amazon is relying on constant investment of profits from mature units in international and service expansion – Uber seems to be nowhere near breakeven
Chinese companies are working hard to overcome the copycat stigma | Quartz – actually this isn’t an overnight thing but has been going on for the best part of ten years. It is also worthwhile giving a shoutout to Naomi Wu who has been educating Chinese businesses on GPL licences and helping get compliance from companies in Shenzhen.
How He Used Facebook to Win | by Sue Halpern | The New York Review of Books – Facebook did turn out to be essential to Trump’s victory, but not in the way Grassegger, Krogerus, and Schwartz suggest. Though there is little doubt that Cambridge Analytica exploited members of the social network, Facebook’s real influence came from the campaign’s strategic and perfectly legal use of Facebook’s suite of marketing tools
Apple Begs Android Users to Switch to iPhone | Makeuseof – beg is the wrong word, but this looks like the start of an effort to promote platform switching which is another indicator of smartphone market maturity and saturation
I’ve go in involved in a few crowdfunded products and some of them have worked out but the majority haven’t. The latest example was the high profile e-ink phone cover PopSlate. PopSlate got over $1 million dollars of funding and was widely covered by the media.
“popSLATE 2 is E-Ink for your iPhone done right.” – Slashgear
“It’s an evolution, not merely refinement.” – Wired
Why crowdsourced projects fail?
Generally I’ve found that crowdfunded projects like PopSlate tend to fail for three (non-criminal) reasons:
They underestimated the cost or complexity for batch manufacture of items. They have problems with getting tooling moulds to work and have to go through iterations that burn up cash
They get gazzumped; their product is sufficiently easy to make that Chinese manufacturers who go through Indiegogo and Kickstarter for ideas get the product into market faster
The engineering is just too hard. This seems to have been the problem for PopSlate who couldn’t innovate and get their product into market as fast as new phones came out
On the face of it, the PopSlate is a great idea. Bringing the kind of dual screen technology to the iPhone that had been in the Yota phone for a number of years. Huawei had a similar snap-on e-ink back available for the the P9 handset in limited quantities.
PopSlate had already launched a mark I version of their product. With the mark II version of their product PopSlate tried to do too much: they tried to make it a battery case but still ridiculously thin. The following email was sent out on Saturday morning UK time:
Critical Company Update
This update provides serious and unwelcome news.
Based upon your support, we have spent the last year continuing to develop our vision for “always-on” mobile solutions. Our goal was to solve three fundamental issues with today’s smartphones: we wanted to simplify access to information, increase battery performance, and improve readability. Unfortunately, the significant development hurdles that we have encountered have completely depleted our finances, and we have been unable to raise additional funds in the current market. As a result, popSLATE does not have a viable business path forward.
This marks the end of a 5-year journey for our team, which started with a seed of an idea in 2012 and led to our quitting our jobs to start the company. Although we are very disappointed by the ultimate outcome and its implications for you as our backers, we are proud of our team, who worked tirelessly over the years to commercialize the first plastic ePaper display, globally ship thousands of popSLATE 1 devices as a first-in-category product, and re-imagine & further extend the platform with the second generation product. Despite a strong vision, high hopes, and very hard work, we find ourselves at the end of the journey.
We are out of money at this juncture for two key reasons. First, we have spent heavily into extensive development and preparation for manufacturing; as you are aware, we hit some critical issues that multiplied the required spend, as described in previous updates.
Most recently, we learned that the fix for the Apple OTA issues would involve more significant redesign. While we initially suspected that the Lightning circuit was the culprit, it turned out that it was a much more fundamental issue. Namely, our housing material is not compatible with Apple OTA requirements. You may think, “Wait, isn’t it just plastic? Why would that be a problem?” While the housing is indeed largely plastic, we used a very special custom blend of materials that included glass fibers. The glass fibers were used to solve two issues, both of which were related to making the device super-thin: a) they enabled uniform, non-distortional cooling of the housing mold around our metal stiffener plate (the key component that makes popSLATE 2 thin but very strong) and b) they added tensile strength to the very compact form factor. Unfortunately, we have concluded that these added fibers are attenuating the RF signal and that we would have to spend additional cycles to tune a new blend with required modifications to the tooling. This is an expensive and timely process.
Second, we have been unsuccessful at raising additional financing, despite having vigorously pursued all available avenues since the close of our March Indiegogo campaign (including angels, VCs, Shark Tank and equity crowdfunding, both in the US and abroad). Many in our network of fellow hardware innovators have encountered this difficult new reality. You may have also seen the very public financial struggles of big-name consumer hardware companies—GoPro, Fitbit, Pebble, Nest and others—as highlighted in this recent New York Times article [link]. The most dramatic example of this phenomenon is the recent and sudden shutting down of Pebble, paragon of past crowdfunding success.
There is no way to sugarcoat what this all means:
popSLATE has entered into the legal process for dissolution of the company
Your popSLATE 2 will not be fulfilled
There is no money available for refunds
This will be our final update
While this is a very tough moment professionally and emotionally for us, it is obviously extremely disappointing for all of you who had believed in the popSLATE vision. Many of you have been with us since the March campaign, and a smaller set helped found the popSLATE community back in 2012. To you—our family, friends, and other unwavering backers—we are incredibly grateful for your enthusiasm, ideas, and support throughout the years. Just as importantly, we deeply regret letting you down and not being able to deliver on our promise to you. We truly wish there were a viable path forward for product fulfillment and the broader popSLATE vision, but sadly we have exhausted all available options.
The problem as a consumer you have for much of these gadget is this:
If a product can be easily made in Shenzhen, it will be so you should be able to get it cheaper on lightinthebox or similar sites
If it can’t be turned out in a reasonable time, it has a low likelihood of succeeding
There have been successes of more hobby-based products; I have a replica of Roland’s TB-303 synthesiser. It’s the kind of product that can be assembled whilst not relying a China-based supply chain. It also is based on well understood technology and there weren’t issues of with designing for very tight places or Apple’s requirements (in the case of iPhone’s accessories).
What about the poster child of Pebble? Pebble managed to go for longer with a sophisticated product but couldn’t withstand the gravity of declining sales in the wearables sector. More related content here.
I’d read Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works over lunar new year so Asian Godfathers was an obvious follow-on. Studwell dealt directly with the reasons for East Asia’s economic growth and Southeast Asia’s failing to follow them.
Studwell attached this same subject through through a different lens. Studwell looks at it through the lens of the business community in these different countries. In Asian Godfathers, he tells the story through Asia’s business tycoons. From the taipans of Hong Kong to Stanley Ho – the Macau gambling tycoon.
The Asian godfathers were generally cosmopolitan privileged people who where in the right place at the right time. Some of them had colourful origin stories as black marketers selling fake medicines and blockade runners. Mao’s China relied on business tycoons across Asia when the country had closed itself off from the world.
Studwell tells of an elderly tycoon who goes to sleep in a bedroom with no windows, such was his paranoia about revenge from the families of people who had been ‘treated’ with his black market antibiotics decades earlier.
This also explains the paranoia that Hong Kong’s tycoons had over politicised youth in Hong Kong as well. These are the people who are most likely to kick back against their rent seeking businesses.
But these Asian Godfathers are just a side show in a wider panorama of political greed and incompetence across Southeast Asia. Asian Godfathers is more like Hotel Babylon than an economics analysis like How Asia Works, yet it delivers its message forcefully. More related content here.
– Amazon
