Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.
Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.
Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.
Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.
Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.
More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.
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.
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
Like many people I was drawn to Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep by the film adaptation Blade Runner. I originally read the paperback book and found it less satisfying. It is one of the few cases where cinema did a better job than the source material, even though it veered off from the book.
I re-read the book after I knew about more about Dick’s amphetamine fuelled life and the paranoia associated with speed underpins the story in plot turns affecting our main character.
I have now had a good deal of time to read the graphic novel adaptation with some distance from the original book. Time has moved along and I think I would be more receptive to the book today.
Tony Parker’s adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep
Tony Parker has done a really good job of interpreting the original and breathing life into it as a graphic novel. He brings it to life to Dick’s work, in particular the entropy of the environment. In particular the phenomenon of ‘kipple’ and philosophy of Mercerism which underpins much of the novel. It is a credit to Parker that he managed to keep the visuals distinct from the iconic style of Blade Runner.
My one criticism of the Parker adaption is that it is an unwieldy book and the binding comes apart under the weight of the pages. As for the content, I think Parker’s adaption is a great way of taking in Dick’s novel. Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep is important for the way it shaped culture and technology. The book foreshadowed cyberpunk culture. It has been listed as one of the 100 books you need to read (at least according to the Times Educational Supplement). More on Do Androids Dream…here. More book reviews here.
The New Yorker has been producing some fantastic surreal content
The Suicide Squad movie was disjointed to say the least, but one good thing that came out of it was a collaboration between Action Bronson and Mark Ronson
Korean cosmetic brand Innisfree tapped into the aspirations of Korean and Chinese consumers with this fantasy VR bike ride to Jeju Island. The execution was canny, from a technical perspective it deals well with the motion / balance issues that VR projects sometimes have. Jeju Island is a famous for its pleasant weather and more relaxed lifestyle. Chinese investors have recently been driving up property prices there. More Korea related content here.
