Innovation, alongside disruption are two of the most overused words in business at the moment. Like obscenity, many people have their own idea of what innovation is.
Judy Estrin wrote one of the best books about the subject and describes it in terms of hard and soft innovation.
Hard innovation is companies like Intel or Qualcomm at the cutting edge of computer science, materials science and physics
Soft innovation would be companies like Facebook or Yahoo!. Companies that might create new software but didn’t really add to the corpus of innovation
Silicon Valley has moved from hard to soft innovation as it moved away from actually making things. Santa Clara country no longer deserves its Silicon Valley appellation any more than it deserved the previous ‘garden of delights’ as the apricot orchards turned into factories, office campus buildings and suburbs. It’s probably no coincidence that that expertise has moved east to Taiwan due to globalisation.
It can also be more process orientated shaking up an industry. Years ago I worked at an agency at the time of writing is now called WE Worldwide. At the time the client base was predominantly in business technology, consumer technology and pharmaceutical clients.
The company was looking to build a dedicated presence in consumer marketing. One of the business executives brings along a new business opportunity. The company made fancy crisps (chips in the American parlance). They did so using a virtual model. Having private label manufacturers make to the snacks to their recipe and specification. This went down badly with one of the agency’s founders saying ‘I don’t see what’s innovative about that’. She’d worked exclusively in the IT space and thought any software widget was an innovation. She couldn’t appreciate how this start-ups approach challenged the likes of P&G or Kraft Foods.
Interesting talk on how distrust in media skews to more right wing voters in the US. Gallup have tracked distrust in the media over time amongst Americans. The Poynter Institute is a respected media research organisation and has done a lot of work on media bias which affects and partly explains distrust in media. Distrust in media is also fuelled by rumours and conspiracy theories according to research by Louisiana State University. While identifying conspiracy theories is well understood, distrust in media continues.
Consumer behaviour
Interesting podcast by the Wall Street Journal on how retirement is something older people put off due to finance, ennui of retirement and the longer lifespan. It is interesting how technology is enabling avoidance of retirement and it even has its own hashtags #neverretire.
I have touched on earlier posts on the rail origins of the barcode, here’s a great documentary on the Kartrak.
Japan
Early 1940s adaptation of the 47 Ronin story. The 47 Ronin is something that really happened in 1703 and is known in Japan as the Ako incident (赤穂事件). The protagonists were seen as examples to be emulated in terms of dedication, honour, loyalty, persistence and self-sacrifice.
McDonalds CSR activities came up a few times over the past day or so I thought I would visit it. CSR stands for corporate and social responsibility. A few American PR executives that I have come across used not to like the S in the middle, which sounded like socialism. The idea was doing good to enhance brand reputation – generally it was a strategic function.
ESG operates at a higher level. CSR predates ESG as an idea. McDonalds CSR is interesting because of the tactical way it seems to be employed around what a couple of rules that I have noticed.
Children are always a good universal focus of McDonalds CSR, which is the reason why Ronald McDonald House is a common theme throughout the worldwide operations of McDonalds
McDonalds CSR is on the side of authority, hence its support for the Metropolitan Police when dealing with XR protests and Korean national service draftees. There is a risk that this could make its conduct in authoritarian countries more problematic
To be a poem. – from the Web Curios newsletter ‘is a digital poem by Alicia Guo – it’s infinite and self-generating, and I don’t quite know how it works or where it’s pulling the words from, but each time it’s different and each time it’s fragmented and magical and silly and poignant and confusing and beautiful and I would like this to be read forever by a choir of machine voices until the heat death of the universe please thankyou.‘
Online bookseller Book Depository is closing down with some three weeks notice. It wasn’t a topic at work and barely made a ripple amongst British friends. The Hong Kong part of my social media bubble shared the news and were sad about it. The company had been owned by Amazon since 2011. I used it for a few reasons:
Free postage anywhere. I have friends around the world and Book Depository was a good way of sending a gift book. It made the process of international gifting so much easier. I bought a set of books there as recently as last week. Many of the upset people on social media were from Australasia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia
Getting hold of English books when I lived in Hong Kong. At the time I lived in Hong Kong there were a couple of nice chains that did English language books, but if I wanted something for my professional life or esoteric interests, then online made more sense. Dymocks, Eslite and the various independent stores would only get you so far. For everything else Book Depository helped out. This was partly down to book shops being a ‘lifestyle’ in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia. They carefully curate fiction but aren’t necessarily like the university book shops I spent my teens and twenties in
Arbitrage. Despite being owned by Amazon, there were a number of items that I bought where there was a price difference between Book Depository and their parent company
You could find a particular edition or format, with Amazon it could be a bit of a lottery
It isn’t full of tat like Amazon. Amazon Marketplace has been both a blessing and a curse. Amazon hasn’t done a good enough job curating Marketplace. I found Marketplace useful at the beginning, rather like a fixed-price eBay. Now its a dystopian retail experience littered with a substantial minority of counterfeit products and sub-standard garbage
Their ask the author section provided some interesting reading.
The brand
I always had it in my mind as ‘The Book Depository’ rather than Book Depository. It’s always the way I discussed it with other people. I had to go back and edit stray ‘The’s that slipped into this post.
Book Depository home page
Diminished ambitions
Book Depository is being closed by Amazon as part of cost cutting across its book and device categories. There is a certain irony in Alexa being in full retreat just at the time when LLMs were about to turn up. Alexa skills are likely to get loss in the subsequent withdrawal and LLM expansion. Book Depository helped plug gaps on the map where Amazon didn’t have native businesses. The decline of Book Depository implies an upper limit to Amazon’s global retail expansion.
Beauty bots drive R&D at Unilever’s £68 million facility | Vogue Business – The world’s highest concentration of robots doing material chemistry can be found at Unilever’s lab in North West England. Vogue Business gets a behind-the-scenes peek at the facility, which develops innovative products for brands including Hourglass and Living Proof.
Is China’s New Rocket Really Coal Powered? Deep Space Updates – April 2nd – YouTube – yes kerosene made from the kind of coal hydrogenation process similar to what SASOL used in apartheid-era South Africa. The National Coal Board had a pilot plant doing something similar during the late 1980s at Point of Ayr under what was called a ‘coal liquefaction plant‘. I used to know a few of the guys that had worked there previously. The plant had a number of experienced oil refinery technicians on the staff when it was running. The site was subsequently taken over and was where BHP Petroleum built their sour gas facility and brought natural gas ashore from the Liverpool Bay oil and gas field in the early 1990s. It also probably tells you everything you need to know about China’s climate related decarbonisation goals.
How the new generation of weight-loss drugs work | The Economist – the potential benefits of such drugs go beyond their ability to promote weight loss in individuals. By showing that molecular mechanisms hinder people’s attempts to lose weight, they show that gluttony is not to blame when people remain obese. That should slowly help to eliminate the stigma. Both weight-loss surgery and drugs are useful tools in the fight against obesity. But by changing the conversation these new drugs may remind health-system leaders that they need to do much more to encourage healthy lifestyles.
Hong Kong
‘Fair price, fine quality’: Hong Kong fast-food chains become go-to place for mainland Chinese budget tours | South China Morning Post – Established eatery chain Café de Coral was among those capitalising on the trend as it offered advance bookings for the tour groups, which have increased after the city fully resumed cross-border travel with the mainland earlier in the year. A Post reporter at 11.45am on Monday observed two mainland tour groups of about 30 people each being guided from their coaches and taken to Grand Waterfront Plaza, a shopping centre in To Kwa Wan, where they dined at the site’s Café de Coral outlet.
Online trolls are taking a toll in China – BBC News – In collectivist cultures such as China, those perceived as going against the norm tend to be severely punished, experts say. What makes it worse, they add, is a pervasive culture of shame. “A strong sense of collectivism in China can mean that cyberbullying, when perpetrated as a symbolic act of violence or aggression towards another in a public setting, may lead to drastic measures, such as suicide, to escape that sense of humiliation,” says K Cohen Tan, a vice-provost at University of Nottingham Ningbo China
NTC Volcano or NTC Vulkan in westernised Russian is an information security firm (think Crowdstrike, HackerOne, Mandiant or the part of BAE Systems formerly known as Detica). Information leaked from the company show that NTC Volcano has played a major role in Russian state sponsored cyber attacks.
NTC Volcano also work on protecting large corporates and include Sberbank and Aeroflot. NTC Volcano has partnered with IBM up to last year.
Like the Panama Papers before it, it looks as if there is going to be a succession of NTC Volcano related stories over the next few weeks coming out by the participating media outlets collaborating on the reporting.
Alibaba Reorg – by Kevin Xu – Interconnected – so many motivations wrapped up in this from conglomerate discount to dissipating market power that made them such a high profile target for Chinese government attention
Current state of US-China relationship. This doesn’t take into account the dumpster fire of China’s relationships with the likes of the European Union.
How China’s Spies Fooled an America That Wanted to be Fooled – Lawfare – Rather than untangle the ways in which the MSS seeks to gather U.S. government or corporate secrets, Joske argues that the MSS’s greatest intelligence strength is its massively successful influence operation against U.S. political and business elites – reinforces a lot of the findings in The Hidden Hand by Hamilton & Ohlberg.
The lengths some companies will go… the amount of money, time and effort they will spend… just to avoid paying women of color.
Jodi-Ann Burey
The reality its that AI-generated models aren’t about systemic racism; but the creative class equivalent of John Henry vs. the steam drill, or the Luddites against textile manufacturing machinery. At a systemic view: when capital and labour come into conflict, capital wins.
The only stakeholder group actually being considered is the company’s shareholders. They are usually put in place for efficiency gains that are traded off against ‘just good enough effectiveness’. The need has probably been accelerated by the inflation in influencers prices and the need for a faster turnaround time.
Finally you don’t have to worry about breach of good behaviour clauses which might occur with working models or photographers. It started with virtual influencers pioneered in Japan notably Imma who first appeared in 2018.
How the security strategy of European countries has changed in recent years. TL;DR – the peace dividend is over.
Software
How to Save Android | Digits to Dollars – Android is not in good shape. After 16 years on the market, Android remains heavily fragmented. This requires developers to build hundreds (thousands?) of versions of their app, and consumers face a bewildering array of user interfaces. Developers are deeply frustrated by this. We know many software developers who insist on using an Android phone out of principal, but their green message bubbles stand out as exceptions. Consumers, especially young consumers (aka customers of the future) prefer iOS by wide margins – the problem is testing rather than developing lots of versions
Beyoncé and Adidas mutually agree to call it quits – A Wall Street Journal report states that this development comes a couple of months after Ivy Park witnessed a 50 per cent decline in sales. The label pooled USD 40 million in 2022, however, the news outlet showed a projection of USD 250 million. This is a massive shrink from USD 93 million in sales in 2021. – the latest collection looked more like high vis workwear than stylish activewear.
I was introduced to Gordon Moore and Moore’s Law through a college class on innovation taught by my friend Neil Keegan. I have also just read Michael Malone’s The Big Score; an account written in the early 1980s that Gordon Moore featured in as one of the co-founders of Intel.
Gordon Moore taken for an OnInnovation interview he was doing circa 2008 for the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation
Gordon Moore was a San Franciscan by birth but educated at John Hopkins University, rather than Stanford University. He worked at Shockley and at Fairchild Semiconductor prior to co-founding Intel. In many respects Gordon Moore was more low-key than other Intel founders like Bob Noyce or Andy Grove – but the ideas behind Moore’s Law echoed around the world. The law has been interpreted and misinterpreted by technologists, economists, journalists and policy makers the world over.
Moore’s Law
Gordon Moore made an observation that was published in 1965 and became an immutable forecast for the rest of the 20th century that would guide the direction of the semiconductor industry and every industry that relied upon it.
It started off with an article that Gordon Moore had published in Electronics magazine on April 19, 1965. He observed that the number of transistors were doubling every year over a 10-year period. This relationship was widely known by people working in the field. But the semiconductor field was a small community and the name Moore’s Law eventually stuck.
The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.
Once, that had been proven correct in 1975, Gordon Moore went on to revise his model to assume a similar effect very two years. This was presented in a speech at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting that year.
All of this meant that technologists like those at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC could spend large amounts of money building foundational technologies and know that the ability to commercially produce these items would catch up ten years hence. Robert X. Cringely posits that much of the dot com bust was down to an industry getting too ahead of itself in terms of what it estimated Moore’s Law could achieve in the mid-to-late 1990s.
Integrated circuits started finding their way into everyday products and facilitating new product categories such as laptops, smartphones and the modern web.
China detains staff, raids office of US due diligence firm Mintz Group | Reuters – “Red alerts should be going off in all boardrooms right now about risks in China,” the source, who did not wish to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the matter, said. China has said it welcomes foreign trade and investment but stressed that security comes before development. U.S. businesses operating in China are increasingly pessimistic about their prospects in the world’s second-largest economy, according to a survey released this month by the American Chamber of Commerce in China. Two-thirds of the respondents cited rising U.S.-China tensions as the top business challenge. Western due diligence companies have got into trouble with Chinese authorities before. British corporate investigator Peter Humphrey and his American wife Yu Yingzeng, who ran risk consultancy ChinaWhys, were detained in 2013 following work they did for British pharmaceuticals group GSK. Humphrey, who spent two years in jail for allegedly acquiring personal information by illegal means, which he denied, told Reuters that providing due diligence in China was even harder now because of a “massive tightening in access to information.” – Ok a bit of context. If Gordon Moore hadn’t died this post would have been Mintz Group + more things – this is how big this is. The Mintz Group is a respected due diligence research company. If you are looking to:
Buy a business and want to know if its real, or what the states of the assets are
Want to ensure that you are not doing business with legally sanctioned entities
If you are a finance firm and want to ensure that the people you are considering to invest in are who they say they are and the business actually exists and works in the way they claim
If you are trying to find out if your supplier is conducting themselves in an honest manner with you
The more opaque China becomes, the less tenable it becomes to conduct work there, do business with Chinese companies or invest in Chinese companies and the Chinese economy. The timing is less likely to be intentionally symbolic than happenstance, but either way it isn’t good news.
Apple ‘Porn’ Filter | Techrights – a disturbing development that opens a Pandora’s box of possible censorship and authoritarian measures in the wrong hands – which its likely to fall given the global ubquity of Apple’s technology
