Ged Carroll

Category: singapore | 新加坡 | 싱가포르 | シンガポール

Welcome to the Singapore category of this blog. So first up a disclosure, back when I worked in Hong Kong, I did some work for the Singapore government ‘home team’. The work was done for their Central Narcotics Bureau and the Singapore Prison Service. Beyond friends that live there, I have no connections commercial or otherwise with Singapore now.

I have had the opportunity visit the city state and really loved it. Is it better to Hong Kong, politics non withstanding I don’t think a true comparison works that way. It has a more Germanic character than Hong Kong, but both are very similar in terms of the people and the built environment.

This is where I share anything that relates to Singaporean business issues, the Singaporean people or culture. Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Singapore Air launched a new ad campaign. And that I thought was particularly interesting or noteworthy, that might appear in branding as well as Singapore la.

So far, I haven’t had too much Singaporean related content here at the moment. That’s just the way things work out sometimes.

I am fascinated by the way Singapore has been deftly playing China to increase its stature as the place to do business. I am only interested in local politics when it intersects with business. An example of this would be legal issues affecting the media sector for instance.

If there are Singaporean related subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.

  • Monster Hunt & more news

    Monster Hunt

    China’s highest-grossing film of all time Monster Hunt flops in US, takes in $21,000 during opening weekend: Shanghaiist – interesting that they didn’t bother to put some marketing wallop behind Monster Hunt, they had enough time to do a good English dub (great way to get Asian Americans on board) and push it out to a more general audience in the US. It would have been a great China soft power vehicle. Instead a China soft power opportunity was lost.

    Then there is the other view, that Monster Hunt performed to expectations. There is a possibility that its Chinese ticket sales were inflated. I and others that I know have gone to see a western film on more than one occasion in a Chinese cinema. The ticket is rang out as a local film and then the screen number is crossed out and the western movie screen number written on by the assistant.

    Secondly, Monster Hunt didn’t spawn a Toy Story-esque merchandise avalanche in China and other Asian markets. Which indicates it wasn’t that much of a cultural moment and ergo, not as successful as one would believe. More China related posts here.

    Consumer behaviour

    Blu-ray Isn’t Going Anywhere – Park Associates – interesting demographic pattern of ownership – “Owners have higher incomes than the overall broadband household population as well as a strong preference for the highest-quality video.“

    Hillary Clinton is losing young voters to Bernie Sanders. | Slate – not scientific but interesting. It also gives an interesting viewpoint on Corbyn’s political chances.

    Design

    Arriving at San Francisco – interesting delve into Apple’s new system font. Unfortunately I can’t download it in a format to use it in documents

    Gadgets

    StarTech Unveils Dual-Display Thunderbolt 2 Docking Station with 12 Ports – AnandTech – this looks like all my peripheral prayers were answered. I ended up with two of these. They work well for handling by two Apple Cinema displays

    Ideas

    Who Killed Nokia? Nokia Did | INSEAD Alumni Magazine – Despite being an exemplar of strategic agility, the fearful emotional climate prevailing at Nokia during the rise of the iPhone froze coordination between top and middle managers

    Why Yahoo Couldn’t Adapt to the Smartphone Era – The New Yorker – the irony is that they got on mobile services early. Yahoo! Go had been launched when I was there at the beginning of 2006. It was a one stop shop to search, access email, share photos on Flickr, get news and access Yahoo! Finance. Christian Lindholm was at Yahoo! back then. He was the director in charge of the S60 operating system interface at Nokia prior to

    Innovation

    LLVM Patches Confirm Google Has Its Own In-House Processor – Phoronix – interesting that they have a custom processor, it is related to their internal network infrastructure

    Media

    Why Jeep’s $10M Super Bowl Ad Only Used a Third of the Screen | WIRED – interesting example of online considerations driving TV creative decisions – mobile devices

    Telemundo to Build New $250 Million Miami Headquarters – The Wrap – which indicates how big the Latin media market is

    On the hypothetical eventuality of no more free internet – FT – interesting discussion of Internet economics and how it relates to  the commons (paywall)

    CBS Says Super Bowl 50 Broke Streaming Records With 3.96 Million Unique Viewers | TechCrunch – which is still relatively small compared to broadcast TV audiences for major events such as this

    Online

    Akamai earnings call hints at Apple CDN – Business Insider – not terribly surprising, Akamai has strategic partnerships with Apple rivals as well. Akamai earnings hint at the service’s ubiquity

    Security

    US intelligence chief: we might use the internet of things to spy on you | Technology | The Guardian – not terribly surprising, each technological frontier represents opportunities and IoT won’t be any different in that respect. The very pervasiveness of IoT is what makes it such a security risk

    Singapore

    Come to Singapore! The Sights (And Branding) Are Lovely | WIRED – it feels very Monocle-esque content on Singapore

    Web of no web

    This Google app could forever change the way you travel – Google’s translation app has a new feature that will come in handy for travelers. You point your smartphone’s camera at a sign printed in a foreign language, and Google’s translation technology

  • Chinas Coming War With Asia

    Chinas coming war with Asia – provocative title

    Chinas Coming War With Asia: where do I start with a book title this inflammatory? I went to the trouble of reading the book twice before starting this review. In the end, the only conclusion I can come to is ‘Policy Faultlines in East Asia’ doesn’t have the same ring to it.

    Chinas coming war with Asia is one of those books that you shouldn’t judge too harshly by its cover, but by Jonathan Holsag’s writings.
    Untitled

    About the book

    Holsag marshals a huge range of facts and opinions within the book. If you want to have a basic understanding of the modern Chinese state, then this book is a good primer.

    He provides insight into the Chinese Communist’s Party’s policy cornerstone of territory maximisation. They were happy to put off their agenda for tactical advantage, but never gave up on their goals. China’s neighbours have similar inflexible policy goals. There is is no win-win solution. This is very interesting given the treaty

    Time has brought increased pressures. A fight for resources to fuel further growth and water rights conflicts. Relative declines in economic growth also fuels nationalistic politics. In China, nationalistic sentiments in citizens grew with prosperity. It has become convenient for politicians to tap into nationalistic sentiments.

    Holsag doesn’t attempt to provide a solution for de-escalation of these edges. His book only provides a macro-level understanding of the countries involved. For the reader who wants to understand Asia, Holsag’s book is an excellent primer.  More on Chinas Coming War With Asia by Jonathan Holsag. More book reviews here.

  • Yahoo Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation

    With the Yahoo Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation  – Yahoo! published a list of properties that it was closing down and services that it was changing support on over the next few months. Most of the coverage amongst the people I follow has been around the shutdown of Yahoo! Pipes, as despite its flakey behaviour it was tremendously useful for putting together cheap, fast services to help with social media monitoring. I ‘built’ monitoring pipes for the likes of Microsoft and AMD after I had left Yahoo! that included careful key word filtering. This allowed them to take this feed and syndicate ‘good’ news machine translated into different languages on different micro-sites. This ‘Pipe building’ process took just a few hours.

    My friend Mat Morrison had put it up to much more inventive uses.

    Yahoo! Pipes, like the Fire Eagle location service came out of a golden age of web development. An influx of talent into the business like Bradley Horowitz, Simon Willison, Stewart Butterfield, Tom Coates and Joshua Schachter brought with it a web 2.0 philosophy of data being:

    • Portable – consumers could back up their own data at any time, or use it to move to a rival service. In stark contrast to the Facebook and WeChat walled gardens of today
    • Data is to be manipulated – data could be overlaid or processed through other services, like crime data on maps, or Pipes

    But enough eulogising; Pipes was an interesting idea that never got the support from consumers or Yahoo! that it needed. The service was flakey at times, if it was a car it would have been a late 1970s/early 1980s vintage Alfa Romeo or Lancia – it was that bad. It is obvious from the Yahoo! Pipes blog that it has been in a mode of minimal maintenance for years – the last post prior to the shut down notice was posted in 2012 to outline a work around from Yahoo! shutting down its Babelfish translation service (which was originally on AltaVista.com in the late 1990s and relied on technology licenced from Systrans).

    Lets look at some of the other services that Yahoo! has sunset this time around.

    The market specific services are interesting, as they paint a picture of Yahoo! under-performing across international markets and in sectors where it previously had a strong advertising offering. Take the cars section across the main European markets, looking at the UK offering – there is no page takeover by a car brand, there is no sponsored content and there is two banner ads (one for AutoTrader, one for BSkyB), one tiny rich content ad at the bottom of the page for the new Terminator film and one re-targeting module. If this is an indicator of what other European markets are like then automotive advertising at Yahoo! Europe is in a bad way.

    TV and film properties have little to no ads on the front page, again no takeovers or sponsored content. So Yahoo! seems to be struggling with getting advertising spend in two key sectors.

    If we go to Asia, the move out of the Philippines is particularly interesting, presumably driven by advertising opportunity – or the lack there of. But when you look at the economic indicators of the Philippines, there is a consistent growth predicted in retail sales according to Statista
    philippines retail sales

    According to Ken Research, the Philippines online advertising market grew with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 43.4% during the period 2008 – 2013 and is predicted to grow almost 15% CAGR between 2013 and 2018. E-tailing is expected to grow by 101.4% CAGR over 2013 – 2018. So why is Yahoo!, which has been established in the Philippines unable to capitalise on the in-market growth. Is it that Yahoo! sees ways to earn more money elsewhere and the opportunity cost is too high in the Philippines, or is it a broken advertising sales machine?

    The closure of Yahoo! Entertainment in Singapore is more curious as Yahoo! still manages to get advertising from major brands. As I write this Oreo has a full page frame running and there is a dynamic banner by group shopping site Qoo10.

    Yahoo! Mail and Contacts support of older Macs and iPhones. I was surprised that these were called out. Yahoo! Mail is depreciating support for devices running iOS4 or older and running the native mail application. A couple of things here; given Apple’s expertise at upgrading iPhone users speedily why would this even be an issue?

    Secondly,  why does Yahoo! need to make a special effort to support accounts that were presumably using POP3 or IMAP email standards? The webDEV standard would make a similarly curious point about Yahoo!’s depreciation of support for contacts on a Mac running OS X 10.8 and earlier. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

    Former CEO, Carole Bartz famously said of Yahoo! that you can’t cut your way to growth. So what do these ‘product updates’ say about Yahoo!? Over the past two years prior to this update, Yahoo! has already closed over 60 services, where does it all stop? More technology related content here.

    More information
    Q2 2015 Progress Report On Our Product Prioritization | Yahoo! Blog
    Pipes End-of-life Announcement | Yahoo Pipes Blog
    Q4 2014 Progress Report | Yahoo! Blog

  • 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

  • Singapore police + more things

    The Singapore Police issued this video where a cardboard cut-out sign warning shoplifters is brought to life, hilarity ensued amongst Singaporean netizens

    Post by Singapore Police Force.
    Disclosure: Singapore Home Team is a former client. The Singapore Home Team is made up of the different services that sit under the Ministry of Home Affairs including the Singapore Police. Guns n’ Roses Welcome To The Jungle for two cellos. It sounds more of an emotional roller-coaster this way than the original version by Guns n’ Roses. In that respect it reminds me of The Nursery remake of Haunted Dancefloor, originally recorded by Sabres of Paradise. IAB on how to get consumers to actually use an app rather than just download it. A focus on putting the core focus of the app front and centre. Being able to reengage is also important. Focus on an app to do one thing really well rather than being a Swiss Army Knife type approach to app development. Like anything else, if the app doesn’t add value, it doesn’t make a difference. I surprised to hear that apps were used as a display campaign by brands. Amazing ‘flow motion’ video that showcases Dubai. It highlights the way Dubai architecture feels like a letter from the future. This is partly due because there was little in Dubai prior to the modern city being built. More on the history of Dubai can found here. The soundtrack of the week was this great tech house mix by DJ Rolando Rolando relocated from Detroit to Edinburgh, Scotland since he became famous with Jaguar. He has his own label R3 (which stands for Roland Rocha Records) The records tend to fit into the melodic side of techno, what would be later called tech house. With the move to Europe eventually came a residency at Berlin club Berghain.