It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.
One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.
My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.
I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.
My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.
Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.
That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.
Nike Japan: Create with Air Max by AKQA. Japan seems to be particularly open to an augmented reality AR campaign in general. This AR campaign taps into the challenges that COVID-19 lockdown represented to creators and the wearing sneakers. The purpose of the AR campaign was three fold:
Reinforce the cultural aspect of the Air Max
Emphasise innovation in the Nike brand through the AR campaign functionality
Beatboxing and digital sampling technology meets meditation in this video by Yogetsu Akasaka, a Japanese Zen Buddhist monk ‘Heart Sutra’ vocal live looping remix.
The Korean Tourism Organisation collaborates with Netflix to promote Korea as a travel destination. The ad spot highlights locations drawn from food travelogues to Korean dramas on the platform. Korean drama already has an international following, previously it has been on specialist sites and DVD boxsets. Netflix has made the potential reach for Korean dramas even larger. At least some of the Netflix audience won’t have heard of ‘hallyu’, or K-pop. Netflix had helped improve access to international dramas in general. That’s the audience that the KTO is trying to tap into with this ad creative.
Why business in Hong Kong should be worried | The Economist – Hong Kong is trapped like the grips of vice. Its economy is dominated by finance and rent-seeking businesses – Simon Cartledge for Gavekal Dragonomics, a consultancy, because these firms are over-represented in government, “Hong Kong’s single biggest disincentive to risk-taking and entrepreneurship—its high costs, especially for property—cannot be tackled.” That is why the back-to-business message is unlikely to resonate with ordinary Hong Kongers. This is probably why Hong Kong start-ups like DJI moved to Shenzhen to found their businesses. (Frank Wang did a lot of the key work on DJI drones whilst studying at HKUST. And even benefited from a small HKUST grant. But he moved across to Shenzhen to found the business itself in 2006.) Fintech has been a bit of a busted flush. It was the latest in a long line of business ideas like wine trading, the arts and medical tourism as failed niches for Hong Kong. Singapore seems to have been much more successful in business creation and seems to be seeing more venture capital interest. Current sectors in Hong Kong likely to be affected include the legal practices specialising in commercial arbitration. Without trustworthy commercial arbitration in Hong Kong doing business in China looks much less attractive. Singapore is trying to bridge the gap, but I suspect that there might be long term corrosion of Chinese business dealings. Digital companies and foreign banks face big worries. Between the Hong Kong Autonomy Act and the Hong Kong National Security Law – Helping America to enforce sanctions would violate the security law. Not doing so would incur American penalties
Mark Ritson: In a virtual marketplace, only the strongest brands will survive – Companies see better profit margins and an almost unlimited customer base but miss the drastic reduction in barriers to entry. – so brand hyper-competition will ensue and the winner takes all model will extend beyond tech. Expect venture capital money to pour all kinds of weird industry niches as they try to pick category winners
Chinese liquor group Kweichow Moutai tumbles after graft news report | Financial Times – Moutai sales are linked to gifting and lavish consumption and some have linked the share price increase with a corresponding uplift in sales and by implication graft. The damaging bit in the article is that Moutai’s former chairman Yuan Renguo quoted saying in private that sales linked to corruption are “a normal part of business” and that China’s corruption clampdown would not reach far enough to affect the company’s business
Banning junk food from TV an ‘irrelevant symbolic gesture’ that won’t reduce obesity | The Drum – the argument whilst true won’t be believed by regulators. Their rationale would be why would junk food companies advertise if it didn’t work? The distinction of this is junk food brand fighting out with similar brands in its category won’t wash. Secondly, advertising bans worked in the past on tobacco products over time
Outrage Over China’s Treatment of Hong Kong Galvanizes the West – WSJ – Complaints about China have piled up in Western capitals in recent years, but it took Beijing’s new curbs on Hong Kong’s autonomy to galvanize them around something approaching a common cause. – In many respects its like boiling a frog in reverse, it is likely that China didn’t expect the frog to jump out of the pot, given that the heat had been on so long
Opinion | A Coronavirus Care Package From China – The New York Times – After the Communist takeover in 1949, traditional Chinese medicine was institutionalized. Folk remedies helped fulfill both a tangible need — credentialed doctors were scarce — and an ideological end: That system of knowledge is quintessentially and uniquely Chinese. Today, the Chinese government sees a political opportunity in the continuing emotional appeal of traditional medicine. If Chinese people can embrace an Eastern alternative to Western medicine, they might also be more likely to accept the Communist Party’s governance model and reject liberal democracy
Speaking in Tongues – Chinese Storytellers – such a great essay on the current challenge facing Chinese (and in particular Hong Kongers) writing for foreign audiences: a Chinese storyteller telling stories for an English-speaking audience in a divided world. As a writer who has called Hong Kong, Beijing and New Haven home, I find myself often in the position of what Zadie Smith once called “speaking in tongues”: equivocating between the lens of the insider and the outsider, examining the places I call home with both the “objective,” parachuted gaze of the foreign correspondent, and the emotionally implicated and invested eye of the local storyteller. Increasingly, that has felt impossible
Google considers alternatives to Hong Kong for undersea cable | Financial Times – Hong Kong has – become less critical for not only US cloud providers but also their Chinese rivals, according to Tao Wu, a senior research analyst for Gartner, a tech research firm. “Singapore has become much more important than Hong Kong from a location and population perspective,” Ms Wu said. “Other top cloud providers such as Alibaba Cloud are much more focused on south-east Asia to go global than expanding in Hong Kong.” – this will have a big impact for those property developers who’ve invested in data centres (internet hotels). Hong Kong’s financial position for international trading desks will also be diminished if international telecoms infrastructure starts to divert away from Hong Kong. From a pure connectivity point of view Korea, Singapore and even the Philippines start to look really good
My friends at LONDON Advertising have rolled out a TV and out of home campaign for themselves. Advertising and creative agencies usually market themselves. This might be:
Awards ceremonies
Search advertising
Public relations
‘Thought leadership’ activities
It is usually consumer brand clients, or those that want to promote their corporate brand (think Oracle or Vodafone) that do TV and out of home advertising. Which makes this campaign by LONDON Advertising rather unique. The principle behind it is relatively simple, what the tech industry calls ‘Eating your own dog food’. LONDON Advertising already does advertising for the likes of Mandarin Oriental – why not do the same thing for themselves? So they’ve done TV, OOH and social channel content. The idea is that spending on the dip allowed an enhanced share of voice.
My favourite TV treatment has a voice over by Liam Neeson.
LONDON Advertising
Swiss duo Yello talk about how they produced ‘Oh Yeah’ – which then became famous as part of the soundtrack to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Georgia Tech looked to bio-mimicry when designing a robot to monitor at tree level the inhabitants and environment at Atlanta Botanical Gardens. The Slothbot prices energy efficiency over speed of movement.
Cameron Paul was one of the first generation of beat mixers in San Francisco. San Francisco’s CBS affiliate eulogy manages to underplay his impact, but has some great archive footage. Cameron started DJing in 1970s San Francisco, when ‘personality DJs’ that got on the mic were the norm rather than someone who could mix.
He founded his own DJ subscription service with exclusive mixes and had his own label. (More on those at Discogs.) His remixing skills helped break Salt n Pepa’s Push It. He probably doesn’t have the profile he deserves because his sound historically was closer to freestyle than house. Here’s Cameron talking about the art of DJing in this vintage recording.
Talking of mixing, I have been listening to this mix by The Reflex for Kombini Radio which is tremendous.
EXP TV – not quite sure how to describe it; EXP TV is just tremendous. In their words “EXP TV daytime programming is called “Video Breaks”—a video collage series featuring wild, rare, unpredictable, and ever-changing archival clips touching on every subject imaginable. Similar to how golden era MTV played music videos all day, daytime EXP TV streams non-stop, deep cut video clips filtered through our own distinct POV. Our Nite Owl programming block features specialty themed video mixes and deep dives on everything under the sun: Bigfoot, underground 80s culture, Italo disco, cults, Halloween hijinks, pre-revolutionary Iranian pop culture, midnight movies, ‘ye ye’ promo films, Soviet sci-fi, reggae rarities, psychedelic animation and local news calamities. On any given night you could watch something like our Incredibly Strange Metal show followed by a conceptual video essay like Pixel Power—our exploration of early CGI art. Aside from our unique tone and deep crate of video materials, one thing that really sets us apart in 2020 is our format. We are *not* on demand, we are *not* interactive—just like old TV! You can tune in anytime and something cool will be on. That’s EXP TV in a nutshell. It’s funny, it’s art, it’s music, it’s infotainment, it’s free and it’s 24/7.” EXP TV reminded me a lot of the pioneering night time TV programming that used to run on British TV.
Gen Z wants brands to be ‘fun,’ ‘authentic’ and ‘good,’ study says | Marketing Dive – Gen Zers prefer brands that are authentic, with 82% saying they trust a company more if it uses images of real customers in its advertising, while 72% said they’re more likely to buy from a company that contributes to social causes. Product quality, positive ratings and reviews and customer service are the top three characteristics that establish trust in a brand among Gen Zers – really? I am sure if you asked any cohort through time of the same age that would have come out as the result. More on ‘generations‘ here
TikTok to pull out of Hong Kong – Axios – interesting how they got out ahead of Facebook, WhatsApp etc. TikTok might feel its mainland app Douyin can be swapped in. It is an interesting canary in the coal mine for Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp etc
Interesting French short film about the future from 1947. In some ways it is a better predictor of technology usage than Star Trek some two decades later.
La Télévision, œil de demain (1947) – J.K Raymond Millet
Luckin Coffee investors oust founder | Financial Times – this looks very similar to WireGuard. The problem is that audited books can’t be trusted due to local law. And locally written analyst reports have to self-censor allowing this kind of thing to happen. China doesn’t seem to be moving to change its law in the same way that Germany is to try and protect shareholders
Facebook Suspending Review of Hong Kong Requests for User Data – WSJ – based on the Xi administration’s concerns about national security and cyber sovereignty; one can expect China to extend Great Firewall into Hong Kong with this. Which will then impact multinational companies who have traditionally used Hong Kong as an exit point for China operation VPNs. It will also affect Hong Kong’s position as a regional base. Firms would no longer want to use the data centres and backbone networks that Hong Kong has. More from the FT: Facebook and Twitter block Hong Kong authorities from accessing user data | Financial Times – WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and Telegram have all given the Chinese Communist Party the finger. They have a strong incentive to. Chinese drop shipping businesses like Shein or Wish will suffer more than Facebook. And it plays well in parliaments and distracts from the other troubles that they may have. China gets burnt because of its information warfare games on these platforms. Facebook et al provide Chinese marketing teams a gateway into markets around the world that WeChat and TikTok don’t – which dings the Chinese government’s economic goals
Above Avalon: Apple Is Pulling Away From the Competition – the obvious candidates missing here are Huawei, Xiaomi and the BBK firms (Oppo, Vivo etc) which have driven the smartphone market into the middle in China and opened a can of whoop ass on the premium sector overall
Philip K Dick’s Metz speech is mind blowing. It was done at an international science fiction festival in 1977, held in Metz, France.
Did China Steal Canada’s Edge in 5G From Nortel? – Bloomberg – short answer yes. Though it probably didn’t help that they had a management team that had failed to act when they were warned about infiltration, a infrastructure business reliance on the frame relay network market and partnered with Microsoft on a lot of enterprise technology. Some fantastic stuff in this article – Did a Chinese hack kill Canada’s greatest tech company? – BNN Bloomberg – in the late 1990s, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the country’s version of the CIA, became aware of “unusual traffic,” suggesting that hackers in China were stealing data and documents from Ottawa. “We went to Nortel in Ottawa, and we told the executives, ‘They’re sucking your intellectual property out,’ ” says Michel Juneau-Katsuya, who headed the agency’s Asia-Pacific unit at the time. “They didn’t do anything.” By 2004 the hackers had breached Nortel’s uppermost ranks. The person who sent the roughly 800 documents to China appeared to be none other than Frank Dunn, Nortel’s embattled chief executive officer. Four days before Dunn was fired — fallout from an accounting scandal on his watch that forced the company to restate its financial results — someone using his login had relayed the PowerPoints and other sensitive files to an IP address registered to Shanghai Faxian Corp. It appeared to be a front company with no known business dealings with Nortel. The thief wasn’t Dunn, of course. Hackers had stolen his password and those of six others from Nortel’s prized optical unit, in which the company had invested billions of dollars. Using a script called Il.browse, the intruders swept up entire categories from Nortel’s systems: Product Development, Research and Development, Design Documents & Minutes, and more. “They were taking the whole contents of a folder — it was like a vacuum cleaner approach,” says Brian Shields, who was then a senior adviser on systems security
China’s Trillion-Dollar Campaign Fuels a Tech Race With the U.S. – WSJ – to develop next-generation technologies as it seeks to catapult the communist nation ahead of the U.S. in critical areas. Since the start of the year, municipal governments in Beijing, Shanghai and more than a dozen other localities have pledged 6.61 trillion yuan ($935 billion) to the cause, according to a Wall Street Journal tally. Chinese companies, urged on by authorities, are also putting up money.
China Millionaire Livestreamer Viya Shows Online Shopping Future – “E-commerce livestreaming,” as it’s lovingly called by analysts, will already feel familiar to many in America and elsewhere; the latest stage in an evolution from infomercial pioneer Ron “But wait, there’s more” Popeil, the Home Shopping Network, Oprah’s Book Club, and Kim Kardashian. Amazon’s been experimenting with the concept for more than a year, most recently teaming up with “Project Runway” stars Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn for a spin-off and retail tie-in that will make the show’s winning designs immediately available to buy. Facebook has been trying to get users to shop on its platform for years; in May, it announced a partnership with Shopify to help integrate buying there and on Instagram
Nomura/Hong Kong: beyond our Ken | Financial Times – interesting how Hong Kong’s national security law could encompass a brokers ‘sell’ note on Chinese equities. This is likely to be another Chinese diplomatic failure
Beijing Threatens Hong Kong’s Companies and Workers – The New York Times – China and its allies are using threats and pressure to get business to back Beijing’s increasingly hard-line stance toward Hong Kong, leading companies to muzzle or intimidate workers who speak out in protest.Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s former top leader, on Friday called for a boycott of HSBC, the London bank, because it had not publicly backed Beijing’s push to enact a new national security law covering the territory
HKU Legal Scholarship Blog: Johannes Chan Comments on the National Security Law (RTHK English News) – what constitutes ‘national security’ has never been defined. “In China they never really define what exactly is ‘national security’. So the law could change according to political expediency or political necessity,” he said. “We don’t know if it will be more clearly defined in the coming law but in accordance with their tradition and the current scope, it could be exceedingly wide,” Chan said, adding it is naive to think the law will only apply to only a small group of people. The legal scholar also said he doubts if the central government will accept unfavourable rulings by Hong Kong courts linked to the new security law
The Quietus | Missing The Jackpot: William Gibson’s Slow-Cooked Apocalypse – “One thing I was curious about with Dominic Cummings,” Gibson continues, “is I wondered if he had noticed that Bigend’s mother was a Situationist – or someone who hung with the Situationists –and I wondered if he knew who they were and what their schtick was, because I somehow doubt he’d get that.” But I guess he sees himself as some sort of disruptor, shaking things up – albeit perhaps in more of a Silicon Valley kind of way, than in a Situationist vein. “But disruption is not hot anymore!” Gibson exclaims. “That’s an old meme.”
How Did I Not Hate the new Ghost in the Shell SAC_2045 CGI Anime? – J-List Blog – one observation J-List’s anime figure buyer made is that Netflix-funded anime rarely result in figures or other products for J-List or other anime shops to sell, and in general don’t have a “long tail” that allows anime fans to enjoy the work over many years, compared with more organically-created anime series. Sometimes this “Netflix short tail” problem is caused by the business model of streaming, which prefers to dump a whole series online at once so fans can binge it and get more addicted to the platform. One such anime was Relife, about a company that lets people return to high school and re-live a year of their lives over again, which totally failed to make a splash because it came out all at once on Netflix, rather than one episode per week
The Wizards of Buzz – WSJ Online – The next time you visit a buzzy Web site, see a funny video clip online or read an unusual take on the news, chances are you owe it to someone like Mr. Worthington. A new generation of hidden influencers is taking root online, fueled by a growing love affair among Web sites with letting users vote on their favorite submissions. These sites are the next wave in the social-networking craze — popularized by MySpace and Facebook. Digg is one of the most prominent of these sites, which are variously labeled social bookmarking or social news. Others include Reddit.com (recently purchased by Condé Nast), Del.icio.us (bought by Yahoo), Newsvine.com and StumbleUpon.com. Netscape relaunched last June with a similar format. The opinions of these key users have implications for advertisers shelling out money for Internet ads, trend watchers trying to understand what’s cool among young people, and companies whose products or services get plucked for notice. It’s even sparking a new form of payola, as marketers try to buy votes – from back when influencers weren’t such a malign dystopian concept of shallowness
The Infinite Heartbreak of Loving Hong Kong | The Nation – The same brutal policing tactics and authoritarian legal frameworks developed by the British to suppress leftist dissent are being recycled by Chinese authorities against pro-democracy Hong Kongers. The CCP constantly casts itself as the answer to Western imperialism. But Chinese state media now argues Hong Kong’s new national security law would improve upon the “frail” British security framework—in other words, that it wants to bolster, not dismantle, the colonial machinery of repression – interesting diacotomy in narrative. All of this compounds Chinese diplomatic failure in Australia and other western countries
WARC | Global Ad Trends: COVID-19 & Ad Investment – advertising investment is set to fall 8.1% – $49.6bn – worldwide this year. This year’s downturn will be softer than in 2009, when the ad market fell by 12.7% ($60.5bn). Traditional media will fare far worse than online. Almost all product sectors will record a decline this year, with the most severe falls seen among travel & tourism (-31.2%), leisure & entertainment (-28.7%), financial services (-18.2%) and retail (-15.2%).
