This blog came out of the crater of the dot com bust and wireless growth. Wi-Fi was transforming the way we used the internet at home. I used to have my Mac next to my router on top of a cupboard that contained the house fuse panel and the telephone line. Many people had an internet room and used a desktop computer like a Mac Mini or an all-in-one computer like an iMac. Often this would be in the ‘den’ or the ‘man cave’. Going on the internet to email, send instant messages or surf the internet was something you did with intent.
Wi-Fi arrived alongside broadband connections and the dot com boom. Wi-Fi capable computers came in at a relatively low price point with the first Apple iBook. I had the second generation design at the end of 2001 and using the internet changed. Free Wi-Fi became a way to attract people to use a coffee shop, as a freelancer it affected where I did meetings and how I worked.
I was travelling more for work at the time. While I preferred the reliability of an ethernet connection, Wi-Fi would meet my needs just as well. UMTS or 3G wireless data plans were still relatively expensive and slow. I would eventually send low resolution pictures to Flickr and even write a blog post or two. But most of the time I used it to clear my email box, or use Google Maps if I was desperate.
4G wireless services, started to make mobile data a bit more useful, even if the telephony wasn’t great
I worked peripherally on And1 early on in my career, but it didn’t catch fire in Europe than it did in the US. I hadn’t known the full extent of the buzz marketing campaign that backed up the brand in the US. Here’s the early versions of their ‘mix tapes’, which did for street football what skate videos did for skateboarding in the 1980s. They blew up street basketball in the US, in a similar way to the X Games blowing up extreme sports. ESPN got on board with a sports related reality TV show with players competing for an And1 team contract.
But all the buzz marketing didn’t get the cut through that Wieden + Kennedy’s Freestyle TV advert did, effectively depositioning And1 from its street ball territory. Then there was a tie-up show on MTV2 that was similar to the And1 | ESPN show of the previous year. The lesson I took away from And1 was that product and reach both matter. Nike could buy reach and And1 didn’t have any product of note after the Tai Chi.
Opinion: Intel’s ‘smart capital’ is a warning from the past | eeNews Europe – the author considers the rise of private equity to fund new silicon fabs as a warning of peak semiconductors. Similar things happened in the 1980s and 1990s when large businesses like Coca-Cola helped fund manufacturing facilities. The key difference this time is how globalisation has been thrown into reverse by ‘Made in China 2025’ and hostile moves against Taiwan
Loss of Chinese tourists forces Europe’s luxury retailers to rethink | Financial Times – A recent surge in Middle Eastern tourists, as well as US visitors buoyed by the strong dollar, has helped fill stores. Eduardo Santander, CEO of the European Travel Commission, said the lack of Chinese tourists left the many luxury retailers that relied heavily on them with “a huge feeling of loss”, but had spurred “a huge effort to diversify”. Retailers have personalised their services. During Europe’s Covid lockdowns, shop assistants contacted customers via WhatsApp with tailor-made recommendations. Berg sees a “possible return to the old idea of service and store management from the 1990s, the little black book with all the customers’ addresses and preferences in it”. “You have to do much more to attract local customers,” Berg said. “They can come back, they have more time to spend, versus an international customer that was determined and straightforward.” – A few thoughts on this: The article asserts that Chinese tourists are straightforward and not picky. I think Chinese tourists are very picky by comparison, although the diagou’s supplying lower tier cities or buying to order might appear to be ‘luxury hoovers’. Secondly, luxury brands have treated non-Chinese customers abysmally (in particular the watch makers like Rolex and their retail partners like the Watches of Switzerland group) and they deserve all the problems that they get. Only focusing on the Chinese market has allowed the Chinese customers to blow up the secondary market. A straw poll of people that I know who have a Rolex from the past 10 years or so:
All of them had to buy their watch on the secondary market
About 80 percent of them had original warranty cards with Chinese family names, which is far higher than the 30 to 40 percent share that Chinese consumers make of the global luxury market
Finally, I don’t see the market coming back in the same way given Xi Jingping’s focus on common prosperity which will make luxury consumption increasingly problematic.
This New Study Reveals How Brand Loyalty is On the Decline / Digital Information World – I see this as more indicative of economic recession rather than any major change. Gallup showed that traits such as preference for green products decline in a recessionary environment, it would make sense if brand loyalty took a similar battering in favour of private label brands and substitute products
Saying out loud the quiet bit about work-life balance; tectonic plates of streaming move again – I’ve found myself thinking about one panel in particular – the participants in the session on advice for aspiring leaders went beyond the usual platitudes, and shared a couple of uncomfortable truths about an industry which is trying to rebrand itself as a gentler place to work. – I think that we’ll see more of this move away from a gentler place to work as companies look to cut staff. I entered the workforce in the middle of recession before I went to college, this was the time of micro serfs and mcjobs. The idea of a gentler place to work seemed to be a transient one to me – one that would come and go with economic growth. Zero hour contracts really grew during and after the 2008 financial crisis, which is as far away from a gentler place to work as you can get.
Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google. :: Reasonably Polymorphic – The primary purpose of the web today is “engagement,” which is Silicon Valley jargon for “how many ads can we push through someone’s optical nerve?” Under the purview of engagement, it makes sense to publish webpages on every topic imaginable, regardless of whether or not you know what you’re talking about. In fact, engagement goes up if you don’t know what you’re talking about; your poor reader might mistakenly believe that they’ll find the answer they’re looking for elsewhere on your site. That’s twice the advertising revenue, baby! But the spirit of the early web isn’t gone: the bookmarks I’ve kept these long decades mostly still work, and many of them still receive new content. There’s still weird, amateur, passion-project stuff out there. It’s just hard to find. Which brings us to our main topic: search. – It is more than search, there is also motivation and consumer behaviour change in the old web versus the new one – The Founder of GeoCities on What Killed the ‘Old’ Internet | Gizmodo
Innovation
How the American semiconductor industry claimed back technological and market leadership from the Japanese
Ocado, the online supermarket – is this a legitimate content partnership with Disney? Something feels a bit off about the Ocado | Disney inspired meals. The ‘inspired by Disney’ tagline and the Lion King themed ‘green grub pasta’ feels weird.
Government concerns over China-owned CCTV company embedded in UK – Channel 4 News – There are more than a million of Hikvision’s cameras installed across the UK – monitoring every aspect of our lives. But Channel 4 News has learned that there are growing concerns within the government about the Chinese state-owned tech company.
Emirates statement on operations at London Heathrow – Emirates lays into London Heathrow’s airport chaos. The airport chaos has been labelled ‘airmageddon’, due to the restriction in numbers of passengers who can fly in and out of Heathrow in a given day of just 100,000 people. That’s 25,000 people a day lower than last year. While there is similar restrictions at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport and a complete failure of their baggage system.
China
China’s Collapsing Global Image – China’s image abroad has declined significantly in the past four years, a sharp revearsal from the relative popularity it enjoyed in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe from the 1990s to the late 2010s. While previous Chinese regimes stressed humble non-intervention on the global stage, distributed generous infrastructure funding via the Belt and Road Initiative, and conducted massive soft power outreach programs through media and academia, many of these strategies have been reversed or rendered ineffective. As Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow for Southeast Asia Joshua Kurlantzick notes, “[there] are multiple reasons for China’s deteriorating global public image. China’s overall rising authoritarianism at home, its cover-up of the initial COVID-19 outbreak, and its brutal repression in Hong Kong and Xinjiang have hurt its perception among many foreign publics. China’s continued zero-COVID strategy has cut it off from much of the world, undermined people-to-people relations with other states, and cast some doubt on the Chinese model of development—even among some Chinese citizens.” – worthwhile contrasting with the following research, which implies a negative but more complex and nuanced situation – China seen as better than EU in completing African projects, survey finds | South China Morning Post – Poll of more than 1,000 policymakers on the continent puts priority on physical infrastructure, speedy results and non-interference in internal political affairs. European Union charts higher on quality of products or services delivered; good working conditions; creating jobs for Africans; upholding environmental standards
HSBC installs Communist party committee in Chinese investment bank | Financial Times – I don’t think that it would be beyond the realm of possibility seeing HSBC China and Hong Kong breaking off ARM China style under the auspices of Ping An and the Chinese government. Ping An is actually a cross holding: HSBC is the largest shareholder in Ping An and vice versa. The question is can they take the bulk of the HSBC Asia businesses with them like Singapore et al as well? This could happen based on company structure and western shareholders would be left with the equivalent of an empty husk
Hong Kong Law Reform Commission proposes 5 new offences to rein in cybercrime, with tougher penalties of up to life imprisonment | South China Morning Post – Will this proposed ordinance be available as a charge, with the prosecution claiming the criminal intent is an offence involving national security?” he asked. “Could all social media become a target? Given the wide criminalisation of speech in the context of national security and sedition charges is there a risk a charge under this ordinance will be added?” Davis said he was also worried the proposed amendment would be used to reverse the outcome of an earlier decision by the Court of Appeal in 2019 which limits the reach of an ordinance that prohibits “access to a computer with criminal or dishonest intent” to cover a person using their own tech devices.
I had heard a variant on the ‘Soviet steel’ story that was responsible for Italian cars being rust buckets when I was growing up. The version I heard was that high proportions of recycled scrap from rusted war wreckage and dismantled ships had been put in Italian steel to make it cheaper. (It was easy to believe this version. Libya had a strong historic connection to Italy and prior to oil being discovered Libya’s top export was scrap metal from abandoned military equipment of the second world war’s North African campaign.) Secondly, Russian cars that made it to the west were unreliable and suffered from rust, which supported beliefs about Soviet steel. The reality would have been that the quality related issues in Alfa Romeo’s factories likely would also occur with unmotivated Soviet workers during the economic stagnation from the late 1960s onwards.
Soviet goods had a rough and ready feel to them, it would be reasonable to assume that Soviet steel wasn’t great. The alternative explanation in this video seems to be reasonable. This viewpoint has changed in the belief of engineers like my Dad that Chinese steel of a particular grade has a quality discount like the Soviet steel of old.
Klarna valuation crashes to $6.5bn from $46bn | Financial Times – unsurprising when I see reports that about 30% of buy now, pay later loans will be struggling to pay them back. It reminds me of storecard debt during the 1991 recession. I was working during college holidays for MBNA a few years later and people were using the balance transfer function to get £20,000 to £30,000 of store card debt on to a card to play off at a lower interest rate. MBNA was then securitising their debt via bonds. There’s probably people who bought a suit at Burtons in the late 1980s that only cleared that debt by the time the millennium came around
People are leaving Hong Kong and here’s where they’re going – “Everyone’s going to Singapore,” said Pei, especially those working in finance, law and recruitment, she said. Kay Kutt, CEO of the Hong-Kong based relocation company Silk Relo, agreed, saying people are attracted to the ease of business, family friendliness, tax incentives and open borders of Singapore. In its 40-year existence, the past three years have been the busiest years on record for Silk Relo’s sister moving company, Asian Tigers, she said. “We cannot keep up with the capacity,” she said. “We don’t have enough people to serve what’s going on in the marketplace.” Families are transferring to Singapore, she said, but small- and medium-sized businesses are also on the move. Whereas one company executive might have left in the past, now “they’re all going,” she said. Small companies are “taking the entire team and putting them into Singapore.” Large companies are also relocating to Singapore, said Cynthia Ang, an executive director at the recruitment firm Kerry Consulting. She cited L’Oreal, Moet Hennessy and VF Corporation — the latter which owns brands such as Timberland and North Face — as examples, while noting there are more who haven’t made their decisions public yet. – the volume going to Singapore is immense based on the amount of people that I am seeing coming to the UK
Hong Kong resistance will live on – SupChina – a few things here. I thought the parallels between Tibet’s annexation by China and Hong Kong was interesting. I don’t think that resistance will continue on. For the majority of people, its just easier to leave. People are going to Thailand, the UK, Australia, Canada and Singapore. They are connected through family networks to the world.
Will Southeast Asia support Russia’s war with semiconductor exports? — Radio Free Asia – Southeast Asian states, apart from Singapore, have eschewed sanctions and continue to trade with Russia. But as the war drags on, that will have consequences in terms of secondary sanctions and other penalties imposed by the west. Russian supply chains run through Southeast Asia, and the United States and other western governments are have made the targeting of Russian sanctions evasion operations a top priority. One area where Southeast Asian actors may be tempted into sanctions evasion – or where, conversely, they could help pressure Russia economically – is in the export of semiconductors. – there will be a point when they will be on the receiving end of either Chinese aggression or western sanctions. In either case, the west will just standby
NASA’s administrator says cost-plus is a “plague,” just as DoD is giving up on fixed-price development | Acquisition Talk – this reminds me so much of the UK’s ministry of defence. My Dad moved over to the UK to work on the Resolution class of submarines that were designed to carry the Polaris nuclear missile. At the time the Royal Navy paid for these submarines on a cost plus basis which meant that the shipyard advertised for tradesmen in newspapers in Ireland and across the Commonwealth. A lot of people spent a lot of time drinking tea and claiming overtime. One can understand why cost plus could be seen as a plague.
However bad cost plus is, fixed cost doesn’t seem to work either with failed projects and strong disincentives to try innovative solutions. Where NASA is at the moment I can understand why fixed price makes more sense than cost plus. But high innovation programmes like Ares or the Apollo programme would do better under cost plus. One of the current best arguments for cost plus is the likelihood that the Ajax armoured vehicle will never be issued. It is a ‘firm priced’ meaning fixed price contract. Crossrail looks more like a cost plus project, it was a mess, it cost way too much, but it runs. I wonder if the UK ministry of defence will ever consider cost plus again?
Opinion | Boris Johnson Is in Trouble, and So Is Britain’s Conservative Party – The New York Times – First through austerity, then through Brexit and Mr. Johnson, the Conservatives have left Britain in the ruins of their ambition. Each one of their proposed solutions, offered in the name of national renewal, has made the situation worse. No one in the party can escape blame for this baleful legacy. One of the pretenders to Mr. Johnson’s throne — Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss or Jeremy Hunt — may offer a change in style. But a substantial change of course is unlikely to come. An economy predicated on low productivity and low investment, buttressed by a self-defeating lack of seriousness about Britain’s condition, is all the Conservatives seem to be able to offer.– Worthwhile reading in association with this: Grim times lie ahead for UK as inflation combines with low growth | Financial Times
Russian emails appear to show ‘network’ holding $4.5bn assets linked to Putin | Russia | The Guardian – An anti-corruption expert in Russia, who requested anonymity given the political situation in Moscow, said the findings raised questions as to whether there was a level of “common management”. “LLCInvest looks most of all like a cooperative, or an association, in which its members can exchange benefits and property,” they suggested. For nearly two decades, Putin has been accused of secretly accumulating vast wealth through proxies, fuelled by a series of disclosures in leaks such as the Pandora papers about the fortunes of those closest to him. Sergey Kolesnikov, a businessman, claimed 10 years ago that he had been behind a scheme that allowed a group of Russia’s top oligarchs to pool billions of rubles into a type of “investment fund” for the benefit of Putin, who was then serving as prime minister. The claims were denied and Kolesnikov fled from Russia. – Interesting how this has been set up
It’s time for data-first diversity, equity, and inclusion | Fortune – In 2010, using nationally representative data on thousands of individuals in their 40s, I estimated that Black men earn 39.4% less than white men and Black women earn 13.1% less than white women. Yet, accounting for one variable–educational achievement in their teenage years––reduced that difference to 10.9% (a 72% reduction) for men and revealed that Black women earn 12.7 percent more than white women, on average. Derek Neal, an economist at the University of Chicago, and William Johnson were among the first to make this point in 1996: “While our results do provide some evidence for current labor market discrimination, skills gaps play such a large role that we believe future research should focus on the obstacles Black children face in acquiring productive skill.”
Incoming Hong Kong leader John Lee unveils team, while Beijing lays out key expectations | South China Morning Post – John Lee pledges to win people’s trust and make policies that meet demands as State Council approves his governing team. Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office lays out five expectations for incoming administration, including tackling housing and addressing wealth gap – this explains the big gaps in Lee’s previous policy document. What’s less apparent is how Lee will deliver on these intractable challenges when every previous chief executive haven’t managed to address them
Edelman Launches Global Gen Z Lab | Edelman – Today, Edelman announces the formation of The Gen Z Lab, a global offering comprising 100 Gen Z employees, a roster of internal and external on-call advisors, and data hub dedicated to generational insights. Under the watch of Edelman’s Global Chief Brand Officer, Jackie Cooper, the Gen Z Lab will lend expertise, perspective and counsel clients looking to effectively engage the Gen Z consumer. In a breakthrough move, Edelman is also appointing the world’s first ZEO as a cultural and creative advisor for the Gen Z Lab. Stepping into this inaugural consultative role from July 1st, will be gender fluid fashion designer, Harris Reed. He will be supported by Amanda Edelman as Gen Z COO. The Gen Z Lab will harness their generation’s perspective and ambitions to solve issues such as race and diversity, sustainability, and climate change, and align with brand interests to become catalysts for change. – I’d totally trust them managing my brand reputation…………….. NOT!
Meta’s new digital fashion marketplace will sell Prada, Balenciaga and Thom Browne | Vogue Business – Balenciaga CEO Cédric Charbit in a release. “Web3 and Meta are bringing unprecedented opportunities for Balenciaga, our audience and our products, opening up new territories for luxury.” Balenciaga, along with Prada and Thom Browne, is among the first to sign on to sell digital fashion in a new Meta-created avatar store where people can buy clothing for their avatars to wear on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger. Eventually, other designers will be able to independently offer digital clothing for sale in the marketplace. The items for sale in the avatar store will range from $2.99 to $8.99 to start. A Meta spokesperson said that it did “not have details to share” on if or how it would share revenue with designers. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram VP of fashion partnerships Eva Chen, who announced the updates via Instagram Live on Friday, said these capabilities will be available next week, starting with the US, Canada, Thailand and Mexico. – Worthwhile reading this piece also: Inside The Metaverse Strategies Of L’Oréal And LVMH | The Drum
What Chinese media reveals about Shein’s secretive operations – Rest of World – There are two main kinds of suppliers: “free on board,” those that make simple designs they haven’t devised themselves, and “original design manufacturers,” those that do both. They all feed into Shein’s sprawling manufacturing execution system (MES). The designer-suppliers will find pictures online and send a selection to Shein’s internal buyers for consideration; the buyer and their manager settle on a final pool. Once samples have been received, there might be two, or even three, rounds of changes before manufacturing can commence. (The entire time, everything needs to be recorded in the MES — materials, pricing, even chat logs — something suppliers balk at, because, if the deal falls through, all the information sits in Shein’s records, and there’s nothing to stop them from producing it elsewhere.) – I could see Amazon acting in a similar way
China’s Expanding Surveillance State: Takeaways From a NYT Investigation – The New York Times – DNA, iris scan samples and voice prints are being collected indiscriminately from people with no connection to crime. The police in China are starting to collect voice prints using sound recorders attached to their facial recognition cameras. In the southeast city of Zhongshan, the police wrote in a bidding document that they wanted devices that could record audio from at least a 300-foot radius around cameras. Software would then analyze the voice prints and add them to a database. Police boasted that when combined with facial analysis, they could help pinpoint suspects faster. In the name of tracking criminals — which are often loosely defined by Chinese authorities and can include political dissidents — the Chinese police are purchasing equipment to build large-scale iris-scan and DNA databases. The first regionwide iris database — which has the capacity to hold iris samples of up to 30 million people — was built around 2017 in Xinjiang, home to the Uyghur ethnic minority. Online news reports show that the same contractor later won other government contracts to build large databases across the country. The company did not respond to The Times’s request for comment. The Chinese police are also widely collecting DNA samples from men. Because the Y chromosome is passed down with few mutations, when the police have the y-DNA profile of one man, they also have that of a few generations along the paternal lines in his family. Experts said that while many other countries use this trait to aid criminal investigations, China’s approach stands out with its singular focus on collecting as many samples as possible. – and more here: Police in China Stalk Citizens With Surveillance That Predicts Future Crime
