Alternatives to Big Tech, and a t-shirt | Creative Good – as someone who has used RSS for a long time I am intimately aware of the needs for alternatives to big tech. Google Reader obliterated RSS readers and then obliterated RSS readership by abruptly withdrawing the product. I’d argue that you could use Apple’s default iCloud account and MacOS apps. Mark Hurst recommends Safari or FireFox but ignores Mail.app, Calendar.app and Contacts.app. I have been using these three apps since I started using OS X in 2001.
Nice little Nesta egg: Former lottery quango took £7m from Google • The Register – details of Google’s influence in European academic life are detailed in a report by the Campaign for Accountability (CfA), an initiative part-funded by Google’s competitors. Google turned out to be the only corporate sponsor of think tank Readie, the Research Alliance for a Digital Europe, hosted at Nesta.
VW Just Gave Tesla a $25 Billion Battery Shock – probably the best argument that I’ve read for super capacitor and hydrogen fuel cell technology due to the shortage of cobalt. Lithium prices have also inflated massively over the past few years
Amazon: The Making of a Giant | WSJ – Today, the AI assistant has more than 30,000 skills available on its store and can be used to control more than 4,000 smart-home devices from 1,200 different brands. (paywall)
The new Roxanne Shante biopic looks amazing and you know the soundtrack is going to be good. Roxanne Shante was like a breadth of fresh air in the early rap scene. She had an amazing technique and was well able to cut male competitors down to size. Roxanne Shante is a legend despite her limited profile.
The South China Morning Post have launched a news site for an international audience focused on the Chinese technology sector – Abacus. Given the amount of blogs that used to cover the China tech sector that have disappeared, this is a welcome addition. Its a nice looking site, it has great interactive design and a good editorial team. My one complaint is that it doesn’t have an RSS feed which is a real bummer.
Unsupported | The Greatest Stories Retold – interesting attempts at really short form storytelling. It doesn’t work well in Safari as a web browser. Something to provide creative inspiration for those 15 second ad spot scripts.
Re-evaluating Media is a piece of research put together that tried to rebalance expectations on more traditional media. Whilst there was room to land meaningful points (TV is better at mass reach for a given CPM), and there is an argument to be made for a media neutral approach where the media mix fits the communications problem to be solved. Instead they made bigger leaps and had a methodology that was optimistic at best – this became the focus of debate among people that I knew. There are arguments to be made about the wider role of brand building which would better help traditional broadcast advertising more.
Is Time Running Out for the Swiss Watch Industry? – WSJ – low-end part of the Swiss Watch Industry threatened by digital disruption but not the higher end. The status of higher end brands of the Swiss Watch Industry will fit in with aspirations and drop culture that has merged streetwear and luxury
Business
Positive acceptance: a reinterpretation of Japanese ‘millennials’ | Analysis | Campaign Asia – 78% are disinclined to save money, meaning big-ticket items like houses, cars or even holidays are low on the agenda. While young people have rarely ever been enthusiastic savers, Harris suggested this could be an unconscious effort to resist “inevitable life changes that they don’t necessarily want”—i.e. responsibilities that make them less flexible.
Royal Bank of Scotland CMO David Wheldon: More marketing will go in-house – Digiday – I’m not sure there was ever a bygone era when agencies enjoyed a great relationship with the top of the house, but what the consultants have now is the C-suite relationships, a deep understanding of technology and a deep understanding of the digitization of our services. It’s not too much of a leap for them to think they can help with the advertising part of that mix
The Number of Counterfeits Seized in the U.S. Grew by Almost 10% Last Year — The Fashion Law – “The merchandise category with the highest number of seizures continued to be apparel and accessories, resulting in approximately 15 percent of all seizures in FY2017.” These products included both trademark infringing and counterfeit luxury products, including those posing as Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Chanel, and Hermes, are routinely some of the most heavily copied
It is a little disingenuous to call the Bose Wave Music System a throwback gadget, mainly because Bose still makes it. It would be reasonable to call it a design classic. There are benefits to picking up a 2006 model Bose Wave Music System, rather than paying the premium of a new device.
Bose Wave System timeline
The original Bose Wave System was launched back in 1984; this was back when Sony was king due to the Walkman, digital wasn’t really on the horizon with the Discman only launching same year. The Acoustic Wave 1 (AW1) was a new take on the boom box radio that was ubiquitous in households and workplaces at that time. The AW1 featured a cassette deck and a two band radio.
Eight years later digital finally arrived when Bose switched out the cassette for a top-loading CD player instead.
In 1993, the Bose Wave System shrank from about the size of a medium sized boom box to something about as tall as an iPod Classic but featured radio only and was called the Wave Radio.
Five years later a slot loading CD player was integrated. In 2004, the CD player also accepted MP3 based discs and Boselink connectivity.
Boselink
Boselink is unique in consumer electronics in terms of the expandability it allows. It was originally designed as a communications protocol for multi-room sound systems, but is also useful for connecting modules that extend the functionality of the basic Bose Wave System. Compatible accessories include:
Multi-CD drive
Soundlink – playback of music which is streamed to the device over Bluetooth
DAB module – UK-only adapter allowing reception of digital radio as well as AM and FM signals
Bose also offered an iPod kit, which charges your iPod Classic and plays back the music. There is a replacement remote for the Bose Wave Music System which integrates basic iPod playback controls.
Vintage over new
The key benefit of a vintage Bose Wave System over a new device is the display. New devices have a back lit LCD display which wash out and aren’t as legible as the vintage vacuum fluorescent displays.
Secondly, you still enjoy the ‘big box’ sound created by the diminutive size of the Bose Wave Music System. They use use a folded waveguide, which is a series of passages from the speaker driver to the speaker grill. This attempts to replicate sound from larger systems. Bose claims the waveguide “produces full, clear stereo sound from a small enclosure by guiding air through two 26” folded wave guides.” The design of the wave guides has changed minimally over the years.
My casual listening at home is based on two systems. A 12 year old Apple iPod Hi-Fi A1121, which works as a centre speaker for my TV when I need it. It takes audio in via TOSLink and gives a better sound than most sound bars that I’ve listened to.
I use a Bose Wave Music System of a similar age to the iPod Hi-Fi with the DAB module connected via BoseLink and iPod adaptor as my go to radio around the house. It is the default provider of background music and up to the minute news. It provides a better sound than most of its newer BlueTooth enabled competitors. It wins out over the Apple iPod Hi-Fi, because of its ability to play digital radio and hide out of the way on book shelf.
I then use a dedicated hi-fi for serious music listening of CDs and vinyl records.
Ok this isn’t the most technical video in terms of its review of the Chinese smartphone eco-system and it doesn’t touch on the WeChat eco-system, but its a good introductory video for westerners by Winston Sterzel, a YouTuber living in Shenzhen. It focuses on only the top domestic Chinese smartphone brands.
If I was looking to explain Chinese smartphone dynamics to a western client, this video is as good an introduction as any to the hardware side of the business.
Here are the key points I’d highlight and additional comments that I would add to the film.
Mobility in the working population drove Chinese smartphone adoption
The transitory nature of the Chinese workforce following China’s opening up has mean’t that many people are migrants and many only return home once a year (for lunar new year) if they are lucky. Staying in touch is critical to keep families together. Secondly being migrants, having a ‘computer’ that you can carry makes more sense than a traditional PC. Finally, the price point of smartphones puts the internet in the hands of pretty much anyone who wants one. These three factors explain why smartphones took off so dramatically in China. This started in the urban areas, but then migrants brought them home to relatives and gave them away as Chinese new year gifts.
China Mobile had a government mandate to build out connectivity into even the most rural areas in China. Data packages and the applications that run on it like WeChat made telecommunications even cheaper and easier.
The smartphone is where the majority of Chinese online shopping takes place, how families keep in touch and are starting to be a tool for the delivery of government services.
The price-value balance of smartphones
The development of the iPhone had an unintended on the Chinese smartphone contract manufacturers. If we go back to the early Samsung Galaxy models from the S to the S4; the industrial design of these phones owed a lot to Nokia. They had replaceable storage with micro SD cards and a replaceable battery with a battery hatch in plastic. If you dropped the phone the hatch may pop off. This was by design as it got rid of the some of the energy from the fall and the frame had a degree of flex to protect the innards. This is one of the reasons why Nokia 3310 feature phones ran and ran. The face and back might pop off your phone if you dropped it; but they could easily be snapped back on.
Manufacturing phones of that nature also helps with scaling up manufacturing based on mouldings.
Apple didn’t bother with external batteries, which at the time sparked a huge controversy. Their battery life was awful and most working stiffs kept their phone charging from their office PC during the day. By comparison I had a desktop charger with previous Ericsson and Nokia phones, along with a few spare batteries and felt comfortable going on holiday for a few days with a spare charged battery in a zip loc bag and no phone charger. Up until the 6 plus, Apple’s battery has been a real pain.
So Apple differentiated by done what seemed like an insane idea of using a CNC (computer numeric controlled) machine to make the phone chassis. This is like a robot version of the machine tools that you would have used in shop class individually making each phone chassis.
Apple tried this out with the stainless steel ‘belly band’ of the 4 series phone and then perfected it with the 5 series. I suspect the reason why they moved from stainless steel to aluminium alloy for manufacturing was to balance durability with optimising manufacturing time.
Over time these machines move from the Apple production lines onto another product. Soon you can’t be the smartphone chassis manufacturing business unless you have this capability. Apple’s machines may have been sold on, but there was probably an increase in the CNC machine makers manufacturing capacity as well.
So all of the smartphones shown, whether it cost £80 or £800; none of them felt cheap or had a ‘China penalty’ in terms of case design. This has affected the market in the Chinese smartphone eco-system. They are more durable, but there is less incentive to go premium when a cheap or medium priced phone looks and feels this good.
The durability of modern Chinese smartphones might be one fo the reasons why sales in smartphones have declined year-on-year. I’d argue a second reason is WeChat; so long as you can use WeChat your smartphone is fine. WeChat has had a similar effect on Chinese smartphones to what the web had on western PC sales over the past two decades – computers had become about as useful as they were going to be and performance became less of an issue.
Chinese smartphone market consolidation
Winston kind of alluded to it in his video but Oppo, Vivo and OnePlus are all related to BBK Electronics; a longtime Chinese phone and consumer electronics manufacturer. When I first went to visit China I bought a BBK ‘keitai’ style clamshell feature phone. At that time BBK competed with international players like Nokia or Samsung and domestic brands like Ningbo Bird. (Ningbo Bird was the largest manufacturer in China from 2003 – 2005).
Now they make everything from cheap TVs and speakers under the Memorex brand, to smartphones and high end Blu-Ray players as Oppo.
In the smartphone sector, they operate under three main brands. OnePlus is aimed at international users and kind of similar to Xiaomi in terms of the balance that it strikes between technology, features and price. Oppo is more of a Samsung or Huawei analogue. Vivo was launched to have a lower price youthful brand.
Between BBK, Xiaomi and Huawei you now have most of the Chinese smartphone eco-system, by value and sales volume. Just a few years ago there would have been far more players that would have merited a review including the following the companies and their sub-brands:
ZTE
Lenovo
Meizu
Coolpad
TCL
These are still big businesses, and I am not denigrating these brands. The analyst reports show that the Chinese smartphone eco-system is undergoing rapid consolidation; in the same way as Sony and HTC have been dwarfed by Samsung and Huawei.
