Search results for: “Japan”

  • Japanese environmental sounds + more

    The meticulous design of Japanese environmental sounds – ‘kankyō ongaku’ – a strand of Japanese minimalism that emerged in the 1980s to soundtrack the architectural wonders and commercial advancements of the country’s economic boom years. In the west we put up with muzak; but the Japanese environmental sounds are highly engineered minimalistic experiences

    Visualizing the Most Loved Brands, by Generation – you do have to wonder about of the quality of the data

    The Internet Used to Make Us Smarter. Now, Not So Much. | Douglas Rushkoffwe too easily lose sight of what it is that’s truly revolutionary. By focusing on the shiny new toys and ignoring the human empowerment potentiated by these new media — the political and social capabilities they are retrieving — we end up surrendering them to the powers that be – I think this is as much about how is online as the online tools

    macos – How to find cause of high kernel_task cpu usage? – Ask Different – this is quite surreal TL;DR charge your laptop on the right hand side – what on earth is going on here.

    #SafeHandFish – I love this idea of repurposing packaging, but I wonder where they got the blue lids from?

    Amazon makes books, video, music and more available for freeAmazon sees if it can get UK consumers to adopt its services during the COVID lock-in – this is all about habit building

    Imagination Commits to Keeping U.K. HQ – For Now | EE Timesunderlying this is very likely to be a worry for Imagination that a move to China could end up with its intellectual property owned by China. And that could worry its major customers, including Apple  — a customer that the now former CEO Ron Black worked hard to win back

    Luckin fraud admission leaves more questions than answers · TechNodeusing part of his handsomely-valued Luckin shares as collateral to take out loans, Lu Zhengyao has made away with in excess of $500 million. That amount would have been much, much smaller if Luckin’s numbers were accurately reported. All this makes it hard to believe that COO Liu Jian would commit fraud without the actual or constructive knowledge Chairman Lu Zhengyao, CEO Qian Zhiya and CFO Reinout Hendrik Schakel. My present hypothesis is that Liu, as a long time errand boy for Chairman Lu Zhengyao, has taken the fall to buy time for Luckin’s management to work out their next move – interesting read. It does make you wonder about other Chinese firms

    Booking Holdings to announce lay-offs after securing $4bn loan | Financial Times(Glenn) Fogel told the 530 employees on the call, which was first reported by the Dutch newspaper NRC, that bookings on the travel company’s platforms had dropped 85 per cent year-on-year in the preceding week and that the loss in revenue because of reduced rates at hotels was even greater. – I’d imagine that’s going to blitz their Google advertising spend reputedly 10 billion dollars a year pre-COVID

    Why China is losing the coronavirus narrative | Financial Times – just wow, it won’t affect public opinion that much, but will affect government and wonks : When Roger Roth received an email from the Chinese government asking him to sponsor a bill in the Wisconsin state legislature praising China’s response to coronavirus, he thought it must be a hoax. The sender had even appended a pre-written resolution full of Communist party talking points and dubious claims for the Wisconsin senate president to put to a vote. “I’ve never heard of a foreign government approaching a state legislature and asking them to pass a piece of legislation,” Sen Roth told me last week. “I thought this couldn’t be real.” Then he discovered it was indeed sent by China’s consul-general in Chicago. “I was astonished . . .[and] wrote a letter back: ‘dear consul general, NUTS’.”

    ‘A level playing field’: digital giants will have to pay for news | Sydney Morning Herald – interesting move ‘Josh Frydenberg will impose a mandatory code on the digital giants after losing faith in their work on a negotiated settlement with Australian media companies to reimburse them for news and other content.’

  • Japan as a power in aerospace + more

    Quietly, Japan as a power in aerospace industry | Ars Technica – really interesting analysis of Japan as a power aerospace sector. What people don’t realise is that Japan supplies key components to Boeing. It also has a set of indigenous plane designs to solve problems like being able to land on water or long range marine patrol. In addition, Japan as a power in aerospace also includes outer space; creating both rockets and payloads for the Japanese space agency

    ‘No Morals’: Advertisers React to Facebook Report – The New York Times – “Now we know Facebook will do whatever it takes to make money. They have absolutely no morals.”  Surprised that advertising execs are going hard on Facebook

    Asda beats Waitrose and Harrods in Which? mince pie taste test | Business | The Guardian – Having done a student job at Cereal Partners I realise how arbitrary taste tests can be. With many products, the same manufacturer might be making the same product for a number of different retailers, with only the boxes changing. It caused some amusement reading the taste test on cereal that was exactly the same, except for the box.

    However the most interesting part of the article was the sub headline: Supermarket tops consumer group’s chart but general standards drop due to rising cost of ingredients. More related content here.

    Inside the hype and reality of Alexa, Siri and the voice assistant ‘revolution’ – Recode – “Smart speaker listeners are much more passive,” she added. “People with voice interfaces tend to accept what’s given to them.”

    The seven deadly paradoxes of cryptocurrency | Bank Underground – great write-up that everyone should read

    A contest wants to build an environmentally friendly air conditioner — Quartz – people generally choose their air conditioners based on price, there is little innovation in the market for a more- efficient AC. There is a need to re-engineer the incentives as well as the technology

  • Global head of PR on Japan + more

    Booking.com’s global PR head on Japan, data, and the fallacy of awards | PR Week – For Cafferty, no outside party can understand a business as well as the people who work in it. Indeed, she sees the key attribute of an in-house PR person as knowing every facet, from “fun stuff” like brand and product to tax laws. She sees the value of PR agencies as being strong media contacts and local understanding, and less about strategy or creativity – a very traditional view of PR as media relations and a disconcerting read for agencies given the lack of receptiveness to higher value service aspects. Booking.com’s global PR head on Japan was not exactly insightful comments either. More Japan related content here.

    McSuicide? Twitter hoax affects McDonald’s Hong Kong | PR Week – probably because Twitter doesn’t have traction in Hong Kong

    What Brands Are Actually Behind Trader Joe’s Snacks? – Eater – it reminds me student jobs that I had in factories making breakfast cereals, frozen cakes and frozen meals respectively – we would change brand boxes on the line but the product remained the same

    iOS 10 Quietly Deprecated A Crucial API For VoIP and Communication Apps – Slashdot – what’s not apparent is why Apple is deciding to depreciate this API, especially given the amount of phone use that happens on wi-fi rather than cellular networks

    Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyberweapon | New Scientist – what would have seemed like a straight-up Bond villain pot, now seems to be the new normal. GPS spoofing has also been done by the North Koreans and China. They key question is how the GPS network achieves ‘cut through’ whilst being jammed. There is only so much transmitting power that can be put on satellites. It would also mean that ‘old’ skills like astral navigation and map reading are still tremendously important.

  • Japanese week

    Things that made my day this week has a lot of a Japanese feel, this maybe some sort of invisible psychological hand of some sort as I am currently reading Ghost In The Shell Man-Machine Interface by Masamune Shirow, but more on that later.

    First up Bose have been positioning their brand as having a love for music through a series of short films, my favourite one was about how Japanese people have taken the Jamaican dancehall sound and done their own thing with it. Japanese dancers have won competitions in Jamaica. Like hip-hop and Chicano car culture before it, Japan put their own spin on it rather doing straight cultural appropriation. 

    Usagi Yojimbo is an American comic drawn by a Japanese American author Stan Sakai and based on classic Japanese chambara film, so you can imagine how psyched I was to know that this was a proof-of-concept prior to a possible animated film.

    Toyo Tires have combined their Japanese heritage with tire technology to come up with yakatas (traditional summer weight kimonos) with a tire tread based print that still didn’t seem out of place.
    Toyo Tire yakatas
    Toyo Tire yakatas
    Moving away from the land of the rising sun to China, Apple’s new iPad featuring Yaoband who use an iPad in a similar way to the way the Art Of Noise used the Fairlight CMI or hip-hop producers used the famous Akai MPC workstation series. It’s interesting that Apple is focusing the light back on creativity.

    Finally a vintage film about the MTR in Hong Kong complete with a stuffy voiceover and pseudo-Krautrock backing track. The trains look retro-futuristic in a Logan’s Run kind of way

    More Japan related content here.

  • Tokyo Girls collection: shopping with a Japanese mobile twist

    Tokyo Girls Collection and Shibuya Girls Collection are twice yearly events held in Tokyo ran by blogs Candywalker.com and Girlswalker.com that highlight the latest Japanese fashion ranges to young women. The women usually live outside Tokyo and usually attend the event in person or watch it streamed live online. 

    The events attract 20,000 attendees. What is very impressive about the events is:

    • The tight integration of the live experience with an e-commerce and m-commerce experience
    • The amount of major sponsors like Toyota and Coca-Cola for these events
    • The huge brand power that these events have developed. Lawson, a challenger convenience store brand (think 7-Eleven) have collaborated with Tokyo Girls Collection on a limited edition tea drink
    • The cross-over between media and retail business that TGC and SGC represent

    The data that they’ve gathered about their attendees show an impressive engagement with the online internet.

    mobile internet minutes per day JPG

    Attendees spend 98 minutes a day on the mobile internet.

    mobile commerce experience JPG

    70 per cent have ‘experienced’ m-commerce in the past year. Kawaii doesn’t only mean cute, but serious spending power and mobile connectivity.

    Why they work (thanks to my friend Junko Furukawa for this insight):

    • SO….Models ARE the key to the event. There are models and dokusha-models. (These are chosen among actual readers of the magazines as “representatives”.  They are more attractive than average readers but not pretty enough to be actual models). Those models have fans who want to be like them, and with dokusha-models, you can relate yourself to them more
    • Why would women order clothes without trying them on, feeling the fabric, quality of the finish etc? Everything is centralised in Tokyo including clothes stores.  Unlike Top Shop which has branches all over the UK, those “select shops” are only in Tokyo. So girls living elsewhere have no choice but to resort to online shopping or m-commerce. Many girls buy exactly the same stuff models wear on magazines, so they don’t actually “need to” try them on.  The dokusha-models are the key here as well in terms of pre-purchase reassurance

    More Japan related content here.