Ged Carroll

Search results for: “hi-fi”

  • Rundle in Korea

    The rundle as a term was popularised by business academic Scott Galloway.

    https://flic.kr/p/YrxdtH

    It means ‘recurring revenue bundle’. In the technology world bundling meant concealing the real price and value of a product, and or maximising leverage from one industry into another. Here are two bundle examples:

    • Mobile carrier combined text, data and call plans were originally designed to make it harder to compare one carriers offering with another. That was supposed to reduce customer churn because it was like comparing apples and oranges, rather than voice minutes, cost per text or cost per MB of data used
    • Microsoft integrated its web browser in with its operating system Windows. This meant that life was appreciably harder for Netscape to build its web browser business. Web developers in large corporates optimised their websites for Internet Explorer. Western Mac users like me couldn’t use online banking. Korean Mac users couldn’t get online because they couldn’t verify their identity. Korean cybersecurity was based on a common identity platform that relied on Microsoft ActiveX – which got hacked by North Korea….

    Back to rundle

    Remember the ‘recurring revenue’ bit?

    The classic example of a rundle that Scott Galloway uses is Amazon Prime. A one-off annual payment made by Amazon customers for free postage. There are also some ancillary benefits such as content from the Amazon Prime Video service. But Amazon Prime has a secondary effect, Prime customers spend more with Amazon over a year. This made increased profits for Amazon and less profits for its competitors, further strengthening Amazon’s hand. By 2019, 82 percent of US households have an Amazon Prime membership.

    Another example would be Apple’s service businesses:

    • Apple TV+
    • iCloud+
    • Apple Music

    So what’s the Korea connection?

    https://flic.kr/p/2n123gZ

    The rundle in Korea story started with a flower market.

    The Seoul wholesale flower market. The first thing that you need to know about Korean flower sales is how small they are. Here’s a rough and ready industry comparison. On average per person, per market on an annual basis:

    • The UK sells about $150 worth of flowers per year, per person
    • Japan sells about $50 worth of flowers per year, per person
    • South Korea sells about $15 worth of flowers per year, per person

    The first week in January meant that the trade was starting to get back to normal. Imports of flowers from around the world had started up again as foreign businesses reopened from the Christmas break. This is when things started to go weird. Wholesalers claimed that an online-only mail order flower company was cornering the market across a wide range of flowers driving prices up. The company that they alleged was doing this was Kukka. According to their allegations, Kukka had managed to get a wholesalers licence so that the could bid directly on the spot market for flowers. There is some anecdotal evidence that this drove florists already operating on meagre margins into the wall.

    At the time, this story didn’t make the local Korean media. Why? There are a few hypotheses:

    • Korean journalists weren’t interested because Koreans don’t buy that much flowers
    • Korean journalists couldn’t get enough sources to make the story fly
    • Korean news media publishers tend to be leery of stories that involve large corporates. What the Koreans call chaebols, unless they can’t really ignore the story any longer

    So why would Kukka have allegedly done this now? A few changes happened at Kukka the previous year. At least one of the founders left, a new management team was put in place and Kukka signed up to be part of T-Universe in August 2021.

    https://flic.kr/p/2mZUwTF

    SK Telecom officially launched T Universe at the end of August last year with a number of subscription services. Think of T Universe as a platform for bundles. It encompassed a number of Korean and international brands into rundles:

    • Amazon Global Store: remember that Amazon Prime won’t cover buying items on Amazon Japan or US? Well for $7.20 per month Koreans can get an Amazon Prime like free shipping. Frankly that would scare the crap out of my bank manager, given the amount of vinyl records, Blu-Rays and books that I would be buying
    • Starbucks: unlike most of the rest of the world, Starbucks isn’t the cock of the walk in Korea. It has a range of fierce domestic and international competitors in Korea. Koreans are big coffee drinkers and pay more than people in the UK for their coffee to go
    • Paris Baguette: despite the name, this company is as Korean as Shin spicy ramen noodles. Think of it as falling somewhere between Pret a Manger and Paul in terms of its offerings.
    • AIA insurance: AIA is an American-founded Hong Kong multinational insurance and finance corporation. It is the largest public listed life insurance and securities group in Asia-Pacific. It formerly used to be part of AIG

    Kukka is also part of these subscription plans with consumer being able to get 9000 Korean won vouchers every month.

    SKT

    SK Telecom (or SKT as its often known) is a vast business in its own right and is part of an even larger group SK.

    SK or as it was originally known Sunkyong Group started off in textiles and then became vertically integrated from petroleum to polyester fibres. Now the business covers:

    • Construction: aka SK Ecoplant does a wide range of projects across oil and gas, chemical plants, power generation and infrastructure, environmental protection, industrial buildings, civil engineering and housing
    • Pharmaceuticals with a focus on drug discovery and development
    • Chemicals also known as SK Innovation. SKC specialises in making polyester films for LCDs and solar cells.
    • Energy from oil and gas to electric battery production
    • Telecommunications
    • Trading and services: loyalty schemes (similar to Tesco Clubcard or Nectar points), a wedding consulting firm and an IT services provider with a particular focus on mobile commerce products. Their US arm launched Google Wallet
    • Semiconductors. SK Hynix is the world’s third largest semiconductor manufacturer

    Even SKT on its own is vast in its own right

    • Mobile carrier
    • E-banking and mobile payments
    • E-commerce platform (Shopify analogue with a loyalty programme)
    • Nate online portal (think Google services but Korean)
    • Satellite communications
    • Broadcast networks
    • Cable TV and brandband
    • T-Map (an Uber like service in partnership with Uber)
    • Dreamus: the people who make the Astell & Kern music players beloved of digital hi-fi enthusiasts

    Market distortions

    SKT brings a number of strengths to the T-Universe rundle series.

    It already handles 100,000,000 customer service calls a year

    • A huge existing customer base
    • CRM software and marketing data-mining expertise
    • It has the scale to bring on a 1,000 (sales) consultants to just focus on growing and upselling T-Universe

    SKT also doesn’t care about margin at the moment, instead focusing on market making:

    “Instead of a profit margin, we are thinking about expanding customer services and believe that new business models will emerge in the process. Margin is not a priority at this early stage,” Ryu said.

    SKT executive Ryu Young-sang quoted in the Korea Times: SKT to boost commerce biz with subscription platform (August 25, 2021)

    All of which is likely to mean a bump in potential customers for flowers, that probably haven’t bought flowers previously. It is easy to see how this rundle could create a market distortion. For businesses like Starbucks and Paris Baguette this would mean reduced margins on higher foot traffic, nothing that they couldn’t manage.

    However in a smaller market scenario like flowers, things could get more interesting. Huge demand from new customers that Kukka would be obliged to fulfil at ANY cost, because being sued in a Korean court by a chaebol would be disastrous.

    Korean business environment

    Korea is a relatively unique business environment. A few large businesses drive the country. You can literally live a Samsung life:

    • Work at Samsung
    • Shop at Shinsagae
    • Commute in your Samsung car
    • Stay in a Samsung hotel paid for with your Samsung card
    • Watch entertainment from CJ on your Samsung TV, tablet or phone
    • Ensure your safety with Samsung insurance for your Samsung built apartment and should you feel ill go to a Samsung hospital

    Online brought additional pressure to large businesses. Internet giant Kakao moved from internet media and communications to taxi bookings and mobile payments. Korean banks feeling under threat have moved into online services. So it was only a matter of time for SKT to build its rundle series for consumers to pick and choose from. Unlike many businesses (Apple and Amazon) who have moved from a transactional to a hybrid transactional and recurring revenue model, SKT was always a recurring revenue model because of its sector. So the only way for it to grow would be to expand the number of sectors that it got recurring revenue from with its ‘subscriptions of everyday things’ in T-Universe. SKT and the flower industry (let alone Kukka) look like apocryphal story of a hippo and a chick sharing the same bed.

  • SITA + more things

    SITA

    SITA | SITA statement about security incident – this gave limited and basic information – specifically your name, membership number and tier, seating preferences and a code corresponding to your meal preferences. – according to Cathay Pacific. It looks like this attack on SITA was more about tracking the travel of persons of interest around the world; so more likely to be a state actor rather than commercial motives. China is known to use this kind of data to track and harass its enemies

    Business

    If you read nothing else here, read this piece of investigative journalism. It reads like something out of a post-Smiley John LeCarre novel – British American Tobacco Fights Dirty In West Africa – OCCRP

    Like China, The West Needs National Champions  

    China

    Jack Ma personifies the contradiction of China’s ideology | Financial Times – interesting end to the article, with a question about whether Goldman Sachs, BlackRock et al will be able to convincingly align themselves “politically, intellectually and emotionally” with Xi Jingping? How will the west regard Communist party cells in their management decision structures?

    China, Russia Images in U.S. Hit Historic Lows – I would imagine that this is a bigger problem for China than Russia. I think will continue to be a big issue for China and would be mirrored across other western countries across Europe. Worth reading alongside Xi Jinping turned me into a China hawk – POLITICO 

    The Fall of China’s Working-Class ‘Palaces’ – Sixth Tone – interesting read on ‘peoples palace’ public spaces

    Luxury

    Kering bets on first-mover advantage with resale | Vogue Business – pretty much all the major houses now have a resale brand of sorts

    H. MOSER & CIE SWISS ALP WATCH FINAL UPGRADE | Watches News – I do like the sense of humour in the design

    LOEWE | The Loewe Show Has Been Cancelled – Loewe’s approach to marketing its spring and summer collection aped a newspaper to create a cookbook.

    https://flic.kr/p/2kHboqs
    Website screenshot

    Marketing

    An Oral History of Mountain Dew’s Puppy Monkey Baby Super Bowl Ad – this feels like the creative was done before the strategy which sounds completely out of whack

    Airbnb slashes spend in permanent shift from performance marketing to brand | Campaign – makes sense since AirBnB is ‘verging’ as Faris Yakob would say. And here comes the why: Why you need a strong brand to win in e-commerce: Adidas’ Simon Peel | WARC. More from Simon Peel here.

    Tymbals : The Agency of the Future – I was reading this by Nigel Scott. I suspect that he’ll be right. My main concern as a marketer is the piss-poor job that the martech stack players do, supporting brand building. The fundamental problem is they only view things from a performance marketing perspective because engineers, programme managers and even the company CMOs don’t get brand. These are the people that brought us growth hacking. Their model is a secondhand car lot salesman.

    Shoppertainment & Livestreaming Gain Steam in Europe’s E-Commerce | Alizila – QVC on your mobile…..

    Russia

    Why the Europeans Don’t Have a Russia Policy – Carnegie Europe – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – the belief held by the older generation of German Social Democrats—and Christian Democrats—that Russia should not be isolated. This was the thinking behind Germany’s Ostpolitik, or Eastern policy, which was begun by the Social Democrats in the late 1960s. That policy was based not only on the idea of dialogue with Russia but also on the notion of Wandel durch Annäherung, or change through 

    Technology

    Qualcomm Snapdragon Sound Countdown | The Science Behind the Sound | Qualcomm – I think that this sits between two stools. It isn’t hi-fi and it won’t be cheap.

    Wave Goodbye, Hello MIPS as Chapter 11 Resolved | EE Times – still has a strategic focus on the RISC-based processor architectures. They are looking to support a mix of legacy MIPS technology and a new “standards-based 8th generation architecture,” based on the open source RISC-V processor standard

    Can WhatsApp stop misinformation without compromising encryption? — Quartz 

    Don’t know how to train your dog? This device will do it for you – CNET 

    Tools

    I have been playing with this for a few days now and could definitely see a use for it – flowchart.fun 

  • 2020 media diary

    I was inspired to write a 2020 media diary after re-reading a post that I had contributed to Stephen Waddington’s blog back in 2015 that looked at my online and offline media consumption. Prior to COVID; it wouldn’t have changed that much from the 2015 variant. In fact in 2020, a lot is still the same through COVID. A number of the changes had happened had been driven prior to COVID.

    But lets start off the 2020 media diary with the COVID effects.

    Zoom fatigue

    When I started off working in agency life. Being able to work from home wasn’t possible for a couple of reasons. I didn’t have my own space that I could work at. Even if I could, I would need to find a block of work where I would need to write and concentrate rather than bounce ideas of colleagues.

    Carver M-500t power amplifier at the top

    I idealised working from home as a bit like the early bits of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Working in my pyjamas, with a kick ass hi-fi. The future is more banal. I own a nice Sony pre and power amp combo rather than a Carver Audio system based around the M-500t power amplifier.

    But what its actually meant was an extension of the working day and a blurring of the line between work and personal time. I empathised with those people I saw using the edge of the bed as an office chair and their dressing table as a desk on Zoom calls.

    Zoom fatigue set in. Zoom was tiring for a few reasons. Calls were often stacked up one after the other. Secondly you couldn’t carve out blocks of time for it like email. Instead its a constant low level presence; rather like Stack or WhatsApp groups. When you did a group video call, there is a lot happening on screen and its much more of a cognitive load than your average meeting. Finally there is the extension of the working day.

    And no, I haven’t managed to work in my dressing gown.

    Return of the desktop

    If I had written my 2020 media diary before March, I would have referenced discussions around ‘post-PC age’; even if it wasn’t mirrored in my own behaviour. I primarily used my Mac for content creation because I spent a lot of my time outside the home. Not being so mobile has meant that my iPhone has been used less and my Mac has been used much more.

    Continuity provided integration across my iPhone, iPad and Mac. All my messenger apps have a desktop client, which I can toggle between on the Mac. A lot of the apps in my personal use made no sense as I have been by my home entertainment set up all the time. Ocado stopped supporting their mobile app as they become overwhelmed with orders; which meant that my shopping was completed on my Mac. My iPhone was then only really useful as a phone.

    Messenger for keeping in touch and on track

    I have been using messenger clients for almost as long as I have been online. I used to have them all together in an app called Adium X on the Mac. Unfortunately that isn’t possible any longer. Instead I am using a hodge podge of clients

    WeChat, LINE, Signal, Skype, Apple Messages, Slack, Zoom, Teams, WhatsApp and KakaoTalk. Over the past 12 months Signal has become very popular and I am using WeChat with contacts inside and outside China much less. Signal took off because of concerns about privacy amongst my network at home and abroad.

    Secondly, I have been using my Mac as my primary messaging device which was definitely an effect that COVID had on my 2020 media diary.

    From always on to keeping it off

    When I started to use internet based services, you made an active decision to get online. You dialled up or logged on. For the best part of the past few decades we moved towards an always-on world. People often complained about the amount of email received at work; the way the email client was a constant draw, when they could be getting things done instead. First my Mac at home was constantly connected to the internet and mobile phones allowed us to be called directly on the go. Then we had mobile email and a nascent web experience. From there it was apps. My 2020 media diary has seen this accelerate even further. Immediacy has been accelerated even further and has been making people burn out and feel sick.

    Turning off and keeping the internet off has now become an active decision. All be it, one that has become much harder to make.

    Flickr is an archive

    Flickr is still my visual archive and an essential part of my 2020 media diary; but since I have been out and about much less. Its less of a source of anxiety for me since Smugmug purchased it from Yahoo!

    Facebook is private groups

    I continue to use Facebook in a similar way to developer friends using Stack Overflow or other forums for professional social discourse on a couple of private groups. I go directly into the groups, I don’t bother looking at the home page news feed.

    Twitter: paring back

    Back in 2019, I started to cut back what I posted on Twitter and how long I wanted it to be on there. Generally posts won’t last more than a week on my profile.

    My Instagram has been paired back and just shares a record from my collection now and again. Just enough activity for people to know that I am still alive, but that’s it.

    Media content

    2020 saw me bulk up my vinyl collection. I bought digital music and vinyl records on Bandcamp. I also bought CDs and vinyl from the Discogs marketplace.

    The major change has been the way I listen to my music. When I was out and about I use a late model iPod Classic upgraded with 256GB flash memory storage. My listening has now moved to my Mac. I invested in a high quality pair of headphones (Beyerdynamic x Massdrop.com DT177X Go for home listening, they are 32 ohms which makes them very easy to drive). I don’t have to worry about driving them with a big amplifier. I also don’t need noise cancelling to deal with the the clutter of my office surroundings. My Bose headphones are charged but unused for the past eight months.

    I have been using my Mac’s native Podcasts app and have pretty much given up watching news from the major UK news channels. The whole Brexit debacle and a failure to hold politicians of all parties accountable meant that I instead listen to content from the likes of RTÉ, CNBC, NPR, NHK and KBS instead. I get this content via their podcasts.

    I still have an Apple TV box that I use for Bloomberg TV, Yahoo! Finance (which is surprisingly good), Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and iTunes store content.

    News is print, the web and RSS.

    Given everything that has been going on, I decided to invest in a print and digital Financial Times subscription. Why print? I like to scan my news quickly on the newspaper with my morning coffee. I can then dive into stories that catch my eye in more depth online. Placement on print provides a layer of context that digital doesn’t really have.

    My RSS reader of choice is still Newsblur.com. That is now supplemented through email updates from Sinocism, the China Research Group and a whole pile of marketing and advertising newsletters.

    I still read magazines. I am currently subscribed to Monocle and the US edition of Wired magazine. I have print and digital access to both.

    Search promiscuity

    I still bookmark with pinboard.in and now have almost 55,000 bookmarks at the time of writing. This represents a ‘trusted universe’ of web pages that I often search in first before going to DuckDuckGo and then Google. I use DuckDuckGo as my first option of search engine. It isn’t because it the best, but for many searches its good enough. Going there first means that I am giving Google less of my data, which has incremental benefits from a privacy point of view. I would like to see DuckDuckGo improve the quality of its organic search results, but that is likely to be a slow process since it is based on Bing search technology.

    Brands that cut through

    I first wrote the headline brands that cut through in my 2015 post. And I started to question as I wrote my 2020 media diary, what does cut through mean in a COVID world? I don’t need the kind of purpose advertising that Dettol came up with in the UK.

    For many of the brands that I like, the product is the marketing – the online marketing efforts of these brands are coincidental.

    COVID tested service brands. Ocado came close to losing me as a customer.

    Hermes reinforced my impression of their service being dreadful.

    The Royal Mail and Parcelforce delivery people continued to shine. Though I have qualms about Amazon’s business practices, they did what I wanted them to. Prior to lockdown I had upgraded my parents to a newer model Apple iPad and have Facetimed them every day. Each day the quality has been consistently good.

    If one brand stood out in terms of its marketing, it was Carhartt US stood out for me this year in the way that it tried to be useful in a low key way to the essential workers and first responders in its customer base.

    Authority in crisis

    Five years ago, if you had told me that I wouldn’t be listening to the BBC any longer and that the prime minister would be so bad at handling a crisis. I wouldn’t have believed you. It sounds like some fantastical dystopian vision. Some institutions have managed to burn through a lot of latent goodwill, moral and intellectual authority. But it’s not just the UK. The Hong Kong government has issues that go beyond the 2019 protests; with a diffusion of power and responsibility. In the US, the Trump administration was surreal. The one bright light being Mike Pompeo, who was at least consistent with regards China.

    Examples of the kind of good leadership that we should expect, stood out for their abnormality; when in reality it should be the other way around. Democracy should give us great leaders in moments of crisis, shouldn’t it?

    Veering towards the jackpot

    In William Gibson’s last two books The Peripheral and Agency, there is the concept of a slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. It isn’t one thing that does the human race in like a meteor, a rogue AI or a nuclear holocaust. Instead its a slow drumbeat of events over decades: changes in weather, mass pandemics, flood, drought and populism.

    I’ve previously enjoyed William Gibson’s visions of the near and far future. It taught me a lot about technology and where the rubber hit the road between tech and people. 2020 has felt like we’ve veered towards the jackpot. Now having lived in Hong Kong post-SARS, I realise that feeling is overly dramatic. We have historically lucked out in the west. COVID-19 posed a unique challenge, because you spread the virus before you exhibit symptoms, which is remarkably different to SARS and other conditions. I hope I am here in five years time to review this 2020 media diary and write a more upbeat 2025 media diary.

  • String art and other things that caught my eye this week

    For me string art is something that was a hangover from the 1960s and 70s. I remember visiting a number of schools as a child as I was going to move infant schools. One of the ones that my parents and I visited had a giant felt covered board with tacks nailed into it and coloured threads forming a geometric patten of string art.

    https://flic.kr/p/24nfCjU

    Artist Petros Vrellis took string art to a new level. Using a giant circular frame with 200 pegs and a computer programme built in Openframework to work out where to arrange the 2 kilometre long strings.

    More on Petros’ string art work here. More design related content here.

    I’ve been listening to a lot of Dimitri from Paris this week. Here’s a sample of this work

    Kerri Chandler does a rare set using reel-to-reel tape recorders. The models he is using are mid-range consumer models by Pioneer (I think they’re the Pioneer RT-707) with direct drive motors that the Japanese manufacturers pioneered in hi-fi. I suspect Chandler is using these more for their compact size than them being the best machines. The RT-707 couldn’t take 10 1/2 inch reels

    He is putting it all into a vintage Bozak mixer. Back in the 1970s and 80s, DJs used reel-to-reel tapes much more in the DJ booth. It allowed new recordings to be tried. Or edits and mixes that had been made at home played to a live crowd.

    The reel-to-reel machine didn’t allow you the same control of tempo that a Technics SL-1200 or CDJ machines would allow. Reel to reel tape allowed for a richer saturated sound than digital recording does.

    Ogilvy did a presentation on what previously have been called youth marketing trends. Despite them using the generation Z label there is some good consumer trend content in it.

    If you were around ten years ago, much of this is is familiar and would have been said about millennials. Authenticity was also said about generation X. Though it was often tied to the idea of not ‘selling out’.

  • Things that caught my eye this week

    House music producer Roy Davis Jr put together an amazing mix for Phonica Records and I have been vibing off it for most of the week.

    Roy Davis Jr for Phonica Records

    An old, but good music video put together by my long time colleague Haruka. It’s a mix of found footage and painting done on 16mm film.

    Gates to the city by Haruka Ikezawa

    I’m not so sure if it was the best portable stereo; but the JVC / Victor RC-M90 was an archetypal boombox of the 1980s beloved by hip hop fans and gadget lovers. Techmoan does a good tour of the device. What’s interesting is how quality seems to have reached a peak in the late 1970s, early 1980s in hi-fi equipment. Quality seems to have declined as more overseas manufacturing was undertaken by the Japanese brands.

    If you are buying a major Japanese brand like Sony etc; try to buy a ‘Made in Japan’ product is still a great rule of thumb. More gadget related posts here.

    Leo Burnett did a great advert for McDonalds. It tells the story of story of a single mum trying to get her son into the Christmas spirit. However, she faces an unresponsive child; until his inner child wins out. The Drum did a walk through of the ad with the creative team who worked on it at Leo Burnett here.

    Leo Burnett for McDonalds UK

    Finally, the IPA did a three hour webinar A New Way to Track Consumer Demand, that is now available online.

    Finally Sony launched the PlayStation 5 in the UK this week. As I write this, there is a strong secondary market at three times the original retail price of the consoles. They’re the hot item for Christmas.

    This was supported by buzz marketing with a takeover of London Underground signs at Oxford Circus station. The square logo (all the shapes are from the PlayStation controller) contrasts with the closed Microsoft store behind it.

    Social media spread images of the signs and it was all very nice. I think part of its success was the counterintuitive aspect of a stunt in a high footfall area in central London – during the COVID19 lockdown, when other brand marketers are spending their budgets online…

    https://flic.kr/p/2k8BWxw
    London Underground sign photo by Ian Wood

    Bonus content: Clifford Stott is an expert in policing. He walked away from a Hong Kong government review into the 2019 protests. He goes into failings of the review and everything that went on in this report: Patterns of ‘Disorder’ During the 2019 Protests in Hong Kong: Policing, Social Identity, Intergroup Dynamics, and Radicalization by Clifford Stott, Lawrence Ho, Matt Radburn, Ying Tung Chan, Arabella Kyprianides, Patricio Saavedra Morales.

    He talks about his findings with the Hong Kong Free Press.

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