Search results for: “hootsuite”

8K resolution & other things

NHK unveils 8K tech | TelecomAsia – of course the challenge is having a TV big enough to make 8K worthwhile. 4K is the height of digital experience at the moment. If you go to watch a film in the West End on a digital projector, you will be watching 4K rather than 8K images. Secondly pixel density like 8K is only one aspect of image improvements. Others including high dynamic range images that are brighter and clearer. Finally the controversial double frame rate of 60 frames per second. This is supposed to provide smoother movement, but has proven to be a divisive experience with cinema audiences. Particularly when it was used on Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. More related content here.

China

Foreign manufacturer exodus from China | Quartz – however a lot of business isn’t moving because of the depth of expertise and clusters of related businesses that they rely on. This has been a bit overwrought and there is also further inland opportunities

Consumer behaviour

Where’s Britain spending? Barclaycard – interesting Q4 data (PDF data)

Culture

An Everton Fan On Why Scousers Hate The National Team – Sabotage Times – the complexity of national identity played out on a small scale

Finance

Hong Kong’s unwanted HK$1,000 banknote is the money launderer’s medium of choice | SCMP – intersting that cash usage has increased by 6 per cent in real terms. Something to ponder on in the face of cryptocurrency and electronic payments

FMCG

Krispy Kreme ‘KKK Wednesdays’ Facebook ad – Business Insider – I can’t believe that they went there. You would be hard pressed to make this up.

Ideas

London is changing – interesting experiment by Central St Martins

Japan

Press Releases : DOCOMO and ZENRIN DataCom Develop New Indoor Navigation Technology | NTT DOCOMO – really interesting move on indoor where2.0 services between DOCOMO and ZENRIN DataCom. I know that a wide range of vendors from aerospace and defence giant EADS to Ruckus Wireless that have explored this area over the years

Luxury

Wine fortunes take off for labels featured on inflight menus | SCMP – inflight cuisine is a great marketing opportunity for wine brands

Media

YouTube makes a move against brand-sponsored videos | Digiday – this is huge for the likes of PR agencies and networks like Nuffnang

Online

spaceprob.es catalogs the active human-made machines that freckle our solar system and dot our galaxy – beautiful site

Introducing TweetDeck Teams | Twitter Blogs – tries to win back users with Tweetdeck Teams against Hootsuite

Apple – Press Info – Apple to Invest €1.7 Billion in New European Data Centres – data centre for Athenry, County Galway, hopefully the area will get a backbone upgrade to match

Security

Pages – Update on the SIM card encryption keys matter | Gemalto – Initial conclusions already indicate that Gemalto SIM products (as well as banking cards, passports and other products and platforms) are secure and the Company doesn’t expect to endure a significant financial prejudice – if the hack was that obvious surely it would have been picked up before now and of flagged? If the security services dd their job well there would be few fingerprints

The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle | The//Intercept – that completely screws Gemalto

Software

Avicii and Other DJs Produce Hits Using Pirated Software | Torrentfreak – interesting connection to Universal Music’s Per Sundin

Web of no web

Daring Fireball: Thinking About the Split in Apple Watch Sales by Model – basically the WSJ numbers are rubbish, especially with luxury consumption down in China

Why the Internet of Things matters – and what it means for marketers everywhere | Percolate – (PDF)

February 24, 2015
Canada on Twitter

Canada on twitter will be an event that will have delighted my friend and former colleague Matthias Lüfkens. Matthias founded the Burson-Marsteller Twiplomacy project. Time spent at the World Economic Forum on social media meant that Twiplomacy has been a long time personal passion of his. The Twiplomacy looked at which countries have accounts and whom they follow and are followed by. The study isn’t exhaustive, for instance it doesn’t cover China’s wolf warrior accounts.

Canada rolled out an official global account

The first post that announced Canada on Twitter showed Canadian self depreciating humour with its ‘eh!’ ending imitating Canadian speech patterns. This account was as much aimed at Canadians as it was at generating digital soft power.

In reality Canada has had a number of digital diplomacy accounts before aimed at specific interest groups like the European Union or Iran. But don’t let those wrinkles get in the way of a good story.

And the internet (actually just over half of them Canadian netizens) responded back. As with most political discussions online this was a male-dominated discussion.

The conversation areas touched upon seemed to mirror the kind of issues that are currently rippling through Canadian politics: the environment, Quebec independence and care for veterans. There was a wonkish strand that talked about this accounts role in digital diplomacy for the Canadian government. Conversationalists also name-dropped well-loved Canadian brands like the Tim Hortons coffee and doughnut chain and the country’s love of ice hockey as the national sport.

Canadian based brands took time out to welcome their country’s government on to Twitter.

The biggest shock for me was that the account showed blatant favouritism towards Hootsuite compared to other Canadian social monitoring companies like Sysomos. Hootsuite was the only commercial entity that the account followed in what looks like a case of casual nepotism or a default setting in Hootsuite’s management tools. If its Hootsuite’s default setting that’s a scummy way of building followers and engagement. More online related posts here.

November 27, 2014

My digital tool box

There are new useful sites springing up all the time so this is just a snapshot of the things that I use as my digital tool box:

Service/category	Description
Digital tool box for analysis / measurement
Domain Tools	Paid for service site with some great free features including DNS look-up and the SEO browser, which allows you to see your web page the way a search crawler, would see it. This is really handy to use with clients who currently have a visual site or to just as part of a website audit.
Google Trends	Google Trends is a cornucopia of data to inspire campaign ideas and provide insight into a brand truth. The best bit about it is that its free and unlike other Google tools like Adplanner it hasn’t been crippled as the company got mean over the past few years.
Mention	A freemium product that augments the reduced service that Google Alerts now provide.
SocialMention	A great free service to grab a snapshot of social activity. The most useful aspect of the service is getting an idea of the aggregated volume of conversations and most active accounts.
State	State is a self-described social opinion network where you can see what consumers think about brands or products often represented by a handy sentiment curve. Ok so the data will be skewed because the audience is self-selecting and tech forward, but it’s also a handy gut check on a brand.
Sysomos MAP	Ok so the agency subscribes to MAP, but it is such a useful part of my life. From new business to PR messaging and everything in between MAP is a major tool in our work. I found it more useful than Radian6 in terms of the quality of the information it provides
Tfengyun.com	Get some basic research and analysis done on a Sina Weibo account. It is all in Chinese so be sure to break out Google Translate as well!
TwitterCounter	Does what it says in the name looks at the change in followers over a 90 day period of an account, which gives you an idea of performance. Handy for benchmarking against competitors or seeing how effective their activity has been.
Communication
Buffer	Buffer allows you to preload updates for Twitter, a Facebook page or even Google+. It is simpler to use than Hootsuite and allows inputs from IFTTT
IFTTT	IFTTT allows you to build simple workflows based on a web input for instance a post tagged on Pinboard.in with a tag or an article in an RSS feed with a particular word. I have found it invaluable in my Twitter workflow. It is much more robust, but less sophisticated than Yahoo! Pipes
Jego	Jego is a VoIP application brought out by China Mobile. Despite the payment mechanism being very clunky the service is really useful. It is what powers my Hong Kong number and I get a bundle of call minutes with it rather like Skype. The call quality can be very rough, but I suspect that they Chinese will lift their game over time.
Skype	So the user experience of Skype isn’t as good as it used to be. The NSA now listens into all of your calls that don’t get dropped or leave you ending up sounding like a dalek. But Skype’s premium account does allow you to do a WebEx-type webinar on the cheap including multiple callers and sharing a presentation.
TallTweets	Indonesians have a very distinctive Twitter culture. High profile account holders are often paid to tweet a long form message by brands. This is called a kultwit. TallTweets was one of the tools that they used; it slices long form messages down into a series of 140 characters that are transmitted one after the other to produce a continuous stream.
WeChat	I can’t emphasise enough how useful WeChat is. It can be used on both a desktop and a mobile device, you can form groups on there; share content, do video calls. It is much better than the likes of Whatsapp or Viber in terms of functionality and quality of the service.
Inspiration
Flickr	Flickr is one of the digital services that I have probably used the longest. At first I used it for image hosting for my blogs and I still do use it for that. But it is also so much more. It is a source of visual inspiration for ideas, brainstorms and even visuals for presentations. Flickr Creative Commons is one of the best examples of good stuff about the web.
Pinterest	Apart from the copyright nightmare that Pinterest represents it is really interesting to search a topic and see what comes up as a kind of instant mood board.
Digital tool box for News
Hacker News by Y Combinator	Not exactly news, but a great set of curated content that taps into the web zeitgeist. It saves time so you don’t have to be trawling Stack Overflow or Reddit.
Newsblur	I am a massive advocate of Newsblur. Since Livedoor closed down it’s English language RSS reader I have been using Newsblur instead. The service has a great iOS client (which is better used on an iPad if I am honest), and has native support of numerous sharing / social bookmarking tools including Pinboard. There is also an Android client and a third party Windows Phone client for those of you who are mobile masochists. Newsblur takes RSS in a number of clever new directions, you can train it to show you only the content that you want to see and provides the content in a number of views including the original website design (for when you want to understand the context of the coverage), or just text (which is handy when you are on the go). Newsblur costs a very reasonable $24/year.
Techmeme	Techmeme is an aggregator that collates the mainstream news; it replaced Google News for me since it was more the zeitgeist than Google managed.
Twitter lists	Twitter is a great tool, but you need to slap a filter on the fire hose. I do this through using lists to give me a pared down view of what I need to know between the links to Buzzfeed articles and yet another cat picture from my friends.
Productivity digital tool box
Basecamp	Basecamp offers a cost effective way to organise / upwardly manage clients and share content. You just set up a different account for each project stream or discrete client relationship and off you go. It is free for 30 days if you are looking at something short term or $20 / month
DownForEveryoneOrJustMe	A single page site that does what it says in the title, really useful
Google Drive	I am not necessarily a great fan of creating a document within Google; it can sometimes feel unresponsive, particularly over a corporate network or where you are collaborating on a document. It is however great for building surveys, customer service question databases for managing social media accounts or holding a common set of passwords.
Hemingway	Hemingway is like having an extra critical set of eyes go over your copy. I have started to use it for blog posts as a way of forcing me to look more critically at my writing and move away from my previous stream of consciousness approach.
iCloud	Apple’s web services have been a part of my life since 2001. Apple at the time offered the first advertising-free IMAP email account, syncable address book and calendar based on WebDAV and hCard standards/formats. It has become less useful since Apple did away with iDisk
Mendeley	If you’ve ever had to do some serious writing like a book chapter or a bylined article, having an application like Mendeley makes the process a lot easier. It is a mix of an application and cloud service that allows you to store citation materials, share with other writers and automatically build a bibliography within a Word document via a simple plug-in. Pretty much a must for journalists or corporate copywriters. Mendeley has a freemium model and at the top end, for just 11.99GBP/month you can have unlimited storage space
Noisli	Noisli is a text editor designed to free you from distraction and is an essential part of my blogging workflow now. It’s white noise generation is also handy for when you want to get to sleep, I often leave my laptop logged in playing their rainfall noise when I am away and trying to get a good night’s sleep.
PDFEscape	Online editing of PDF files
Pinboard	Back in the day there was a service called del.icio.us that allowed you to store all your bookmarks in the cloud and put labels on them called tags rather than having to put them in folders. This allowed your bookmarks to exist in multiple categories. delicious allowed you to search these categories. Unfortunately del.icio.us became delicious.com and got crippled in a spectacular bout of shareholder value destruction overseen by numerous managers at Yahoo! who understood the price of everything and the value of nothing as Bill Hicks would say. Pinboard was created as a home for del.icio.us refugees like me and works as an augmentation of my memory and as a hopper for me to feed content into IFTTT.
Ribbet	Ribbet is a basic online photo editor that does everything that I need a photo editor to do. Usually I use it for altering images for use in presentations.
Skip	Skip is the app formerly known as ClipPick, it is basically multi-device / multi-screen cut and paste. Simple, easy, instantaneous. Like it or not the current mobile/tablet systems and PC systems aren’t particularly open, they tend not to work together well unless inside a particular vendor walled garden like Samsung, Sony or Apple.Skip breaks down those walls, it’s kind of like Google was in that once you start using it you couldn’t imagine life without it. Some really nice people in South Korea make it; show them some download love.
WeTransfer	The simplest handy way of shipping files around. A lot of people find it hard to grasp the concept of Dropbox so the one-click approach of WeTransfer is really handy.
Planning / research digital tool box
AcronymFinder	Clients love TLAs and FLAs as professional shorthand, use AcronymFinder to work out what they are actually saying (TLA: three-letter acronym; FLA: four-letter acronym)
Archive.org	Need to understand a former organisation? The Wayback Machine becomes particularly handy in understanding an organisation that has acquired or merged other businesses together.
CIA World Fact Book	Surprisingly useful almanac of economic and infrastructure data from the Central Intelligence Agency. Everything from time zones to what the flag looks like.
Dogpile	Dogpile is a meta search engine. It trawls a number of search engines rather than just Google to present you with potential answers
Eurostat database	The European Commission pulls together a lot of research every year and gives it away to the likes of you and me for free. You can get some real gems that come in handy for campaign planning and ideation.
Federal Election Committee financial reports and data	Handy when you are doing a search on likely reputational risks of clients. See whose campaign they donated to and the kind of issues that these people support.
Follower Wonk	Probably one of the most useful Twitter tools out there which allows you to look at third party Twitter accounts and see which have common followers or not. Really handy for doing influencer mapping incorporating competitor thinking. It is part of the Moz series of products so costs, but is worth it.
Google search box	Baidu talks a lot about the concept of ‘box computing’ where the search box is actually the gateway to other services, but Google has a lot of inbuilt services that people don’t realise. These services came from its competition with the likes of Yahoo! as it grew to be the online oligarchy that it currently is. More information on Google’s hidden features can be found in my Grokking Google series of posts
Infomine	A handy augmentation to searching for research papers on Google Scholar
IPL2	An old school search engine a la the Yahoo! Directory of old that is curated by US librarians so is full of high quality links.
Ixquick	A surprisingly useful and fast search engine, pull this out of the bag if Google isn’t giving decent results.
Similarsites	Really handy for looking at influencers in a given sector once you have one, Similarsites can then be used to suggest others within a ranked system based on how close they are to the seed site you have used
The Economist World in Figures	This used to be a free to access website and is now bundled up as a free iPhone and iPad application as an ideal counterpart to the CIA World Fact Book
WordPress.com	A surprising recommendation for research, but a quick search of WordPress.com is worthwhile as people will often have an email address on their profile. Either using a domain specific search on Google find someone’s WordPress.com profile or by exploring the tags.
Travel digital tool box
Foursquare	Foursquare’s explorer function allows you to search an area by category for people driven recommendations. I have found it useful because of the map driven interface. Foursquare replaced Dopplr in my travel folder after Nokia shut it down.
Open Rice	Detailed restaurant recommendations for Hong Kong. Hong Kong locals are some of the most exacting food critics I know which means that the Open Rice database is uncommonly useful. I recommend downloading the Open Rice mobile apps.
Skyscanner and OnTheFly	Booking flights can be a bit of a nightmare Skyscanner and OnTheFly provide background information to help you make the right choice of flight.

What services do you use that you would recommend for a digital tool box? More related content here.

April 30, 2014

Nu Skin + other news

Nu Skin Faces Troubles in China – Financial – Beauty – WWD.com – “Investors are waiting for more details on the size and scope of Nu Skin’s troubles in China. During an earnings call on March 3, Nu Skin president and chief executive officer Truman Hunt told Wall Street analysts, ‘We elected to voluntarily suspend business promotional meetings as well as the engagement of new salespeople in China to cooperate with relevant authorities and demonstrate our commitment to our policies.’” – Disclosure: I worked on Nu Skin when I was in Hong Kong. It is a multi level marketing beauty business that tries to position itself as a luxury version of Avon. Today Nu Skin faces a more complex MLM marketplace with Mary Kay, Nerium and Herbalife. Nu Skin faces beauty rivals who would be local brands like FANCL and international brands like SK-II.

Nu Skin faces issues in China over MLM. MLM can make companies like Nu Skin look more like a ponzi scheme. Understandably the Chinese government is being very careful about regulation of MLM businesses like Nu Skin. MLM is popular in China as it is viewed as a side hustle that might bring passive income from Nu Skin.

Looking past MLM, beauty brands including Nu Skin, make bolder claims in China and Hong Kong than would be the case in the UK. Nu Skin and FANCL both have positioned some products, not in the beauty space, but as cosmeceuticals. I thought that this would be a space for greater regulatory risk for Nu Skin. More posts related to Nu Skin can be found here. (Paywall)

Beauty

Shu Uemura asks bloggers to lead new content strategy | Marketing Interactive – this is the kind of work I wish I had been involved in, such a great programme idea

Business

How Facebook Could Move Beyond Social Media – PSFK – cash cows and searching for the new new things, part of which seems to be being a creative / build shop for brands – think IBM Interactive

JetBlue Sells LiveTv to French Aerospace Company Thales – Businessweek

At last, a break for Bill Ackman on his Herbalife bet | Quartz – multi-level marketing or pyramid scheme?

Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem – NYTimes.com – culture is a barrier to ‘hard innovation’

Yahoo: Destroyer Of Startups – ReadWrite

Consumer behaviour

The Massive Explosion In Apps In China | BusinessInsider – App usage in China has absolutely exploded in the last year according to data from Umeng, an app analytics firm that tracks Chinese smartphone usage.

DATA POINTS: Chinese put family first – Campaign Asia – emphasis on work life balance and anxiety over food safety pollution and health (paywall)

Study: Millennials Deeply Confused About Their Politics, Finances, and Culture – The Atlantic

High School Has No Dances Because Students Stay Home And Text – Business Insider

Danah Boyd Has Message to Adults About Teens Behavior Online: It’s All Your Fault | Re/code – adults use apps and eco-systems for worse things than kids

China’s biggest homegrown gadget is a hit—but not at home | Quartz – Chinese people prefer real cigarettes to e-cigarettes

Economic Growth and Life Expectancy – Do Wealthier Countries Live Longer? | Euromonitor International

Meat Market Malaise: Continuing Decline in Fresh Meat Consumption – Euromonitor International – I suspect that its down to economic issues as much as health reasons

Pew Study: Many Technophiles Also Love Libraries : The Two-Way : NPR

Where Millennials Stand on Social Issues | Marketing Charts

How people really read and share online | Flowing Data

Economics

The World’s Megacities to Retain Strong Hold in 2014 – Euromonitor International – welcome to William Gibson’s sprawl

Six charts that show why China is competing with the multinationals it used to work for – Quartz

China Data Show Economy Cooling – Bloomberg – lowest retail growth since 2004

U.S. China trade deficit: It’s not what you think it is. | Slate – Andy Kessler made a similar argument a number of years ago

The Changing Face of Global Manufacturing – Euromonitor International

China in $23 bn February trade deficit – Figures just released show China went into an unexpected trade deficit of almost 23 billion US dollars in February. This compared with a surplus of almost 15 billion in the same month last year, and a median forecast of a nearly 12 billion surplus in a poll of 13 economists by Dow Jones Newswires. – How? I know Chinese new year would have reduced productivity for the first two weeks of February but don’t understand the jump

China’s inflation rate eases | RTHK – Figures just released show China’s inflation rate eased in February to 2 percent year-on-year

Is Silicon Valley really more efficient than Detroit? | Excapite – deconstructing the economic value of Silicon Valley

Ethics

McDonald’s Accused of Stealing Wages From Already Underpaid Workers | Mother Jones

Apple, IBM stash more profits overseas to avoid US taxes | South China Morning Post – The largest US-based companies added US$206 billion to their stockpiles of offshore profits last year, parking earnings in low-tax countries until Congress gives them a reason not to (paywall)

Finance

The Chinese government just hit the brakes on finance-minded internet firms and their “virtual credit cards” – Quartz

New fund exemplifies London’s reliance on banking and dodgy foreign cash | South China Morning Post – The investment vehicle from asset manager London Central Portfolio, which will commit £100 million (HK$1.29 billion) to prime residential property, amounts to a bet that London retains official policies that make it the corrupt rentier’s bolt-hole of choice (paywall)

Europe’s latest bank stress test is working, and it hasn’t even started yet – Quartz – as the sub-head on this article said ‘smell the fear‘

What you’ll find in a Chinese pawnshop: a BMW and a Beijing penthouse – Quartz – props up small business banking and you thought NatWest and RBS were bad…

New Investment Platforms Raise Questions for China’s Banking System | Stratfor – (paywall) – historically Chinese consumers have seen their savings milked to help fund state owned business expansion and have had few financial vehicles with decent returns, hence bubbles around property, gold etc.

Echoes of US subprime seen in China debt ratings | SCMP – competition among China’s credit-rating agencies is intensifying, leading to a slide in standards reminiscent of what happened in the US before the financial crisis, according to Dagong Global Credit Rating. (Paywall)

Gadget

Nokia X release date, price drive quick addoption in China | BGR – which gives you an idea of how much of a fail the burning platform move to Windows was

LG’s G Flex: Is a curved smartphone screen innovation or desperation? (review)

BlackBerry fans’ last glimmer of hope in the U.S. market is gone

Hong Kong

HKTV postpones mobile TV launch as proposal falls foul of broadcasting watchdog | SCMP – so the mobile TV channel didn’t manage to run an end game around the regulators?

How to

How to Check if an Email Address is Valid and Exists or Not | Digital Inspiration – I can see Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and this technique being used by spammers to build better lists

10 tips for young Wall Street – CNBC – great advice whatever industry you are in

SMToolbox: Getting the Most Out of HootSuite – An Expert’s View – If you are in social media, you will be aware of Hootsuite. It is arguably the most widely used social media management tool globally, with over 8 million users – I am not a big fan of Hootsuite but used it at Burson-Marsteller, this is interesting reading

Ideas

The Pentagon’s Guide to Overcoming Climate Change Denial | Motherboard

Tencent predicts the markets nearing collapse in China | WantChinaTimes.com – the markets slipping the fastest towards collapse ‘collapse’ in China include the mainland and Hong Kong property markets, the mainland’s stock markets and market, China’s stock markets, the renminbi exchange rate – according to Tencent social data

Forget about being the message, it’s time to become the medium | Excapite

Innovation

LG Chem to buy clean water startup NanoH20 for $200M – potable water is the new oil?

Bill Gates: Bots Are Taking Away Jobs – Business Insider

The power of science lures viewers (and famous people) to NASA’s original videos – the ironic thing is, as interest in space and science in the US takes up, the government has kneecapped the space programme. Bang goes big innovation for the future

Legal

Weibo: Baidu, Xiaomi, TCL Leaders On Display At NPC | Young’s China Business Blog – interesting given that these are dynamic and atypical culture businesses in China

Web firms face a strict new set of privacy rules in Europe —GigaOm

Big promises but little reform in increasingly violent China | Little Red Blog – little reform yet, give them a chance

Luxury

Bordeaux gets Chinese hangover | Business Spectator – and it could have been a lot worse if it wasn’t for the social media campaign done to reposition the wine in China, big shout out to my girl Emma – who did amazing work on community management and content for CIVB

Jing Daily: BMW joins foreign luxury brands in teaching China’s wealthy how to part with their cash

Young affluents provide the best growth potential: study – Luxury Daily – Research

Chinese customers flocking to Tokyo’s used brand good shops – The Asahi Shimbun

Jing Daily: From necessities to niceties: a look at China’s fast and furious museum boom

o-office turns an abandoned factory into iD town: the creative art district | designboom – an abandoned 550-foot long concrete factory is slowly renovated into a thriving art district complete with studios, restaurants, and hotels in Guangdong, China

Top three Hurun Report self-made female billionaires are Chinese | WantChinaTimes – Chinese businesspeople grabbed the top three places of the Hurun Report’s list of the Richest Self-Made Women in the World this year

Domestic clothing brands find love among wealthy Chinese women | WantChinaTimes – as more and more international designer brands enter China, many wealthy middle-aged Chinese women have expressed a preference for domestic clothing brands

Marketing

Volvo’s PR Flub In China Shows Why Social Media Managers Matter By International Business Times

Fictional Characters on Social Media | Social Media Today – it depends but I would be inclined to think that most brands shouldn’t

5 Link-building Linchpins for 2014 | Socialnomics – taking a more content marketing approach

Why customers write online reviews? | Socialnomics – “One day you’ll discover that the opinions of worthless people are worthless.” This quote of Piers Anthony (“A Spell for Chameleon” feb, 2012) is the opposite of the digital reality. 70% of Americans say they look at reviews before taking the next step to conversion.

Media

The Multi-Platform Majority is Here to Stay, and What This Means for Your Web Analytics – comScore, Inc

Seoul Opens K-Pop’s ‘Abbey Road’ – WSJ

Gawker’s Nick Denton Says BuzzFeed is ‘Pointless’ | Advertising Age – interesting use by Gawker of their comment system as a brand vehicle that they can monetise

Advertisers Blend Digital and TV for Well-Rounded Campaigns – eMarketer

MediaPost Publications TV Viewers Heed Social-Media Buzz, Not Apps 03/12/2014 – not good news for TVTag et al

MediaPost Publications New IAB Glossary Limits ‘View,’ Defines ‘Skip’ (As In Ads)

Daylight saving is the worst thing that happens to television | Quartz – That’s because when the time change arrives, the TV industry must grapple with a corresponding drop in viewership

Facebook Zero: Considering Life After the Demise of Organic Reach | Social@Ogilvy – we all knew this was coming

Get ready for ‘Insta-ads’ — Instagram signs $100M deal with Omnicom | VentureBeat – it will be interesting to see how these are done

Eight great examples of mobile marketing from Southeast Asia | Econsultancy

Yahoo signs Mourinho to be Tumblr-posting global football ambassador | Battenhall – Yahoo! continuing on with some of its smarter sponsorships

Facebook launches Public Content Solutions to help media partners with trend data – Inside Facebook

Microsoft is using your data to target political ads on Xbox Live | Washington Post – play Call of Duty? – You must be opposed to defence spending cuts?

Online

VICE News: ‘We don’t treat the internet like a low-rent version of other media’ | The Media Briefing

First Porn, Now Extremism: The UK Looks to Expand Web Censorship | Motherboard

Shanghai Girl Broadcasts Suicide on Instagram, Reactions – chinaSMACK

点名时间 – 中国最大众筹平台! 支持创新的力量 | Demohour – Kickstarter or Indiegogo but with Chinese sensibilities.

Demohour focuses on innovative household gadgets and designer goods. Some of the new products promoted on the site have been a Bluetooth sound box made from bamboo, an anti-pollution air control system for cars, and an “intelligent wallet” that operates like a global positioning system, telling the user his or her location.Although Demohour was inspired by US crowd funding website Kickstarter.com, Chang said there were huge differences between the US and Chinese markets.

Compared with the US, he said, the mainland has a weaker culture of donations, which is the basis of the crowd funding concept. Angel investors may also provide us with enough funds. But what we can get from a crowd funding platform is more than money

Quality

The Paradox of Quality: Why Better Technology Fails — mobileYouth® – sad but true. But then consumers have always flocked towards crap, Amstrad being a case in point

Retailing

Jing Daily: China’s massive role in Asia’s e-commerce market

Nowness’ ‘Shoppable Video’ Holds Solid Potential For China Luxury Marketing – A screenshot from Nowness’ new shoppable video. (Nowness) A chic new shoppable video by LVMH’s luxury editorial site Nowness may be a sign of what’s to come for the future of global high-end e-commerce—and that definitely includes China.

Luxola raises $10 million to doll up women (and men) in Southeast Asia | Techinasia

China’s Tencent may take 16 percent stake in JD.com: media | Reuters – China’s internet market represents a battle of leviathans unlike anything ever seen outside the country. Imagine if Yahoo! bought Amazon back in the day and Excite had owned Pets.com?

Bits Blog: On Instagram, a Bazaar Where You Least Expect It | New York Times – Though not designed as an e-commerce site, Instagram can offer shoppers the thrill of discovery.

Security

Michael Geist – If U.S. Cloud Computing Isn’t Good Enough for the Canadian Government, Why Should It Be for You?

SWIFT boss calls for international standardisation of cyber security requirements – Businesses should not have to comply with a complex set of differing rules on cyber security, the chief executive of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) has said.

Pre-installed malware found on new Android phones – Computerworld

New attack on HTTPS crypto might reveal if you’re pregnant or have cancer | Ars Technica

Mozilla makes authentication system Persona Community Project | gHacks Technology News

Malaysia Airlines’ missing flight is the latest sign of a safety crisis in the region | Quartz – yes there is stiff competition and growing traffic numbers in East Asia, but Quartz’ assertion without evidence this crash was due to airline safety is wrong

MasterCard, Visa form group to push for better card security | Reuters – team up to drag US payments system into late 20th century

Software

Mozilla scraps Metro version of Firefox, citing low interest | CNet

DataPoint: King.com Takes 25% Of Facebook App Market | AllFacebook – AppData announced Friday that its data are reporting King.com‘s ascendance and where is Zynga now?

Windows Phone Developers in a Tiff Over Lack Of Advertising | Programmable Web – revenue down by 97% and fill rate on ads for applications 2-10%

Why Google Is Not Scared Of Samsung Forking Android – Business Insider – ouch

Yoshida in China: Why ‘WeChat’ | EE Times – Yoshida gets a few things wrong in this article BUT is is interesting that she bothers to cover it at all in EE Times

IP, TCP, and HTTP – Syncing Data – objc.io issue #10

Asus is reportedly under pressure from Google and Microsoft to shelve its dual-OS PCs – The Next Web – I am reminded of the end passage in Orwell’s Animal Farm: “Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.“

How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing | Ars Technica – I remember the changeover happening with my design friends

Facebook Engineering Team Takes A Look Back At The Work Behind A Look Back – AllFacebook – this is insane

Popcorn Time: Open Source Torrent Streaming Netflix For Pirates – over the years BitTorrent has become fairly mainstream, with hundreds of millions of people using torrent clients to download the latest entertainment, but it can be awkward to use

Scale of Chat Apps in Asia | Pixelbits – Mona Nomura on chat apps

Taiwan

elle lee 李文煊 // e l l e i c o n l e e . c o m // 时尚煊言 » Whenever, Whatever – W Taipei – interesting post about user interface design

Technology

Pixelworks Discloses Relationship With Apple – Seeking Alpha

ZTE Joins Gaming Crowd With Console Plan | Young’s China Business Blog

The Flight of the Birdman: Flappy Bird Creator Dong Nguyen Speaks Out | Rolling Stone

‘Mass line’: the new buzzword in China’s IT sector | WantChinaTimes.com

Quit the whining: More gentrification is good for London’s startup district – Quartz – errr no it isn’t

Telecoms

New Rules to Reshape Telecom in Mexico | New York Times – the country’s recently created telecommunications regulator issued tough new conditions that could break up virtual monopolies in phone service and television broadcasting – is the Mexican government taking on too much: the drug cartels AND Carlos Slim?

TelecomTV | News | Open source for the optical domain

I, Cringely pCell is only as good as the Linux it runs on – I, Cringely

Implications of the Rise of TV Everywhere and Video-on-Demand | GfK

Hong Kong viewers turn to Xiaomi boxes, online alternative to local TV | South China Morning Post – Alris Technology, the authorised seller of the box in Hong Kong, is getting through 10,000 of the HK$599 boxes per month (paywall)

A plain English guide to how natural language processing will transform computing | GigaOm

Web of no web

NCR sees retail banking upgrades, new services driving ATM growth in Hong Kong | South China Morning Post – banks start to deploy advanced video-enabled systems and upgrade the operating system on their ATM networks (paywall)

Siri needs to get serious | T3 – I can so vouch for the opinion in this article

MediaTek unleashes challenge to NFC – Rethink Wireless

Twitter Tests a ‘Click-to-Call’ Button for Ads – WSJ – integration of voice which had been done for a while on other platforms, opens up online advertising to offline businesses

UK Govt invests £73m in ‘Internet of Things’ research – Digital Intelligence – China has considered this a priority for years

Sony Shows Smarteyeglass Prototype to Developers – CIO.com

Tumblr Now Lets You Dial A Toll-Free Number To Post Audio To Your Blog | TechCrunch – I really like this, makes Tumblr much more accessible

Artificial Intelligence could kill us all. Meet the man who takes that risk seriously | The Next Web

Wireless

700m smartphones & tablets in China — Benedict Evans

Deal with acquisition anger through dialogue – Campaign Asia – as Asian companies buy into western brands (paywall)

Tencent M&A in overdrive with reported handset bid | South China Morning Post – is Tencent really buying a cellphone maker? (Paywall)

Apple Is Finally Figuring Out How It’s Going To Sell iPhones In The Second Biggest Mobile Market In The World (AAPL) – Apple plans to go local with a vengeance, setting up small, neighbourhood shops in big cities and tier II markets, in a bid to get closer to potential buyers as it pushes ahead with an India

Samsung’s Most Famous Spokesperson LeBron James Just Tweeted That His Phone Had A Total Meltdown | BusinessInsider – Oops! Samsung spokesperson LeBron James just tweeted out that his phone had a total meltdown and erased everything that was on it. “One of the sickest feelings I’ve ever had in my life!!!” said LeBron. Just a few minutes after sending the tweet, James realized he’d make a mistake.

TelecomTV | China handset vendors to control half the global market next year

comScore: Apple starts 2014 with 41.6% US smartphone share, Samsung at 26.7%; BlackBerry falls below Windows Phone – The Next Web

March 15, 2014

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