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Credit card + more things

Satan’s Credit Card: What The Mark Of The Beast Taught Me About The Future Of Money – BuzzFeed News – interesting read on the human factors of credit cards and payments in general. What happens when your credit card sits underneath your skin? In Sweden you can actually do this. Sweden has already gone virtually cashless already. The irony is that the confusion in your wallet becomes an even greater confusion of apps. There is still a place for artefacts. For instance a Centurion card will look more impressive in reality than as part of an Apple wallet.

Microsoft Acquires Leading Web-Based Calendar Company Jump Networks | Microsoft News Center – almost two decades of online PIM (personal information management) and email. I used Jump prior the acquisition and used to have the email address ged@jump.com before Microsoft shut it down. It used to sync with my Palm device through a conduit on my work desktop machine. All of this has become effortless in the smartphone age. Now I take for granted my calendar and other data syncing seamlessly between devices.

Surrey teen charged over Mumsnet hack attack | The Register – not sure how this would go down in terms of bragging rights on dark net forums… On one hand, there is the quality of the data, but then there is the embarrassment of it all. I don’t know who this Surrey teen needs to be more worried about more: the police or a phalanx of middle-class Mums…

Your next server will be a box full of connected stuff, not a server • The Register – Linux is just a poor copy of Unix anyway, Linus Torvalds apparently founded it because he didn’t know about BSD. BSD ran the infrastructure of Hotmail for many years. macOS, tvOS, iOS and iPadOS all run a variant of BSD proving that there is still a place for it. Unix won by becoming so ubiquitous in nature.

May 25, 2016
The New Nokia
The New Nokia can rise from the ashes of the old. Microsoft finally let go of its licence for the Nokia brand license on May 19, 2016.

There is a lot of logic to this move:
- Microsoft has already written down the full value of the business acquisition
- It has got the most valuable technical savvy out of the team and moved it into the Surface business
- It removes problematic factories and legacy products
For the businesses that have acquired the rights to use the Nokia name and the factories the upsides are harder to see.

The factories may be of use, however there is over supply in the Shenzhen eco-system and bottlenecks aren’t usually at final manufacture, but in the component supply chain.

There is still some brand equity left in the Nokia phone brand. I analysed Nokia along with a number of other international Greater China smartphone eco-system brands using Google Trend data.

There has been a decline in brand interest over the past 12 months for Nokia of 37%

Nokia still has comparable brand equity to other legacy mobile brands such as BlackBerry and Motorola

The brand equity is comparable to other value mobile brands. Honor; Huawei’s value brand has had a lot of money and effort pumped into it to achieve its current position.

But it’s brand equity doesn’t stack up well against premium handset brands from Greater China. The reason for this is that smartphone marketing and fast moving consumer goods marketing now have similar dynamics – both are in mature little differentiated markets. Brands need to have deep pockets and invest in regular advertising to remain top-of-mind across as large an audience as possible. Reach and frequency are more important than social media metrics like engagement.

In addition to advertising spend needs to be put into training and incentivising channel partners including carriers.

They are entering a hyper-competitive market and it isn’t clear what their point of advantage will be. Given the lock down that Google puts on Android and commoditised version of handset manufacture, the best option would be to look for manufacturing and supply chain efficiencies – like Dell did in the PC industry. But that’s easier said than done.

Garnering the kind of investment required to seriously support an international phone brand is a hard sell to the finance director or potential external investors.

Growth is tapering out.

The average selling price is in steady decline

This is partly because the emerging markets are making the majority new phone purchases.

Consumers in developed markets are likely holding on to the their phones for longer due to a mix economic conditions and a lack of compelling reason to upgrade.

All of the consumers that likely want and can afford a phone in developed markets have one. Sales are likely to be on a replacement cycle as they wear out. Manufacturers have done a lot to improve quality and reliability of devices.

Even the old household insurance fraud standby of dropping a phone that the consumer was bored with down the toilet doesn’t work on the latest premium Android handsets due to water-proofing.

More information

The answer to the question you’ve all been asking | Nokia – Nokia’s official announcement
Gartner highlights a more challenging smartphone sector for Nokia than when it “quit” in 2013 | TelecomTV
Nokia is coming back to phones and tablets | The Verge
So the Nokia brand returns.. with a Vengeance | Communities Dominate Brands

Supporting data slides in full

1605 new nokia smartphone deck from Ged Carroll
May 23, 2016
Hong Kong Strong

Brandon Li put his short film Hong Kong Strong on Vimeo last week. The video sprang up all over my Facebook feed as proud Hong Kongers shared the video. There were a number of things happening. The Hong Kong Tourist Board was having its strategy and spend challenged by some of the public and Wan Chai was shut down as a senior Chinese official arrived in the city for a three-day inspection.

Why does Li’s Hong Kong Strong work? Its a beautiful piece of film in its own right and its cleverly edited. But you can see films with similar production values to Hong Kong Strong all over YouTube and Vimeo.

I think that the answer lies in the strong sense of place that it provides the viewer. In this respect it reminded me of Hollywood director John Ford’s The Quiet Man. Ford’s real name was Feeney and he was a first generation Irish American. His parents were from the west of Ireland (Galway and the Arran Islands respectively).

As with great art Ford poured some of himself and his sense of place into the mawkish comedy. That lack of irony and love the old country saw the film become a touchstone for many Irish Americans.

Hong Kong is a largely thriving city but the sense of itself is under attack as the city state is absorbed by mainland China, that process has caused a dissonance in Hong Kongers which is why a film with a strong sense of place resonated so much. Hong Kong Strong captures not only what Hong Kong looks like, but also the energy and vitality of what Hong Kong is.

Brandon accompanied the video with a description of how it was made. The film was boiled down from over 1.7TB of rushes.

For more Hong Kong related commentary click here.

May 22, 2016
Disaster at BBC + more

A recipe for disaster at the BBC | Broadstuff – really good guide for people outside the UK on what is happening to the public service broadcaster. From beloved Aunty Beeb to disaster at the BBC

Nokia back in mobile phone business | TotalTelecom – interesting move via HMD. It will be interesting to see how much brand equity is left in Nokia mobile devices. It will be interesting to see how HMD will do things differently from Microsoft/Nokia. More writing on Nokia here.

This nifty device translates foreign languages in real-time | TheNextWeb – I would have to try it, I don’t believe it from what I’ve seen so far from the likes of Nuance and Google.

Kevin Smith Is Making an Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai TV Show – I so hope that this is true. I loved the kooky original film version. It had big vision, 80s fashion, but not a big budget to match – which was a big part of its charm

Why Snapchat Doesn’t Care About India — The Information – build for the markets were the advertising revenue and mobile structure make it worthwhile. Countries with low ARPU may not enrich the companies. They won’t attract much ad revenue and may even require specialist apps to take account of low bandwidth or local servers to comply with national data laws.

North Korea’s new ad men try out pitches to new consumer class | Reuters – This uniquely North Korean style of advertising may have developed out of trade fairs, Abrahamian said.

As the “donju” have earned money in the unofficial economy, the flaunting of wealth has become more commonplace, especially in Pyongyang where those with access to political capital are often the wealthiest traders.

The advertisements seem acceptable inside shops, but not outdoors, Abrahamian said. During North Korea’s recent Workers’ Party congress, ads could be seen in several Pyongyang shops. – this sounds like the door-to-door salesman that was popular in the UK when housewife was a more common occupation.

May 19, 2016
Granny’s Got Talent

Granny’s Got Talent – The Korean Cultural Centre has a fortnightly screening of films. The latest one that I went to was Granny’s Got Talent or 헬머니 (pronounced Helmeoni – a literal translation would be Hell Granny).

The premise is built around an old woman who is released from jail. She lost contact with her eldest son and tries to build that connection whilst living with her youngest son. The eldest son is a salary man with an over-bearing set of rich in-laws. The youngest son an inveterate gambler. To bail the youngest son out of trouble she participates in a Korean reality TV show based around cursing and chaos ensues. Veteran Korean actress carries off the role of Hell Granny with aplomb. I laughed so hard at some points I ended up crying.

The raucous bawdy humour of Granny’s Got Talent works despite subtitles and has some amazing comedic set-pieces. But this rudeness is only the top layer in the story, where the viewer gets a glimpse at the hard life a strong woman had to live in a fast-developing South Korea.

The film works on a number of levels touching a number of distinctly Korean themes including the obsession with hierarchy, its turbulent political past, the corrupt aspects of chaebols and the love of family (no matter how dysfunctional).

The piece that British audiences will most relate to is the exploitative nature of reality TV formats. Something that the English title translation picked up, rather than going with a literal translation of the Korean ‘Hell Granny’. ‘Hell Granny’ as a title focuses on the profanity. When I was young someone who swore or used bawdy language was said to have the mouth of a washer woman – a low class blue collar job. For more Korea related posts, go here.

More Information
Movie page on Daum in Korean

May 18, 2016