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Wednesday Campanella
Haruka introduced me to WEDNESDAY CAMPANELLA『桃太郎』

The videos are pretty far out but draw on Asian culture, hence peaches. More on Japan related topics here. The song writing is absolutely top notch as well. Well worth keeping an eye on WEDNESDAY CAMPANELLA for the future. There’s more to Japan than idol groups than the identikit model of K-pop, of which WEDNESDAY CAMPANELLA is a prime example of distinctiveness.

Interesting video on entrepreneurial opportunities in China. Probably a bit optimistic as Credit Suisse is on the sell side of opportunities for foreign investors – just saying…

Interesting way to approach content for a travel portal and a great bit of storytelling.

The mag that captured 60s countercultural Japan | Dazed – check these photos out from Provoke magazine, Showa era FTW. These are just tremendous and shows a side of the counterculture revolution that was seldom seen here in the west. Its gives a bit of context of the scene that Yoko Ono came out of.

I am not the greatest fan of Wired UK and prefer its US counterpart, but this documentary on Shenzhen is quite nice. It captures all the main elements of note about Shenzhen:
- The Blade Runner type skyline of the Shenzhen central business district (CBD). You add in the hyper humid haze and it looks like a piece of Syd Mead architectural paintings. Buildings are lit up with massive LED screens advertising offices available for lease or cosmeticals and smartphones
- The standard workshop-of-the-world tropes with factories that look aged in the tropical heat of southern China
- Maker culture – this is notable in itself because of Chinese people generally not having hobbies which are often seen as a waste of time. But enough of that for another time
- Business to business and business to consumer bazaars
You can almost taste the South China humidity. If you liked this video its well worthwhile checking out Scotty Allen’s Strange Parts YouTube channel.
June 10, 2016
Ten most popular posts of H1 2016
In order of traffic volume, the ten most popular posts of H1 2016 on my blog (up to the beginning of June):
1. What are the major reasons behind Yahoo!’s drastic decline – a Quora question inspired post. The reasons I highlight are a bit different to the popular media narrative around the Yahoo! business
2. How the Panama Papers story broke online – a look at how the story broke across social media and traditional news with data
3. What the IFTTT is going on? – IFTTT changed the way it approached development which left many service users such as me in the lurch. The key outtake is don’t trust services that you don’t pay for.
4. Inside Virgin Atlantic’s online racism crisis – how the Chinese diaspora teamed up to highlight a racially motivated incident on a Virgin flight.
5. On Writing – inspired by a similar post that Stephen Waddington did. We had a contrast of approaches and motivations
6. The Trouble with Twitter – with growth stalled what does it mean for the social media platform?
7. Yahoo! how did we get here? – similar post in many respects to to the top-ranking post that highlights missed opportunities
8. Online advertising and technology data points – this is the April edition of a monthly (or as near monthly updates on statistics that I can do)
9. The Smartphone Market and Huawei – analysis of Huawei’s consumer business. One can see the impact of smartphones on Huawei’s business. Huawei’s feature phone business was more successful than their smartphone business in terms of profit margin for a good while. Whilst Huawei has aspired to become progressively more I updated it in a separate post when Huawei published its annual results at the beginning of April
10. Everyday tools that are a part of my process part one – items that I use in my everyday workflow to create, curate content and brand strategy.
June 9, 2016
Google I/O 2016
Google I/O 2016 happened on May, 18 – 20. There had been a lot of pieces of coverage about the different products and services released. But I wanted to spend a bit of time reflecting on what Google I/O 2016 told us about their viewpoint on technology.

Giving apps a second chance

Google knows as well as anyone that the app moves towards a maturity model where consumers stick with the core apps that they want and then don’t go any further.

Data shows that consumers use their top five apps 88 per cent of the time. So why would Google care when it knows that 60 percent of the top apps on the Android platform?

The reasons for an expanded app usage include:
- A proportion of Google’s advertising (like Facebook) is derived from the promotion of app downloads
- Android devices are reaching market maturity in many markets, growth is likely to come from new uses – at least some of which will be derived from third party platforms
- Google has staked its ambition in the PC sector on its Chrome operating system being able to run apps from the Android eco-system. In order for that to happen there needs to be a healthy community of developers
- In the same way that DoubleClick’s ad network greatly expanded the inventory of Google’s advertising business, third party applications offer Google an additional source of usage for its own services. If you want to see the future of Google Apps look at the the way the likes of Baidu and Tencent allow third-party integration with their own tools
Streaming or ‘instant’ apps is part of Google’s efforts to encourage consumer trial of new apps and enhance relationships with developers. Firebase, it’s new analytics platform for mobile developers helps them have a better relationship with their installed user base allowing them to use data to target notifications and campaigns.

More faith in wider area networks (WANs) than personal area networks (PANs)

Android Wear’s updates were interesting. Put simply Google has more faith in data being delivered in a timely manner over cellular or wi-fi networks than it does for inter device transfers over variants of Bluetooth. Both the Apple Watch and Android Wear products suffered from performance lags when the watch was a thin client of a phone. Having a cellular radio on board the phone presents challenges with battery life, but speeds up real world performance.

The original design failure wasn’t down to network performance, but is likely to have implications for personal area network technology like Bluetooth in its different variants or ZigBee. These technologies are all about scale, lose a scale advantage and it poses a problem for future adoption by others. This can happen in a virtuous way. Apple’s adoption of USB benefited the standard greatly and drove interest in peripheral development for both Mac and PC. Apple’s abandonment of FireWire and the 3.5″ diskette marked their decline.

Lots to be concerned about from a privacy point of view?

Google Home moved yet another pair of Android powered ears into our environment. It was obvious from Google’s description of services that a paid marketing model to be the ‘car booking’ or equivalent service of Home could be very lucrative for the search giant. How this device could be used for market research, tracking brand mentions or government surveillance also poses some conundrums moving beyond smartphones to brown goods.

Android N features file based encryption rather than treating the whole device as an encrypted disk. This raises questions around the comparative ease of access from a privacy perspective. Secondly, SafetyNet allows Google to reach into a phone to remove pre-existing applications without user permission. There is no explanation if they also have write privileges to the phone as well. If so, expect law enforcement and intellectual property owner interest. From the way it reads this would affect apps and content that have been side loaded as well as got from an app store.

Android is giving the high ground to Apple on privacy presumably because it considers its own customers don’t care about it that much.

Reference designs in VR to drive adoption and commoditisation

Google’s Daydream project looks to provide standardisation in hardware. By going down this route, Google hopes to spur on the sensor market required for improved AR experience and drive uptake. These will likely be a very different experience to the computer workstation powered Occulus Rift. Driving this technology into the smartphone market may combat the current stagnation in phone sales growth.

More information
Google I/O 2016 event page
A16hz on Google I/O 2016
Everything Google just announced at its I/O conference
Palm, Apple, Google and the whole mobile device thing
The Limits of Google
If Google’s right about AI, that’s a problem for Apple – Marco.org
ISIS’s Mobile App Developers Are in Crisis Mode | Motherboard
June 8, 2016
Jeremy Corbyn + more things

Jeremy Corbyn Facebook strategy is so much more sophisticated than you think | Business Insider – I am not convinced that this is going to move the needle for him, it won’t reach beyond his core followers. It doesn’t match marketing best practice which makes me believe Jeremy Corbyn will be very disappointed come election time.

How e-commerce changes lives in rural China | South China Morning Post – interesting article the key thing to remember is that the South China Morning Post is owned by Jack Ma of Alibaba. More on China here.

Deodorant Changes Attractiveness Of Men And Women In Different Ways – PsyBlog – How men who appear low in masculinity can be more attractive to women.Wearing deodorant makes men who are seen as low in masculinity more attractive to women, new research finds. – the original Lynx / Axe brand positioning was closer to the mark than we thought

Can a Neuroscientist Understand Donkey Kong, Let Alone a Brain? – The Atlantic – Two researchers applied common neuroscience techniques to a classic computer chip. Their results are a wake-up call for the whole field.

This ‘Demonically Clever’ Backdoor Hides In a Tiny Slice of a Computer Chip | WIRED

The Chinese Government is Setting Up Its Own Major Science Fiction Award | io9 – this is really interesting, think about how Star Trek inspired the cellphone or Neuromancer and Star Wars inspired augmented reality. I wonder what way the government will be directing the content towards. Now do you see what China is doing here? A second thing is the that science fiction writer Cixin Liu is the one bright spot in Chinese (government-approved) soft power at the moment

The Perks Are Great. Just Don’t Ask Us What We Do. — Backchannel – life inside a malvertising company. Interesting expose

Berlin clubbers are now snorting chocolate to get high | Dazed – WTF. I’d imagine that just because chocolate sounds innocuous doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be painful to snort

June 7, 2016
Facebook most shared

I managed to get hold of some data about the top 10 of Facebook most shared sites and it made some interesting graphs. From a media perspective Facebook has become less social.

What does Facebook most shared content tell us?

For the past year or so there has been a steady sustained decline in the amount of content shared. This even has a name internally at Facebook – context collapse.

This is even more striking when I compared it with 12 months of data from January 2014 to January 2015. One can see that the trend of the graph has gone from a positive to a negative slope. Secondly, different media organisations have sailed in and out of this chart showing that even now after years of experience they don’t a consistent formula for success.

The media landscape also started to change to more reactionary content with the rise of titles like the Conservative Tribune and Breitbart.

What these graphs don’t explain that well is why the drop in sharing happened. Did our media consumption become much more fragmented?

These trend lines partly explain media’s push into other channels like SnapChat, especially given that Twitter has hit a natural ceiling in its subscriber base.

Perilous pivot to video

Secondly there has been a big push into video content, particularly live video content. Video is more expensive to produce, yet monetisation is difficult. Viewability of video ads is lower than display ads. One has to wonder about the sustainability of all this video production? Especially since many of these media organisations don’t seem to have managed long term success at the top of Facebook’s eco-system.

Ad fraud or ‘invalid traffic’ is higher on video advertising inventory solid via programmatic platforms – which are the hot new thing. Both of which are issues of concern to marketers and publishers alike.

More on Facebook related topics here.

June 6, 2016