Blog

BlueFocus + more news

BlueFocus

BlueFocus FY 2014 profit up 62.8% | PR Week – Sir Martin Sorrell will be concerned. BlueFocus is at the centre of a high growth market. BlueFocus has access to cheap capital due to its high share price on the Shenzhen stock exchange and it demonstrates the kind of dynamism that WPP no longer has due to its physical size.

Consumer behaviour

Founding Fuel Hunting with the hounds – Indian consumers, by and large and across product categories, gravitate towards lower prices and more features instead of passionate brand loyalty

Design

The Story of the “Save the Memory Project” | Ricoh Global – impressive dedication and process

Economics

4 steps to getting your business model ready for emerging markets – interesting that The Economist’s tongue-in-cheek Big Mac Index is used as a serious pricing reference point in this article

Finance

80% of Bitcoin is exchanged into and out of Chinese yuan | Quartz – capital flight or something more criminal in nature?

Gadget

Why I changed my mind about the new MacBook | VentureBeat – nice run down on the MacBook’s limitations

Keacher.com » How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the web – interesting article, especially since he has to use at least two pieces of external tech to pre-process required applications to develop a web connection and render the web content itself. It puts into perspective how powerful a smartphone is. More technology related posts here

Legal

German duo to be caned, jailed for spraying graffiti on Singapore train | South China Morning Post – and they weren’t good graffiti artists either. Singapore has public spaces laid aside for graffiti

Luxury

How Jony Ive made Apple a luxury goods company – Business Insider – interesting technology is a substitute product for luxury sector goods argument made at the end of the article

Marketing

Tinder Users at SXSW Are Falling for This Woman, but She’s Not What She Appears | Adweek – sci-fi film Ex Machina uses a bot on Tinder to market the film at SXSW. More marketing related content here.

Software

iPhone 6s specs rumors: SiP processor reportedly in the works | BGR – computing power is likely to be below what an iPhone 6 would need, but interesting

March 26, 2015
That Jeremy Clarkson post (or lies, damn lies and sentiment analysis)
It isn’t often that my thoughts turn to Jeremy Clarkson. This is mainly because being a car-less resident of London (and late of Hong Kong); I don’t really have much reason to pay attention to Top Gear. Secondly, there is only one Stig and that’s my childhood sporting hero – rally driver (and probably Sweden’s fastest pensioner) Stig Blomqvist.

But I couldn’t avoid the fracas when it exploded as a story across the media.

I was particularly struck by PR Week’s coverage of the story: Jeremy Clarkson’s popularity on social media plummets after BBC ‘fracas’. Yeah, right! The problem with stories like this is about how you slice the data and interpret it.

Social media conversation as a mode of popular measure

The very nature of a conversation is the ebb-and-flow. Mr Clarkson would need to be more worried if he no longer was a topic of conversation as it would indicate that his celebrity had run its course. If everyone was unified in agreement when the volume of conversation would be lower, but it doesn’t necessarily measure popularity, but polarity of sentiment.

Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is worthy of a post in of itself. Machine sentiment analysis is generally no more than 65% accurate. That sounds pretty good until you see the results. When done properly it is usually supplemented by manual analysis, to pick up on colloquial language, sarcasm or complex sentence construction – all of which can fool the smartest systems. So any argument built on sentiment as a key indicator is built on a foundation of sand.

Social following

If we look at the amount of followers on Jeremy Clarkson’s Twitter account using social media monitoring tool Sysomos MAP; we see numbers that suggest his popularity on social has surged rather than declined as he became embroiled in controversy.

The story we are actually seeing is a polarisation of opinion with detractors becoming increasingly vocal and fans becoming firmer in their support. As a brand marketer, having a client that stands for something is the jumping off point for great creative. You are not constrained by having to please everyone and so great marketing can happen:
- Red Bull – Gives You Wings
- Hooters – Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined
- Mid-1980s – 90s Guinness – Pure Genius
- Audi – Vorsprung durch Technik
At the moment, Jeremy Clarkson probably doesn’t have a lot to worry about in terms of his social popularity; so long as the lawyers don’t get too involved his popularity is likely to sustain him in media work of some sort for a while yet. More online related content here.

More information
Jeremy Clarkson’s popularity on social media plummets after BBC ‘fracas’ | PR Week
Stig Blomqvist
March 25, 2015
rc is 11
rc is 11. Well its 11 years since started under it’s own name. The first post under the rc moniker was ‘Are we too complex’ which was a brief cross post that pointed to a longer piece I wrote at The AlwaysOn Network on Dan Geer. Dan Geer is a computer security and risk management expert who did a lot of work around the economics of security and how this all relates to technological complexity. The AlwaysOn Network had been newly formed by Tony Perkins, a founder of dot.com cheerleading magazine Red Herring. At the time it was a kind of proto-social network and Huffington Post for digital thinkers. I met my good friend Ian Wood on it. The fact that rc is 11 has had me reflect on 11 years of writing, cultural and technological change.

I had got into blogging mainly because I had Aljazeera as a client for a while. George W. Bush was about to send the US forces into Iraq after weapons of mass destruction and Aljazeera was a lot less respected in the west as a media outlet. I found it hard to get media coverage so decided to go directly to the prospective audience that we wanted to reach. We were seeding content on forums related to finance, currency and oil futures trading. I’d heard about this thing called blogging, which made sense exploring further while I was at it. The rest as they say is history.

Some 11 years later, Always On is a more prosiac seller of networking events and op-eds, but less of salon style community compared to what it was back in the day. At the time it was built on a proprietary CMS by a company NetModular that has since disappeared into the ether of technology as other off-the-shelf social platforms came along.

The blog went from exploration with a specific client end in mind to become an aide memoire and scratchpad for ideas. This exploration through writing inspired the name: renaissance chambara:
- renaissance – as in renaissance man to indicate that the blog would cover a lot of different ideas
- chambara – after my love of Japanese samurai films, in particular Akira Kurosawa’s work with Toshiro Mifune – I was curious about East Asian culture, the nascent Hallyu movement in Korea, Hong Kong and Chinese cinema and pretty much anything coming out of Japan
Over the subsequent decade I got invited to contribute to two books and got at least two of my roles because of the content and prominence of this blog. Even though I never monetised it, it always seemed to contribute and pay me back in some way or another.

Things have changed, social platforms, tools and gurus have come and gone. Media spend has risen in prominence and brand marketing has declined. What surprised me was the slow rate of change within the PR industry and time it took for media and ad agencies to gain the whip hand. I had expected that mobile and desktop experiences would be less divergent in nature as screens grew (I had been using a Nokia Communicator E90 in the late noughties) which meant that Google’s lead in search was much sharper than I expected.

I never had a plan for the blog, it has always been in the moment. Blogging isn’t dead, this one now sits in a spiders web of social properties rather than front-and-centre. It is no longer a conversation but a contributor to dialogue that usually happens on Twitter. The posts are collated alongside other people’s work on my feed. The process has taken on a life of its own. I have note books were ideas germinate, tens of thousands of bookmarks of reference material and look at the RSS feeds from 954 blogs or websites for inspiration.

This process forces me to be continually curious about my field-of-work.

I have posted from three continents and some 11 or so countries. I got to explore my interest in East Asia by living in Hong Kong for a while as well as visiting surrounding countries. Looking at rc is 11 I don’t know if I will be writing the post ‘rc is 18’ or even ‘rc is 21’ in ten years time, but I don’t currently see any reason why I won’t.

More information
Are we too complex (hosted on Blogspot)
AlwaysOn Network
NetModular
March 13, 2015
Ghostly sounds + more things

Ghostly sounds

All the ghostly sounds that are lost when you compress to mp3 – this has been quite well publicised but there is something about it that sends shivers down my spine each time I listen to the ghostly sounds.

Culture

Benjamin Von Wong’s superhero series of pictures are amazing

TJ Fuller’s animated GIFs of psychedelic animals are tremendous

Gadget

The Apple Watch Is Time, Saved | TechCrunch – watch as context dependent screen for iPhone

Apple Watch vs. Samsung Smartwatch: No new Gear announcement at MWC | BGR – a lot of supposition here but it was interesting that Samsung kept all the limelight for the Galaxy S6 models

Innovation

BBC News – Technology helps visually impaired navigate the Tube – interesting where 2.0 project on the London Underground

Japan

A History Of Gundam, The Anime That Defined The Giant Robot Revolution – as if this needs any explanation. More Japan related content here.

Marketing

Wednesday. Hump Day. Peak of the week. – hump day promotion great way to bury the competition by O2

StateOfPR – Research report – the key take out in the stateofpr research report for me was the stagnation in budgets, however this maybe due to the CIPR membership skewed towards NFP and public sector

Media

David Shing’s vision of a world united by tech: Media360Summit – Campaign Asia – the sixth biggest contributor to stress is media overload

Online

Adult content policy on Blogger – Blogger Help – Google looks to clean up Blogger which has become a bit of a spam nest. More related content here.

Retailing

Why has ASOS removed its guest checkout option? | Econsultancy – they must have data to back this up surely? Or they don’t value drive by custom? More related content here.

Security

When Strong Encryption Isn’t Enough to Protect Our Privacy | Alternet – much of this is because the information about the communication is useful in itself. It provides the typography of networks, the nature of the communication. Frequency of communications indicates the relative strength of communication. Strong encryption is like an envelope, but the stamp, the address, the colour of the envelope, the way the address is written, the franking over the stamp and the return address all provide useful information.

Edward Snowden Citizenfour: The former contractor sparked a movement that’s winning the surveillance argument. | Slate – interesting analysis of the dynamics of the US privacy movement. Thi is going to have legs. The only thing that surprises me however, is that other people are surprised. It is a natural extension of the ECHELON network of the late 1990s.

March 13, 2015
Apple Spring Forward event
Apple Spring Forward event

I started this post a few hours after watching Tim Cook and company launch a number of product revisions under the title of Apple Spring Forward. The most anticipated of which was the Apple Watch. I was in full Post Traumatic Apple Event Disorder mode. I have collated some of my thoughts about the event below and tried to order them into some sort of cogent narrative.

AppleTV

The reduction of cost in Apple TV hardware at the Apple Spring Forward event was an interesting move. Apple has decided to go for market share rather than margin with the device and the incumbent HBO Now service might be just the catalyst to drive adoption. That Apple is leading with a HBO streaming service tends to imply that Apple has likely given up on trying to build its own ‘cable channel over IP’ offering. It does raise another interesting question about how other studios will want to handle their content in iTunes or via a an app similar to BBC iPlayer. Apple is passing on to consumers the cost benefits of using the older silicon design that powers the Apple TV. It also means that the Apple TV is the least powerful computer in Apple’s product range – including phones and tablets. The AppleTV is an egalitarian device rather a luxury brand product and a vote against widespread 4K adoption; unless the price discount is making room for a premium 4K capable device at a later date?

Social Enterprise

Apple’s moves at becoming a ‘social enterprise’ were interesting. For an organisation so polished at presenting itself to the outside world, the ResearchKit announcement and the case study with Christy Turlington felt awkward. ResearchKit was delivered in a flat manner and didn’t explain how the product fitted in with Apple’s position on user privacy. Turlington’s appearance was like a particularly sycophantic Charlie Rose interview. There was a lot to talk about without having to ‘over-reach’ for celebrity endorsement.

Apple needs to work harder picking the spokespeople to burnish its reputation, the nature of the projects and the deliver to be less cringeworthy. The very nature of the product and design story means that Apple already has a certain amount of implicit moral imperative and the company should be more in-tune with that.

Apple Watch

I am deeply conflicted by a lot of the discussions around the Apple Watch, for a number reasons:

I haven’t used an Apple Watch, but watching others use it in the demos made me think that it is fiddly and dare-I-say-it: hard to use. It could be un-Apple in nature

Scott Galloway points to the Apple Watch and describes Apple as having transitioned to a luxury brand. The Edition watch maybe a luxury product, but not all of the Apple product range are luxurious – the AppleTV at a new price point of $69 implies ubiquity. This maybe a specific choice to get scale for the media content that other luxury Apple devices need to function. Just in the same way that quality newspapers couldn’t survive solely on sales to luxury consumers. What does this mean for those Apple customers who use the the devices as professional or creative tools?

Much of the debate revolves around what luxury consumers want by people who can’t afford to buy the Edition version of the watch. Do the kind of luxury shoppers who wouldn’t care about a $13,000+ watch have a smartphone, or a smart person to organise their lives? An astute reader of Popbitch will soon realise that the celebrity accessory to have is a personal assistant, not a bejeweled Vertu. Secondly, not being available is a luxury as privacy and time are the preserve of the reach in an always-on world

Many of the more positive predictions depend on the Chinese luxury market. The luxury market is changing in China. Luxury goods are used as tools in China; if you look successful, you are more likely to be successful in a culture that relies on high-touch personal relationships to facilitate business. However, consumers are becoming more sophisticated and moving away from at least some of the gaudier products. The Middle East may be a more opportune market for Apple.

A second use case in the Chinese luxury market is that of a compact storage of value for capital flight or making a payment. The culture of payments for favours is being clamped down on my the Xi administration which has been made visible by a 20%+ drop in luxury watch sales. I don’t know the way plutocrats would likely jump on the gold Apple Watch.

‘Apple Watch is just an iPhone remote control‘ Craig Johnson senior analyst at Piper Jaffray – heard on Bloomberg TV. ‘Luxury watches are a store of wealth, an Apple Watch isn’t‘. Which is probably true for many people on Wall Street, but may not true for the truly rich.

Apple MacBook

The MacBook carried the biggest dissonance for me and was arguably the biggest disappointment of the Apple Spring Forward event. For long time Apple customers, MacBook means entry level laptop. They used to come white polycarbonate shells that matched the iMac G4 and Apple eMac. Instead the MacBook seems to reflect status:
- A price point above the MacBook Air, but less powerful and less adaptable
- Good battery life, but underpowered for many tasks
- Three finishes including a gold colour that screams status in the iPhone line
- A single port which made many of geek friends freak out with anger. The morning after one of my friends posted on Facebook about the single port: I am still angry. I use a Retina MacBook Pro at work and suffer from a lack of ports for external drives (including an optical drive), Ethernet, a secondary display and a card reader for multimedia work. The MacBook has a single port which replaces the MagSafe with a USB connection. For business users or creatives the machine is gloriously impractical and destroys their investment in things like the Apple Cinema display. I currently an Apple TV and have tried to screen-cast over Wi-Fi to it for presentations, it doesn’t like video at all. When I travel I usually present, for business users who travel regularly like me the MacBook feels like a pig-in-a-poke. Is the MacBook then decided to be a luxury consumer device?
The trackpad which is being rolled out across other Apple laptop models looked attractive to me. The next generation of keyboard seems to be less convincing. I suspect its attractiveness will be inversely proportional to your touch typing speed due to the lack of haptic feedback from shorter key travel. Despite the price point difference, I suspect that the MacBook is actually designed to cannibalise some Apple iPad sales as an executive toy – I don’t know whether it will.

That’s my take on the Apple Spring Forward event, but I would be interested on your take on it.

More information

Post Traumatic Apple Event Disorder
On Smart Watches, I’ve Decided To Take The Plunge
The Watch Post
Size Zero Design | 厌食症设计
 Questions I Have About Apple’s Business | Apple 业务挑战
 CES Trends
Waking from an Apple Watch hangover « Observatory
New Apple Stuff and You | The Wirecutter
March 12, 2015