Interesting and funny film from Mercedes for the SLS coupe AMG. The way the businessman loses his mind trying to define luxury feels like a parody of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Are the metaphysics of luxury and the metaphysics of quality the same? The SLS coupe AMG is a very impressive looking vehicle. But surely its performance is a bigger draw than its luxury, it’s ride is likely to be very firm. Especially given the AMG heritage.
Vice put together a great documentary about a veteran tattooist in Hong Kong. His work goes back to when Hong Kong was a port of call for the merchant navy as well as the US and Royal navies. More Hong Kong related posts here.
I love the way Honda taps into the inner child of potential customers. With there being no truly bad cars now and green pressures, so brand and emotion becomes so much more important for car brands. Honda has been consistently been ahead of the curve.
PBS have animated interviews that were done with Robin Williams back in 1991, and they’re really good. Really smart and thoughtful stuff that makes you realise the huge hole that the loss of Williams made in the entertainment industry.
TOMY’s Cocoro scanner which detects stress (and according to the maker, lies). I could see managers thinking that it would be a good idea to keep the Cocoro scanner ton their desk. Though I would keep it out of view if I were you, as the display would be stress raising in its own right.
Search results for: “tomy”
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SLS coupe & other things that made last week
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Dan Catt + more things
Rev Dan Catt | Conference Eaters – captures the dichotomy of conferences really well. Dan Catt compares the experience of conferences to religious services where the faithful gather.
Brand Brain Britain! How Brits engage with brands differently across the regions | Weber Shandwick – interesting research on brand attitudes. More branding related content here.
Huffington Post and Leo Burnett partnership | Marketing Interactive – in reality this line is being blurred all the time Vice Media etc
How an FBI Informant Ordered the Hack of British Tabloid ‘The Sun’ | Motherboard – could the FBI be legally liable?
Generation Flux’s Secret Weapon | Fast Company – interesting analysis of Chipotle
Only 25% of iPad Users are aged 16-24 | Global Web Index – it makes sense given that the iPad is a discretionary purchase with adequate substitute products
Slack is Killing Email | PixelBits – is it really? I think there is still a use case for email and a use case for less email
Google’s Eric Schmidt: “Really, Our Biggest Search Competitor Is Amazon” – trying to spin their way out of European sanctions
Microsoft And Salesforce Promise Windows, Office And OneDrive Integration | TechCrunch – hell froze over
Saudis would accept lower oil prices | Hong Kong Economic Journal Insight – all about trying to raise barrier to entry for competitors
The Cost of Living the Luxe Life Has Fallen — if You Live in Asia | TIME – softening property prices
Ofcom | UK leads the way with new wireless technology trials – overly dramatic headline for white space trials
How China’s ‘naked officials’ make the getaway｜WantChinaTimes.com – since there is such an obvious behavioural trail shouldn’t card transactions and travel record patterns create ‘red flags’? Why do so many get through?
Finland is in trouble, and it blames Apple for everything – Quartz – bit of an exaggeration but gives you an idea of how crucial Nokia was
Singapore rail operator eyes UK minicab firm | Hong Kong Economic Journal Insights – interesting move. Is Addison Lee a technology company or a transport company?
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Keybase + more news
Keybase – ‘Keybase is a website, but it’s also an open source command line program’ – outlines one of the key problems with encryption right there for widespread consumer adoption. (Note: Keybase ended up being acquired by Zoom in 2020). More security related content here.
FMCG
What Chinese brands know that MNCs don’t – Campaign Asia – marketers targeting too small a segment of Chinese middle class. Don’t really get Chinese middle class dynamics (paywall)
Hong Kong
One in five Hongkongers may emigrate over political reform ruling | SCMP – no they won’t and the people who feel the most strongly about this are in the least good position to leave
Ideas
LOOK Google gamifies search with Google Mo Lang | Marketing Interactive – interesting Google tactic to increase usage
Luxury
Luxury brands in a quandary as China’s wealthy young develop resistance to bling | The Observer – picking Wendi Deng as an ambassador won’t do anything for their appeal to a Chinese market and they could have got more contemporary than Gong Li (gorgeous as she is)
Media
Facebook Earns 10% of Digital Ad Dollars, More Than Any Other Online Platform | Adweek – a third of global social spend is in APAC
VML China acquires Teein, fills hole in social media capability – Campaign Asia – really interesting that IM2.0 didn’t already have social and used to outsource it. VML in China is formidable
Online
Line temporarily cancels its IPO | Techinasia – avoiding the kerfuffle around Alibaba
Quality
iPhone 6 Is the Most Durable iPhone Yet, Says Insurer – WSJ – you would need to do a larger sample of phones for statistically significant sampling
Security
MIT Students Battle State’s Demand for Their Bitcoin Miner’s Source Code | WIRED – it’s all a bit weird
The free wifi war’s security edge in China | WantChinaTimes – interesting that Chinese internet companies are rolling out free wi-fi. Where does this leave the likes of China Mobile?
The Athens Affair – IEEE Spectrum – anatomy of the Vodafone Greece hack. Very Snowden-esque
Microsoft no longer Trustworthy | The Register – interesting that it is getting shut down, I suspect integrated is a better way of looking at it
Wireless
Apple – Press Info – First Weekend iPhone Sales Top 10 Million, Set New Record – take this with a pinch of salt may have something to do with not all markets being address which has driven demand and scarcity
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Naspers + other news
Naspers
Red-Hot Web in China Richly Rewards Foreign Investors (David Barboza/New York Times) – great to see that Naspers were getting a bit of respect. Naspers is a South African media company that moved into online retail and venture capital investing. Naspers were fortunate to buy into Tencent in 2001 and become their largest shareholder. Naspers then went on to invest in mail.ru and a number of Indian online startups. Naspers also is Africa’s largest subscription TV provider. Naspers also has a share in Ctrip – China’s answer to Expedia.
Business
Is it really a tech bubble, or is it something else? — GigaOM – narcissism and a tech bubble
Profits Way Up at China’s Tencent As WeChat Goes Global – WeChat now up to 396 million active users
No matter what the boss says about flextime, get to work early – Quartz – morning bias
Consumer behaviour
Phablet Use Distinct From Smartphones, Tablets Re/code – interesting research and bad news for media companies hoping that phablets will be a gateway for streaming and slide loaded content
The new opium of a stressed people | FT – rise of buddhism amongst China’s middle classes
How is Renren Doing in China Social Media Now? | ChinaInternetWatch – about 51 million monthly unique users – no social versus gaming breakdown on this though. Partly down to the fact RenRen is a specific lifetime thing. You are on there during high school
Design
The History Of Dive Watches | aBlogtoWatch – interesting evolution of design
Finance
WePay Blames “The Rules” For Withholding Medical Funds from Sex Worker | Valleywag – still pretty disgusting given that this was for emergency medical services. There are rules and there is knowing when to lift them
America has a new subprime problem: cars | Quartz – not really surprising when one thinks about how the US manufacturers have been propping up car sales with low interest loans before, during and since the financial crisis
FMCG
Digital Intelligence :: Unilever supports start-ups with global digital platform – interesting move, reminds me what PepsiCo and Kraft attempted to do over the past few years
Hong Kong
Li Ka-shing’s rumoured plan to reduce investments ‘could damage Hong Kong’ | South China Morning Post – it makes sense for Mr Li to diversify, Hong Kong is optimally priced; there are bargains to be had elsewhere
20 fantastically helpful IFTTT recipes – the title exaggerates
Ideas
Shanzhai: China’s Collaborative Electronics Design Ecosystem | The Atlantic – interesting how the rise of the maker movement has changed Shanzhai meme from quirky shadowy tech pirates to collaborative design in western media
Korea
How Naver Hurts Companies’ Productivity | WSJ – surprising critique of Naver. Korean consumers wouldn’t use it if Google offered a better search function in Hangul
Legal
That Oracle-Google Appeal | ongoing – interesting analysis by Tim Bray, a prominent contributor to the OSS movement and former Googler
Amazon Patented Taking Pictures In Front of a White Background | Geekosystem – they’ve just patented pack shot photography?
Luxury
Rich pay, rich clients, but luxury retail jobs go begging | South China Morning Post – mainland clients are considered difficult
The Launch and Fall of Burberry’s Tmall Flagship Store | ChinaInternetWatch – really interesting analysis of Burberry’s attempt on TMall
Economist: China Luxury Slowdown ‘Short Blip’ In Big Picture | Jing Daily – expectations that the slowdown will see mass affluence purchases in the future
Marketing
PwC: Marketers not moving fast enough to mobile | Marketing Interactive – While there is plenty of money in social media marketing in mainland China, there’s still not enough attention to the fact that accessing ads and special deals from mobile is just different
Ignore the Silicon Valley Twilight Zone | Marketing Forward – I think that this is the rabbit hole WPP is a risk of going down
REPORT: Engagement Optimization ‘Isn’t The Best Bet’ For Facebook Advertisers – Facebook is a display advertising platform rather than an engagement platform
Geo-Target the Right Audience For Your Tweets With Sprout Social | Sprout Social – this could change the way brands think about Twitter, moving to a global page model, rather like Facebook
Dixons and Carphone Warehouse: A Merger Driven by Interconnectivity | Euromonitor International – personally I think Carphone Warehouse is attaching itself to a turkey. Regardless of any Internet of Things synergies there maybe, the customer service culture of Carphone Warehouse is alien to Dixons. Richer Sounds and Empire Direct may have made more sense?
OnePlus Smash the Past Winner Receives Empty Box, Uploads Unboxing to YouTube | Droid Life – it sounds like buzz marketing gone horribly wrong
9 Successful Ways to Recruit Market Research Participants | PARC blog – good advice
The Trouble With App Install Ads | Ad Exchanger – expensive despite driving growth for Facebook
Media
BBC News will post live #indianelection results via @WhatsApp – 1st serious wide scale ‘commercial’ comms use?
Daring Fireball: ‘For Me, the Movies Are Like a Machine That Generates Empathy’ – I really like this phrase, great films like Blade Runner for me were more than the moving image or ‘air-conditioned darkness’ as Sir Run Run Shaw put it
TV Show Renewals Could Hinge On Social Engagement – focus on quality of viewership with social engagement as a proxy measure
“24″ Win Fails To Boost Youku Tudou | Young’s China Business – probably down to government regulation of media sector
The audience solves a mystery in this real-time interactive TV show powered by a South Korean startup – it reminds me a lot of Majestic
Netflix’s Neil Hunt Says Personalized Recommendations Will Replace The Navigation Grid | TechCrunch – not so sure how I feel about this. It could be reductive since it relies on past behaviour and loses what little serendipity one gets through browsing and discovery to broaden taste and usage
Online
China’s Top Mobile Social Apps by Time Usage | China Internet Watch – why Weibo is overrated and WeChat is so powerful
Meet the People Behind the Wayback Machine, One of Our Favorite Things About the Internet – “The average life of a web page is about 100 days before it’s either changed or deleted,” says Kahle. “Even if it’s supported by big companies: Google Video came down, Yahoo Video came down, Apple went and wiped out all the pages in Mobile Me.” Interesting dichotomy between permanence in terms of effect on reputation versus transient nature of pages
The Wayback Machine Passes 400 Billion Indexed Webpages | TNW – impressive scale but this misses out on the explosion of content created by social network platforms as walled gardens, and that may not be a bad thing
Retailing
Mapping Our Interiors – NYTimes.com – interesting business model by IndoorAtlas, if you are in retail, you should be embracing this
Security
New feature helps Facebook grow ears | FT – integrates with TV (and presumably radio ads?) but you have to wonder about the privacy aspects of this
NSA spying is causing Americans to self-censor their Internet activity | VentureBeat – if you substituted PSB for NSA and Chinese for Americans this could be any other article about China in the western media
Alibaba’s Cloud Business Expands With Hong Kong Data Center | Data Center Knowledge – gradual internationalisation
Chinese Cyber Attacks Trigger US MIDLIFE Crisis | VICE News – interesting analysis the recent U.S. action against China
Taiwan
Taiwan makers struggling to automate equipment | DigiTimes – current automation offerings don’t suit their businesses so the likes of Foxconn et al are developing and manufacturing automation inhouse
Technology
I, Cringely Apple’s iPad Problem – they last too long, more like a PC than like a mobile phone
Users folder vanished after OS X 10.9.3 update? Here’s a fix • The Register – nifty help out
China Bans Use of Microsoft’s Windows 8 on Government Computers | Re/code – if the Chinese government don’t trust it, should consumers?
Chinese Tech Startups are Building Steaming Projectors to Beat Smart TVs TechNode – makes sense when one things about home space
“Tech companies are being left to make all the decisions” | Dezeen – interesting perspective on wearables
Sichuan professor makes biocoal out of leftovers | WantChinaTimes – interesting, particularly as food waste recycling is a bugbear in waste disposal. How can the collection be done efficiently though?
American TV dramas attract high-end ads in China | WantChinaTimes – not terribly surprising as they reach an English speaking, often foreign educated technocratic middle class
Web of no web
Mapping The Hidden Cost Of Mobile Apps | MobileGroove – will be reviewing my use of some of the apps mentioned
Wireless
Bounden on Android delayed: we need your help – Game Oven – rather reminds me of PCs and driver problems, were Sound Blaster compatibility meant that you might be able to get audio on a game
So where are we going in Mobile? | DigitalEvangelist – interesting piece by Ian Wood. The most depressing thing I find out about this is the wasted R&D when so much hard innovation is going begging
Communities Dominate Brands: Lets Do 2014 Numbers for the Mobile Industry: Now we are at 100% Mobile Subscription Penetration Rate Per Capita Globally – that headline number now isn’t as meaningful as it could be. I personally have two numbers on one smartphone. 3UK via the SIM and China Mobile Hong Kong via Jego. It also conceals the continuing gulf between established markets, the developing world and the astonishing acceleration of APAC markets
Huawei Ascend P7 Review | BGR – interesting review of Huawei Ascend P7, interesting that they still have sluggishness issues and the skinning that makes it look like a shanzhai version of iOS7. You would have to pry my iPhone from my cold dead hand though
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DuPont plastic & more news
DuPont plastic counterfeited
Chinese “counterfeit” DuPont plastic prompted Aston Martin’s giant recall – Surely physical testing would have shown that the counterfeit Dupont plastic product wasn’t to spec? It makes me wonder about the inbound quality control at Aston Martin on materials. It makes sense that counterfeiters would go after a brand like DuPont plastic. But its also interesting that counterfeiting moves beyond manufactured
Business
IBM to peddle chip unit | The Register
Google bought 5.94% of Lenovo | Reuters
Consumer behaviour
Millennials Put Their Surprising Stamp on the American Dream – not about secure old age or a certain level of consumerism but about day-to-day control over their life
JWT London study: U.K. men more multidimensional than conventional wisdom has it | JWT Intelligence
Economics
Britain is now being taxed so much that the pips are squeaking | City AM – interesting I would add to this that it is reliant on the PAYE tax payers
Exclusive: How mainland millionaires overwhelmed Canada visa scheme | South China Morning Post – (reg wall)
Ideas
David Ignatius: After Snowden, a diminished Internet? – The Washington Post – sure just the worldliness that followed the ‘summer of love‘ in the late 1960s
In the Asian century, Australia is becoming Asian too | Trends in the Living Networks
Innovation
Luxury
Jing Daily: Chinese Designers Rise In Ranks At Top Global Fashion Weeks – are the creative industries in the West really a bulwark against China?
Louis Vuitton attaches personas to men’s bags to broaden appeal – Luxury Daily – Internet
Jing Daily: Estee Lauder pins hops on China’s tier 2 cities to lift lagging growth
Marketing
Study Says a Personalized Subject Line is the Key to Email Success | Marketing Pilgrim – open with a good headline
Media
YouTube clamps down on fake views with video audits – Digital Intelligence
Critical blog on Blinkx was paid for by investors | CityAM
The Anatomy of Facebook: A Quick Guide to the Facebook Ecosystem For Brands | Simply Measured
Retailing
2012-2013 China Online Shopping Transaction Situation — China Internet Watch
UK retailers see rise in overseas mobile searches | IAB UK – from Germany, the US, France and the Netherlands
Korea to Chinese Tourists: Shop Here, Get a Visa – South Korea plans to offer VIP cards to big-spending Chinese tourists entitling them to five-year multiple-entry visas, use of exclusive immigration counters and discounts at certain stores
Security
India: Huawei investigated over alleged BSNL hack | beyondbrics – one to watch to see how it develops
Errata Security: That NBC story 100% fraudulent – a lot of technology media coverage is embarrassing
Quoted: on British spies targeting hacker group Anonymous | SiliconBeat – Targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs – Which is what security services do when the political beliefs are divergent from the establishment: anti-nuclear movement, new age travellers and anti-globalisation protestors
Software
I, Cringely Nadella’s success at Microsoft probably depends on Gates – I, Cringely
Web of no web
V2V: What are vehicle-to-vehicle communications and how will they work | ExtremeTech
Government OKs Car-to-Car Talk | EE Times
Wireless
Apple RESURRECTS the iPhone 4: report • The Register – the iPhone 4/4s format is almost like the Mac Classic which lived in various incarnations through the 1980s and early 1990s in Apple’s range