Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Taoism & social media

    I was watching this video and thinking about taoism and social media. The video is by Irish-Chinese film maker Edwin Lee on the refurbishment of of the Wong Tai Sin Temple in northern Kowloon and thought that it was an excellent metaphor for something I’d been looking to talk about for a while.

    Sik Sik Yuen is the Taoist organisation who look after the temple were faced with a challenge. They were renovating a hall of worship, but didn’t want to see their handiwork be adversely affected by the smoke of traditional prayer offerings. Their solution was an ‘electric’ temple that signifies the offering being accepted. The prayers are then burned in the traditional way by Taoist priests elsewhere.

    So what does taoism & social media have to do with each other?

    Well if you’re like me you’ll have heard a number of times that ‘we need to do something on <insert the social software platform of the day here>‘ or ‘we need to have a <insert owned social media platform here>‘.

    It’s hard to get people to think about things the other way around:

    • What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
    • Is it a new problem or an old problem?
    • If its an old problem, what is wrong with the old way? (If there is nothing wrong with the old way, apart from the fact that its old, is the realpolitik of the new worth it?)
    • How can you solve it and fit into the lives of the people who you are trying to solve the problem for?

    Don’t get me wrong, I am all for innovation and I am quite happy to sell someone the new new thing – particularly if I can use it as a case study to sell other people the new new thing at a later date as well. But a significant amount of the time innovation occurs for all the wrong reasons, delivering little and wasting marketing resources.

    Does your brand really need that latest, greatest Facebook commerce application or are their easier picking to be made optimising what you already have?

    Is there a better creative vehicle rather than social media for what you are trying to achieve; like creating some sort of real-world experience or web-of-no-web application to knit offline and online together?

  • Patriot Act + more news

    PATRIOT Act

    PATRIOT Act clouds picture for tech | Politico – the PATRIOT Act passed in the wake of the September 11 attacks, giving the US government access to web services to try and fill in the gaps in intelligence. However the PATRIOT Act covers data held outside the US. So many foreign multinational companies are baulking at using US web services for their businesses. This is particularly important given the move from server and software apps to cloud computing. So the PATRIOT Act is disrupting US businesses from scaling

    Consumer behaviour

    Trendpool » Panasonic’s Female-Only Consumer Trial House

    Students of Virtual Schools Are Lagging in Proficiency – NYTimes.com – interesting that technology isn’t the panacea that people thought it would be in education. Smartboards haven’t been successful given their cost either

    Counterfeit goods losing attraction | SCMP.com – (paywall) Brands stand for quality – like they did in the Victorian era

    Young Women Go Back to School Instead of Work – NYTimes.com

    Economics

    More on What’s Left Over After Paying for Housing – The Atlantic – interesting article on housing and economics. Its less about house prices and more about income net of housing expenses

    Big Developers Dabble in Apartment Market – WSJ.com – decline in home ownership

    Finance

    Ray Dalio’s Richest and Strangest Hedge Fund : The New Yorker

    Innovation

    Single-Atom Wires Could Help Moore’s Law Live On

    Omron smartphone app comes close to instantaneous text translations | The Japan Times Online – like something straight out of a DARPA project

    Domestic robots failed to ride to rescue after No. 1 plant blew | The Japan Times Online – law of unintended consequences and innovation

    Liquid metal capsules used to make self-healing electronics | ExtremeTech

    Roboden: Japanese Company Develops World’s First Elastic Electrical Cable (Video) | TechCrunch

    Japan

    Woodford to sue Olympus, citing lack of investor support to get his job back ‹ Japan Today – not surprising he didn’t get support, first he trashes their shareholder value (probably exasperated by his theatre) then he asks for their help. They won’t care about the truth they’ll care about the 70 per cent drop in the market capitalisation

    Korea

    President Lee Myung-bak talked a lot about controlling high prices. – WSJ – growth and price inflation both considered issues

    Legal

    US Threatened To Blacklist Spain For Not Implementing Site Blocking Law | TorrentFreak

    London

    An Obligatory and Pointless Debate About the Olympics | VICE – but Vice nails it

    Luxury

    NetEase’s Luxury E-Commerce Site First Casualty Of 2012 « Jing Daily – interesting, especially since Netease has a lot of expertise in online businesses. I guess luxury handbags aren’t like World of Warcraft

    Will China’s E-Commerce Market See An Industry Shakeout In 2012? « Jing Daily

    Taking First-Class Coddling Above and Beyond – NYTimes.com – … first class represents less than 5 percent of all seats flown on long-haul routes, and business class accounts for 15 percent, those seats combined to generate 40 to 50 percent of airlines’ revenue, according to Peter Morris, the chief economist at Ascend, an aviation consulting firm

    Marketing

    UK marketers anticipate change: Warc.com – Ball & Hoolahan expecting marketing departments to get nuked in amalgamation with other departments

    Media

    Beijing Calling: The Trouble With China’s New English-Language News Network | Fast Company

    Retailing

    UK retailers face “carnage”: Warc.com – partly economics, partly industry structure due to etailing

    Wireless

    Nokia Moving to China from Singapore – WSJ – interesting complex reasons for choosing China or other countries outlined

    Interview with Murtazin – Will Microsoft Buy Nokia’s Smartphone Unit? – Forbes

    Text Messaging Is in Decline in Some Countries – NYTimes.com

    Nokia N9 outsells all other phones in Finland during October – Neowin.net – did Nokia’s move to Windows screw the pooch? Anecdotal evidence that it probably did. Also this code is now called Tinzen being pushed by Intel and Samsung

  • The North Face and Nike

    The North Face and Nike on marketing

    The North Face seems to have just peaked on its cultural moment in Korea. The North Face jackets are worn by all strata of society. Below is a Korean blog post that compares Its winter coats with different types of high school students as the brand has become so ubiquitous in South Korean school yards and on the backs of consumers during the winter months.

    The bottom of the blog post goes on to compare The North Face with the duffle coats worn by previous generation of school children in a mocking way.

    it is as much the winter uniform of the Korean salary man as his tie.

    The North Face sees itself as a technical brand rather than a true luxury brand, but the vast majority of its jackets don’t see the mountains and ski slopes for which they were originally designed. It has begun to treat itself as a premium brand with its purple label retro designs and different fabrics like Harris Tweed – currently exclusive to the Japanese market. But how can this be maintained if the brand becomes this overexposed?

    It is not a corner that it can easily get out of and technical innovation in the clothing design will be of limited use.

    North Face overexposure

    Part of the problem is the nature of Korean society itself which has a certain conformity to it. This means that once a trend picks up, it goes everywhere. But then because it goes everywhere it has a finite life. A small amount of tastemakers move on and the cycle begins again.

    The next winter jacket might be Canada Goose or Moncler.

    Contrast this with Nike: The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about how Nike and Footlocker maximised revenue from the Jordan franchise through careful timing of limited product releases. More marketing related posts here.

  • Zynga and the IPO

    I had held off writing on the ‘failed’ Zynga’s IPO at the end of last year. I am not going to say that Zynga is a great business; in many respects I don’t think it is, without even looking at its numbers I think that Zynga has three big challenges:

    • Facebook owns their customer base
    • Facebook owns their payment system
    • Facebook owns their customer acquisition strategy

    But was the Zynga IPO really a failure? Before I answer that I wanted to talk about another IPO.

    VA Linux IPO case study

    Back in 2000, I had the experience agencyside running the European launch of a company called VA Linux and took its then CEO Larry Augustin around the media. At the time VA Linux’s primary busness was building specialist workstations and servers were optimised for Linux and had Linux pre-installed. This meant that they thought carefully about component choices for instance the ethernet card (network interface card or NIC) in the computer was from Intel rather than 3Com because Intel did a better job in supporting Linux  in terms of the quality of its drivers.

    My experience of Augustin was of someone who was whip smart, with a dry wit and a genuinely nice guy – which made my job a hell of a lot easier to do. Life was good, Augustin gave good copy on the Judge Jackson finding of fact that had happened the previous November, Linux was building momentum in the enterprise and with web servers because it performed better than Windows, required less skill than the BSD distributions and was more of an entry level product than Sun Microsystems, SGI or IBM Unix hardware on specialised RISC architectures. One of the things that audiences wanted to talk about was VA Linux’s at the time record-breaking IPO.

    VA Linux’s underwriters had priced its IPO at US$30 per share, on the first day of trading the price topped US$320 per share. It was described as a stunning success but that success was double-edged. In economic terms, the bank staff working on the IPO had obviously under-priced it because the price had surged so much – depriving the company of a substantial amount of potential capital that it could have raised. Admittedly it was crazy times and VA Linux wasn’t worth the absurdly high valuation in the end, as businesses like Dell started competing with them head-on. But one has to ask what difference would the extra capital have made? How big does the pop have to be to go beyond rewarding initial investors and become negligent underpricing of a company’s stock?

    The Zynga comparison

    Back to Zynga, which had the opposite challenge, the bank staff working on the IPO had optimally priced the stock so that the company got pretty much the full amount that at least some people were prepared to pay. Rather than a pop, a price decline occurred which investors got upset about as late arrivals to the Zynga party made a financial loss. The underwriters for the IPO earned their money on this occasion. If you want to be the first kid on the block in a new set of the latest Nike Air Jordans, the latest gadget or the season’s must-have handbag, you have two choice get in early enough or pay over the odds. Who is to say if you’ve overpaid, once the heat goes those items are then likely to become cheaper again. And so it goes with Zynga, this shouldn’t be your pension fund; it is part of the new hotness, a fashion stock if you will and was priced and paid for as such.

    Disclaimer: this doesn’t constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy stocks. I am not a financial services professional nor do I profess to be. If you want investment advice, pay someone who does this for a living for it.

    More information

    THE TRUTH ABOUT ZYNGA: The Only Reason The IPO ‘Flopped’ Is Because Idiot Investors Paid Too Much

  • Workampers

    The Wall Street Journal had an article that introduced me to the idea of workampers. The article was on the seasonal workers that Amazon.com uses in the US to help it with the surge in demand in the run up to Christmas.

    Who were these elves to Amazon’s Santa Claus?

    The article describes them as workampers. Older retired people who live a transient lifestyle by choice in an RV (recreational vehicle) for at least part of the year.
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    Their motivations were diverse in nature. Some of the workers are similar to their ancestors during the Great Depression, who moved across the country following work were it was available.

    For others the reasons are diverse, from money to help with expenses to camaraderie with similarly nomadic peers or proving to themselves that they could still hack a task. A mix of forced earlier retirement and improvements in health mean that many seniors still have decades of potential work still in them that they want to take advantage of.

    A mix of ageism and globalisation have meant that there is a growing body of workampers. Future workampers might be in a worse financial state due to less generous pensions and health insurance, higher personal debt and automation. The move to a lower carbon economy will also impact the ability of a workampers to live out of an RV and transverse large distances at a reasonable cost.

    Workamper futures

    With an aging population and the decimation of working class communities due to the opioid epidemic we are likely to see more demographics like workampers as companies adapt to tap into an older work pool. With Amazon in particular, one has to wonder if more of their warehouse and logistics work can be automated and how it will be affected by a low carbon future.

    More explanations of of jargon terms can be found here.

    More information

    Seasonal Amazon ‘Workampers’ Flock to Remote Towns for Temporary Gigs – WSJ.com (paywall)