End of men + more news

9 minutes estimated reading time

End of men

Is this the end of men? – FT.com – the end of men is a book title and catch all phrase that encompasses changes in mens roles across society and in the economy. The end of men encompasses declining participation in third level education, professions and management. The end of men also means a net drop in labour participation, which has an economic impact in the workplace and domestic settings. One of the problems is that the end of men doesn’t define a new role. Instead men who try and make a more domestic role are looked on repulsion. One interesting vignette was the way the romance of Romeo in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet was rejected by female high school students as being ‘whiney lameness’. So metrosexuality isn’t likely to hold at bay the end of men. What becomes apparent is that this disconnect is where the ‘all men are trash’ meme is likely to come from.

Business

PR industry’s exploitation of interns probed by HMRC | PRWeek – but the point is that PR is elitist; just like the professions, the media, fashion and politics and yes life is unfair

Consumer behaviour

MEC, Seven Network & Neuro-Insight reveal findings of world-first neuro study – WPP

Producer-engineer Young Guru on what good sound sounds like | The Audiophiliac – CNET News – interesting insights on generation, culture and sound appreciation

Twitter / IanWhiteNews: Two people watching Lady …  – Just two people watching Lady Thatcher’s funeral in Leeds city centre, Liverpool didn’t run the feed because of fears of rioting

Culture

Could This Be the Summer of Disco? | VICE United Kingdom – not terribly surprising disco edits, 80s electronica and Balearic have been moving the London DJ vinyl purchases for the past five years, its only a matter of time and the UK needs hedonism

Economics

New Study Finds China Manufacturing Costs Rising to US Level – By 2015, manufacturing in China will be just as costly as it is in the U.S. according to a new study? But there are whole clusters of industry in China – it isn’t only about cost but interdependence

Forget Gold, the Gourmet Cupcake Market Is Crashing – WSJ.com – will cupcakes be the symbol marking the end of web 2.0 as secondhand Aeron chairs were of the dot.com era?

Finance

UK’s top regulator Bailey asks why no bank bosses convicted? – were they a product of their regulatory environment?

FMCG

Potential Suitors for GlaxoSmithKline’s Lucozade – Euromonitor International

How to

Six keys to tweeting and sharing during a crisis

Innovation

Boffins explain LED inefficiencies • The Register

AMD reveals G-Series X embedded chips, drops a little ARM-powered bombshell

China Took the Clean Energy Lead in 2012, and Will Likely Stay There | Motherboard

Ron Conway, Tech Investor, Turns Focus to Hometown (Norimitsu Onishi/New York Times)

Luxury

Coach gets boost from “accessible luxury” image in China

Why China’s luxury shoppers are spurning Louis Vuitton for Burberry – Quartz

L2: A Think Tank for Digital Innovation » Japan 2013 – luxury brands not doing a great job marketing to luxury consumers in Japan

Media

Despite Major Buyer-Seller Differences, Programmatic Buying Widespread – Sales and Marketing @ FolioMag.com

Average Facebook Fan is Worth $174 | Syncapse – but how many companies are getting this value out?

Here’s What Happened the Last Time a Conservative Tycoon Took Over a Top American Newspaper | Motherboard – decline in long form journalism. Is that a political slant or a profit slant, I suspect the latter

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Citizen ‘journalism’ ran amok in Boston crisis – interesting how the Boston marathon seems to have been an inflection point against citizen journalism

iTunes Store adds ‘buy now, download later’ option for video and music | Macworld – interesting for two reasons. Firstly, flash memory devices don’t have as large a capacity as magnetic drive based computers, secondly it also highlights the lack of network ubiquity that makes streaming viable

Fox Censors Cory Doctorow’s “Homeland” Novel From Google

Penguin to terminate ebook deal with Apple in bid to end European antitrust investigation

android have lower CPMs on ads than iOS

New regulations in China ban journalists from quoting foreign media | South China Morning Post – without the news being verified by state sources first. Includes ‘informers, freelancers, NGOs, commercial organisations’

Turn Report Shows A 15 Percent Increase In Display Ad Costs And A 45 Percent Drop In Mobile – TechCrunch

Online

It’s Getting Harder to Make Money on YouTube – Businessweek

Niice. A search engine with taste. – nice complement to Flickr creative commons search as a source of visual inspiration

Websites That Inspired a Generation – The Deepend work in particular is stunning

News Fail – Tim Bray on why real-time news updates don’t work particularly well

AFP Yahoo China to end email service: media – this makes a lot of sense when you look how Alibaba has been reinventing Yahoo! China as more of an entertainment portal, so email didn’t fit so well into the product mix

Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer tries to trigger chain reaction | Internet & Media – CNET News

U.S. Flip-flopping Proves Us Right, Megaupload Tells Court

Are Teenagers Abandoning Facebook? [INFOGRAPHIC] | Social Media Today

Retailing

A Hyped Startup Called Fab Is Pivoting To Become The ‘World’s Alternative To Amazon And Wal-Mart’ (Megan Rose Dickey/Business Insider) – retailer | designer collabs long a staple of apparel is now coming to furniture. Shifts the position of the Fab brand from being a curator of cool things to co-creating cool things

京东网上商城-综合网购首选(JD.COM)-正品低价、品质保障、货到付款、配送及时、放心服务、轻松购物! – a Chinese Amazon.com-type operation in the US for Chinese ex-pats

Deloitte: Shoppers’ Belts Remain Tight Despite Economic Improvement – PR Newswire – consumers know this isn’t a recession but a global restructure – at least at an instinctual level if not be fully cognisant of the change, they will spend to reflect the new world order

Britain is doing more of its shopping online and not just because it’s been freezing

Security

Data Communications Bill: the Home Office is trying to trap Britain in the past – Telegraph

ICO asks Home Office for information needed to form view about legitimacy of Communications Data Bill FOI request refusal

The Bearer of BadNews (Marc Rogers/The Official Lookout Blog) – Android apps infected with malware via Google app store

What Happened to Boston’s Mobile Phone Networks After the Marathon Bombing? | VICE United Kingdom – interesting article by Vice. When July 7 happened in London I have vivid memory of email and the web grinding to a halt along with the mobile networks. I remember only being able to contact Jonathan Hopkins – then my account manager at Bite via Yahoo! Messenger to check in and make sure the team was OK

Software

Deconstructing download statistics of a Mobile App | SAP for Mobile – good guide to Google Play and Apple App store analytics

Microsoft Brings Out the Trolls to Fight Android Dominance

88 Acres | Microsoft – the great satan of software eats its own dog food; does interesting things with data and the web-of-no-web for operational efficiency. Gives IBM indigestion…

Microsoft reports weak Windows 8 sales in Q1 2013, says it will “respond to customer feedback”

Taiwan

Taiwan Tries to Shore Up Its Defenses Against Samsung – NYTimes.com

Taiwan tech industry faces up to Samsung – Yahoo! Finance

AFP: Taiwan probes Samsung ‘dirty tricks’ vs HTC’ – astro-turfing and sock puppetry allegations

Technology

IBM Takes a Beating (Spencer E. Ante/Wall Street Journal) – not as surprising as one thinks since following some of Bob Cringely’s articles on IBM Global Service business practices

The rise and fall of AMD: How an underdog stuck it to Intel | Ars Technica

Web of no web

Ads on Google Glass Will Never Work | MIT Technology Review – but advertisers paying for super-relevant contextual information to be put in front of users likely will be

Wireless

All you need to know about Apple in 3 easy steps. – broadstuff

The Only Thing Apple Really Sells

Did an Apple 2.0 story touch a nerve at Samsung HQ? – Apple 2.0 -Fortune Tech – did Samsung indulge in astro-turfing?

FOSS Patents: Google keeps losing: ITC finally tosses Motorola’s complaint against Apple

Euro states stick fingers in ears to Huawei, ZTE tech ‘dump’ claims • The Register – interesting dynamic, will European telecoms manufacturers really benefit from Chinese sales?

Report: Apple returned 8M shoddy iPhones to Foxconn • The Register – that is one hell of a quality FAIL. Interesting that it got through Apple’s own engineers scheduled on ‘Mordor duty’ in Shenzhen

Apple’s Stock Not As Doomed As You Think (Jay Yarow/Business Insider) – it’s more about the irrationality of financial markets. Microsoft has been dinged like this for years and Apple Shares Are Dirt Cheap; So What? (Steven Russolillo/MoneyBeat) – interesting if not entirely cogent counterpoint to Jay Yarrow’s post on Apple

The $12 Gongkai Phone (Andrew Huang/bunnie’s blog) – I love this phone as a study in minimalist design. It would make a great ‘festival’ handset

Samsung Parries Apple’s 7th Amendment Arguments ~pj

Mobile Monday London: What happened on 15th April, BYOD: A Faustian Pact? – inevitable

Communities Dominate Brands: Nokia Q1 Results, very quick comments – interesting analysis in some of the comments

Verizon iPhone sales tumble 33% – Apr. 18, 2013 – This is a false headline

Nokia Sales Drop More Than Estimated on Slow Phone Demand – Bloomberg

Samsung strategy analysis: ambitious company, major threat to rivals | BGR

Apple’s amazing decline, in four fascinating charts – Quartz

Don’t Multitask: Your Brain Will Thank You | TIME.com

Telegraph to launch dual static and dynamic iPad app – Media Week

Evernote CEO: We want to build hardware | PCWorld – this could be interesting

Twitter Adds Google-Like Keyword Targeting – Peter Kafka – Media – AllThingsD

Who’s Winning, iOS or Android? All the Numbers, All in One Place | TIME.com

Samsung Ends Anonymous Web Reviews Amid Taiwan Probe – Bloomberg – I suspect this happens a lot more often in the consumer electronics space than people let on

My iPhone is the least valuable thing I carry. I like it that way | Econsultancy – because the data can be backed up

Xiaomi’s Bin Lin Says Company Is Betting on Services, Not Smartphones – John Paczkowski – Dive Into Mobile – AllThingsD – I wonder what would happen if Google did this?