Hand scanning + more news

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Hand scanning

Swedish city introduces payment by hand scanning – The West Australian – having your biometrics such hand scanning to be used as authentication; I am sure that there ethical issues with this. You can change a password, but you can’t change your biometrics. Fujitsu have had an ATM up and running that reads the vein patterns in its hand scanning.

Gadget

Samsung Gear 2 Teardown – iFixit – interesting teardown

1 million preorders of new HTC flagship phone on Chinese sites | WatchChinaTimes – not a bad start at all

Slideshow: 10 Things I Saw at Bluetooth World | EE Times

Sony Curves Images Sensors & TSMC Stacks Them | EE Times – interesting design moves

Hong Kong

Apocalypse Now in Hong Kong | WSJ – interesting new film (paywall)

Television Advertising Continues To Reign Supreme | AdPulp – not terribly surprised if one looks at a prominent FMCG brand business like Colgate | Palmolive the overwhelming majority of their advertising spend is television. Also digital doesn’t work well in brand building, if anything spend is overweight towards digital

Was that expensive Chinese New Year campaign worth it? | Marketing Interactive – really good tips on running an international marketing campaign

Media

Bits Blog: Amazon Buys ComiXology | NYTimes.com – well that’s the comic industry screwed then

Digital Intelligence :: Online ad revenue overtakes TV for first time in US

(Re)defining multimedia journalism – Medium

Online

U.S. teens prefer Instagram over Twitter, Facebook – no real surprises here

Alternatives to Paid Search on Baidu | L2 ThinkTank

Wonga faces social media storm after forcing Twitter to remove satirical material | Brand Republic – cack-handed handling of satire that would have gone way over the heads of the working poor that Wonga ~~preys upon~~ has as its customer base

Another Chinese Counterfeit Product: Social-Media Followers | Advertising Age – One Asian ad exec who asked not to be named described buying fake fans to give an ego jolt to a new venture in China. The rate, he said, was about 5 U.S. cents for a zombie that’s just a name, and 16 cents for higher-quality fakes with some content on their profiles. In addition to zombie fans, there’s a market for faux re-tweets and comments too

QQ reaches 200 million users – surprising how it’s still climbing in the face of WeChat

The Future of Social Media ROI: From Likes to Relational Metrics | INSEAD

Retailing

Beijing’s first 24-hour bookstore turns first page | WantChinaTimes.com – I wish London still had the 24-hour Borders on Oxford Street

Burberry’s flagship Shanghai store facade responds to weather changes – Brand Republic News

The future of retail in 5 charts | Digiday

Software

China Mobile Browser Industry Analysis in 2013 | China Internet Watch

WeChat opens its image-recognition tech to the public | VentureBeat

How Does Facebook Handle Graph Search Queries In A Timely Fashion? | AllFacebook – interesting primer on Facebook’s back-end technology

The Box Blog » Announcing Box Open Source – good for OSS movement

Telecoms

Need for speed: Testing the networking performance of the top 4 cloud providers | GigaOm – I was one of the original non-US beta testers for WeberWorks – an online environment / workflow tool for doing and running PR programmes with real-time reporting and the thing that kept killing my usage of the tool was network latency, it was like working in treacle. Interesting to see GigaOm bringing this up as a key performance indicator

Freescale and ALU show off small cell SoC – Rethink Wireless