Month: June 2015

  • HSBC PMI + more things

    HSBC PMI HSBC will no longer provide one of the best gauges of China’s economy – Quartz – but hopefully someone else will step up to do the sponsorship instead. The HSBC PMI measure was the most reliable economic measure coming out of China that was wasn’t skewed by state-owned enterprises (SOEs). SOEs get easy state…

  • Space dogyssey & more things

    Space Dogyssey Space Dogyssey – beautiful college student animated film. Space Dogyssey is interesting mixed media. A mix of stop animation  and cel animation  Roger Linn Great panel discussion with three great designers of electronic music instruments: Roger Linn (LinnDrum, Linn 9000, Akai MPC originator), Dave Smith (Prophet 5, MIDI inventor) and Tom Oberheim (Oberheim…

  • Daihatsu + other news

    Daihatsu Daihatsu Releases 3rd Model of Copen Sporty Minicar – Nikkei Technology Online – the Daihatsu customisable car, with manufacturer kits to change the vehicle appearance dramatically. Daihatsu is one of Japan’s smaller manufacturers with budgets dwarves by Toyota and VW, so this move makes a lot of sense Culture Chevrolet Issues Press Release Written Entirely…

  • An odyssey to get online

    I have gone through a number of journeys to get online. This year I will have been connected to the internet for 20 years. I actually had email even longer. Back in 1994, I was working on a temporary contact at a company called Optical Fibres – a collaboration between Corning and UK cable maker…

  • Quibb + more things

    Why aren’t App Constellations working? Quibb members share some diverse opinions | Quibb – interesting that there are only US examples used in the Quibb research. There are wider issues with some of the companies mentioned especially Foursquare and the app constellations that they are building according to Quibb Beware the Listening Machines – The Atlantic –…

  • The silent majority of social

    The silent majority as a concept was introduced to the world by Richard Nixon in a speech about America’s position in Vietnam on November 3, 1969. The portion of the speech that featured it is below: Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the…

  • Prada ‘it’ bag + other news

    Prada ‘it’ bag Here’s Prada’s New ‘It’ Bag, the Inside – Racked – interesting that Prada is trying to design itself out of its current financial slump due to low demand in Asian markets. Part of the problem that Prada has is retail presence, the poor experiential aspects of the brand and the ease of faking…

  • China bubble + more things

    Stand Back: China Bubble Will Burst – Bloomberg View – I don’t think it will go pop, though it will correct, probably not this year. The China bubble has become an existential threat to global markets, because of the scale of the China bubble. At the end of the day, China’s retail investors are starved of…

  • Brand storytelling: a bitter pill to swallow?

    I have been thinking about brand storytelling after watching Adam Curtis’ Bitter Lake over the weekend which is ostensibly trying to tell the story of Afghanistan from then end of the second world war to today. But it is also a parable on how the simplicity of storytelling used by the political classes to get…