Google Hangouts + more news

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Google Hangouts

Google Hangouts breaks out on its own site | TechRadar – dismantling Google+ piece-by-piece literally with the Google Hangouts service. Google+ has been a failure for user adoption; even if they did benefit from the enrichment of search data. Whether Google Hangouts will remain, who knows?

Consumer behaviour

China is two-speed consumer market | warc.com – high speed and low speed consumers – These high speed households, consisting mostly of the urban middle-class, currently number 81m people and generate $1.7tr of the $3.2tr in total urban consumption, but their numbers will swell to 142m by 2020 when they will account for $3.8tr of the $5.6bn in total urban consumption. – high speed consumption is crucial to China moving to balance its dependence on exports. More China related posts here.

Tinder and Hookup-Culture Promotion | Vanity Fair – is this really that different from the traditional meat market approach?

Culture

HAVE BRITS ABANDONED RAVE CULTURE? | DJMag – Newsbeat was probably the wrong format to do the report from

How to

How Long to Read – find how long it will take to read any book

Luxury

Ritz-Carlton, Naples shares a slice of pie on social media | Luxury Daily – being useful, smart social play

Luxury Hotels Move Into Low-Touch Luxury | L2 Think Tank – thinking carefully about process and the use of digital

Media

Channel Mum looks ahead after ITV takes a stake | digiday – ITV investing in YouTube content

Online

Is Bing Trolling Google & Alphabet With ABC.WTF Redirect? – looks like some prankster punk’d Alphabet

Retailing

China’s Ecommerce Giant JD.Com Expands to Russia | SocialBrandWatch – just because Russia is under western sanctions doesn’t mean that the Chinese won’t go there. Chinese tourists are already driving much of the demand for luxury goods at GUM and other high end shopping destinations in Moscow. I would imagine Logistics across Russia would likely prove to be challenging. More on retailing here.

Wireless

Smartphone giants have lost 15,000 jobs to cheap Android phones this year | Quartz – commoditisation belting the life out of the market. Premium smartphones won’t go away but low market handsets and mid-market will likely converge

Intel Said to Unseat Q’Com in iPhone | EE Times – Qualcomm has the best modem technology in the market and the iPhone 6S is a premium phone. I can’t see Apple settling for second best technology – will Intel have the IP and the staying power to match Qualcomm? If Intel history is anything to go by; Qualcomm is likely to emerge victorious over time