Month: January 2016

  • Cool tools & things that made last week

    Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools website has a podcast series, this episode on great tips

    Cool Tools is a direct descendant of The Whole Earth catalogue. Kelly started his career helping Stewart Brand edit the last few editions of the Whole Earth catalogue. He was then an editor for follow on projects including the Whole Earth Review and The WELL (Whole Earth eLectronic Link). More Kevin Kelly related stuff here.

    For the right content Chinese audiences will watch longer form branded content, Pepsi’s Bring Happiness Home campaigns are designed to tap into Lunar New Year celebrations and this February ushers in the year of the monkey. This is a beautifully made short film about the different portrayals of the Monkey King over time.

    There is a new Monkey King film due out with an awesome looking trailer

    The X-Files has a new teaser out for the six-part TV series reboot, more over at a microsite which seems to be strangely appropriate. I enjoyed the original series just at the start of my internet usage at college and watched series one of The X Files on a Casio TV with a postage stamp sized LCD screen.

    The campaign: Zwitsal is a well-known baby brand in the Netherlands. For many parents and carers, it has associations with the first formative years of a baby’s life.

    The aim was to use Zwitsal’s famous fragrance and team it with Robijn laundry (both cleaners and conditioners) to produce a unique highly-emotive new product that would extend the reach of both brands.

    Nostalgia and the power of smell was the focus of the brand campaign which used bloggers and Facebook to engage and harness the sharing power of socially engaged mothers.

    The results: The campaign, which ran over ten months, saw over 3.5 million people engage with it on Facebook (average engagement rate 8.4%), 137,752 YouTube video views, 23,861 online views and an 11% uplift in sales.

  • Cinema building obligations

    Hong Kong Looking at Cinema Building Obligations | Variety – When the British colonial government was building new towns in Kowloon and the New Territories it operated policies that specified the minimum number of cinema screens that should be built per head of population. The Hong Kong government are looking to revisit cinema building obligations because retail rental prices for cinemas in Hong Kong have become cripplingly expensive

    Tangible Media Group | Biologic project – really interesting project, the question is how to keep the functionality if the garment is washed

    Ryanair and easyJet eye work with rivals – FT.com – working as feeder airlines for long haul flights. The big issue would be fares once baggage charges had been incorporated; the discount will be negligible compared to legacy airlines like BA or Swiss(paywall)

    PGP-encrypted Blackberrys aren’t immune to being cracked | TheNextWeb – not really terribly surprising. It is remarkable that PGP has been so robust for so long

    Snapchat’s Daily Mobile Video Views Said to Rival Facebook’s – Bloomberg Business – so 7 Billion clips delivered for up to 100 million users per day. That’s a lot of video, but a clip delivery doesn’t necessarily mean a view by a human

    Qualcomm Asks U.S. Court for Documents in Korean Probe – WSJ – Qualcomm must be crapping themselves

    Japan’s Newest Adults Pessimistic About Nation’s Future – The Macromill study found that Line continues to be the most popular social network service among 20-year-olds, with about 90% of them using it. Twitter followed a distant second with a little more than 70% of them saying they use it. The study found the overall percentage of people using social media was dropping, with Facebook and Mixi seeing sharp declines. – more Japan related content here.

    Official Grindr.com Blog | Exciting announcement: Grindr takes investment from Beijing Kunlun – the irony is that Grindr has a better chance of tapping the Chinese market than Facebook does

  • PrivaTegrity: the flawed model of distributed keys

    Dave Chaum’s PrivaTegrity – an idea to to try and balance between state actors demand for internet sovereignty and the defacto end of citizen privacy. Whilst also addressing the need to deal with emotive causes such as terrorism, paedophile rings and organised crime got a lot of attention from Wired magazine.

    Backdoors are considered problematic by privacy advocates and seem to be a panacea for governments who all want unrestricted access.
    Yesterday evening on a bus stop in Bow
    The principle behind PrivaTegrity is that there would be a backdoor, but the back door could only be opened with a nine-part key. The parts would be distributed internationally to try and reduce the ability of a single state actor to force access.

    However it has a number of flaws to it:

    • It assumes that bad people will use a  cryptographic system with a known backdoor. They won’t they will look elsewhere for the technology
    • It has a known backdoor, there is no guarantee that it can’t be opened in a way that the developers hadn’t thought of
    • Nine people will decide what’s evil
    • If you’re a state actor or a coalition of state actors, you know that you have nine targets to go after in order to obtain access by hook-or-by-crook. It was only Edward Snowden who showed us how extraordinarily powerful companies where bent to the will of the US government. The UK government is about to grant itself extra-territorial legal powers to compel access. There is no reason why a form of extra-ordinary rendition couldn’t be used to compel access, rather like Sauron in The Lord of the Rings bending the ring bearers to his will. Think of it as Operation Neptune Spear meets a Dungeons & Dragon quest held at a black site. Even if the US wouldn’t consider it a viable option, who is to say that other countries with capability wouldn’t do it. That group of countries with sufficient capability would likely include: UK, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, People’s Republic of China, Russian Federation, France, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Israel. All that these countries would need is intent

    More information
    The Father of Online Anonymity Has a Plan to End the Crypto War | WIRED
    Privategrity

    More privacy related content here.

  • Threat score + more things

    The new way police are surveilling you: Calculating your threat score – The Washington Post – similar to China’s social credit score, the threat score sounds like a concept perilously close to ‘pre-crime’ in Minority Report. Also how will the threat score handle accusations of systemic racism or infringement of civil or constitutional rights?

    Moleskine 开出了第一家咖啡店,在日内瓦机场 | 理想生活实验室 – interesting brand collaboration in Germany with restaurateur Caviar House & Prunier

    El Chapo, journalists and readers – Scripting News – pre-approval of copy happens at the celeb level whether it is Madonna or an ‘in the public eye’ CEO, or ’embeds’

    Apple News App Is Off to a Rocky Start – WSJ – problems with traffic measurement

    Schibsted wants to circumvent the mobile adblocking apocalypse by making better, more effective ads » Nieman Journalism Lab – interesting online advertising research

    SoundCloud reportedly raises €32 million in debt funding – Tech.eu – interesting that its debt funding, did they originally go for VC funding and increased valuation?

    Yahoo’s Brain Drain Shows a Loss of Faith Inside the Company – The New York Times – 30 per cent attrition rate. When I worked there the attrition rate was high, this is combination of changing business needs and media / tech industry rotating doors in many roles

    2016 emerging food trends | Global Food Forums ™ – interesting set of insights

    Inside the tiny house revolution | Yahoo! – Katie Couric on downsizing

    Creating a marketing organisation for the Digital Age – HBR & Marketo – marketing automation getting Harvard Business Review onside with a substantial sponsorship deal no doubt

    UK defense industry slams snooper’s charter – It also states that the bill’s provisions “unduly interfere with the rights to privacy, freedom of opinion and expression.” The coalition also argues that Britain’s implementation of the bill will have far-reaching implications for the rest of the world as other countries seek to emulate the UK’s policies. – Reminds me of the overreach on the Digital Economy Bill, if that is anything to go by HMG will ignore feedback

    VR porn lends a hand. Masturbation will never be the same – CNET – so if you want to know if VR is likely to take off when the media world gets the content right, adult entertainment company Naughty America might be a good bellwether

    Behind the Numbers: Saudi Aramco Valuation – The Numbers – WSJ – the interesting thing is why do the Saudi’s want to sell now and what about the tension between domestic energy demand and the more profitable export sales? Once the red herring comes out details on the reserves and production facilities should be clearer

    Why Diesel is about to start advertising on Pornhub | Dazed – “I was always frustrated by those things that we all think but we’re not allowed to say,” admits artistic director Nicola Formichetti of what inspired this “transparency” – something which is continued in both in the brand’s SS16 campaign (exclusively released above) and a new strategy that involves ads on Tinder, Grindr, Pornhub and YouPorn. “What we see in advertisements is just selling fake dreams, fake things, this impossible beauty. I think we have to be honest. Yeah, this is an ad, we’re selling shoes. But it’s in an interesting way, and people smile.”

    Artificial intelligence: Can Watson save IBM? – FT.com – Part of the problem lies in digesting real-world information: reading and understanding reams of doctors’ notes that are hard for a computer to ingest and organise. But there is also a deeper epistemological problem. “On Jeopardy! there’s a right answer to the question,” says Ms Chin but, in the medical world, there are often just well-informed opinions – interesting delve into the limits of expert systems (paywall) – via Azeem’s great newsletter Exponential View

    Hoverboard inventor says he has made no money – mostly because of cheap Chinese knock-offs | South China Morning Post – Still, it grates with Chen that big supermarkets and department stores facilitate the counterfeiters by dealing in knockoffs. “It is very discouraging. The patent system is not working if something is popular. With something like Hovertrax, the patent is almost useless.” – Maybe IP authorities should look at Wal-Mart and co rather than the factories?

    UK Foreign Affairs committe considers probe on Sino-British ties: concerns about erosion of Hong Kong’s Basic Law | South China Morning Post – this could be just the thing required to knock the economic relationship on his head and give Cameron’s enemies the upper hand destabilising him further on his European stance

    The Internet of Things That Talk About You Behind Your Back | Motherboard – great article by Bruce Schneier

    Why The Fashion World Hates Wearables | Fast Co-Design – not practical, not subtle and butt ugly

  • The smartphone market and Huawei

    It is hard for anyone reading the media to believe that Huawei’s rise in the smartphone market was anything short of miraculous. In reality the roots of this rise go back at least six years. Back in 2010, Huawei was already shipping 3,000,000 smartphones. However since that time, the year-on-year percentage growth in consumer devices shipped by the company reduced from 82 per cent year-on-year growth to about 8 per cent growth in 2014.  This growth was initially driven by less sexy products like feature phones for China Mobile, DSL routers and 3G/LTE dongles.
    Huawei numbers
    In fact if we go back further to 2007, feature phones drove a 757 per cent growth in consumer devices shipped.

    2010 is quite crucial, Huawei Consumer Devices suffered a 32 drop in year-on-year growth in revenue / device going from $56 per device in 2009 to $38 in 2010. The margins per device then began to climb again during period from 2010 – 2014.

    January’s numbers discussed at CES don’t give us the total numbers of devices shipped by Huawei, but only smartphone numbers, so I haven’t calculated revenues for 2015, but they would represent a significant upswing from the 20+% growth enjoyed in previous years.

    Reading the Huawei coverage one would believe that the growth is being driven by developed markets and premium devices, but the truth according to the numbers found seem to be less clear. In between the years 2014 and 2015, the percentage revenue derived from Western Europe dropped from 11.3% to 10%, even as overall revenues grew. Much of this is driven by Southern European markets that had been hit hardest during the 2008 recession. It will be interesting to see how Huawei looks to crack Germany, the UK, France and the US.

    So what does this all mean?
    Huawei smartphones and watches are firstly just the most visible aspect of the company and not likely even the most profitable. Huawei equipment likely runs at least part of the internet network that brought you this page. They power mobile networks around the world (outside the US). They provide storage (very large boxes of hard disks) to banks and businesses around the world.

    Huawei Consumer Device numbers are reflective of wider technological change. In the space of the nine years that I looked, you could see the peak of the feature phone business, where Huawei was predominantly a domestic supplier. The rise of the mobile dongle to fill the gaps in free wi-fi networks and the rise of the smartphone/phablet which negated some of the mobile working laptops did around email, but also acted as tethered modems reducing the need of dongles.

    Huawei’s numbers are indicative of a successful fast follower strategy. Huawei learned the smartphone trade by first of all making badge engineered Android phones for T-Mobile. It then went out on its own. Each generation of phone improved in terms of industrial design and they built a direct to consumer channel over time.

    Xiaomi’s direct-to-consumer e-commerce strategy was transformative in the Chinese market and something that Huawei replicated with the Honor brand. Huawei hasn’t tried to build services in the same way that Xiaomi has and hasn’t ventured as deeply into the smart home.

    In terms of device numbers the company has successfully managed to displace both Samsung and Xiaomi in markets, but despite the ‘premium positioning’ it has taken a while to build the average revenue per device (ARPD). If the 20 billion dollar annual revenue announced at CES, only represents smartphone devices, then the ARPD (of $188) is still less than a third of what Apple enjoys with the iPhone.

    The smartphone market like dongles and DSL modems before it is moving rapidly towards maturity and lower growth. It will be interesting to see where Huawei’s business strategy goes next.

    How I got the data?
    The data quoted is based on numbers given out in Huawei’s annual reports from 2006 – 2014 and the Huawei Consumer Device press room where Consumer Device started to break out some of their own numbers. The types of numbers talked about vary from year to year. You can see a copy of my collated and calculated numbers here. When converting CNY to US dollars, I assumed an exchange rate of 1 yuan is 15 cents.

    More information
    Huawei annual report page
    Huawei Ships 108 Million Smartphones in 2015, Contributing to Annual Revenue Exceeding $20 Billion USD
    Total order value of Huawei Consumer in Western Europe exceeds 2 billion dollars
    Huawei Consumer Business Group Announces 1H 2015 Financial Performance
    Huawei Consumer Business Group Announces 2014 Financial Performance
    Huawei Consumer Business Group Announces Q3 2014 Financial Results
    Huawei Consumer Business Group Announces 1H 2014 Business Performance
    Huawei Consumer Business Group Ranked Third in Global Smartphone Shipments in 2013