QQ themed KFC + more news

First QQ themed KFC opens in Shenzhen | Marketing Interactive – interesting brand collaboration. KFC has always made a point of being more local and closer to the Chinese consumer than rivals. This has paid off over time. It is no surprise that there is a QQ themed KFC, but what’s next in terms of media-dining experiences? What could be the content tie-ins that would bring a QQ themed KFC concept to life? Is it the China market answer to Chuck E. Cheese?

Here’s How Snapchat Might Be Beating Facebook | TIME – relative engagement rates and popularity with millennials desirable for marketers. But it has easily copied features and might end up being the beta tester for Instagram’s new features.

Pentax K-1 Hands-on First Impressions – Bokeh by DigitalRev – I really like the look of it. Pentax has had a rough ride with change in owners but they are still a great DSLR camera platform. One of the key reasons for this is the cheap but good quality lens available for it.

Google takes aim at Microsoft and IBM’s enterprise clients (GOOG, GOOGL, MSFT, IBM) | BusinessInsider – probably not what IBM needs at the moment. I think that Microsoft would have much less worried simply because it has better client relationships. IBM Global Services have had issues for years documented by Robert X. Cringely in The Decline And Fall Of IBM

Is Apple starting to rot in China? Top level thoughts – SocialBrandWatch – It is less about ‘what the phone projects externally’, and more about “does the phone allow me connect digitally, if so, I am open to what fits me best” – interesting cross platform commoditisation as app layer becomes OS. WeChat is doing what Netscape thought that they could do with the browser and the web in the late 1990s. Also smartphones in trough part of innovation. The big gains between models are no more.

How Facebook’s Stock Split Lets Mark Zuckerberg Keep Control | Fast Company – getting out ahead of things to prevent a future Yahoo! situation with activist investors and slowing growth ending up in tortious tech death

Twitter now bills itself as a news app, not a social network | Digiday – ok, but where’s the revenue and user growth? Twitter has a lot of things going for it except the ability to effectively

Google just pissed off the entire TV industry | TheNextWeb – hahahahahaha really, lets see reach curve data across different consumer groups and CPMs. Technology companies don’t get marketing and branding. They do get sales, but they’re lame on brand and really understanding the consumer. More posts on advertising here.

The Guardian bets big on VR: ‘We’ve jumped in the deep end of the pool’ | Digiday – feels more like an experiment or a PR stunt rather than a meaningful media exercise. I guess it could be an interesting way to explore storytelling in VR. Film doesn’t work as well as an analogue as it has in video gaming. VR seems to be more about experiences and emoting

Yahoo’s $8 Billion Black Hole – Bloomberg Businessweek – My own take is Mayer had a nearly impossible job as a turnaround, but a manageable job as an optimise and shred. The products launched just weren’t up to standard and those that were aren’t monetised well. How on earth could Tumblr be worthless. We’re talking not just about underachieving a la Twitter, but literally having no value. When Yahoo! bought Flickr it was breaking even and they managed to ruin that as well

This is one big example of the market conditions that are holding Apple down (AAPL) – lengthening upgrade cycles. You’ll see an emphasis on services. It also means that the first Apple device is a pre-owned Apple device

Kaiser Kuo on Baidu, Foreign Reportage, and the ‘Paradoxes’ of China | Asia Society – great interview. Kaiser is one of the best ‘translators’ of China out there.

The Shape of Things — Welcome to Thington — Medium – interesting vision thing on the IoT by Tom Coates.

Traffic to Wikipedia terrorism entries plunged after Snowden revelations, study finds | Reuters – The traffic dropped even more to topics that survey respondents deemed especially privacy-sensitive. Viewership of a presumably “safer” group of articles about U.S. government security forces decreased much less in the same period. 

Penney’s results, subjected to peer-review, offer a deeper dive into an issue investigated by previous researchers, including some who found a 5.0 percent drop in Google searches for sensitive terms immediately after June 2013. Other surveys have found sharply increased use of privacy-protecting Web browsers and communications tools. – I am not terribly surprised as an Irish child growing up in the UK during the Troubles I saw the community around me self-censor so they couldn’t be accused of anything.

Apple iPhone, Once a Status Symbol in China, Loses Its Luster | NYTimes.com – “None of the brands do really great,” he said. “But while I might sell one or two Huawei phones in 10 days, I may not even sell one iPhone 6s.” (paywall)

The rise of China’s millionaire research scientists | South China Morning Post – A total 1.4 trillion yuan was spent on the sector last year, according to the government, more than the entire GDP of New Zealand