3 minutes estimated reading time
COSCO SHIPPING Lines | Customer advisory on network breakdown within America Regions – Customer statement on how their business IT systems were (allegedly hacked and) shut down. COSCO is one of China’s state shipping companies. COSCO is also one of the largest owners of containers in the world. COSCO also owns OCS, the Hong Kong shipping line. More security related content here.
ITV Self Serve – this could be the equivalent of 1980s era slideshow style cinema ads for your local Indian restaurant. I could see the benefits for estate agent chains, car supermarkets and local hotels. All of which will be reliant on powerful expensive intermediaries (rightmove, autotrader and booking.com respectively)
Facebook Added Several Creative Tools to Its Ads Manager App – Adweek – reminds me a fair bit of percolate’s editing features
Hollywood Marketing Firm Ant Farm Is Shuttering | Hollywood Reporter – Omnicom, an advertising and media holdings conglomerate, is seeking to shed any venture that doesn’t have a substantial return on investment, or a 25 percent margin. “Omnicom is having a tough go, and they didn’t think they [Ant Farm] was core to their strategy,” said one insider.
Why Monocle shuns social media in favour of going swimming with its readers | The Drum – contrarian strategy in action
Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone (RACE) – Federal Business Opportunities: Opportunities – interesting project, there is a tension between this and the US law enforcement community’s concern about ‘going dark’
China economic analysis by Martin Wolff | FT – mix of rising debt, slower growth and lower than needed domestic consumption
Facebook stock plummets after warning of slower revenue growth – Axios – most of the growth now must be in the developing world
Apple Is in Danger of Abandoning Creative Pros – ExtremeTech – “You will see us do more in the pro area,” CEO Tim Cook said back in early 2017 at a shareholder meeting, in a response to a question about the Mac Pro. “The pro area is very important to us. The creative area is very important to us in particular.” I still don’t doubt the company’s commitment. But I’m certainly disturbed by its inability to execute lately.
Molecular clock chip promises improved smartphone navigation | eeNews Europe – huge for navigation and time stamped applications
The man who invented the self-driving car (in 1986) – POLITICO – interesting reflection on where machine learning has been before
There is no precedent—a president sides with America’s enemies – interesting if optimistic take on the rise of China. I think that the west’s beliefs have been shown to be malleable over the past couple of decades
Understanding multimodality: An analysis of early JUMP users – drives overall app use, cannibalises short distance drives
Before scooter shares, The Sharper Image was selling Razors to tech workers — Quartz – circular innovation in action. I remember the first person I saw with a micro-scooter was a German freelancer that we had in the office. It made him look like a knob as he tried to ride it through Covent Garden during the dot com boom. When working on Genie (a still birth mobile internet product that was extended out of a trial proof of concept) we had lots of them all over the office. The bag that the scooter came in was a solid cotton canvas duffle that I still have. As far as I remember I only took the bag and there was a load of these scooters sitting folded up and unloved in a cupboard in the back of the office when I left a year or so later
WPP courts Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent over $2.5bn deal – if they wait until Brexit drops, Alibaba and Tencent could push through a tricky purchase easily
The Chinese Communist party entangles big tech | Financial Times – there’s some antitrust arguments the west can easily make
Multinational brands predict higher spend on influencer marketing | PR Week – not sure why at the moment, where is the business case?
Amazon advertising is working directly with brands now, cutting out ad agencies – Digiday – this is similar to what Baidu, Sina and Tencent do in China.