Ged Carroll

Month: January 2019

  • 3 year phone contracts + more things

    Paying for Keeps | CC Insight – 3-year phone contracts will suppress smartphone market even further, that includes 5G handsets (the why 5G in a handset is a whole other question). 3-year phone contracts will also likely encourage SIM only shopping. More wireless related content here.

    MOFT – World’s First Invisible Laptop Stand – of course early laptops had more opportunity to do ergonomic design which isn’t available when you fallow Apple’s ‘size zero’ design ethos. My first laptop an Apple PowerBook 165 had small rotatable legs. I am surprised that class action suits aren’t a thing due to RSI and carpal tunnel syndrome on modern laptops. The ergonomic information required to make the case for MOFT has been available for decades

    Uncover Harassers – rage as a plug-in. Surprised that there isn’t a UK version for gammons and remoaners respectively. Download this plug-in to optimise you’re being triggered. I get where they coming from but I can also see the downside of it as well

    The Facts About Facebook – WSJ – Zuckerberg’s op-ed falls flat with WSJ subscribers. A lot of people have written out how this back end binding of the services is as much about fending off coming regulation as anything else. Think Internet Explorer and Windows when Microsoft were taken to task. Read also Opinion | Mark Zuckerberg, Let Me Be Your Ghost Writer – The New York Times – funny but true, love the VCR analogy (paywall)

    I Bought a Fake Canada Goose Jacket on Amazon – The Atlantic – Amazon is full of fake stuff. There doesn’t seem to be a vendor quality control facility on Amazon Marketplace

    Global mobile ad spend set to tip TV in 2019 thanks to programmatic boom, and 5G boost – a 5G boost really?

    Huawei/Edelman Relationship Ends Before It Starts | Holmes Report – very interesting reading and the optics are pretty bad for Huawei.

    Xiaomi Mijia laser 4K projection TV goes on sale for 14999 Yuan ($2210) – Gizchina.com – who has clear space for a 100 inch screen to be thrown up on a wall?

    China has a special passport for its elites—like Huawei’s detained executive — Quartz – the smoking gun that connects Huawei to the government in the way that the company has always denied. I was really surprised that more hasn’t been made of this story. A P series or ‘Public Affairs’ passport is a non-diplomatic, but otherwise VIP passport for party officials and others who are very tightly involved with the Chinese government. It is the smoking gun that links Huawei and the Chinese government in a way that hasn’t been previously done and shreds a lot of Huawei’s counter arguments

    Tencent, NetEase Shut Out Again in New Batch of Games OK’d by China – Variety – “Given the current speed of new game approval, the backlog of games waiting for licensing, and the government’s stricter control over game content, we estimate it could take two to three years before the Chinese games industry stabilizes,”

    ‘They need the scale’: DTC brands like Peloton and Chewy are buying more TV ads | Digiday – because TV advertising still works

    WSJ City | Russia accuses Facebook Twitter of failing to comply with data laws – surprised more countries aren’t Balkanising personal data storage

  • DLD 2019 & things that made last week

    Scott Galloway presented at DLD 2019, Munich this week. DLD is a German version of Paddy Cosgrave’s Web Summit. You get attendance from the EU, the German government and German banking and industry as well as the tech sector. For those that don’t know him, Scott Galloway is a business professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and the founder of L2 Inc. which was recently acquired by Gartner.

    funicular freak – amazing Tumblr account, words that I don’t often have in the same sentence any more

    7 of the Cutest (and Smartest) ‘Year of the Pig’ WeChat campaigns | Jing Daily  and here is how you can get it wrong. The flexibility of the WeChat platform for marketers is something that western social platforms can learn from. In terms of the content, Gucci consistently manages to come up with the right product designs and content for WeChat around lunar new year.

    Chloe managed to do a good job using celebrities in their campaign. It was interesting that they collaborated with an Indian artist Rithika Merchant, rather than a Chinese artist for the New Year designs.

    I had another late addition to my collection of the best Chinese New Year creative. Heineken did a Chinese New Year advert for the Singapore market. But its not on their social feeds so I can’t share it. I presume that the content must be a TV only campaign.

    Starbucks opens interactive coffee sanctuary in Bali as tribute to Indonesia’s Arabica coffee | The Drum 

  • Things that I am reading at the moment

    Out of Control by Kevin Kelly

    Out of Control by Kevin Kelly

    I have been a subscriber to the US edition of Wired magazine for longer than I care to remember. We’re living in a different time now and the future that Wired features isn’t as thrilling as it once was. Kevin Kelly was one of the founding editorial team and still contributes. He also helped found The WELL and The Whole Earth Catalog. I like to revisit his 2010 book What Technology Wants every so often and have decided to delve into his back catalogue. I can remember skim reading Out of Control the first time around. Its a great read now that I am going more slowly, but like New Rules for the New Economy it informs as much with what it got wrong as what it got right. Technological progress has a weird pattern of looping around on several attempts before becoming an everyday product, so the ideas may have new life yet.

    How Brands Grow: Part 2: Emerging Markets, Services, Durables, New and Luxury Brands by Sharp and Romaniuk

    How Brands Grow: Part 2: Emerging Markets, Services, Durables, New and Luxury Brands by Sharp and Romaniuk. Part 1 is more famous for the impact it has had in consumer marketing. I have been working on a business-to-business project and have been thumbing through this, but probably not as enthusiastically as I should do. That reflects more on me than the book.

    To Kill The Truth by Sam Bourne

    To Kill The Truth by Sam Bourne. I received a galley copy of this book, it’s my current leisure read. Historians are being killed and historical records destroyed in the combustible environment of white nationalists and the alt left. The book is very now and its engaged me so far.

  • Airlines + more things

    Fliers Find an Old Friend on More Planes: Empty Seats – WSJ – Airlines’ average passenger loads first crossed 80% capacity in 2007, after climbing from 55% in 1978. Ryanair and other discount airlines must skew these numbers, which means that other airlines must run almost empty flights on some routes.

    Friends Don’t Let Friends Become Chinese Billionaires | Forbes – not surprised by the executions, as Balzac said, behind every great business lies a crime. And you can’t do anything in China without the necessary permits which means getting dirty. What I was more surprised by was the number of billionaires who have been murdered

    Automation in the transition region | Vox – really interesting read

    VW’s chairman says even small electric cars aren’t going to be cheap | Quartz – which makes a lot of sense as you haven’t seen Silicon Valley semiconductor type transformation in price and performance for the components. More automotive related content here.

    “Brand purpose” is a lie – a lot of truth right there

    North Korean Hackers Gain Access to Chilean ATMs Through Skype – impressive social engineering skills by the hackers

    BJ Fogg’s persuasive technology design has been abused by the likes of Google. The Stanford Lab is name checked in the article. What is interesting is that Tristan Harris doesn’t talk about the ethical aspects of the persuasive technology course curriculum – which graduates tend to ignore.

    Under house arrest in Vancouver, Huawei CFO lives in luxury and spends her days out shopping – Financial Post – “I’ve been working hard for 25 years,” she said through her lawyer during her bail hearings last month. “If released, my only simple goal would be to spend time with my husband and daughter. I haven’t read a novel in years.”

    China threatens reprisals if Canada bans Huawei from 5G contracts | RCR Wireless – no choice about it, Canada needs to ban Huawei now that the Chinese have drawn that line in the sand

  • Apple and Jaguar Land Rover in China

    Apple and Jaguar Land Rover blamed the Chinese economy for their recent financial results. The truth is probably more complex. What factors are affecting affecting Apple and Jaguar Land Rover that aren’t directly related to the Chinese economy?

    The reality is that Apple and Jaguar Land Rover are being buffeted by very different forces, some of which are their own making.

    Apple

    China is a unique mobile environment and in some ways it mirrors the hopes (and fears) for the internet in the late 1990s. Oracle and Sun Microsystems spent a lot of time during the dot com boom developing technologies that would allow applications to run on the web. Enterprise software sudden had a user experience that could be accessed via a web browser. Java allowed applications to be downloaded and run as needed. Netscape had a vision of the internet replicating the operating system as a layer that would run applications. Microsoft also realised this which was why they developed Internet Explorer, integrated it into Windows and killed off Netscape. The Judge Jackson trial happened and that was the start of the modern tech sector allowing Google and Apple to rise.

    Move forwards two decades and most computing is now done on mobile devices. In China, WeChat have managed to achieve what Netscape envisioned. Their app as a gateway to as many services as a consumer would need including a plethora of mini applications. It doesn’t suffer the problems that native web apps have had in terms of sluggish user experiences. In addition, WeChat has invested in a range of high-performing start-ups to built a keiretsu of businesses from cab services, e-commerce, property companies and even robotics. In the meanwhile Tencent who own WeChat have a range of consumer and business services as well.

    What this means for Apple is that many of its advantages in other markets are negated in China. The OS or even performance of a smartphone doesn’t matter that much, so long as it can run WeChat and a couple of other apps. The look and feel of the app is pretty much the same regardless of the phone OS. Continuity: where the iPhone and a Mac hand-off seamlessly to each other doesn’t matter that much if many consumers use their smartphone for all their personal computing needs.

    This has been the case for a few years now in China – but Apple haven’t found a way around it.

    As for phone industrial design – Apple lifted the game in manufacturing capability by introducing new machines and new ideas. To make the iPhone 5, Apple helped its suppliers buy thousands of CNC machines. This grew the manufacturers capability to supply and the amount of pre-owned machines that eventually came on the marketplace. It meant that other manufacturers have managed to make much better phone designs much faster.

    That meant Chinese consumers can buy phones that are indistinguishable from an iPhone if you ignore the logo and function the same because of China’s app eco-system. Again this has been the same for a few years and has accelerated due to the nature of the dominant smartphone form factor. The second iteration of the iPhone X form factor is what really changed things. The phones were different to what has come before, but they weren’t demonstrably better. They were also more expensive.

    In the mean time Huawei and others have continued to make progress, particularly in product design and camera technology – the two areas where Apple led year-on-year. Huawei devices can be expensive for what they are, but they gave domestic manufacturers ‘brand permission’ in the eyes of many Chinese consumers to be as good as the foreigners.

    This wasn’t helped by Samsung’s missteps in the Chinese market that started with the global recall of the Samsung Galaxy Note7 battery recall. Samsung hasn’t managed to make that gap back up and seems to make marketing missteps regularly such as its recent tie-in with the ‘fake’ Supreme brand holder China. If you’re a Chinese consumer the additional value or status that you used to see in foreign handset brands is now diminished. This seems to be a wider theme as domestic brands are also making similar gains in market share compared to foreign FMCG brands. Although there are also exceptions like baby formula.

    Domestic brands have done a good job marketing themselves. BBK in particular are very interesting. Whilst Huawei makes lots of noise and bluster at how big they are, BBK creeps up. It has a number of brands in China and abroad OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo and RealMe going after particular segments. The brands are focused but run separately like companies in their own right. Apple’s marketing riffs on its global marketing (though it did a great Chinese New Year themed ad last year). This reinforces the perceived common view that foreign businesses are full of hubris and don’t sufficiently localise for China. Apple’s recent pricing strategy in a market where this is so little to show in value provided looks like the epitome of hubris.

    180120 - China smartphone market

    Finally, there has been a massive amount of consolidation of brands in the China smartphone market over the past four years. That provides for scale in terms of logistics, supply chain, design, component sourcing and marketing.

    Jaguar Land Rover

    If we move to the automotive sector and look at Jaguar Land Rover – their problems in China look self inflicted. China’s car market has declined for the first time in 20 years. But it seems to have mostly affected brands like Hyundai rather than prestige brands like Mercedes Benz or BMW. The reasons why aren’t immediately apparent. Yes diesel cars are less popular, but BMW, Audi and Mercedes make diesel cars.

    Jaguar Land Rover aren’t the only foreign brand suffering: Toyota has had problems in China since the last round of strong anti-Japanese sentiment exploded in 2012.

    More information

    Why Does WeChat Block Competitors, While Facebook Doesn’t? | Walk The Chat

    Apple’s China Problem | Stratechery

    Samsung recalls Galaxy Note 7 worldwide due to exploding battery fears | The Verge

    Samsung angers hypebeasts by partnering with fake Supreme brand in China | The Verge

    Fake News: Samsung China’s Deal With Supreme “Knock-off” Spurs Drama | Jing Daily

    Chinese car sales fall for first time in more than 20 years | World news | The Guardian