Easter & things from last week

Easter Week has mean’t that I’ve been exceptionally busy closing things before taking the long weekend break. Easter isn’t a huge holiday in the Carroll household, but its the first break that we get since the Christmas holiday, so always welcome. For many students in Europe Easter signals a hard push on revision in advance of exams. If you are studying or relaxing Happy Easter and Passover.

Kerri Chandler went through one of his Dad’s record boxes, that he hadn’t previously opened. His Dad had been a DJ and inspired Chandler to get behind the turntables himself.

Chandler Senior’s box is an eclectic collection of songs but also had impeccable taste.

  1. Cerrone – Love in C Minor (1976)
  2. Kerri Chandler – Get It Off (1990)
  3. Kerri Chandler – Super Lover (1990)
  4. Kerri Chandler – Drink On Me (1990)
  5. Ronnie Laws – Always There (1975)
  6. The John Coltrane Quartet – Greensleeves (1961)
  7. Lonnie Liston Smith & The Cosmic Echoes – Summer Nights (1975)
  8. The Impressions – People Get Ready (1965)
  9. The Delfonics ‎- Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time) (1969)
  10. Crown Heights Affair – Dreaming a Dream (Goes Dancin) (1976)
  11. Crown Heights Affair – Dancin (Special Disco Mix) (1976)
  12. The Dells – Always Together (1968)
  13. The Dells – I Want My Momma (1968)
  14. The Dells – Agatha Van Thurgood (1968)
  15. Bob James – One Mint Julep (1976)
  16. Bob James – Westchester Lady (1976)
  17. Roy Ayers – Searching (1976)
  18. Teena Marie – Portuguese Love (1981)
  19. Jakki – Sun…Sun…Sun.. (1976)
  20. Donald Byrd – Lansana’s Priestess (1973)
  21. Roy Ayers – Running Away (1977) 
  22. Kerri Chandler – Atmosphere E.P. – Track 1 (1993) 
  23. Martin Circus – ‘Disco Circus (Disco Version) (1979)
  24. Quincy Jones – Killer Joe (1969)
  25. Michael Franks – Tell Me All About It (1983)

You can here it here via Mixmag

More related posts here.

Beats in Space put together yet another amazing mix

Amazon leaving China. Amazon bought into an e-commerce business which at the time had just over 10% of the country’s e-commerce market. At the time I had colleagues in Hong Kong who worked on promoting the newly acquired business. A number of years ago I spent an inordinate amount of time creating a three-page document pitch for the Amazon China business. At that time Amazon’s market share was between 1.5 and 2% of the Chinese e-commerce market place. Five years later and its down to 0.6%.

1904 - Amazon China

What’s going on? Like most things there are a wealth of factors impacting foreign competitors in China. But one big one that people probably don’t want to admit is that Silicon Valley isn’t insurmountable. For decades the US technology has managed to concentrate wealth and talent in a small place and then benefited from market scale. Europe has been unable to replicate this success. It’s home market is an aggregation of markets that aren’t as integrated or coalesce as well as the US. And US companies exploit the European single market treating as divisible international components illegally.

When US companies like Google, Uber and Amazon hit China they come up against:

  • Smart people – Chinese universities churn out huge amounts of developers, engineers, designers and business managers
  • Huge home market scale
  • Equally well motivated entrepreneurs who know their home market better than the foreigners. They are also willing to work very hard with a 996 culture
  • Local market conditions that are divergent from their own. For instance, Google failed to predict how fast it needed to grow its search indexing to match the Chinese web. Baidu kept throwing in the boxes needed. Google had lost when it suddenly changed its mind on censorship
  • Government regulation (but that isn’t as important as they’d have you believe in most cases)

Amazon thinks that its cross border business where Chinese consumers buy abroad from online will grow. Consumers do this to get products that they can trust. Domestic platforms have made big gains in this market sector too though.

I wouldn’t buy a Range Rover Evogue, even if I was richer than Bill Gates. But I did love this advert.

And this old video of Jim Carroll talking about ideas as they relate to account planning.