Ged Carroll

Month: July 2020

  • Zero touch spaces + more things

    Zero touch spaces – Wunderman Thompson Intelligence  – I am actually liking these Logan’s Run style personal space bubbles. I also understand Wunderman Thomson’s concerns over zero touch spaces being close, but still isolated. I think of zero touch spaces as a physical manifestation of what we do mentally through cocooning with gadgets such as iPods, smartphones (and apps) and noise-cancelling headphones. Before that there was social networks (rather than real world networking), sat navs, etc. Both the zero touch spaces and cocooning puts distance between us and the world around us.

    https://flic.kr/p/hFSb5T
    Fiona Paton geodesic dome

    Government minister Liz Truss. get pwned on Brexit, international trade and the WTO by Adam S Posen of the Peterson Institute of International Economics. The discussion is so one-sided, it is like watching a naked drunkard getting mauled by a polite but hungry polar bear. Truss’ ministerial portfolio is international trade. It’s exceptionally grim to watch if you’re based in the UK.

    Ad Aged: Talmudic, Biblical, Keynesian and Advertising. – I have taken a different path. I always have and I always will. I try to do what I think is right and smart and good—and mostly difficult, not what is popular, obvious and pandering. Never trust anything from anyone who spends a good portion of their time practicing expressions in front of the mirror – some savage burns in this post

    How a Chinese agent used LinkedIn to hunt for targets – BBC News – The use of LinkedIn is brazen, but not surprising, said Matthew Brazil, the co-author of Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer. “I think lots of worldwide intelligence agencies probably use it to seek out sources of information,” he said. “Because it’s in everybody’s interest who is on LinkedIn to put their whole career on there for everybody to see – it’s an unusually valuable tool in that regard.” He said that commissioning consultant reports is a way for agents to get “a hook” into a potentially valuable source who might later be convinced to supply classified information. I’d be surprised if LinkedIn wasn’t used in this way.

    You Won’t Find These Masks at 7-Eleven – The New York Times – Although the pandemic will end at some point, he added, “people will still be using masks because they’re afraid.” While it’s unclear how well some of these more ambitious masks will fare with consumers, one innovation has been a clear hit: face coverings with high-tech fabrics that are said to provide superior comfort or protection. As summer temperatures rise, masks made of materials intended to keep wearers cool are in demand. People who have been wearing reusable cloth masks — including those sent by the Japanese government to every household in the country — are finding them ill suited for the heat and humidity of summer in central Japan, much less Singapore or Hong Kong. – That humidity also has issues for skin conditions beneath the masks offering beauty product opportunities. More design-related posts here.

    Parfums Givenchy Debuts Makeup in Animal Crossing – WWD – we’re seeing more of these brand activity for a few reasons. Lockdown gave the game increased cultural relevance. The game has a significant amount of female users. Like the original Atari games it isn’t too childish or gender-specific. Animal Crossing’s creator tools allowed consumers to bring brands to the platform.

    Jibo, the social robot that was supposed to die, is getting a second life – The Verge – interesting how NTT is looking to build an all digital version, I think the physical artefact is as important as the digital being

    China’s two-child policy means more babies named after mum | Today Online – Giving the mother’s surname to a child is gaining traction in Chinese cities, defying deeply entrenched family traditions in the country. The country’s one-child rule, which ran from 1979 to 2016, meant daughters have also been tasked with safeguarding their parents’ wealth and bloodline — previously this had been the preserve of male heirs. This caused a shift in some family’s attitudes but it was the law change to allow couples to have two children that has ignited the trend for kids to be given the maternal name. Now, some parents are giving the father’s family name to the first born and the mother’s to the second child.

    He’s 83, She’s 84, and They Model Other People’s Forgotten Laundry – The New York Times – these are the cutest influencers

  • Internet Myths

    There are myths that we tell each other about the internet. These internet myths aren’t helpful. They can adversely affect our planning and our online experiences.

    Masks & Puppets Bali
    Laurent Houmeau – mask, Bali

    So onward to the internet myths:

    What’s online, stays online forever…. – Tell that to the archiveteam.org who were frustrated in their efforts to save Yahoo! Groups for posterity by Verizon. This obstructive unhelpful behaviour is entirely in keeping with Verizon’s core values.

    Or the 700,000 Tumblr blogs containing over 800 terabytes of that were deleted from the web. Machine learning software designated any image that contained round shapes or beige for deletion. This was part of a Verizon effort to purge adult content from Tumblr.

    Finally, keen students of digital media services like Amazon Prime, Apple iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify etc will know how content appears and disappears in their digital libraries. A case in point would be my collection of James A. Michener books that I bought on Apple Books and then disappeared less than a fortnight later. No refund, and no mindless reading material to keep me occupied on a long haul flight.

    Everything is online…. – no it isn’t. There are large rafts of content that aren’t digital let alone online. Google and IBM have worked on large scale digitalisation projects. But there is content that never made the jump from analogue to digital. Master tapes decaying in record company vaults. If you go through Discogs like I do on a regular basis, you can see a huge body of recording that have never made it online via legal, or illegal means.

    You can find anything you want online…. – I remember the first time I found a web ring. These were connected ‘walkthroughs of pages by different authors all linked together in a giant ring. They catering to people who liked different subject areas. Education had double the amount of subject area webbings compared to sports. Cats hadn’t conquered the web yet: there were just 17 rings for animals and pets.

    And you got an arcane level of detail in discussions about the subject area. Over time, the web became too vast for ‘surfers’ and search engines came to past. Prior to the rise of the modern social web, I saw estimates that Google only indexes 15% of the available web. So 85% of content that hasn’t disappeared isn’t searchable.

    Secondly, a lot of content is being created on platforms like Instagram; where search is essentially broken in nature. There is a similar curation of search in TikTok where the focus is on the ‘now’.

    Then there is the concept of link rot. Where deleted content or broken links caused by SEO (search optimisation), or technology platform transition mean that content disappears. The phenomenon has been studied since at least the mid-1990s and Library studies academics have put serious efforts into documenting it. They set out measure how ‘unstable‘ in nature the worldwide web is as a research resource. The quote below by Sarah Rhodes of the Georgetown University Law Center sums up the problem quite elegantly:

    In the context of web archiving and digital preservation, one often hears that the average life span of a web page is forty-four days. This statistic has been repeated among those in the digital preservation community for years, but it never seems to be accompanied by a citation. In a 2002 article by Peter Lyman, a footnote briefly explains why the source of this figure is so elusive: “These data sources were originally published on the Web, but are no longer available, illustrating the prob- lem of Web archiving.” Ironically, the very source of a statistic often used to sup- port the cause of web preservation has itself become a victim of “link rot.”

    Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive’s Examination of URL Stability by Sarah Rhodes, Georgetown University Law Center (2010)

    More online related posts here.

  • China remote network access + more

    Morgan Stanley blocks remote network access for China interns | Financial Times – Another large US bank said its systems in China were exposed to frequent cyber attacks that were of “infinitely greater” magnitude than many other countries. – not terribly surprised that remote network access is a threat vector in China. More China-related posts here. It will be interesting to see if remote network access brings out more

    The Key to Winning Boomers Is To Be Turn-key | MediaVillage – basically like many cohorts, with a trusted brand convenience wins out

    Energy Department announces plan to build a quantum Internet – The Washington Post – Quantum only works point to point. This seems to be building Qubit computer capacity by copying supercomputing from the what I can see? From Long-distance Entanglement to Building a Nationwide Quantum Internet: Report of the DOE Quantum Internet Blueprint Workshop (Technical Report) | OSTI.GOV 

    Bingewatch Britain? Viewers more likely to finish a TV series if it’s released all at once | YouGov – reading this reminded me of Marshall Cavendish part-work books and their completion rates

    Do Chinese millennials want diversity in fashion ads? | Advertising | Campaign Asia – Fashion’s culture wars are dividing Chinese millennials. In June, a series of fashion and beauty moves, including a Calvin Klein pride campaign featuring the black trans model Jari Jones and the decision by some top beauty groups to take their skin-whitening products off the market in China, polarized opinions across the country’s social media landscape. While the mainstream overwhelmingly saw these radical changes as a byproduct of the West’s excessive political correctness, the fashion-forward crowd recognized these debates as the start of a much-needed change in their country.

    Duterte’s troll armies drown out Covid-19 dissent in the Philippines | Coda Story – interesting analysis of social media in the Philippines

    Home Shoppers are Trending Toward Buying Sight-Unseen, Selling Virtually – Zillow Research – digital acceleration

    The Ultimate White Fragility | The New Republic – so much to unpack in this

    The FBI Is Secretly Using A $2 Billion Travel Company As A Global Surveillance Tool | Forbes – I would have been surprised if they weren’t doing this with SABRE

    Korean Air Seeks to Convert Passenger Jets to Cargo Planes | Chosun.com – surprised that British Airways didn’t do this with their Boeing 747s, rather than retiring them

    On the Twitter Hack – Schneier on Security – Whether the hackers had access to Twitter direct messages is not known. These DMs are not end-to-end encrypted, meaning that they are unencrypted inside Twitter’s network and could have been available to the hackers. Those messages — between world leaders, industry CEOs, reporters and their sources, heath organizations — are much more valuable than bitcoin. (If I were a national-intelligence agency, I might even use a bitcoin scam to mask my real intelligence-gathering purpose.) Back in 2018, Twitter said it was exploring encrypting those messages, but it hasn’t yet.

    Ad Aged: More on the dismal science and the dismal state of Holding Company advertising. – interesting allegations of collusion

    Enter the parents | Film | The Guardian – no one suspected that he would turn out to have two brothers still alive and living impoverished, anonymous lives in mainland China. Nor did they have any inkling that Jackie’s mother had once been a legendary gambler in the Shanghai underworld or that his father had been a Nationalist spy and gangland boss. These are among the more startling revelations that Cheung uncovers. “The fact that his mother was an opium smuggler, a gambler and a big sister in the underworld was a big shock to Jackie and also to us,” she admits. “Everybody in Hong Kong knew that his mother was like a common housewife, very kind, very gentle.”

    China has big ideas for the internet. Too bad no one else likes them – CNET – New IP would shift control of the internet, both its development and its operation, to countries and the centralized telecommunications powers that governments often run. It would make it easier to crack down on dissidents. Technology in New IP to protect against abuse also would impair privacy and free speech. And New IP would make it harder to try new network ideas and to add new network infrastructure without securing government permission

    Japan’s karaoke bars offer ‘mask effect’ feature to amplify singing while wearing face mask – the intersection of changing consumer behaviour and product design with extra amplification to pick up on voices covered by face masks

    Creator of Douyin / TikTok: How We Created A Product with A Billion Views A Day in 18 Months: Part I – Pandaily – China style growth hacking profiled

    Singapore
    Fabio Achilli – Singapore

    Disneyland with the Death Penalty | WIRED – William Gibson nails Singapore. And its still true almost 30 years later

  • Nike Air campaign + more

    Nike Japan: Create with Air Max by AKQA. Japan seems to be particularly open to an augmented reality AR campaign in general. This AR campaign taps into the challenges that COVID-19 lockdown represented to creators and the wearing sneakers. The purpose of the AR campaign was three fold:

    • Reinforce the cultural aspect of the Air Max
    • Emphasise innovation in the Nike brand through the AR campaign functionality
    • Encourage customisation

    More Nike related content here.

    It isn’t usual to be proud of your government’s IT department. COVID Tracker Ireland on the App Store – had the highest uptake of tracker applications in a country’s population. It was based on Apple and Google’s APIs. Ireland has shared its code as an open source project – Ireland donates its COVID Tracker app to Linux Foundation. Singapore did something similar early on the year. Northern Ireland is said to be adopting Ireland’s code base for their own tracking app – Coronavirus: Northern Ireland rejects UK’s COVID-19 contact-tracing app | UK News | Sky News

    Beatboxing and digital sampling technology meets meditation in this video by Yogetsu Akasaka, a Japanese Zen Buddhist monk ‘Heart Sutra’ vocal live looping remix.

    How Taiwan’s Unlikely Digital Minister Hacked the Pandemic | WIRED – Audrey Tang has been doing some interesting press briefings on how the Taiwan government deals with disinformation. A lot of creativity is used; inspired by behavioural science. More on this podcast as well.

    The Korean Tourism Organisation collaborates with Netflix to promote Korea as a travel destination. The ad spot highlights locations drawn from food travelogues to Korean dramas on the platform. Korean drama already has an international following, previously it has been on specialist sites and DVD boxsets. Netflix has made the potential reach for Korean dramas even larger. At least some of the Netflix audience won’t have heard of ‘hallyu’, or K-pop. Netflix had helped improve access to international dramas in general. That’s the audience that the KTO is trying to tap into with this ad creative.

  • Venture capital, clean tech + more

    Venture Capital and Cleantech: The Wrong Model for Clean Energy Innovation by Gaddy, Sivaram and O’Sullivan – venture capital investment is very inefficient according to this MIT paper. More venture capital related posts here.

    Why business in Hong Kong should be worried | The Economist – Hong Kong is trapped like the grips of vice. Its economy is dominated by finance and rent-seeking businesses – Simon Cartledge for Gavekal Dragonomics, a consultancy, because these firms are over-represented in government, “Hong Kong’s single biggest disincentive to risk-taking and entrepreneurship—its high costs, especially for property—cannot be tackled.” That is why the back-to-business message is unlikely to resonate with ordinary Hong Kongers. This is probably why Hong Kong start-ups like DJI moved to Shenzhen to found their businesses. (Frank Wang did a lot of the key work on DJI drones whilst studying at HKUST. And even benefited from a small HKUST grant. But he moved across to Shenzhen to found the business itself in 2006.) Fintech has been a bit of a busted flush. It was the latest in a long line of business ideas like wine trading, the arts and medical tourism as failed niches for Hong Kong. Singapore seems to have been much more successful in business creation and seems to be seeing more venture capital interest. Current sectors in Hong Kong likely to be affected include the legal practices specialising in commercial arbitration. Without trustworthy commercial arbitration in Hong Kong doing business in China looks much less attractive. Singapore is trying to bridge the gap, but I suspect that there might be long term corrosion of Chinese business dealings. Digital companies and foreign banks face big worries. Between the Hong Kong Autonomy Act and the Hong Kong National Security Law – Helping America to enforce sanctions would violate the security law. Not doing so would incur American penalties

    The untold story of Stripe, the secretive $20bn startup driving Apple, Amazon and Facebook | WIRED UK – what’s more interesting about Stripe is the brothers reading list

    Remarks to the Economic Club of New York – United States Department of State – interesting speech by Mike Pompeo

    What It’s Like to Escape the Mindset of a Conspiracy Theorist – Vice – fascinating psychology

    Barr warns against corporate America’s China ‘appeasement’ | Financial Times – “You should be alert to how you might be used, and how your efforts on behalf of a foreign company or government could implicate the Foreign Agents Registration Act,” he said, referencing a 1938 law that requires foreign agents to publicly identify themselves – those comments hit US banks, Apple and other US multinationals. Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Remarks on China Policy at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum | OPA | Department of Justice – the US C-suite executives must be getting very worried about this

    Quisling

    The State of Strategy. A view from the Frontline | Noteworthy – The Journal Blog – great read and nails the issues affecting strategy and planning at the moment

    Mark Ritson: In a virtual marketplace, only the strongest brands will survive – Companies see better profit margins and an almost unlimited customer base but miss the drastic reduction in barriers to entry. – so brand hyper-competition will ensue and the winner takes all model will extend beyond tech. Expect venture capital money to pour all kinds of weird industry niches as they try to pick category winners

    WeChat users in the US say a potential ban of the app would cut them off from friends and family in China | South China Morning Post – Banning it might be a mistake. It would be more worthwhile using WeChat data to investigate Chinese in the US with ‘anti American’ sentiment as it’s easy to surveill in comparison to other platforms. WeChat sends messages in the clear with no encryption at all. You then start using the Espionage Act or the Patriot Act prosecutions

    Chinese liquor group Kweichow Moutai tumbles after graft news report | Financial Times – Moutai sales are linked to gifting and lavish consumption and some have linked the share price increase with a corresponding uplift in sales and by implication graft. The damaging bit in the article is that Moutai’s former chairman Yuan Renguo quoted saying in private that sales linked to corruption are “a normal part of business” and that China’s corruption clampdown would not reach far enough to affect the company’s business

    Banning junk food from TV an ‘irrelevant symbolic gesture’ that won’t reduce obesity | The Drum – the argument whilst true won’t be believed by regulators. Their rationale would be why would junk food companies advertise if it didn’t work? The distinction of this is junk food brand fighting out with similar brands in its category won’t wash. Secondly, advertising bans worked in the past on tobacco products over time

    The party’s grip – Under a new national-security law, Hong Kong is already a changed city | The Economist – you have to wonder about the share run and will the pop of the bubble be blamed on ‘foreign interference’?

    Outrage Over China’s Treatment of Hong Kong Galvanizes the West – WSJ – Complaints about China have piled up in Western capitals in recent years, but it took Beijing’s new curbs on Hong Kong’s autonomy to galvanize them around something approaching a common cause. – In many respects its like boiling a frog in reverse, it is likely that China didn’t expect the frog to jump out of the pot, given that the heat had been on so long

    Opinion | A Coronavirus Care Package From China – The New York Times – After the Communist takeover in 1949, traditional Chinese medicine was institutionalized. Folk remedies helped fulfill both a tangible need — credentialed doctors were scarce — and an ideological end: That system of knowledge is quintessentially and uniquely Chinese.  Today, the Chinese government sees a political opportunity in the continuing emotional appeal of traditional medicine. If Chinese people can embrace an Eastern alternative to Western medicine, they might also be more likely to accept the Communist Party’s governance model and reject liberal democracy

    Speaking in Tongues – Chinese Storytellers – such a great essay on the current challenge facing Chinese (and in particular Hong Kongers) writing for foreign audiences: a Chinese storyteller telling stories for an English-speaking audience in a divided world. As a writer who has called Hong Kong, Beijing and New Haven home, I find myself often in the position of what Zadie Smith once called “speaking in tongues”: equivocating between the lens of the insider and the outsider, examining the places I call home with both the “objective,” parachuted gaze of the foreign correspondent, and the emotionally implicated and invested eye of the local storyteller. Increasingly, that has felt impossible

    Google considers alternatives to Hong Kong for undersea cable | Financial Times – Hong Kong has – become less critical for not only US cloud providers but also their Chinese rivals, according to Tao Wu, a senior research analyst for Gartner, a tech research firm. “Singapore has become much more important than Hong Kong from a location and population perspective,” Ms Wu said. “Other top cloud providers such as Alibaba Cloud are much more focused on south-east Asia to go global than expanding in Hong Kong.” – this will have a big impact for those property developers who’ve invested in data centres (internet hotels). Hong Kong’s financial position for international trading desks will also be diminished if international telecoms infrastructure starts to divert away from Hong Kong. From a pure connectivity point of view Korea, Singapore and even the Philippines start to look really good