Ged Carroll

Month: February 2021

  • Klarna + more things

    Klarna

    How Klarna’s pastel pink exterior began to crack | Dazed – Klarna isn’t new technology, its unsecured financing. Once you scratch beneath Klarna’s technology veneer you realise that Klarna is like pre-internet business like a shopkeepers lay away or the catalogue agents who used to work for Freemans and Littlewoods. Previously the catalogue companies were vertically integrated with retailing and consumer finance. Now Klarna does the unsecured consumer finance, de-risking the retail business. But this business model leaves Klarna with all the risks. Klarna also has age-old problems regarding fraud. I am also concerned about the consumer debt risk that Klarna represents.

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong’s historic businesses face an uncertain future | Financial Times – my money would be on Jardines over Swire. Jardines moves in Indonesia seem to have just the right amount of risk to them

    Hong Kong population drops for first time in 17 years ｜ Apple Daily – unclear how much is due to national security law related exodus

    China

    Estonia warns of “silenced world dominated by Beijing” – Axios 

    Most people in Britain see China’s rise as a top threat to security in next decade, survey finds | South China Morning Post – China is the Millwall of countries in terms of soft power perceptions

    Ex-officials, academics call for US to work with Europe to counter China | South China Morning Post – “A road map for US-Europe cooperation on China”, published by the Paul Tsai China Centre at Yale Law School on Wednesday, the experts said steps needed to be taken as an “urgent priority” in six key areas: trade, technology, human rights, climate, pandemic plans, and reform of international institutions

    US and China on path to ‘inevitable’ economic decoupling: report | South China Morning Post – Rhodium Group report

    Confronting Chinese State Capitalism | Center for Strategic and International Studies 

    Dead poet rekindles cultural feud between South Korea and China ｜ Apple Daily – “There is general consensus that Yun is Korean and it is not in dispute,” he said, adding that “the Chinese hegemony is imposing its values on South Koreans.” – first trying to steal kimchi, now trying to steal Korean patriots; the Chinese government has no shame

    Energy

    This unusual hydrogen paste could revolutionize the transport industry – hydrogen offers a better opportunity than Li ion batters in the longer term

    Finance

    The China challenge | Financial Times – the interesting thing is the way China is co-opting Goldman Sachs and others as a fifth columnist hook into the US until they have their digital currency ready to challenge the dollar as global reserve currency

    Virtual control: the agenda behind China’s new digital currency | Financial Times – private sector innovates, government then does fast follower. A lot in about social control; but also useful for understanding the money supply in near real time that would allow the fine tuning of economic policy much faster

    Luxury

    Is The Role of Digital Becoming Obsolete Within Luxury Companies? – recent changes at the top level management at LVMH may signal a wider move within the luxury industry to move away from “digital transformation” and a shift towards a “total immersion” in their business.

    Miscellaneous

    The west is too obsessed with its colonial guilt | Financial Times – its also bad for the colonised who are fixed in a state of permanent victimhood – really interesting op-ed by Kamel Daoud

    Marketing

    Apply challenger thinking | WARC – remember, the enemy is indifference, not rejection. – BBH’s John Harrison on brand salience by any means

    The profound, unintended consequence of ATT: content fortresses | Mobile Dev Memo 

    Adam Curtis knows why we all keep falling for conspiracy theories | WIRED UK best read with The China model has come to America – Asia Times – Far too few Americans grasp the implications of such a view taking root among their own elite. Though more and more Americans are awakening to the challenges inherent in China’s growing economic, technological, and military capabilities, few understand the threat that China’s governing philosophy and structures pose to the US. – assumes that US philosophy will stand on its own merits, or in other words magical thinking or a blind spot

    P&G’s Old Spice to open first barbershop, doubling as content studio | Marketing Dive – kind of similar to the old Lynx barber shop in London

    Jaffa Cake economics | Yiu – I remember getting told off bringing a calculator into the supermarket when I was at university because of this

    Livestreaming: will UK FMCG get in on the Asian foodie shopping craze? – will UK consumers buy FMCG products over live-streaming?

    Media

    1 in 12 Irish people access radio on digital devices | RTÉ – About 8% of the population, or 330,000 people, listen each day using a digital device, the report found. Just under 5% listen via a mobile device, 2% on a PC and around 1.5% on a Smart Speaker and the remainder on a TV set or DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting). – 77% on FM. This makes sense given high car ownership, poor mobile coverage and slow progress of DAB head units in cars

    Top 100 Hong Kong movies – the best Hong Kong films of all time – everyone of them a banger

    China Bans BBC World Service, Following U.K. Ban Of Chinese Network : NPR – no one surprised

    China eyes ‘virtual production’ technique used in The Mandalorian to help local film industry catch up to Hollywood in visual effects | South China Morning Post – the scenes were not shot on location, on a movie set, or using a green screen. They were filmed in front of a giant LED wall display that could project an imaginary world as one that appears real to the audience. 
    Known as “virtual production”, the digital background are generated in real time by a powerful computing game engine, allowing filmmakers to combine live-action footage with visual effects in real time. 
    The technology could revolutionise filmmaking because real world settings can be replaced. China, with more than 20 billion yuan (US$3.1 billion) of box office revenue in 2020, is known for its theme parks across the country that double as locations for film shoots. In the town of Hengdian in China’s eastern province of Zhejiang, for instance, the so-called “movie city” built a replica of the Forbidden City for filmmaking

    Technology

    France Ties Russia’s Sandworm to a Multiyear Hacking Spree | WIRED – what comes through in these stories is size, capability; expertise in project management and long-term offensive planning – Microsoft says it found 1,000-plus developers’ fingerprints on the SolarWinds attack • The Register  – Russia has its own problems in terms of data security that Bellingcat has used in its Russian related investigations as databases bought on Telegram with digital currency

    Nasdaq Decodes: Tech Trends 2021 | Nasdaq – buzzwords in enterprise technology sales for 2021

    Facebook Meets Apple in Clash of the Tech Titans—‘We Need to Inflict Pain’ – WSJ – The war of words and ideas will ultimately play out in court, regulatory agencies and user decisions as both companies defend themselves against antitrust investigations. The potential regulatory settlements and legal decisions are likely to affect hundreds of millions of consumers’ phones in coming years. A Facebook spokeswoman, Dani Lever, said the choice between personalized services and privacy was a “false trade-off,” and that Facebook provides both. “This is not about two companies. This is about the future of the free internet,” she said, asserting that small businesses, app developers and consumers lose out under Apple’s new rules. “Apple claims this is about privacy, but it’s about profit, and we’re joining others to point out their self-preferencing, anticompetitive behavior.” – spoken like a true sociopath

    BBH_Labs – A download on Telegram – interesting that BBH is going here now

    Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou sues HSBC in the UK — Quartz – looks like this is a case to get hold of evidence that Meng hopes would be useful to fight the US extradition case

    NEC Bids for Open RAN Leadership | EE Times 

    Nanomaterials are being discovered in living organisms | Fast Company – nano technology’s dystopian grey gloop by other means

    Artificial intelligence helps automation, but can’t tell you where to put your money, Indexa CEO says 

    Sennheiser wants to 3D print you bespoke earbud tips using an app – problematic for Snugs

    Facebook reported revenue it ‘should have never made’, manager claimed | Financial Times – call it what it is: fraud

    UK competition watchdog warns Big Tech of coming antitrust probes 

  • Clubhouse & things that caught my eye this week

    Korean American security researcher Brian Pak looked at Clubhouse and some of the findings were very interesting. Pak posted a full analysis in Korean here. The key takeouts for me where:

    Some (probably early adopter) Koreans have been buying used iPhones so that they can try Clubhouse, since the app is currently iOS only.

    The concept of an audio chat app that isn’t new. Pak identified Clubhouse’s key strength as having an intuitive UI/UX and a large number of participants from various backgrounds.

    I found it interesting that Pak felt there might be technical difficulties in having Clubhouse for desktop (macOS / Windows) or Android. I suspect that the reason was more about managing the scaling of the app.

    Clubhouse is a closer to a mashup than a ‘real app’. It’s voice functions are based on Agora, a Chinese provider. Most of the rest of the features are using the Pubnub communications service platform. The way protocols have been handled was highlighted as a security risk. Stanford Internet Observatory got into this in more detail here.

    I can also recommend this coverage about how Clubhouse usage has evolved in Hong Kong, China, Japan and Nigeria.

    There was a major fall of snow in the US last week. It unfolded as a catastrophe across Texas. NBC’s New York affiliate set up a live stream at New York’s Time Square. It is amazing to zone out and watch. It could be considered to another entry in the slow TV genre pioneered by Norway’s public broadcaster NRK.

    I watched Adam Curtis’ Can’t Get You Out Of My Head last week and wanted to track down some of the films in it. Here are some of them.

    Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain was a film about opposition to the Japanese invasion of China. filmed during the pre-communist phase of China.

    Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy is a Communist propaganda film describing how a communist infiltrated a bandit gang and helped the communists to destroy them. It was apparently based on an incident that happened during the Chinese civil war. Like the other Communist films featured here, it is extremely stylised using Peking opera techniques mixed with ballet.

    A ‘slave’ girl on Hainan island runs away and joins a female group of communist soldiers who are fighting a local warlord in The Red Detachment Of Women. The film was made just prior to the cultural revolution at Shanghai Tian Ma studio.

    https://youtu.be/zoPM9d18e9o

    Finally The East Is Red is musical dramatising from the Chinese communist party perspective; the decline of the Qing dynasty through to the communist takeover.

    The original film was produced in 1965, right before the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The prologue seems to have been added after the ‘Gang of Four’ were put on trial. There is certainly a touch of the classic MGM musical to the production style, alongside Beijing opera and ballet.

    Filipino brand Jollibee did a pandemic themed Valentine short films which was really clever. All of the films were made by local directors and are emblematic of the COVID-19 experience. Tonally it hits the right spot for the Philippines. What might seem to be too cute and emotional for UK audiences resonates well in that market. Thankfully, it isn’t the tear-jerking emotional rollercoaster that Thai ads can take you on.

    I particularly like the second one because of the twist in the plot.

    Jollibee’s overall approach on brand as media makes sense when you think about the nature of the Philippines media market and the good number of diaspora that they need to reach.

  • User domestication

    User domestication was an interesting phrase that I noticed in an essay about the growth of WhatsApp. In the essay the author highlighted a number of factors in WhatsApp’s success:

    • Having a proprietary messaging client that didn’t support industry standards for messaging such as the XMPP protocol supported by Google Talk. (Google later abandoned the XMPP open protocol itself in favour of its proprietary Google Hangouts).
    • WhatsApp had a low learning curve of adoption through to a well designed user experience.
    • The user experience of WhatsApp was easy to learn
    • WhatsApp worked across both Android and iOS devices which helped its adoption through network effects

    This led to a number of things, which the author identified as user domestication factors:

    • A high level of user dependence on WhatsApp
    • No control over the software. (it can’t be modified, it prevents migration to another platform – a la Facebook and people’s address book)
    • Exploitation of ‘captive users’ who would find it difficult to resist

    If all of this sounds familiar, its because it was the Facebook playbook from the get-go. Like organising export of your address book from Yahoo! to Facebook, but not the other way around.

    Messing around with iPad
    Captured attention

    The author makes clear that WhatsApp is just an illustrative example.

    This probably explains why the essay doesn’t seem to match up with the WhatsApp story pre-Facebook. Founders Brian Acton and Jan Koum originally had a nominal subscription model. Acton went on to help set up the Signal Foundation, after leaving WhatsApp post Facebook takeover. His reason for leaving was concerns over the monetisation of WhatsApp by Facebook.

    But I think that there can be little argument that Facebook thought of WhatsApp as a user domestication opportunity.

    The relationship that the media industry has with consumers through the use of DRM (digital rights management) is a similar form of user domestication mentioned in his essay.

    Another example of this ‘user domestication’ in action is the apparent failure of Google’s search choice screen to have any effect on its monopoly market share in Europe.

    It differs from previous generations of technology lock-in exercised by the likes of Microsoft, IBM and Apple in that the costs of these obvious upfront. In user domestication, the costs are less apparent and the value extraction happens on an ongoing basis.

    More information

    WhatsApp and the domestication of users

    WhatsApp founder Brian Action, says Facebook used him to get its acquisition past EU regulators | Techcrunch

  • Signal messenger + more things

    Signal privacy orientated messenger

    Signal has become a popular messaging clients among my contacts for privacy orientated messaging. I’ve shared this guide a number of times, so I thought I would share it here. More on Signal messaging here. I use Signal on my phone and my desktop computer, both of which are an integrated experience.

    Innovation

    FISCAL YEAR 2020 a great report by the UD Department of Defence – a U.S. business climate that has favored short-term shareholder earnings (versus long- term capital investment), deindustrialization, and an abstract, radical vision of “free trade,” without fair trade enforcement, have severely damaged America’s ability to arm itself today and in the future. Our national responses – off-shoring and out-sourcing – have been inadequate and ultimately self-defeating – punchy, but I don’t see much attention being paid to it (PDF)

    The Times view on institutions’ ties with China: Academic Decoupling | Comment | The Times – overall change in UK stance across elites

    Germany to help Europe invest ‘billions’ in chip manufacturing 

    Quad’ nations sign up for meta think-tank to advance ‘Techno-Democratic Statecraft’ • The Register – Universities and think tanks from Australia, the USA, Japan, and India have come together in a new group that together hopes to advance discussions on the intersection of information technology, regional security, and internet freedom. Dubbed the “Quad Tech Network”, the group is managed by the National Security College at The Australian National University, an organisation backed by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

    Technology

    China issues new anti-monopoly rules targeting its tech giants | Reuters – interesting how the global temperament turning against technology and e-tailing

    China Blocks Clubhouse App After Brief Flowering of Debate – The New York Times – At times, the conversation went off the rails, as when one man who identified as Taiwanese chimed in to curse out mainland Chinese people, before quickly signing off. But for the most part, users said that the app’s use of moderators and real-time voice sharing promoted a civility and intimacy lacking on other popular social media platforms like Twitter and its Chinese equivalent, Weibo. – interesting given its reputation for racism and sexism

    Clubhouse is now blocked in China after a brief uncensored period | TechCrunch – they were a bit slow, obviously some of China’s project Golden Shield people need to reflect on their shortcomings.

    Brexit

    PRWeek poll: A third of PR businesses predict Brexit revenue hit | PR Week – “First, whereas previously the UK would always be the gateway for new entrants to the European market, we’re now seeing Germany emerge on par as the primary entry point. Historically, Germany would almost always be the secondary priority after the UK, then followed by France, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy. “Second, we’ve seen clients proactively ask to have multinational teams lead their account in Europe, as opposed to the traditional approach of having a UK-led European approach. In our mind, this is because the UK no longer has the same authority to lead. “This is one of the softer impacts of Brexit in terms of the UK’s perceived influence and leadership in the region.” Mark Pinsent, managing director of The Hoffman Agency Europe, has also noticed a trend for UK-based clients to “explicitly tell us that they’re keen to be positioned as European companies rather than UK”. “That can be tricky if they’re headquartered in the UK [or] don’t have a significant presence on mainland Europe,” he said. “It’ll be interesting to see whether, over time, the UK becomes less of a priority market for international businesses looking to market in Europe… certainly for UK-founded start-ups, I could see it accelerating their need to have EU-based businesses.” – the psychology of the UK’s diminished image is fascinating

    Culture

    Kaffeine | Rave culture and specialty coffee a comparison – nice verbal history of the Australian wave of London specialty coffee shops. It is interesting to see how specialty coffee went mainstream over time

    Luxury & streetwear

    New Balance wins $3.9m in damages from China logo copycats | Financial Times – The two defendants, Fujian-based footwear maker New Barlun and its distributor Shanghai Shiyi Trade, have expanded quickly in China’s smaller cities and sold knock off shoes at below half the price of New Balance. – Damages are still pretty low, only 2.5m pounds or so

    Luxury’s Involvement in Resell Could Be the Beginning of the End – I had written about peak streetwear a while ago

  • Golden bull & things that caught my eye this week

    Digital golden bull at Pavilion, Kuala Lumpur & Chinese new year

    The golden bull in question is on the digital screens of Pavilion, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Pavilion is an upscale shopping area and the animation was designed to tie into the year of the ox in the Chinese lunar calendar.

    The golden bull is supposed to be auspicious and is seen to break through the coronavirus that affected 2020.

    https://youtu.be/llFkwcAlFSk
    Pavilion Kuala Lumpur

    The golden bull execution is very similar to an installation done by a Chinese property developer that I found earlier this year. Both rely on corner screens and on understanding the viewing angle of pedestrian footfall streaming past the animation.

    Following on from my post collating adverts celebrating Chinese new year last week, Radii China had some additional suggestions that came out after I had written my original post. Let’s hope that 2021 lives up to the auspicious promise of the golden bull.

    Design & culture

    The Royal Shakespeare Company is looking at using a virtual set for a performance based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. RSC’s Dream will be performed live from March 12 – 20, 2021. It shows how the arts are looking to adapt to a COVID world and experimenting with cutting edge technology.

    RSC – Dream trailer

    My friend Arun has released a COVID inspired track available for purchase from Underbelly Music on Bandcamp. Check out the accompanying video here.

    Coffee Hype x Underbelly

    This weekend I will be watching the latest Adam Curtis documentary series – BBC iPlayer – Cant Get You Out of My Head it’s the only thing that I bother watching on the BBC now.

    Consumer behaviour

    Really interesting drill down into the American middle class by the Brookings Institute that came up with some concerning findings. I am slowly working my way through The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert J Gordon and much of this Brooking Institute findings fits in with this.

    Brookings Institute Middle Class Monitor