Ged Carroll

Category: business | 商業 | 상업 | ビジネス

My interest in business or commercial activity first started when a work friend of my Mum visited our family. She brought a book on commerce which is what business studies would have been called decades earlier. I read the book and that piqued my interest.

At the end of your third year in secondary school you are allowed to pick optional classes that you will take exams in. this is supposed to be something that you’re free to chose.

I was interested in business studies (partly because my friend Joe was doing it). But the school decided that they wanted me to do physics and chemistry instead and they did the same for my advanced level exams because I had done well in the normal level ones. School had a lot to answer for, but fortunately I managed to get back on track with college.

Eventually I finally managed to do pass a foundational course at night school whilst working in industry. I used that to then help me go and study for a degree in marketing.

I work in advertising now. And had previously worked in petrochemicals, plastics and optical fibre manfacture. All of which revolve around business. That’s why you find a business section here on my blog.

Business tends to cover a wide range of sectors that catch my eye over time. Business usually covers sectors that I don’t write about that much, but that have an outside impact on wider economics. So real estate would have been on my radar during the 2008 recession.

  • Friendly foxes + more things

    Friendly foxes pull in tourists to give Tohoku region a boost – AJW by The Asahi Shimbun – interesting that Tohoku’s friendly foxes awareness is word-of-mouth driven across so many different cultures. More Japan related posts here.

    Avicii Has Announced His Retirement – Magnetic Magazine – probably makes sense when you look at the current state of SFX. I suspect Avicii will still produce under one alias or another

    HKTB taps influencers to discover hidden gems in Hong Kong | Marketing Interactive – interesting passion-led campaign

    RuTracker to Bypass Web Blockade With IM Delivered Torrents – TorrentFreak – using a bot system to deliver torrents in Telegram messenger

    Mouse Movements Could Identify Tor Users’ Real IP Address | Greycoder – not terribly surprising given that back in WWII, radio operators were identifiable by their morse code key style

    Instagram Users Are Losing It over the Company’s Impending Switch | Vanity Fair – they’ve seen how algorithmic models have nuked influence in favour of brand advertising

    AP Investigation: How con man used China to launder millions – Law enforcement has not globalized as fast as crime, and the legal firewall that surrounds China has added to its appeal as a money-laundering hub. 

    Chinese authorities generally have done little to help Western companies defrauded in Chikli-style scams recover their money, according to European intelligence documents reviewed by the AP. 

    The U.S. State Department, in a report this month, reproached China for lackluster performance on money-laundering investigations. 

    “China has not cooperated sufficiently on financial investigations and does not provide adequate responses to requests for financial investigation information,” the State Department wrote.

    Xiaomi Exec: ‘We’re Playing a Completely Different Game’ | TIME – ‘we’re in the business of getting internet users’ -hmm sounds familar

    The next big thing in phones may not be a phone | VentureBeat  – “Everything in the phone industry now is incremental: slightly faster, slightly bigger, slightly more storage or better resolution,” said Christian Lindholm, inventor of the easy text-messaging keyboards in old Nokia phones that made them the best-selling mobile devices of all time – lumpy innovation

    How to Transfer Your Notes from Evernote to Apple Notes | Lifehacker –  this article and Microsoft’s migration path for Evernote users gives me a good idea of how in trouble Evernote must mean

    Cultural differences in responses to real-life and hypothetical trolley problems by Gold, Colman and Pulford – the trolley problem is whether you allow 5 people to die on a tram or divert it with a switch and only kill one person instead. Ordinary British people will pull a switch between 63 and 91% of the time but Chinese people would do so between 33% and 71% of the time. Chinese decision making seems to be based on belief in fate (PDF)

  • Starboard threat + more news

    Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer downplayed Starboard threat – Business Insider – thinking about the Starboard threat, she didn’t see that Microsoft could use its money to leverage a more friendly board. Mayer has quite rightly looked to better monetise search. I don’t agree with a lot of what’s she’s done but her instinct on this was right. More on Yahoo! here

    Those Entry-Level Startup Jobs? They’re Now Mostly Dead Ends in the Boondocks — Backchannel — Medium – looking at this, even Silicon Valley doesn’t value Cluetrain Manifesto

    Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley – The New York Times – Mr. Grove contrasted the start-up phase of a business, when uses for new technologies are identified, with the scale-up phase, when technology goes from prototype to mass production. Both are important. But only scale-up is an engine for job growth — and scale-up, in general, no longer occurs in the United States. “Without scaling,” he wrote, “we don’t just lose jobs — we lose our hold on new technologies” and “ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.

    Facing 35 percent ad-block rates, Future decided to drastically cut ad impressions | Digiday – interesting and probably smart approach to ad blocking

    Jean-Claude Biver: ‘The Watch Industry Is Not in Trouble, The World Is.’ | BoF – TAG Heuer has latched on to wearables

    Domo, Slack and Tableau: How the disruptors are already facing disruption | VentureBeat – not terribly surprising: easy rather than hard innovation with low barriers to entry. The barrier to entry is brand, marketing and user inertia

    The FTC Cracks Down On March 2015 Lord & Taylor Social Media Launch: Native Advertisers Beware! | Fashion & Apparel Law Blog – native advertising, not quite the wild west it had been

    Dynamic battery for the future developed by Japanese team  – A lithium-ion battery more than three times as powerful as normal that could be used in vehicles and power grids has been developed by a team of academic and corporate researchers in Japan

  • Microsoft in Yahoo! saga

    Microsoft in Yahoo! saga

    Re/code has an interesting article on how the Microsoft in Yahoo! saga continues to influence the sell off of Yahoo! assets by investing money in whichever bid coalition wins. This feels like a riff on Yahoo!’s history over the past six years.

    Careful balancing act for Microsoft

    The 2010 aggressive bid for Yahoo! was one of the factors in the departure of Steve Ballmer as CEO. A Microsoft-owned Yahoo! made almost as little financial sense as the Nokia handset acquisition.

    A later deal via active investor Carl Icahn gave Microsoft everything it wanted. Access to Yahoo! search inventory with no upfront payments. Under the Microsoft deal Yahoo! lost search market share and ad money. Microsoft’s AdCenter was not able to monetise Yahoo!’s search traffic as well as Yahoo! did. Search used to be responsible for half of Yahoo!’s revenue.

    Whilst Yahoo! now represents a smaller proportion of search traffic it is still lucrative for Microsoft. Microsoft’s advances in cloud services are still not as lucrative as search advertising.

    Microsoft will want to defend a position that on a rational analysis shouldn’t last. By loaning money, it gains leverage over a new management team.

    Cheap money to structure deal would be attractive for private equity groups. But it will be bad for the management team put in place and Yahoo!’s future prospects. The Microsoft in Yahoo! saga was at best a spoiling move.

    All just a little bit of history repeating

    Microsoft provided financial support for Icahn’s run at Yahoo! which saw the departure of Jerry Yang – and the sale of his position in the company. At the time of his overthrow, Yang was the largest single shareholder in Yahoo!.

    Six years later we can all see how successful that was.

    Problems that it won’t solve

    Yahoo! morale. There will be a right-sizing of  the workforce, private equity will be ill-prepared to retain the talent required to maintain and evolve Yahoo!’s services. They will also find it impossible to bring in talent in key areas (beyond senior executives). Yahoo!’s former chief product offer Blake Irving is a case in point of this. Expect Facebook, Amazon, Google and others hoover up the key technical talent Yahoo! needs to retain.

    Yahoo!’s international business seems to be a point-of-failure. Yahoo! has withdrawn from markets, particularly in Asia where market conditions should be much better. It has wound up businesses that it had recently acquired in the Middle East. Yahoo! Europe seems to have gone from bad-to-worse.  Expect Yahoo! to shutter more businesses and consolidate its business in North America.

    A highly leveraged Yahoo! still won’t have a mobile advertising solution beyond Flurry. Yahoo!’s own mobile apps consistently under-perform in app marketplaces. The mobile talent Yahoo! has gained will head for the door.

    Yahoo! still won’t work out how to sell millennial advertising. Tumblr is a good property, yet Yahoo! can currently monetise 15 per cent of advertising inventory on the platform. How will private equity solve this? Or will someone else pick it up at a fire sale? Microsoft is likely to try and stop any sale to Google (which would be a natural home).

    Yahoo! still won’t have an effective play in social platforms. Flickr will still be a niche rather than mainstream product.

    A key goal for Microsoft would be to obtain search traffic from Yahoo! Japan. Since Yahoo! Japan is a joint venture with SoftBank, this won’t happen. Yahoo! Japan has already gone to court to keep Microsoft out of its business. The new relationship with a divested core won’t change this.

    Getting Yahoo! on Microsoft’s cloud would be a major coup, but would require major coding, something that private equity owners probably wouldn’t want to do.

    Yahoo!’s IP including core patents for paid search offer little opportunity for additional revenue. They can’t be used against Google and would be unattractive to sell on. Yahoo!’s contributions to open source software would be missed – PHP, Hadoop and the Debian distribution of Linux have all benefited.

    History as an indicator of failure

    This would represent the second activist shareholder owned board. The current one has been responsible for a catastrophic destruction of value. None of the acquirers have articulated a reason why advertisers should believe in them. Whilst a deal needs to maximise value for Yahoo! shareholders; if it doesn’t offer a plan that pleases customers – it will fail.

    A highly leveraged business will not be in a good place to cope with programmatic advertising which will likely reduce the cost of Yahoo!’s over-priced display ad inventory. The likely leverage also means that Yahoo! would make an unattractive long term partner for the major marketing groups. More on Yahoo! here.

    More information
    Microsoft Tells Possible Yahoo Buyers It Would Consider Backing Bids | Re/code
    Yahoo! – how did we get here? | renaissance chambara
    Reflecting on Yahoo!’s Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation | renaissance chambara
    Facebook: the Yahoo! patents case | renaissance chambara
    Why I am sunsetting Yahoo! | renaissance chambara
    The trouble with Yahoo!’s M&A scuttlebutt | renaissance chambara
    Thoughts on the Microsoft and Yahoo! search deal | renaissance chambara
    Yahoo! Japan and The Gordian Knot | renaissance chambara
    Yahoo!: some things I am worried about | renaissance chambara
    Barbarians in the valley | renaissance chambara
    The Steve Ballmer Post | renaissance chambara
    The Wall Street Journal Online bounced my comment | renaissance chambara
    A quick primer re @blakei @yahoo #delicious | renaissance chambara
    2010 MICROSOFT BID FOR YAHOO | NY TIMES

  • Woz + more things

    Woz

    Reddit have interviewed geek heroes. In each interview they discuss their formative moments for a series of videos on YouTube. The complete playlist is below. Steve Wozniak aka Woz is one of the geek heroes highlighted . It’s a a quality interview with the Woz on form on various topics. You can read more about Woz here.

  • VS250 online racism crisis

    VS250

    Virgin Atlantic flight VS250 had a tough finish to the week as Chinese social media users and their overseas counterparts united to hit the airline hard. The problem had percolated for the previous two weeks on Chinese social media as netizens fumed at the way cabin staff had allegedly treated a Chinese woman traveller.

    Chinese social media users are known for their direct co-ordinated action such as the ‘human flesh engine’ in a way that is similar to Anonymous or Reddit readers – but at a greater scale.

    Looking at the VS250 related social data we can see that there were two concerted pushes on social media. The first one happened on Twitter at 4am – 5am and then hours later it landed on Facebook. Interesting that the open nature of Twitter was the first place Chinese netizens went. Presumably because it was more visible and likely to get picked up. A second reason might be the superficial similarity with Weibo made it their first choice.

    The surge post volume would be enough to stress even the largest and most sophisticated customer services team.

    Key lessons for brands:

    1. A Chinese market problem has the potential to be an international one. The Virgin Atlantic team had a good two weeks to either shutdown the protest through a quick resolution or prepare for the Chinese netizen onslaught. They didn’t seem to do either
    2. The Great Firewall will not keep the protest isolated. In fact through benign neglect the Chinese government has encouraged patriots to jump the firewall on issues like Taiwan
    3. Expect a more co-ordinated approach if the protest jumps the firewall. It can be diagnosed by looking at realtime data
    4. Chinese netizens can effectively drive international media coverage, despite western scepticism or possible concerns of state collusion. (They often give the Chinese Communist Party too much credit, and not enough credit to the effective adhocracy Chinese netizens create)
    5. Sentiment analysis doesn’t seem to be a good trigger / escalation vector in this incident as the tweets mostly seemed to register as neutral based on the analysis tools that I used. On their own it wouldn’t indicate anything untoward – which negates some of the pretty command dashboards you see

    Here’s a similar analysis that I did on the Panama Papers.

    More information

    Trail of conversations on Sina Weibo – you need an account to log-in and see the content
    Virgin Atlantic targeted after racism accusations | Global Times
    Woman Was Called “Chinese Pig” on Flight by Passenger, Only to be Threatened by Crew to Leave the Plane in Mid-air | People’s Daily – probably the best write up of the incident by Chinese government’s paper of record
    Virgin Atlantic investigates abuse case as story goes viral | China Daily – London bureau breaks the western social media debacle for English language readers
    Chinese woman claims flight attendants ignored her after man called her ‘Chinese pig’ | asiaone – asiaone is a Singaporean news aggregator owned by SPH who own The Straits Times
    Richard Branson sends apologetic tweet after woman claims she was called a ‘f****** Chinese pig’ on Virgin flight by fellow white passenger… but cabin crew threatened to kick HER off the plane | Mail Online – the Mail Online piece is particularly importance as it validates the story for western audiences and other media such as The Metro
    Richard Branson apologises to woman called ‘Chinese pig’ on Virgin flight | Metro.co.uk