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.

  • Pebble

    It took me a little while to write this post on Pebble. Pebble was a start-up that looked to build a more civil microblogging platform than Twitter. Unfortunately it closed on November 1, 2023.

    tombstone

    It supported 280 character posts, replies and messages. The staff validated prominent users such as journalist accounts. The service had its own mascot rather like the famous Twitter fail whale; it was a snail called Herbert.

    Pebble.is

    It was the little touches in the user interface that most impressed me when I first started using it, like the ‘radio button’ functionality that showed you what mode you were using the service in. In the screen shot above you can see how the profile icon on the left is filled out to show I was looking at my profile.

    The Pebble community

    The founders set out to build a community that more resembled early Twitter than the reactionary discussion dominated platform of today. Along the way they also looked in improve the Twitter user experience design. The product was launched as T2 and slowly built up a community. There are good reasons for slowly building a community.

    As co-founder, Gabor Cselle put it

    “Twitter, but back to the roots”

    From T2 to Pebble: The Rise, Challenges, and Lessons of Building a Twitter Alternative by Gabor Cell on Medium.com

    Years ago, I got to see George Oates talk about how the community around photography social network Flickr built up. The key was a slow build up of the right people to ensure a community was built with a set of norms that would morph into community rules and culture as the platform scaled larger.

    Which begs the question is Pebble a platform at all, or a common state of mind that bonds the community together?

    The Pebble community was surprisingly diverse from designers, fantasy authors and Silicon Valley insiders to Japanese cat enthusiasts and a few random netizens like myself. It was odd and eclectic like Twitter circa 2006 / 2007. In this respect it certainly met the brief of “Twitter, but back to the roots”.

    This diversity was even more surprising that the platform had about 20,000 registered accounts in total. Media coverage of T2 had garnered an original waiting list of 33,000 interested people.

    T2 is dead; long live Pebble

    Originally the platform was called T2, a not so subtle allusion to the ambition of building a better Twitter microblogging service. One that isn’t full of reactionary content, or the erratic policies of owner Elon Musk.

    T2 rebranded to Pebble. This was to provide a name that was more human-friendly than T2. The move to Pebble pleased investors, but didn’t help attract new consumers.

    Criticisms

    Pebble didn’t work for everyone, my friend Stuart claimed that he found it unusable with Microsoft Edge. Pebble didn’t have an app, which would have taken time to develop and so would APIs.

    If Pebble had started licensing APIs to social listening platforms, this may have driven more brand interest in the platform over time and would have been a clear differentiator vis-a-vis Threads, Bluesky, TikTok and Instagram.

    Scale

    In the technology sector, scale is considered to be everything. But that’s the approach that left us with TikTok, Facebook and Twitter with all of their attendant problems. Yet despite the attendant problems of large technology platforms, trust and safety were not clear compelling differentiators for Pebble.

    Pebble.is

    A second problem that the founders identified was that there wasn’t enough content coming in to make it a daily destination. Like Twitter and Threads before it, I found I had to ‘wind up’ to putting content on the platform on a daily basis.

    My timing wasn’t great.

    The End

    The last post was by Serge Keller, who posted a video of Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again.

    serge

    “This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”

    Winston Churchill

    Pebble didn’t completely die. As soon as news broke of the platform’s demise a few things happened. Participants started rallying around, sharing their details on other platforms and sharing invites for Bluesky and Mastodon.

    Gabor set up a sub-Reddit for Pebble participants, which didn’t get too much take-up. But a Mastodon instance that he skinned in the Pebble UI and put up as a social experiment did manage to take off.

    It provides an improvement on the user experiences I have seen on other Mastodon instances so far. A surprisingly large amount of the Pebble community kind of held together across Bluesky and Mastodon. This indicates to me that to those that know safety and trust might be more compelling than we currently believe. I find myself using the Pebble Mastodon instance more than Bluesky at the moment.

    More related content here.

    More information

    From T2 to Pebble: The Rise, Challenges, and Lessons of Building a Twitter Alternative | by Gabor Cselle | Gabor Cselle | Nov, 2023 | Medium

    Pebble, a startup that tried and failed to take on Twitter, finds new life on Mastodon | Yahoo! Finance

    @canongatebooks • It’s been a year (and 3 days) since Elon Musk bought Twitter. Strange to say, part of my profe… • Threads

    Twitter clone Pebble is shutting down just five weeks after a rebrand | Engadget

  • Watch registry

    Over the past few years we’ve seen a plethora of watch registry platforms spring up. There have been a number of reasons for this happening:

    • European Union regulations
    • Business processes
    • Crime

    European Union regulations

    The European Commission Health and Digital Executive agency have been championing the idea of digital product passports across a range of sectors including textiles and various manufactured goods. This includes:

    • Electrical and electronic equipment
    • Batteries
    • Food waste
    • Textiles
    • Packaging and packaging waste

    Even if a watch is mechanical in operation and doesn’t come with a sewn strap, it still comes with packaging. Digital product passports mean that watchmakers end up with a watch registry service almost by default for newly manufactured watches.

    The EU digital product passport sits at the intersection of a number of EU related policies including the Ecosystem for Sustainable Products regulation and the Cyber Resilience act. The focus on sustainability is designed to facilitate a circular economy of manufactured, serviced and recycled materials. Having a product’s documentation follow it through its life helps prevent fraud and regulatory non-compliance in a similar way to animal passports as part of the common agricultural policy. It isn’t perfect but it makes criminal activities harder to do and easier to uncover. For such a system to work, it would need to resist the efforts of bad actors like Russia.

    There are secondary benefits to the digital product passport including inserting friction in the global trade of products made outside of the EU for importation into the trading bloc, such as fast fashion items.

    Luxury items, by their nature have less to worry about, but given their high value, at a future date analysing watch registry data may help understand and intercept money laundering schemes.

    patek

    There have been existing watch registry players for instance The Watch Register which is a spin-off of the Art Loss Register.

    Business processes

    As well as using the digital product passport for regulatory purposes and a watch registry. Digital product passports allow product traceability to facilitate:

    • Manufacturing including quality control and quality assurance
    • Service and repair
    • Customer relationship management
    • Product recycling or remanufacture
    • Proof of authenticity throughout the life of the product, provided as a watch registry function

    Crime

    Non manufacturer related platforms have been very upfront about their concern to help combat watch thefts that seems to have surged. Between 2021 and 2022 luxury watch thefts in London surged over 40 percent. London as a global city has rapidly built a reputation for itself as a centre for watch thefts. It has been suffienctly out of control that a luxury auction house and secondary market dealers have been warning prospective and existing customers of the crime risk. The idea is that by having traceable ownership of timepieces in a watch registry, the stolen watches would be harder to fence and would likely be seized when submitted for service, repair or resale.

    For secondary dealer watch related fraud has also been an issue with a high profile allegations against Anthony Farrer aka The Timepiece Gentleman (TPG).

    The Watch Register

    The Watch Register was founded in 2016. For a 20 percent fee, they will store the details of a stolen watch. Watch dealers then check inventory that they are about to receive against the their database. This is problematic for a number of reasons:

    • You can’t register your watch unless it’s been stolen.
    • Police are now reluctant to provide a crime number to watch thefts, which you need to register your watch.
    • There’s a 20 percent fee for registration
    • The watch, its box and papers may have all been stolen. Which might make having the watch number to hand all the more difficult.

    Reviews on watch forums of the service have been mixed. Given the forthcoming regulations coming through The Watch Register is likely to be relegated only to older watches and its 20 percent commission fee looks expensive versus both manufacturer offerings and Digital Watch Vault.

    Blockchain and Watch registry

    Some of these services have adopted blockchain as their technology stack of choice. I am sceptical of blockchain as a technology in general due to its relatively slow transaction rate compared to relational databases and high speed payment networks operated by the likes of Visa, Mastercard and American Express.

    Arianee digital passport

    Arianee is a SaaS business and a governing body for a protocol. It offers digital passport and membership services that are used by luxury fashion brands, luxury retailers and beauty brands. Several watch brands have adopted Arianee’s digital passport offering. The product is white labelled and different brands might use different functions, but it is based on top of a block chain technology stack.

    • Audemars Piguet
    • Breitling
    • MB&F
    • Panerai
    • Roger Dubuis
    • Vacheron Constantin

    Breitling was the first of the brands to launch its digital passport service in 2020, Panerai rolled their version out in October 2023. There isn’t cross-brand interoperability to make a registry of registries. They all seem to operate as ‘shards’ or instances.

    Aura digital product passport

    Aura is an LVMH led consortium for the deployment of blockchain based solutions focused not he luxury sector. Other luxury groups including Richemont and Prada Group are members. Much of the use has focused on luxury fashion brands like Loro Piana and Prada. Cartier is also involved and the service is pitched at luxury watch makers. Watchmakers involved include

    • Bulgari
    • Cartier
    • Chopard
    • H Moser
    • Hublot

    Like Arianee there isn’t cross-brand interoperability for the watch registry function.

    Digital Watch Vault

    Digital Watch Vault is a platform that has been put together by individuals involved in the secondary market for watch. There is no charge to submit the details of your watch.

    Digital Watch Vault is a new service. It has a number of high profile advocates as well as some detractors.

    More luxury related topics here.

    More information

    Digital Watch Vault

    Introducing My IWC Passport | IWC Journal

    A digital passport for our watches | Panerai

    The Watch Register

    KPMG Switzerland | Blockchain technology in the luxury watch industry

    Six Steps to Digital Product Passport Readiness | Kessler

    Digital Product Passport | European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA)

    Wearing your Rolex or Patek Philippe in Europe? Why you should be worried about London and Paris’ spikes in luxury watch theft | South China Morning Post

  • Omakase

    Omakase origin.

    Omakase is a Japanese term that has become popular in Korea. Omakase as a phrase comes from the term ‘makaseru’ meaning to entrust. In a sushi restaurant omakase meant the customer turned over responsibility for choosing their menu to the sushi chef. The chef would choose the type of fish and the cut. They would assemble the sushi in front of the customer, tell them what it was and choose the next piece, based on what they think the customer should try next. It is likely to have developed sometime in the last two centuries when nigiri sushi became popular. This was sushi that could be quickly assembled in front of the customer – which is essential for the way omakase operates.

    Omakase experience

    The personalised nature of the experience and the choice of ingredients by the chef rather than the customer means that omakase is an expensive experience. The ingredients will be seasonal in nature and the chef will select the finest ingredients available.

    Tokyo Sushi Chef
    Tokyo sushi chef by Yi Chen

    Like having a meal at a western restaurant awarded three-stars by Michelin Guide, there is a degree of theatre and ceremony around it.

    Few formal dining experiences are as revered or as intimidating as omakase

    Kitchen Language: What Is Omakase? | Michelin Guide

    All of which makes it ideal for a luxury culinary experience, which has gone international along with the sushi restaurant.

    It was a feast to remember, 22 courses, all chosen and prepared by the chef himself, right then and there, plus three wines poured in generous amounts

    Inside the Costly, Rarified World of the Omakase Menu | Vogue (US edition)

    Omakase meets Korea

    A short trip across the Sea of Japan (or what the Koreans call the East Sea) is South Korea. And it was inevitable that this particular type of sushi experience would cross the waters as well, given that it has already made it the best sushi restaurants in the US and Europe.

    gangnam at night
    Gangnam at night by laurabl

    Expansion of Omakase

    In Korea omakase took off some time before 2020. At first it was in upscale sushi restaurants. Then it extended itself into tempura in the Japanese restaurants of high end hotels in Seoul, you see this in some restaurants in Japan as well.

    It started to spread throughout the country beyond Seoul and as it grew geographically within Korea, it was extended beyond Japanese cuisine.

    Western dessert tasting menu as an omakase experience

    • Coffee tasting with your own barista. Coffee fuels Korean work life and is immensely popular.
    • Champagne tasting with a personalised experience from a sommelier.
    • It has been even extended to grilled pork belly – a stable dish of Korean neighbourhood restaurants. Rather than barbecuing it yourself, pieces are selected and grilled for you by a personal chef.

    Why ‘Korean omakase’ happened?

    In Korea you have a confluence of factors affecting young consumers.

    Korea is known for its luxury consumption. On a per capita basis, Koreans spend more on luxury personal goods than any other country. Harrods has been surpassed as the number one retailer in luxury goods by the Shinsegae department store branch in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Korea with $2 billion dollars of sale in 2021.

    Like young consumers in many developed markets, young Koreans have money in their pocket but are unlikely to be able to afford to buy their own home. Korea’s ultra-wealthy have a good deal of their wealth in buy to let property.

    The Jeonse system of home rental exasperates the home ownership problem. A Jeonse tenancy begins with the initial security deposit of a single amount which is usually about 40% to as much as 80% of the current market value of the property. Unlike in most of Europe, the interest yield on the deposit will not be paid to the tenant, but the landlord can keep this as income. No additional monthly rent is paid. On expiry of the contract period, the original deposit will be refunded in full.

    This leaves young (and not so young) Koreans heavily indebted and makes it hard to plan for the future.

    Live for today, the future is lost anyway

    So young Koreans spend on luxury consumption now, rather than save for a future that they believe is unaffordable. While Korean is a developed economy with successful industries, one in ten of young Koreans are unemployed. When they look at the generation of Koreans who built the country over from the post-war years into the developed economy it is today; 45% of these elderly live in poverty.

    Omakase as social standing

    Luxury consumption is used to reflect a higher social standing. Korea is known for a high degree of conformity, which creates big fashion winners. Once a trend picks up, it goes everywhere, but then also has a finite life as brands like The North Face have found to its cost in the past as consumers move with the crowd.

    But Korea is also a Confucian society which means that social standing matters, and this is where the luxury consumption comes in. The quest has moved into online channels as well, with these channels showing to your peers your social standing.

    Jeong

    The social platforms act as a pressure point in modern Korean life. Because of social, luxury experiences like omakase become as important as having luxury goods.

    In Korea, the power of social is amplified by jeong (정) – can be considered to be a sense of social responsibility. Jeong is a positive force for conformity and community in a collectivist society. Historically, jeong is built through shared experiences, such as eating together and a sense of community bond is formed.

    Aspects of jeong include

    • Scheduling quality time with loved ones.
    • Create meaningful shared experiences.
    • Expand and engage with your community.

    Modern urban and digital life has disrupted Korean society which has meant that values like jeong manifest themselves in new ways.

    Mukbang aside

    The principles of jeong is where mukbang videos originally came from. Mukbang started as streaming videos where the host would share a virtual meal with the viewers and interact with them. Korean meals are designed to be shared, yet a third of Koreans live in single person households. Mukbang provided the lonely with shared experiences that had a degree of meaning in their lives – creating a kind of virtual jeong between the host and the audience. Now they are genre of video content that’s carefully edited and removed from the original social context that they came from.

    Getting back to jeong, think about your Instagram feed for a moment, think about how you might feel if you have had a mediocre day and your feed is filled with people you know living their best lives. Now dial that up to 11.

    Sharing content is engaging with your wider community and growing your community and sharing experiences with them. There is a corresponding pressure to share experiences back within your feeds. This has driven a demand for luxury products and experiences including omakase.

    Omakase is a rational economic response. There are only so many times that you can share a new bag or watch costing thousands of pounds. But you can share omakase each time you go, with the price being in the hundreds of pounds instead.

    So where does the money come from?

    Omakase experiences aren’t an everyday thing for young Koreans; they would think its perfectly fine most days to eat a lunch bargain meal from a convenience store and then do an omakase experience every so often that they can document it on social media.

    Korean households have the highest amount of debt in the world, and over 21% of young Koreans have personal debt that at least three times their salary. A decade earlier, the rate was 8.2%.

    So what?

    Korea today is a cultural powerhouse. Trends that start here go worldwide. Korea is involved in all aspects of global culture:

    • Cinema.
    • Television series.
    • Beauty.
    • Fashion.
    • FMCG products.
    • Food.

    Korea’s role as a global trendsetter has not gone unnoticed, Christian Dior opened its flagship store in Seoul and held its collection debut in Korea over China or France.

    Luxury businesses already realise that consumers want status experiences as well as status goods. LVMH has been actively exploring the hotel and restaurant business, as has Kering. But these businesses have lower margins than their existing businesses. The way to increase these margins would be to address less customers and charge even more.

    Luxury is being redefined into highly personalised experiences by consumers and it makes commercial sense for luxury businesses to meet their needs.

    While luxury groups are looking at cutting edge technology like generative AI, NFTs and metaverse experiences, the future of luxury might be more human, as well as more technology.

    More Korea-related content can be found here.

    More information

  • Beyond Disruption

    Beyond Disruption by W Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne moves their focus from general business strategy in their book Blue Ocean Strategy. You can read my review of Blue Ocean Strategy which I originally read a number of years ago. By contrast this book looks at the idea of non-disruptive innovation. Non-disruptive innovation as a topic makes sense within the blue ocean / red ocean model.

    Beyond Disruption
    Beyond Disruption book cover

    Success has its own challenges.

    Kim and Mauborgne face a Augean literary challenge. Blue Ocean Strategy was so successful at the time, that any subsequent book will look diminished in its success by comparison. Blue Ocean Strategy had something for everyone. To marketers it spoke of differentiation and salience, for business management types it was about differentiation and innovation. Beyond Disruption delves deeper into the nature of that innovation in a way that Blue Ocean Strategy didn’t.

    In Beyond Disruption the authors posit that their blue ocean strategy approach was a blend of disruptive and non-disruptive growth.

    Difficult narratives

    Disruptive innovation by its very nature means destruction of existing businesses as a new one is created. A classic example of this would be the battles between regulators and taxi drivers with Uber, or city governments looking to protect the needs of their citizens from AirBnB. The ideas of Joseph A. Schumpeter fit in with the innovation stories coming out of Silicon Valley. Apple and Google didn’t invent the smartphone, but they came up with a design that captured larger scale consumer interest than Nokia devices and captured the market.

    It is the predominant narrative in the media and business community at the moment around innovation. Disruptive innovation fits in with the conflict driven narrative of business. It is reinforced by adaption of military thinking in a literal manner to business strategy. The authors themselves point out about how much business decision-making is driven by aggression and fear.

    Approach of Beyond Disruption

    The approach of Kim & Mauborgne to ‘nondisruptive creation’ in Beyond Disruption is broken into two parts which cover

    • What it is and why it matters.
    • How to realise nondisruptive creation.

    What it is and why it matters

    Kim and Mauborgne focus a lot of time in the first part of the book explaining the economic and social impact of non-disruptive creation. The idea is that creating new markets doesn’t destroy existing marketplaces. In theory, value will be created on top of the existing economic order, rather than being substitutive in nature.That narrative is largely true, but there are exceptions to bear in mind.

    If we think about the smartphone as a device category, even prior to Apple and Google displacing Nokia, cell phones were displacing existing categories. Sales of answerphones dropped, as did the sales of chocolate to children and the incidence of children smoking. Instead the pocket money was spent on handsets and PAYG (pay as you go) mobile tariffs.

    Beyond Disruption outlines four sources of business advantage to non-disruptive creation:

    • Avoiding direct confrontations with established incumbents.
    • An effective way to respond to full-on disruption.
    • Support from internal stakeholders who will view non-disruptive innovation as less emotionally charged.
    • No evident backlash from external stakeholders.

    The authors see this approach as a way to address the challenges of ESG and the fourth industrial age of automation.

    How to realise non-disruptive creation

    The authors start with the idea of the right perspective. This involves:

    • Leaders moving away from the ‘startup story’ of an innovative founder or co-founder. Instead the problem to be solved needs to be recognised first.
    • Don’t confuse the means with the end.
    • Focus on the many, not the few. Have a product that is likely to be adopted by a range of customers.

    Identifying opportunities is considered in a separate section, the key point of which was the idea of empathetically observing newly emerging or unexplored problems. These ideas can then be explored further by understanding the scale of the challenge (amount of people affected etc) and understand the assumptions others have made that persuaded them to avoid the opportunity.

    In conclusion

    With Beyond Disruption, Kim and Mauborgne are looking to encourage a business more in keeping with the needs of stakeholder capitalism. More on Beyond Disruption here.

  • Beauty masks + more things

    Beauty masks

    Beauty masks have been mainstreamed by the mainstreaming of Asian beauty culture norms. There isn’t the faff of having to make something up or smear something on. Instead, pop the mask on, leave it on for a specified time (usually 15 minutes) and peel off. If Switzerland is the home of fine watchmaking or chocolate; then South Korea is the home of beauty masks. Beauty masks are really relaxing to pop on whilst bingewatching a show or film series.

    Beauty has its price

    This footage of beauty mask manufacture in Busan South Korea intrigued me. I was surprised by how small scale production was in this factory, even though it’s a batch manufacture process, I was expecting greater scale given how ubiquitous Korean beauty masks are.

    https://youtu.be/oTR0TByuX0A?si=YXXjl0QyZB2m4V07

    Beauty

    China economy: What anger over top influencer says about China today – BBC News

    A state-owned railway in China told women not to put on makeup on trains. Here’s how they responded | CNN 

    Radiation concerns: Japanese skincare products under scrutiny | Daxue Consulting

    China

    The rise and fall of a Chinese-Canadian pop star – Macleans.ca – Wu seems to have been doing similar antics to the ‘Black Sun’ night club management in Seoul, I can understand why he faced jail time

    WHO chief pushes China for ‘full access’ to solve Covid’s origins | Financial Times 

    Chinese defence minister under investigation for corrupt procurement | Reuters 

    Free speech law tackles Confucius interference | Telegraph Online – Confucius Institutes in focus

    Chinese shadow bank exposed to troubled property developers | Financial Times 

    Chinese netizens outraged over Apple employee photo | Wen Hat 

    Consumer behaviour

    How music emotionally affects us by Gresham College.

    Why don’t people leave bad jobs? | Financial Times 

    Economics

    Companies ease off on share buybacks as rising interest rates push up costs | Financial Times

    Why don’t people leave bad jobs? | Financial Times 

    Energy

    Toyota plans mass production of solid state battery for 2027 | EE News Europe 

    Finance

    Rival banks unite to take on Big Tech | Financial Times 

    Gadgets

    Can Echo Finally Break Through in Home Automation? – Amazon has expanded the Echo line to include models that are tailored to certain use cases and certain rooms – like small screen models for bedside, large screen models for kitchens, high quality speakers for living rooms and dens, and small, inexpensive models for everywhere. We see efforts to get Echos into multiple rooms in Amazon’s promotions, where they sold multiple device packages of the least expensive models in the early days, and aggressively discount a variety of models regularly throughout the year. Amazon clearly has room to go in pursuing this strategy. Nine years in, most Amazon Echo owners still have only one device. In the most recent twelve-month period, 69% of US Echo owners have one, and about one-quarter have two or three

    Health

    Mental health screens using AI | Axios – UK ahead of the US in use of apps for therapy

    The Biden administration takes on the US drugs industry | Financial Times 

    Google DeepMind: Drug developers seek a structural advantage from AI | Financial Times

    Hong Kong

    China’s Language Police | Foreign Affairs 

    Innovation

    Intel gearing up for glass substrate production for advanced packaging | DigiTimes

    Those trying to pick AI winners should remember the dotcom days | Financial Times 

    Japan

    Changes in the Japanese economy and economic activity

    Asia Society

    Korea

    South Korean telco SK Broadband and Netflix call a truce • The Register

    SK hynix exec denies doing business with Huawei • The Register

    Suspected covert Chinese outpost sparks push for S. Korea ‘spy bill’ — Radio Free Asia

    Luxury

    Genesis Sells over 1 Million Cars – The Chosun Ilbo (English Edition): Daily News from Korea – Business > Business – as if German car manufacturers don’t have enough to worry about

    ‘The worst I’ve seen it for decades’: Australian wine glut leaves growers searching for new markets | Rural Australia | The Guardian – China continues to take a toll

    Marketing

    From followership to friendship: strategies for creating connection on TikTok | Mintel

    Materials

    Space Forge teams with Northrop Grumman for space materials | EE News Europe 

    Media

    UK DAB+ receiver sales exceed 50m – The Media Leader – by comparison Ireland is rolling back its DAB network to rely on FM

    BBC’s commercial arm to relaunch international news website | Financial Times 

    UK broadcasters develop free digital TV service to take on streaming | Financial Times  and UK PSBs to launch ‘online Freeview’ in 2024 – The Media Leader – this will be important for multiple occupancy homes

    Meme

    Coca-Cola Releases Brand-New Flavor That Was Created by AI – Tech 

    Online

    The murky world of online age certification raises privacy questions | Financial Times 

    Google faces multibillion-pound lawsuit from UK consumers | Google | The Guardian

    You need to talk to your kid about AI. Here are 6 things you should say. | MIT Technology Review – a variant of sage advice for everyone 
    1. Don’t forget: AI is not your friend 
    2. AI models are not replacements for search engines 
    3. Teachers might accuse you of using an AI when you haven’t 
    4. Recommender systems are designed to get you hooked and might show you bad stuff 
    5. Remember to use AI safely and responsibly 
    6. Don’t miss out on what AI’s actually good at

    EU fines TikTok €345mn for breaching children’s data rules | Financial Times 

    Retailing

    Amazon debuts generative AI tools that helps sellers write product descriptions | TechCrunch

    Security

    There’s now a Clorox cleaning product shortage, thanks to hackers | Fast Company 

    Thales chief on the lookout for acquisitions | Financial Times 

    How Estonia’s Military Intelligence Secretly Helped Ukraine – VSQUARE.ORG

    Former GCHQ chief joins security investment group Gallos as chair | Financial Times 

    Ukraine has provided the first “audit” of the US military | Quartz – “For 3% of the US defense budget, Ukrainians won the Battle of Kyiv, won the Battle of Kharkiv, won the Battle of Kherson, won about half of the territory that Russia invaded in February 2022”

    Software

    Adobe’s Firefly generative AI tools are now generally available – The Verge 

    Style

    Peter Dundas’s label ceasing operations in the UK | Vogue Business 

    Race to the bottom? Temu takes on Shein worldwide | Vogue Business 

    Technology

    Intel’s China-specific AI chip in huge demand | DigiTimes

    Move over AI, quantum computing to be most powerful technology | VentureBeat – Leaders in the military and cybersecurity community believe that quantum computing could become a potentially serious threat in 4 – 6 years. Quantum computers have been proven to vastly outperform traditional computers on specific sets of problems. A vastly outperforming computer like this could pose a serious threat to cybersecurity across several critical industries like banking and logistics. While potentially impactful in the future, the technology is currently limited by a lack of ability to reduce probabilities of errors. Extreme temperatures required to operate the computers are also a barrier.

    Web of no web

    How Do You Connect an Ecosystem? | LBBOnline – how QRcodes are continuing to be extended for APAC consumers