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.

Dan Catt + more things

Rev Dan Catt | Conference Eaters – captures the dichotomy of conferences really well. Dan Catt compares the experience of conferences to religious services where the faithful gather.

Brand Brain Britain! How Brits engage with brands differently across the regions | Weber Shandwick – interesting research on brand attitudes. More branding related content here.

Huffington Post and Leo Burnett partnership | Marketing Interactive – in reality this line is being blurred all the time Vice Media etc

How an FBI Informant Ordered the Hack of British Tabloid ‘The Sun’ | Motherboard – could the FBI be legally liable?

Generation Flux’s Secret Weapon | Fast Company – interesting analysis of Chipotle

Only 25% of iPad Users are aged 16-24 | Global Web Index – it makes sense given that the iPad is a discretionary purchase with adequate substitute products

Slack is Killing Email | PixelBits – is it really? I think there is still a use case for email and a use case for less email

Google’s Eric Schmidt: “Really, Our Biggest Search Competitor Is Amazon” – trying to spin their way out of European sanctions

Microsoft And Salesforce Promise Windows, Office And OneDrive Integration | TechCrunch – hell froze over

Saudis would accept lower oil prices | Hong Kong Economic Journal Insight – all about trying to raise barrier to entry for competitors

The Cost of Living the Luxe Life Has Fallen — if You Live in Asia | TIME – softening property prices

Ofcom | UK leads the way with new wireless technology trials – overly dramatic headline for white space trials

How China’s ‘naked officials’ make the getaway｜WantChinaTimes.com – since there is such an obvious behavioural trail shouldn’t card transactions and travel record patterns create ‘red flags’? Why do so many get through?

Finland is in trouble, and it blames Apple for everything – Quartz – bit of an exaggeration but gives you an idea of how crucial Nokia was

Singapore rail operator eyes UK minicab firm | Hong Kong Economic Journal Insights – interesting move. Is Addison Lee a technology company or a transport company?

October 15, 2014
Walmart + other things
Walmart online to offline retailing

A really interesting video with Walmart that looks at the interface between online and offline retailing. Particularly interesting take on mobile payment form factors. Amazon presents an existential threat to the Walmart business. Walmart isn’t going down without a fight. It has innovated in the past on using technologies like data mining. More recently Walmart has been making strategic purchases across the online retail realm.

More retail related content here

Water resistance

The reality of watch water resistance is that it is usually measured in a pressurised laboratory rig. Five years ago Casio took their Frogman model from the G-Shock range and did the test in open water off the coast of Japan. It shows the reality of the watch being exposed to a depth of 200M. The two most disappointing aspects of this video are:
- It hasn’t got as much viewer love as it deserves
- They failed to come across any diakaiju during the dive and we don’t know what Japan’s beloved son Godzilla (ゴジラ Gojira) thinks of the G-Shock range
Name generator

Citizenfour the Edward Snowden documentary launched this week, which prompted a lot of NSA product name silliness including too much time spent on the NSA Product Name Generator

Mascots

The people at Rocket News have come up with a new take on the Japanese mascot meme with Hard Ku**mon. More here. Japan seems to have mascots for everything as a way to engage consumer attention. The mascots can build up to be big business in their own right and gain international attention.

NASA apps

Finally I have been working my way through NASA’s collection of iPad and iPhone applications, more here. NASA has an amazing range of content. I would also recommend checking out their flickr accounts for high quality imagery.
October 13, 2014
John Legere on T-Mobile
John Legere knows how to work his crowd, a technology CEO channelling Lenny Bruce with a mix of common sense and expletive strewn humour. Beneath that showmanship is an interesting analysis from the inside of what its like to run a modern cellular carrier business.

Outtakes from John Legere
- Interesting the way he talks about his clash of personality personality with his parent company as John Legere vs. T-Mobile
- At the time T-Mobile was winning share from Sprint, AT&T and Verizon
- The video is on YouTube so may not be available for all readers.
- Historically acquisitions was about spectrum, it now seems to be about industry consolidation
- Legere on the difference of Global Crossing and T-Mobile. He was looking to adapt as a personality to his younger tech savvy consumer base. CEOs are generally a monoculture.
- He uses social media for insights on customer experience and brand health
- Customer care calls gives him a lot of insight about customer experience
- All of the ‘Uncarrier’ positioning and moves were inspired by customer service calls and the experiences that customers have in the interactive voice systems. Uncarrier started with ‘how you buy’ and then went on to ‘how you use’
- T-Mobile benefitted from being able to move fast and their competitors reluctance to change their services
- Apple iPhone 6 ‘Bendgate’. It wasn’t a real story according to Legere and hadn’t dented demand for the iPhone on T-Mobile
- Legere felt that the tasks he needed to address going into T-Mobile were: improving the network, getting spectrum, reinvigorate the T-Mobile brand and get the iPhone on T-Mobile. Store traffic was incomplete, customers wouldn’t go to a cellphone store unless they had the full range of devices.
- Before Legere arrived people wouldn’t even mention T-Mobile in terms of the data capability & network speed
- Apple drove a lot of quality focus on Wi-Fi and VoLTE calling
- Amazon missed out on its Fire phone (and later tablets). The company didn’t think about it in terms of service bundling with all the other assets like Amazon Fresh and Amazon Prime
- On Windows Mobile – stop the charade that cellular networks are OEM manufacturers. Legere would have liked Windows Mobile and Amazon to be successful if customers want them
More mobile related content here.
October 7, 2014
Why did Yahoo Directory closing become a big deal?

Yahoo Directory is a bit like the shark. It has been around pretty much as long as the modern commercial web. Yahoo! was among the first online media companies. Whilst peers like Lycos and Excite disappeared Yahoo! managed to survive. The name Yahoo! is actually an acronym: Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. Yahoo! started as a list of interesting links to sites, these then needed to be categorised as it grew and the first iteration of Yahoo! was as a directory.

Yahoo! then expanded its service offering with a portal, email, shopping, auctions, celebrity chats and specialist kids content. Directories were the forerunner of search as they provided editor-driven categories. In 1998, Netscape went into competition with Yahoo! with its own directory, which now exists as DMOZ – an open directory hosted by Aol and run by volunteer editors. DMOZ has catalogued 4,167,366 sites in over a million categories over 16 years. It became obvious that human editors couldn’t scale.

Even when consumers went away to the search box of Alta Vista HotBot and Google, the Yahoo! Directory served a secondary purpose. As a repository of ‘screened and categorised’ websites algorithmic search engines took entry in a number of directories into account as part of their ranking for sites. Directories became important to search agencies.

When I worked at Yahoo! during the start of the web 2.0 period, tagging and its role in social search was considered to be reflective of Yahoo!’s past in directories and offered a future that was not solely dependent on the dictatorship of an algorithm. Social search promised a blended approach.

Over the past decade Yahoo! Search and Google both gradually depreciated the importance of a directory entry for search ranking as other signalling factors took over including social mentions.

A lot of digital marketers have lived with Yahoo! Directory for a long time. The shutdown of Yahoo!’s original service comes at a turning point for the company. It looks as if Yahoo! is about to be torn apart as Wall Street tries to get it to liquidate its holdings in Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba; return the cash to them and pick over the rest of the assets like a dead carcass on the Serengeti.

More information

Progress Report: Continued Product Focus | Yahoo! Corporate Tumblr account
The Yahoo Directory — Once The Internet’s Most Important Search Engine — Is To Close | SearchEngineLand
Yahoo killing off Yahoo after 20 years of hierarchical organisation | Ars Technica
Yahoo Directory, once the center of a web empire, will shut down at year’s end | The Verge

More Yahoo! related content here.

October 1, 2014
Yahoo corporate culture
I bumped into some former colleagues over the past couple of weeks and the experience reminded me of a lot of the items in this post. We shared a common bond based on our exposure to the Yahoo corporate culture. Given the circling activist investors surround the current iteration of Yahoo! this maybe a capsule of a soon-to-disappear culture. Many of the things below are artefacts, totems of the Yahoo corporate culture.
- You know that Yahoo! was the brand and a Yahoo was a person who worked for Yahoo!
- You were told that you bleed purple. There were values that were ingrained into you
- You understood the struggle of constantly moving budgets and spending a quarter’s marketing budget in three weeks
- You have an address book full of friends and aquantances working at great companies in digital media. The business was a rotating door for talent, in six months you had a great Rolodex full of contacts.
  
  Your have an old brand Yahoo! laptop bag that just won’t die. Not too sure what they made those Timbuk2 bags from but mine is eight years old, well travelled and still looks new.
- Friends introduce you to former colleagues you were less familiar with by including their IM identity as well as their name.
  
  You still have a star kicking around in a box somewhere from when you packed up your desk one last time.
  
  Your colleagues gave you a list of tchotchkes to get from the shop in building D if you went to the headquarters campus in Sunnyvale.
You’re still using at least one of Jerry and David’s Christmas presents around the house.
September 28, 2014