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.
Data that matters has impermanence – One thing that springs up periodically is how older electronic data becomes harder to access.
Whether its floppy disks that are no longer readable or optical disks which have become corroded through chemical reaction over time electronic data is generally impermanent.
I lost a substantial amount of the posts on this blog two years ago when the server I used over at Yahoo! Small Business hosting went into meltdown 90 per cent of my blogging output between December 2006 and January 2008 disappeared. I managed to recover 10 per cent of the content from the Google cache of my blog.
However it isn’t only digital artifacts that are at risk. I was going through bags of old papers and found my old P60s some of which could no longer be read since they were printed on thermal paper and my first payslip which was barely readable.
This was from my first full-time job cleaning and repairing equipment that was rented out to building contractors including lawn mowers, concrete mixers and Makita power drills.
You can also see paper go yellow from the acid used in its manufacture as well as fade from the carbon paper print.
I had obviously put it away to keep it for posterity, but I decided to keep it in the cloud as I figure that it might last longer that way now. Though your guess is as good as mine. The thermal paper and Flickr’s business model are both tough things to fathom how robust they will be.
The problem with this is often the data we don’t want to keep stays like embarrassing pictures on Facebook or a drunken rant on a Usenet forum, whereas the stuff we want to keep too often fades away. So how do we get better at looking after electronic data that matters? More online and internet related posts here.
Google has finally left the Chinese market for search, so I thought I would try the alternative, hence an unscientific assessment of Baidu. My trial is unscientific in nature and not particularly rigorous. I did what most consumers would have done and searched for myself.
I was quite open-minded about this, on the one hand Google has been killing the search market in Europe, nothing can touch it in the EU and they have made moderately successful forays into other sectors as well. I also know that Google is not all conquering. In fact the wheels start to come off the Google search wagon when you venture into areas with non-Roman languages such as Russian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese.
On the other hand, Robin Li over at Baidu is no slouch. Baidu is famous for is huge index and its continued appetite to crawl content whenever and wherever it can find it.
Baidu like its Korean counterpart Naver has also managed a successful social search product running a question-and-answer service like a better version of Yahoo! Answers – largely free of spam and a more middle-class range of participants provide highly relevant quality content.
It is also blatantly obvious that Baidu doesn’t care whether it attracts a potential English-speaking audience as the entire site apart from investor relations is in Chinese.
I was expecting some divergence between Google and Baidu search engine results pages for a number of reasons. Google crawls an estimated 15 per cent of the total web, and Baidu is likely to crawl a slightly larger amount. That means that their search indexes are likely to be slightly different. Secondly, both will have started with slightly different algorithms and these will change over time with a experience of what users want. Finally, the results are usually ‘flavoured’ according to local market preferences such as language and local content.
I was a bit surprised at the level of divergence between Google and Baidu, which was great than I had seen between Google and Yahoo! in the past.
First of all flavouring. A comparison between the Japanese and Chinese versions of Baidu show a high degree of variance between the two versions of the Baidu search engine.
Part of the reason for the difference may be due to Chinese regulations around permitted services, for instance an educational video of me by Econsultancy on YouTube is the top result on the Japanese site and a couple of twitter related hits come in at six and seven. The Japanese site skews much more toward video services than the Chinese site which picked up profile services Plaxo and Naymz.
Interestingly, the Chinese site picked up the re-direct URI for my blog (renaissancechambara.com), whereas neither the Japanese or the Chinese versions picked up my proper domain (renaissancechambara.jp) at all. Even when I clicked a few pages down.
Plotting Baidu China against Google Hong Kong produced an interesting diversity of the results.
Their one point of correlation, my profile on Naymz. Again part of this may be because of my presence on services that don’t do business in China for instance YouTube and Twitter. Google rightly puts more weight and a consequently higher ranking on my Crunchbase and LinkedIn profiles than Plaxo which appears a couple of pages down on Google.
Baidu obviously puts much more emphasis on a historic redirect URI I have for my blog than the ‘real’ one and doesn’t seem to crawl the site in any great depth. I am guessing that this is because of its largely English language content.
In Japan, the Baidu | Google comparison told a similar story. The Google flavouring between Hong Kong and Japanese versions wasn’t that great only showing differences at position five and lower on the page. Baidu Japan managed to pick up my last.fm profile and twitter profile, but didn’t pick up my blog or any professional information on the first page.
In conclusion, my unscientific assessment of Baidu has shown provides a great search experience for consumers. But I am uncertain how valuable it would be for people in a professional context, for instance researching foreigners with whom they may be doing business or finding foreign presentations. I can understand why Chinese scientific audiences would be concerned by the departure of Google.
I also suspect that optimising content to make it searchable on Baidu is different to the process that I would go through for Google or Yahoo!, but that would merit far more investigation before I could blog with any confidence about it. More Baidu related posts here.
First of all some disclosure: I worked on the Palm account at my agency some ten years ago now and got to work with some of the smartest people in mobile device technology, notably the company’s chief competitive officer Michael Mace as an occasional media spokesperson back when his pictures had him with a Magnum PI-style moustache.
At the time I worked on the account the company was riding high on the PDA boom, but the seeds of its current problems were sown back then.
Even after working on the Palm account, I was a Palm customer. I had a Palm Vx which I used to death (quite literally) and spent a fortune on accessories including a Rhinoskin titanium slider hard case and a ThinkOutside portable keyboard. After that I had a number of other Palm devices: a m515, a Tungsten3, a Treo 600 and a Treo 650.
The last device left such a bad taste in my mouth because of an address book full of duplicates and corrupted data that I migrated to Nokia E-series devices, which provided a superior experience to the Treo 650 despite serious software stability issues.
The company has been buffeted by critics over the years, many of them well-meaning.
With the arrival of Jon Rubenstein to give it flare and product smarts and a matching injection of new money into the company, there was every chance that Palm could reinvent itself.
Unfortunately it didn’t, and the company is now reaping the fruits of mediocre labours.
To be honest the signs where there that the new product line wasn’t great and I wasn’t surprised:
Notably, poor developer relations (ie doing a worse job than Apple and Nokia) though very few companies are truly beloved by developers
General poor handling of relations with US market analysts and media – you shouldn’t show that they have riled you
The communications-related signs are particularly damning as they indicate that at least some insiders at the company may have realised that the product despite the hoopla was not ready for primetime.
The second good sign of a bad device is when after a decent amount of time virtually no one that you know owns one. I only know one person: the fashion-forward Rise co-founder Paul Allen; however on this occasion the Palm Pre has turned out not to be a fashion classic and more like a gadget equivalent of MC Hammer’s parachute pants.
Interestingly, in his letter to Palm employees, Rubenstein puts much of the weight of corrective action on working short-term tactics with carrier partners to create demand push with no clue about what execution improvements in terms of product redesigns and quality improvements (if any) would be coming to shore up a poor customer experience. More gadget related content can be found here.
China South City is a complex just outside Pinghu, Shenzhen that allows manufacturers to showcase their wares. Think Hannover Messe but as a full-time stand. It is populated with paper salesmen, pallets of raw plastic from chemical companies, fabrics companies and factories that churn out garments and accessories.
Many of the halls look like Smithfields market on steroids, but the newest building which opened up a couple of months ago here looks like the mother-of-all-shopping-malls lies empty.
Is this multi-storey behemoth a white elephant? I don’t know, if they can keep it open long enough I think it will fill up with vendors over time. In addition to the real-world options for networking and customer education, China South City also provides an online marketplace for the firms similar in nature to Alibaba.
The real-world world meeting option allows customers to find out about the tangible qualities that a web page can’t tell you with sufficient precision. How doe the leather in the handbag feel, what is the tension like in stitching between two fabric pieces. Allowing the two parties to meet in the real-world helps engender trust so that repurchases could happen online inside. I was pretty impressed by this multi-channel offering.
‘Ren chi’ is a Chinese phrase that my friends used to describe the deciding factor of the complex’ likely success -it roughly translates as ‘people energy’. The property developers seem to be very conscious of this so are opening up the centre to tour groups despite the fact that the centre is wholesale. The exhibition hall onsite serves as a sports centre for the locality and spare car park space has been turned into basketball courts to keep young people in the area and top-up the ‘people energy’ deficit.
The sale tag is like manna from heaven for my Mum. She loves a bargain and looks forward to sales at her local stores.
Like many people she suspects that some stores may put in special stock that they have shipped in to sell especially at this time amongst items that have just not sold.
Allied Carpets was often the butt of jokes for its never-ending sales, but thought of as the exception rather than the norm.
A friend here in Shenzhen got this basket from a market here. The markets are usually full of production overruns and samples. I managed to pick up a couple of genuine North Face Basecamp duffle bags for 30 percent less than UK retail.
What I found interesting about this particular item was that it had a UK sale tag attached.It reads £29.99 £19.99 SALE.
My initial reaction was how can it be reduced if it hasn’t even reached the shopfloor yet? It was an interesting proof-point of how retailers play customers as chumps. By all means enjoy bargain hunting but don’t believe the SALE tag hype. From what my friend told me about the production overrun market; the retailer in question (Woolworths) seemed to have vastly overestimated British consumer demand for rattan laundry baskets.
My friend had the basket for a few years. I was writing this post almost a year to the day after Woolworths Group had gone into administration, closing its stores across the UK. More retailing related content here.
