Ged Carroll

Category: culture | 文明 | 미디어와 예술 | 人文

Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.

Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.

Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.

Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.

Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.

More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.

  • Hardkiss reissues + more things

    Hardkiss Music – love to see this stuff get reissued. Gavin and Scott Hardkiss brought something new to the table with their recordings. Scott Hardkiss’ use of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s  Fire on High for the track The Pheonix blows me away every time that I listen to it.

    5ninthavenueproject – YouTube – set of VHS amateur documentaries that capture New York in the late 1980s

    The decline and fall of HTC | Digital Evangelist – a bit of the PC commodisation industry model and the mistake of following the Apple model without the full stack and marketing spend

    Korea’s Daum Kakao Brings In 34-Year-Old CEO To Grow Its Messaging Business Overseas | TechCrunch – can KakaoTalk deal with LINE, WhatsApp, KIK and WeChat overseas? WeChat has already failed to expand significantly beyond the Chinese diaspora

    Has America Completely Forgotten Its Roots In Dance Music? Magnetic magazine – I understand it but many people think that the blues started with Eric Clapton, culture is becoming like vapour

    Google new operating structure – Business Insider – interesting moves which formalises where Google has been. It also means that the Google brand isn’t likely to be over extended or risked on edge ventures. Innovation is likely to be stifled

    Pinterest’s Difference From Other Social Media Lures Quaker | Advertising Age – more like search. Longer content shelf life, minimal snark, searchability. I would be surprised if more family brands don’t go there as well. Facebook and Twitter have become cesspits

    759 Store dips toe in e-Commerce waters | Marketing Interactive – pet products, snacks and other in store products to follow. More retailing related content here.

    Traditional ad spending drops for first time | Kantar China – presumably because the Chinese economic growth is slowing down. Changes in media regulations is making it harder for TV stations to show the kind of content that consumers like

    Here’s how a Finnish startup landed $10M from Baidu. In a McDonald’s – interesting use of magnetic fields

  • Native advertising + other news

    Native advertising

    Podcasting embraces native advertising | Digiday – interesting as podcasting historically has struggled with finding a advertising model and native advertising doesn’t fit that comfortably in the performance orientation of online ads. Native advertising does make sense in podcasting as it shouldn’t affect the podcasters flow and content integrity too much – more marketing content here.

    Beauty

    Sephora Launching Beauty Box Subscription Service | TIME – interesting that the retail brand is stepping into BirchBox territory, it’s not only about sales but product market testing and says something about the tyranny of choice. Sephora has also rolled out vending machines in high footfall areas like airports to tap into the tyranny of choice. I can see this working in high value areas but puzzled why subscriptions has caused so much universal excitement across FMCG sectors, yet not luxury brands

    Business

    California Court Gets One Step Closer to Deciding Uber’s Fate | TIME – important because California tends to lead legal trends in the US. Uber will be fighting this tooth and nail

    Culture

    Jungle, Raves and Pirate Radio: The History and Future of Kool FM | VICE – nice to see Kool FM getting some recognition, how did they manage to survive through the raids I wonder

    Economics

    Pepsi plant shuts down in Venezuela as desperation grows over product shortages | Fusion – soft drink becomes a form of currency exchange

    Gadgets

    How to be a cyberpunk, according to a 1990s tech magazine | Fusion – love this article image, but it shows how far Sony has fallen from prominence compared to where it was

     Web of no web

    Refinery29 – Time cover reinforces tech stereotypes – PCGamer calls the cover “the greatest threat to VR” because it “reinforces, rather than challenges, the perception that VR is a mask that nerds use to blot out the world.” – it also probably isn’t helped by photos from the Facebook F8 developer conference with a sea of coders wearing them whilst apparently staring into nothingness.

  • 3 & Wind merger + more things

    Consolidation in Italy as Wind, 3 ink €21.8bn merger | TotalTelecom – I I hope that it won’t affect 3 UK roaming? I wouldn’t be surprised if 3 did similar deals in other mature European markets like the UK. Li Ka Shing is no one’s fool and wireless is mature and capital intensive. More wireless related posts here.

    Fancy 10 Gbps home broadband? Broadcom’s built the guts of it | The Register – fibre dreams?

    Less Money, Mo’ Music & Lots of Problems: A Look at the Music Biz | REDEF – interesting business analysis of the music industry

    Apple denies plan to sell mobile services directly to consumers | Reuters – interesting that they went to the trouble of denying it. It might make sense for them to have a corporate MVNO for their staff

    Nikkei report paints a disturbing picture of Konami | SiliconAngle – PR trainwreck

    The Unemployable Programmer – a nice counterpoint to the ‘get everyone programming’ meme

    Walt Disney Animation Studios | Hyperion technology – interesting write-up of their Hyperion render engine

    Apple is testing a Siri voicemail transcription service – Business Insider – will it work any better than SpinVox?

    brandchannel: Every Product Placement in ‘Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation’ – love the early press release quoted and remember getting to site in college

    FBI Struggling With Cybersecurity Because of Shit Pay and Drug Tests – both of which says a lot about the war on drugs and government getting tech

    Official Google Blog: Everything in its right place – downsizing of Google+. The move to break it up is viewed by many as a defeat, it also makes sense when one thinks of app constellations, though I cannot help think of Brad Garlinghouse’s famous ‘peanut butter manifesto’ at Yahoo! nine years earlier. Though that was a blatant grab for political power, it resonates with some of what seems to be happening at Google in terms of retrenchment

    Why the fear over ubiquitous data encryption is overblown – The Washington Post – interesting op ed by a former head of the NSA, a former secretary of homeland security and a former US defence secretary challenging the intelligence industrial complex demands for weaker encryption and more surveillance legislation

  • Invisible cloaks + other things

    Invisible cloaks

    The possibility of invisible cloaks straight out of a Marvel comic hero’s tool kit or a wizarding wardrobe a la Harry Potter. The underlying technology involves some science that sounds more like science fiction. Could ‘Harry Potter’-like invisible cloaks really exist? – CNET

    On a more serious note invisibility cloaks have applications in the military, law enforcement and even urban design through the power of cutting edge science.

    Foxes on the moon

    Foxes and science fiction what could be more awesome? This reminded me of TinTin for some reason that I can’t put my finger on at the moment. Have a watch and let me know what you think.

    SIN R1

    The SIN R1 looks like the kind of car I would have had as a poster on my wall as a kid, but now it looks too outlandish to be on the road.

    The driver doing doughnuts on the public road reminded me of the young lads who would take their hot hatches down to Blackpool for the lights . Revving their engines and pulling similar stunts. Which makes me wonder, what do they think their customer is going to be like? A yob, the stereotypical young footballer?

    Key outtakes:

    • Misdirection: Matthews would allow surveillance teams to tail him, so that other colleagues would be tail free
    • Playing into stereotype and using them as a judo move; Warsaw Pact men tended to believe a woman’s place was in the home and didn’t think of Matthews’ wife as a potential operator
    • Interesting points on the problems that intelligence agencies have in understanding the motivations of ‘non state actors’ such as religiously motivated terrorists
    • During the cold war, Russians who spied for the US generally didn’t get to spend any money they made, as they would only survive 18 months on average
    • China’s approach is much more long-term ‘picking up grains of sand on the beach’
    • The most dangerous threats in his opinion: Iranian nuclear programme for the set of unknowns that it creates, China as a short, medium and long term threat, Russia as an ongoing but less serious threat than China and ‘non state actors’

    Matthews also took a New York Times journalist on the street to explain what surveillance infrastructure looked like now

    “You never try to elude or escape from surveillance,” he explained. “You want to lull them into thinking that you’re not operational on this particular day. You want to calm the beast.”

    Shadowing Jason Matthews, an Ex-Spy Whose Cover Identity Is Author | New York Times

    More posts on related areas here.