Ged Carroll

Category: fmcg | 雜貨業務 | 소비재 | 食料品事業

FMCG or fast moving consumer goods sprang out of the mass industrialisation. Brands sprang up originally as a guarantee of quality. Later on as these brands needed to be promoted, we saw the foundation of the what we think of as modern marketing and advertising.

Today media and entertainment takes up an increasing amount of the household spend, as does housing, but FMCGs are a crucial part of their essential and disposable income spend.

They have nostalgia wrapped up in them, distinctive aromas, taste and packaging designs. From the smell of my Granny using so much Pledge on the TV that I was surprised it didn’t burst into flame to the taste of Cidona and texture of Boland’s Fig Roll biscuits in my mouth.

The sound of their advertising jingles was the soundtrack of my childhood. Digital advertising is largely rationale, it lacks the fluent devices that provide the centre to advertising and made FMCG advertising iconic. Fluent devices like the Peperami ‘Animal’, the M&M characters or the Cadbury Smash robots were embedded in deep marketing research. FMCG brands still sponsor the best research in marketing science.

I had the good fortune to work inhouse at Unilever and agency-side for their brands. I also managed to work on Coca-Cola and Colgate during my time in Hong Kong.

  • Afghanistan + other news

    Afghanistan

    I couldn’t avoid doing a post on Afghanistan given what had been going on this week. The Afghanistan conflict posed a number of interesting questions about:

    • What privacy and security means for the people left behind in Afghanistan in the digital age
    • Why strategy is seldom a teacher and several countries have made the same mistake in Afghanistan – (Britain did so twice!)
    • The failure of intelligence in Afghanistan reminded me of the failure of intelligence agencies to realise that the fall of the Berlin Wall would happen. There was also a failure to underhand who the players were and their motivations in Afghanistan
    • What will Afghanistan mean for Pakistan moving forwards? Once out, the west has the perfect opportunity to shun Pakistan; which will leave the country vulnerable to Chinese predatory practices

    The US Is Removing Records of Its War in Afghanistan From the Internet – Lives are on the line here, but helping them may mean destroying—even if temporarily—the memory of the war and all that happened. It’s a horrible problem to face. One potential solution would be for the U.S. and its allies to take as many Afghan refugees as want to flee the country. – it assumes that the Taliban and supporters like the Pakistani ISI intelligence agency haven’t been caching this material themselves over the years. Things got rolled up so fast, they probably have hold of records from Afghanistan government payroll ledgers to intelligence reports

    1999 Afghanistan
    1999 Afghanistan map, courtesy of the CIA

    Germany Flew 65,000 Beer Cans Out of Afghanistan, but Just 7 People on an Evacuation Flight – “​​There was transport capacity for alcohol, but not for the local staff in Afghanistan,” read a piece in Germany’s Bild newspaper, referring to the fact that the German military had earlier flown home 65,000 cans of beer and 340 bottles of wine before it withdrew from its bases in Mazar-e Sharif and Kabul at the end of June. – surely they could have blown up the alcohol and put people on the flights? – this is the kind of thing that fuels future grudges that morph into terrorist attacks. But it also shows the colossal failure in intelligence in a microcosm

    How Social Media Helped ‘Taliban 2.0’ Take Control of Afghanistan | Vice – The modern, tech-literate Afghanistan Taliban aren’t the same as they were 20 years ago. Now they’re using technology to control the narrative and assert dominance.

    Ranger Wing to be sent to Kabul to aid in evacuation of Irish citizens | Irish Times – if you want to understand what a mess Afghanistan is, look at Ireland. Ireland hasn’t been involved in Afghanistan and has had to send a special forces team in to try and get three dozen Irish citizens out of the country

    SIGAR | Lessons Learned. The Ides of August – a couple of good post-mortem reads on Afghanistan. A few things struck me. Mission creep had been baked in, although much of that was down to the allies partnering with the Northern Alliance and liberal values. The dual nature of Pakistan, which I suspect Pakistan will get punished for in the longer term. The lack of intelligence on the main players involved such as former president of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai

    Beauty

    Skincare Preferences by Generation | NPD Group – Despite the generational differences in skincare preferences, there are also commonalities. At the end of the day, it seems we’re not so different, after all. Whether they are more like my mother or my cousin, we see from consumers across-the-board that they are open to trying new things, are looking for clean ingredients, and simply want skincare that produces results from a brand they can trust. Regardless of the trends driving the category, the demand for efficacy and transparency is here to stay

    Business

    Wolfsburg, we have a problem: How Volkswagen stalled in China | Reuters – Last month, though, he said Volkswagen had fixed the problems revealed by the test, that the ructions of the episode had subsided and the carmaker’s Chinese business was recovering. “We have once again clearly one of the safest cars on the market in this segment,” Woellenstein told reporters in July. “We will once again take up the old leadership of the Passat.”But there is quite some ground to regain in the large family car segment. A total of 47,480 Passats were sold in the first six months of this year in China, some way behind the 91,110 Toyota Camrys (7203.T) and 89,157 Honda Accords (7267.T), according to LMC. The figures from the same period of 2019, before the pandemic struck, show how steeply the Volkswagen model has fallen away of late: 91,400 Passats were sold versus 111,968 Accords and 85,396 Camrys. – I am surprised by this, given Volkswagen’s obsession with common platforms

    Xi Jinping Millionaire Relations Reveal Fortunes of Elite – Bloomberg 

    Tata’s rise mirrors the sweep of India’s history | Financial Times – Tata is no longer at India’s entrepreneurial vanguard. The likes of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries and Gautam Adani’s eponymous group, with their investments in telecoms and renewable energy, hold stronger claim to be the “nation builders” of today. These tycoons represent a different way of doing business, one that has prompted much consternation. They lack Tata’s ambivalence about the state, aligning themselves unabashedly with Narendra Modi, and share few of the conservative Tatas’ qualms about “wealth creation for its own sake”.

    Consumer behaviour

    Parents in China are giving their children growth hormones to make them taller | South China Morning Post 

    Biden is sandbagging on immigration – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion – the new American support for throwing open the country’s gates is more broad than it is deep. There’s a real desire to cleanse the stain of Trump’s human rights abuses and flirtation with white-nationalism — to at least be able to say that America is still the Nation of Immigrants, that we still have compassion for the people of the poor countries of the world. But beyond that idealistic impulse, I’m not so sure that most liberals have a strong, enduring commitment to welcoming in as many refugees, asylum-seekers, and economic migrants as possible. 

    One reason is that the Democratic party is increasingly the party of the educated, and to most educated Americans, people like refugees and asylum seekers live in a different world. There’s little natural class solidarity or empathy there. And when it comes to skilled immigrants — the people waiting desperately for that backlog of 100,000 green cards to be processed — well, to most educated Americans, that’s the competition. Both for themselves and for their kids in schools.

    Coronavirus: Singaporeans eye savings with bulk-shopping groups on WhatsApp, Telegram | South China Morning Post – interesting how these groups were informally formed

    Economics

    Beijing’s American Hustle | Foreign Affairs – U.S. institutions, especially in finance and technology, cling to self-destructive habits acquired through decades of “engagement,” an approach to China that led Washington to prioritize economic cooperation and trade above all else. 

    If U.S. policymakers and legislators find the will, however, there is a way to pull Wall Street and Silicon Valley back onside, convert the United States’ vulnerabilities into strengths, and mitigate the harmful effects of Beijing’s political warfare. That must begin with bolder steps to stem the flow of U.S. capital into China’s so-called military-civil fusion enterprises and to frustrate Beijing’s aspiration for leadership in, and even monopoly control of, high-tech industries—starting with semiconductor manufacturing

    Why has the gig economy been a disappointment? – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion – it seems likely that Uber and Lyft will survive, but not at the scale investors hoped — instead, they’ll mostly be boutique services for the well-heeled. And I expect they’ll probably take a hit to their valuations.

    Ethics

    Engrave Danger: An Analysis of Apple Engraving Censorship across Six Regions – The Citizen Lab

    Apple exports PRC censorship to Hong Kong and Taiwan – Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech – Liu believes what he calls the “lameness” of Apple’s China filter list suggests Apple might have its own in-house censorship team, because “if it were a Chinese company to provide censorship to Apple, they would’ve done a far better job.”

    China’s Hong Kong Crackdown Sweeps Away Unions, Activist Groups – Bloomberg 

    How Chinese pressure on covid origins probe shocked WHO — and led Tedros to push back – The Washington Post – When a WHO scientist on a coronavirus origins probe announced in February that the idea that the virus leaked from a lab was “extremely unlikely” and unworthy of further investigation, senior WHO staff in Geneva were shocked. “We fell off our chairs,” one member told the authors. The team in Wuhan appeared to have given in to Chinese pressure to dismiss the idea without a real investigation. Later, when the WHO-China team released a report that again dismissed that scenario, Tedros pushed back, saying that the research was not “extensive enough” and that there had not been “timely and comprehensive data-sharing.” Since then, relations between the WHO and China have nosedived. Chinese officials said in July that they would not accept any further investigation into the origin of the coronavirus in China and accused the United States of pressuring scientists. The WHO last week released a statement that resisted the idea that “the origins study has been politicized, or that WHO has acted due to political pressure.”

    China, the WHO and the power grab that fuelled a pandemic | News | The Sunday Times – In 2017 Chan crowned her final year in office by welcoming Xi to Geneva. While he was there, she signed an agreement that committed the WHO to working alongside China on health as part of the country’s Belt and Road initiative. It was the first time any UN agency had signed up to the initiative, which seeks to extend Chinese influence and trade in more than 70 developing countries by financing infrastructure projects. The initiative is highly controversial because its critics argue that China uses it to shackle countries, particularly in Africa, to “unsustainable debt” as a way of gaining access to the continent’s raw materials and buying political favours. “I think health is too special to get into the really seedy politics that Belt and Road is part of, and I wouldn’t want the WHO to be associated with it,” Gostin argues. “The cost in terms of human rights and debt, and other adverse events for Africa, was a bridge too far.”

    Hong Kong’s Leader Killed Her City – The Atlantic – Regina Ip, a pro-Beijing lawmaker and member of Lam’s cabinet, told me that simply having the laws on the books would provide a “deterrent effect” to protesters, and that the fears of journalists and activists over the curtailing of freedoms were not “completely misguided.”

    Why is advertising still ignoring people in their 50s and 60s? | Campaign – TL;DR lazy generational thinking and ageism

    Finance

    Why Hong Kong’s crypto crown is slipping | Financial Times 

    Facebook (FB) Offers Loans as Tiny as $6,720 to Businesses in India – Bloomberg

    China’s Hong Kong Crackdown: Billions in Retirement Money Blocked for UK Emigres – Bloomberg – Chinese authorities consider the BN(O) policy as a “means to destabilize Hong Kong,” said Joseph Cheng, a retired political science professor who left Hong Kong shortly after the security law was imposed. “These people are seen as traitors and fugitives.”

    Luxury

    How the daigou can help new brands | Vogue Business – The classic image of the daigou is of an entrepreneurial and well-connected individual who buys global luxury brands on behalf of Chinese clients abroad, where prices are lower and hard-to-find products are more accessible. But the new model daigou is also working closer to home, and mixing emerging Chinese designers with foreign brands. The motivation for the evolution of the daigou’s role comes from a wave of young Gen Z Chinese consumers who are seeking more interesting and affordable fashion and don’t care as much about the name on the label. This is good news for new brands in China – and elsewhere. In a fiercely competitive market, any well-designed brand has the potential to catch consumers’ eyes. What’s needed in the early days of a new brand’s development is an effective sales channel. – Building a similar relationship with daigou, that brands currently have with fashion stylists

    Marketing

    Insight & Strategy: #LikeAGirl | Contagious – on brands taking a leadership position – a great example by Always

    Media

    [Report] Bad News, By Joseph Bernstein | Harper’s Magazine – In the beginning, there were ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they were good. Midcentury American man could come home after eight hours of work and turn on his television and know where he stood in relation to his wife, and his children, and his neighbors, and his town, and his country, and his world. And that was good. Or he could open the local paper in the morning in the ritual fashion, taking his civic communion with his coffee, and know that identical scenes were unfolding in households across the country. Over frequencies our American never tuned in to, red-baiting, ultra-right-wing radio preachers hyperventilated to millions. In magazines and books he didn’t read, elites fretted at great length about the dislocating effects of television. And for people who didn’t look like him, the media had hardly anything to say at all – give this a read

    Inside the Hong Kong Newsroom at the Edge of Autocracy – The Atlantic – SCMP bias on protests

    Security

    COVID slows Apple and Google production shift away from China – Nikkei Asia – AirPods — both entry-level and high-end models — were among the earliest products that Apple began making in significant amounts in Vietnam, having moved production there around two years ago during the height of U.S.-China trade tensions. Apple’s plan to bring some MacBook and iPad production to Vietnam has also been put on hold due to a lack of engineering resources, an incomplete notebook computer supply chain and the dynamic COVID situation, one of the people said. Production of smart doorbells, security cameras and smart speakers for Amazon, which recently moved to Vietnam, has also faced delays since May as assembly lines in the northern part of the country coped with a surge in local cases and tougher COVID prevention measures

    Apple’s NeuralHash Algorithm Has Been Reverse-Engineered – Schneier on Security

    Opinion | We built a system like Apple’s to flag child sexual abuse material — and concluded the tech was dangerous – The Washington Post – Our research project began two years ago, as an experimental system to identify CSAM in end-to-end-encrypted online services. As security researchers, we know the value of end-to-end encryption, which protects data from third-party access. But we’re also horrified that CSAM is proliferating on encrypted platforms. And we worry online services are reluctant to use encryption without additional tools to combat CSAM. We sought to explore a possible middle ground, where online services could identify harmful content while otherwise preserving end-to-end encryption. The concept was straightforward: If someone shared material that matched a database of known harmful content, the service would be alerted. If a person shared innocent content, the service would learn nothing. People couldn’t read the database or learn whether content matched, since that information could reveal law enforcement methods and help criminals evade detection. Knowledgeable observers argued a system like ours was far from feasible. After many false starts, we built a working prototype. But we encountered a glaring problem. 

    Our system could be easily repurposed for surveillance and censorship. The design wasn’t restricted to a specific category of content; a service could simply swap in any content-matching database, and the person using that service would be none the wiser. 
    A foreign government could, for example, compel a service to out people sharing disfavored political speech. That’s no hypothetical: WeChat, the popular Chinese messaging app, already uses content matching to identify dissident material. India enacted rules this year that could require pre-screening content critical of government policy. Russia recently fined Google, Facebook and Twitter for not removing pro-democracy protest materials. 
    We spotted other shortcomings. The content-matching process could have false positives, and malicious users could game the system to subject innocent users to scrutiny.     – Emphasis in bold is mine

    Technology

    Laptops Shortage Is Easing as Pandemic Demand Wanes – Bloomberg – The waning demand for PCs will likely last for at least several more quarters. Memory prices are dropping precipitously on fears the chip cycle is over. But it’s good news for anyone looking to buy a laptop, printer, webcam or router. Expect them to be much easier to find in stores this fall. – I am hoping that the price of SSDs will fall again

    Robinhood Q2 earnings: Crypto makes up 52% of company’s revenue — Quartz – would I be right in thinking that there is more derivatives and CFDs of crypto being sold then than there is crypto and could be vulnerable to a market squeeze?

    Intel with an old take on big.little for Alder Lake | EE News Europe – Intel’s next-generation desktop chip, code-named Alder Lake, is the company’s first hybrid architecture to integrate two core types – the Performance-core and Efficient-core. This is similar to ARM’s big.little approach which used a small core optimised for low power consumption with lower performance alongside a larger, higher performance core. Both cores could run the same code depending on the context, avoiding the problems of having a scheduler to allocate tasks to multiple cores. This has traditionally been a limiting factor for the system-level performance of multicore chip designs

    IBM shows first dedicated AI inference chip | EE News Europe – interesting that they fabbed it using Samsung’s 7nm process. It has 22 billion transistors. Indicates a move away from GPUs to put machine learning back on the CPU

    Wireless

    Epic’s Fortnite lawsuit has become a nightmare for Google – Protocol – Google ‘estimated in 2019 that it risked losing as much as $6 billion per year if app makers and app store operators banded together with Epic and began creating alternative distribution channels. So instead of offering a superior product, the company muscled its way to a market position now being viewed by U.S. regulators as potentially anticompetitive’ – this might feed into a wider FTC case later on given the focus on revenue. More related content here.

  • Photo hashing & other news

    Apple photo hashing

    Report: Apple to announce client-side photo hashing system to detect child abuse images in user’s photos libraries – 9to5Mac – photo hashing its not foolproof. Once the proof of concept exists, Apple won’t be able to withstand the pressure authoritarian government could use it to track other materials. Tencent’s WeChat is already collecting memes that the Chinese government wouldn’t like from foreign WeChat accounts so that it can train its algorithms to locate similar content with domestic users. The risk for Apple’s customers in other markets like Russia, China and the middle east is real. Apple’s development of photo hashing has garnered a lot of coverage

    Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery | Financial Times 

    Apple led the market on encryption, but other players like WhatsApp have made it clear that they won’t follow Apple on photo hashing.

    Apple has been trying to ignore the voices complaining against its photo hashing initiative. The problem is that those voices are the early adopters and developers who have made Apple what it is today. I think that this could end very badly for Apple in the long term. Particularly when viewed in context of questionable ethical choices despite its progressive positioning on issues in western markets

    Apple Discusses “Screeching Voices of the Minority” in Internal Memos – It’s difficult to even write a piece like this, pointing out that a feature ostensibly created for good could have bad implications. Again: What happens when a country like China uses this feature to find people with images critical of the government? Why wouldn’t the industry want to start searching for pirated content on iPhones in a few years?

    Apple Privacy Letter: An Open Letter Against Apple’s Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology – a legion of the great and the good of the technorati from around the world on the photo hashing

    One Bad Apple – The Hacker Factor Blog 

    Even the FT weighed in.

    Business

    The China risk factor continues to reverberate: China’s Corporate Crackdown Is Just Getting Started. Signs Point to More Tumult Ahead. – WSJ

    Chinese music group pulls $1bn Hong Kong IPO after tech crackdown | Financial Times – interesting move, especially given Netease’s exposure to the edutech sector

    ‘If Masa said yes, who am I to object?’: SoftBank deals unleash internal compliance tensions | Financial Times – sounds like desperate measures

    China

    Is Pax Sinica possible? – China will need to start upholding democratic values and norms, and cultivating peaceful relationships with other countries. Pax Americana has survived for so long, because many countries, including China’s neighbours, rely heavily on the US for trade, finance, technology, and security. They will be reluctant to accept Pax Sinica, unless China offers them something better. And that must begin with pax – I suspect that Premier Xi would be thinking more along the lines of mercantilistic trade relationships and vassal statehood, which would be more in keeping with pre-revolutionary China

    Consumer behaviour

    Everybody needs to get vaccinated, says Tilman Fertitta – Fertitta’s comments about employees admitting that they had fake vaccines cards is pretty disturbing. It isn’t like vaccines are in short supply in the markets that has restaurants in like New York. The counterfeit vaccine cards must be more about avoiding vaccines all together

    Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades | PNAS – Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual’s mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders. – literally society is sick

    The xenophobic chicken and the propaganda egg: disentangling official and popular nationalism in China – by Kevin Carrico – NSL can’t cancel me – you could not make some of this up. But then, you also couldn’t make up the QAnon community if you tried either.

    ‘Sales funnels’ and high-value men: the rise of strategic dating | Dating | The Guardian – I suspect this is an edge case but its interesting

    Where have all the pre-teens gone? – The Face 

    Design

    ongoing by Tim Bray · Apps Getting Worse – Every high-tech company has people called “Product Managers” (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.” Because that’s not bold. That’s not visionary. That doesn’t get you promoted. – This also explains why Skype got designed into irrelevancy

    FMCG

    Unilever installs a detergent refill machine in Mumbai | Trendwatching – this all feels like things have gone full circle. My Mum and Dad growing up as children in rural Ireland talked about how many dry goods products were sold by weight in the village store. My Granny used to keep spices and flavourings for baking in a bucket sized tin that she’d been gifted decades before by the village store owner. Used packaging was a community asset rather than a liability. The biscuits were sold by the dozen in a paper bag by the shopkeeper. I can just about remember the village store and its long time owner Mrs Paddy Kelly, (Mr Kelly had died decades ago but I have no idea what Mrs Kelly’s name was). By the time I was born, it was more like a modern convenience store, with a farm supplies store attached. Electricity had come to the farm when I was three or four, so we had a fridge and an icebox – ideal for a block of HB vanilla ice cream that came back from the shop wrapped in newsprint to try and keep it cold.

    Secondly, by having a vending machine in store; Unilever are still managing to keep control of their brand.

    Japan

    Japan’s fractured polity exposed by COVID-19 crisis – Nikkei Asia – Whatever the intention, the public sees hypocrisy, inconsistency and incompetence. The vaccination rollout has been a mess. The public was asked to practice “self-restraint” and stay at home for the fourth state of emergency as the country opened its doors to tens of thousands of athletes and officials for the 2020 Olympics. 

    This dismal state of affairs clashes with the image of competence and professionalism that Japan has enjoyed for decades, and for which it is admired around the world. 

    Japan looks good in international COVID comparisons, but by its own standards, the situation is perceived as chaotic and a failure of leadership. The public has lost faith. Cynicism has spread as people blame a sclerotic government that does not seem to understand the many recent transformations of Japanese society

    Legal

    South Africa grants patent to an AI system known as DABUS — Quartz Africa – The patent application listing DABUS as the inventor was filed in patent offices around the world, including the US, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. But only South Africa granted the patent (Australia followed suit a few days later after a court judgment gave the go-ahead). South Africa’s decision has received widespread backlash from intellectual property experts. Some have labelled it a mistake, or an oversight by the patent office. However, as a patent and AI scholar whose PhD aims to address the gaps in patent law created by AI inventorship, I suggest that the decision is supported by the government’s policy environment in recent years. This has aimed to increase innovation, and views technology as a way to achieve this – back when I worked for DSM before I went to college, a lot of of our patented products were developed using software that tested and then gave us optimal formulas – yet the patents went to the doctor who was the nominal head of the lab

    Luxury

    LVMH’s Deal With Google Is Groundbreaking. Here’s Why. – develop business solutions based on artificial intelligence (AI), it raised many questions about how brands are embracing the use of digital technologies to reshape the luxury experience. Google said they would join forces to empower LVMH’s individual luxury brands to create new, personalised customer experiences that fostered long-term growth, through functions like demand forecasting, inventory optimisation, as well as develop new business use cases at scale and explore co-innovation opportunities by launching a data and AI Academy in Paris

    Luxury Daily | Have China’s ‘trafific stars’ become toxic for beauty brands? – Chinese versions of K-pop stars are becoming embroiled in scandals that affect their brand partners

    Retailing

    Crocs, Ralph Lauren, LV All Get More Expensive As Apparel Prices Soar – Apparel prices across US retailers rose nearly 5% in June, the biggest leap in a decade.

    Software

    ongoing by Tim Bray · Apps Getting Worse – Every high-tech company has people called “Product Managers” (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.” Because that’s not bold. That’s not visionary. That doesn’t get you promoted. – this explains why Skype got designed into irrelevancy

    Sports

    Why Puma cancelled a $2.7 million deal with Nigeria — Quartz Africa – Nigeria’s current sports administrators are delighted. The athletics federation said Nigeria’s sports minister had successfully stopped athletes from receiving Puma bags containing about 40 items each in Tokyo through the Nigerian embassy. To this set of administrators, the 2019 deal was not properly agreed between Puma and previous leaders of Nigeria’s athletics body

    Wireless

    General Dynamics Mission Systems Introduces Badger Software-Defined Radio – Soldier Systems Daily – interesting decline in size, but much slower than would be likely to happen in the commercial space

    Samsung flagships can no longer compete with the Chinese smartphones – The current flagship Galaxy S21 series has never managed to win worldwide love. Judging by the information from South Korean publications, the flagships, which were supposed to destroy competitors, failed miserably in sales. Based on the report of Counterpoint analysts, it can be concluded that the Galaxy S21 series has not been able to repeat the success of any of its predecessors, starting with the Galaxy S5 – this looks like PC sales when ‘white box manufacturers’ disrupted Winter brands such as IBM and Compaq

    Research Alliances Grow to Learn How 6G Will Play Out – EE Times Europe

    Thailand

    Jack “dekfarang” Brown is having a tantrum – by Andrew MacGregor Marshall – Secret Siam – foreign influencers enjoyed by Thais were a thing I didn’t even know about

  • Female voices impact + more news

    Pinay female voices power

    The Philippines’ secret weapon against Chinese incursions | The Economist – having women radio operators seem to be more successful and less likely to rise tensions, seems to be down to training and the nature of female voices. It reminded me of how early HCI experiments by DARPA found that jet fighter pilots responded best to ‘mature’ female voices on warning alerts. An interesting aside is that the radio altimeter on Airbus aircraft actually use an English mature male voice instead.

    Academic research gives us an idea of what kind of female voices are likely to be more effective. Maybe this authority is conveyed by the female radio operator training and the female voices selected by the Coastguard?

    Women with masculine voice are perceived to be more rational and persuasive than those with feminine voice. In addition, masculine voice is rated as more competent than feminine voice, regardless of the actual gender 

    It’s not What It Speaks, but It’s How It Speaks: A Study into Smartphone Voice-User Interfaces (VUI) by Jaeyeol Jeong & Dong-Hee Shin of Department of Interaction ScienceSungkyunkwan University, Seoul,Korea (2015)

    Other research suggested that a preference for female voices occurred over time, this might be due to technological change in voices. The heavily synthesised ‘Speak n Spell’ type voices were male, better technology allowed for great choices and detail in female voices to be conveyed.

    …the survey found that people preferred human-like, happy, empathetic voices with higher pitches. However, these preferences were not static; for instance, user preference for voice gender changed over time from masculine voices to more feminine ones. Based on these findings, the researchers were able to formulate a high-level framework to classify different types of interactions across various computer-based technologies

    The role of computer voice in the future of speech-based human-computer interaction – Tokyo Institute of Technology

    Other research that it is attitude rather than a female voice that matters. Which begs the question is it compliance to the radio operator training rather than a female voice that is more important in this context? Filipino culture has a certain amount of machismo and having female voices delivering the radio instructions might be a way around this dilemma.

    introvert participants rated the introvert computer voice as more attractive, credible, and informative, while the extrovert participants rated the extrovert voice more highly. Expanding on these findings, it was found that the personality conveyed by the voice was the dominant percept

    Voice as a design material : sociophonetic inspired design strategies in Human-Computer Interaction by Selina Sutton, Paul Foulkes and David Kirk of the University of York presented at CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019). (PDF)

    The use of female voices in this way could be accused of playing to sexist tropes

    China

    Another day, another reminder of how Brand China has deteriorated – Fawning and complacent, the West has eased China’s path to power | The Sunday Times – while the statement is true, it also shows how much the tone has changed towards China amongst UK political elites

    China goes on the defensive as Covid vaccine diplomacy backfires | The Times – Beijing’s hopes of winning favour by helping the world’s poorer nations out of the pandemic have been hamstrung by questions over the efficacy of the jabs on offer

    Alleged assault on scientists overshadows China’s space race success | Financial Times – Police detained Zhang Tao, chair and party secretary at China Aerospace Investment Holdings, for his alleged attacks on Wu Meirong and Wang Jinnian last month, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday. Wang and Wu had refused to recommend Zhang for membership of the International Academy of Astronautics, a Stockholm-based group that recognises distinguished scientists

    For China’s Business Elites, Staying Out of Politics Is No Longer an Option – The New York Times – The Chinese internet immediately savaged Didi and Ms. Liu — and then Mr. Liu. A hashtag, #Didiapppulledfromappstores, which was started by the official People’s Daily, was viewed more than one billion times over a 24-hour period on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. Weibo users called Didi a “traitor” and a “walking dog of the United States.” They urged the government to also punish Mr. Liu for selling out national interests

    Underground front: the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong – Continuing to operate secretly in Hong Kong can only cause unnecessary discomfort. Hong Kong people already accept the CCP’s undoubted authority in leading the affairs of state. While the party appreciates that Hong Kong needs to function differently from the mainland, its basic instincts, which are Leninist in nature, make it difficult for the party apparatus not to over- extend its reach into the city’s public affairs. The sharpest point of departure between the party’s way and Hong Kong’s way arises from their different governing experience. (PDF)

    Consumer behaviour

    Japanese fax fans rally to defence of much-maligned machine | Japan | The Guardian – Members of the resistance said there were concerns over the security of sensitive information and “anxiety over the communication environment” if, as the government had requested, they switched exclusively to email. Japanese ministries and agencies use faxes when handling highly confidential information, including court procedures and police work, and the Hokkaido Shimbun said there were fears that exclusively online communication would result in security lapses

    Patriotism Abroad: Overseas Chinese Students’ Encounters With Criticisms of China – Henry Chiu Hail, 2015 – research on international education suggests that host country students’ lack of interest in talking to international students is a major cause of international student segregation. Some Chinese international students, however, complain that although host students want to talk with them about China, they often exhibit misinformed, prejudiced and offensive views of Chinese current events. This has occasionally led to tensions between Chinese international students and host communities. Drawing on interviews and open-ended surveys of Chinese students at an American university, this study shows a variety of positive and negative cross-national interactions and uses social identity theory to explain why tensions may arise. Negative reactions to hearing criticism of one’s home country are often motivated by concerns for status, loyalty, harmony, or utilitarian politics. However, fostering a common group identity and the perception of mutual benevolence among students from different countries can promote positive cross-national interaction. Furthermore, international students may learn more about democracy and human rights through observing the host society rather than directly discussing these topics with host country members – basically the delta between western perceptions of China, versus domestic Chinese propaganda is going to drive that wedge deeper. Universities have Chinese students purely for the money as there is minimal wider benefit to their domestic student body. Which begs wider questions about the purpose and morality of many western third level education institutions

    Culture

    Trese: the true crime and folklore behind Netflix’s… – The Face – it reminded me of the animated Blade series and Ghost in The Shell. The Philippines could be an anime powerhouse

    Finance

    China’s Big Tech Crackdown Puts Dozens of U.S. IPOs at Risk – Bloomberg – “The Chinese government could have stopped the IPOs from happening, like how they did with Ant,” said Sharif Farha, a Dubai-based portfolio manager at Safehouse Global Consumer Fund. “Instead, they allowed global investors to take pain, and consequently have broken trust with a lot of foreign investors. While we did not participate in any of these listings, we would imagine that several funds would consider exiting.” – it makes the Goldman Sachs ICBC deal look even more sketchy

    China Mulls Closing Loophole Tech Giants Use for U.S. IPOs – Bloomberg – on one hand I get it. Mainland Chinese are creating bubbles in areas like property and have poor returns because they don’t have stocks or ETFs that they can invest in. On the other hand this burns early stage foreign investors to the ground as they can no longer exit their money from China.

    Tell me lies, tell me sweet little VIEs | Financial Times – not terribly surprising. VIEs are the vehicle that Chinese companies use to go public abroad

    Chinese companies listing in the U.S. like DiDi face audit concerns – Protocol – basically you don’t know what you’re buying

    UK advertising watchdog to crack down on misleading crypto marketing | Financial Times

    Hong Kong

    Vitasoy faces boycott in mainland China following stabbing in HK | PR | Campaign Asia – Following the incident, an undated internal memo was circulated among Vitasoy employees expressing condolences to Leung’s family. A translated version of the memo, which leaked onto Chinese social media, mentions that “human resources has contacted [Leung’s] family and will follow up and provide assistance when needed.” The internal memo proved controversial, as Chinese social media users accused the brand of condoning violence and defending anti-China sentiments. – the red guard are already here. This wasn’t an endorsement of his act, but sympathy with the loss and grief that his parents must be feeling as they try and make sense of his actions.

    Crypto Keepers’ NFT-Backed Drama Series Hatched by AMM Global – Variety – the production company spun out of Hong Kong’s Asia Television – a former free to air TV station. Meanwhile in the UK, I heard that a production company is looking for people how have lost the password to their cryptocurrency wallet.

    Ideas

    If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals – Kevin Drum ….Over the last four years, white liberals have become a larger and larger share of the Democratic Party….And since white voters are sorting on ideology more than nonwhite voters, we’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of “racial resentment.” So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us. 

    ….If Democrats elevate issues or theories that a large minority of nonwhite voters reject, it’s going to be hard to keep those margins….Black conservatives and Hispanic conservatives don’t actually buy into a lot of these intellectual theories of racism. They often have a very different conception of how to help the Black or Hispanic community than liberals do – well worth a more in-depth read

    Culture Wars are Long Wars – The Scholar’s Stage – Democrats under 40 take socialism very seriously. The Great Recession was their formative event; the old orthodoxy did not seem equal to the fear and heartache it caused. Thus, gradually, the younger cohorts have been won over to the socialist cause.5 All that keeps the socialists at bay is the power of their elders. That power cannot last. At some point in the next decade the transition point will arrive. Gradually will become suddenly, and America’s most popular party will be openly run by socialists – I don’t agree with a lot of the post, but it provides an interesting prespective

    Bristol Unpacked on whether white working class people are shut out of the equality debate, with Hartcliffe’s award winning filmmaker Paul Holbrook – The Bristol Cable – far too short a discussion session as podcast, it felt like they were just scratching the surface with this recording

    Erik Prince Had Pitched $10 Billion Private Army in Ukraine: Time – everything he does seems like it’s taken from the plot from William Gibson’s sprawl trilogy

    Innovation

    Institute for New Economic Thinking | How Intel finkncialised and lost its leadership in semiconductor technology – The root of Intel’s failure in organizational integration lies in the financialized character of a third social condition of innovative enterprise, strategic control. Accepting stock yield as the measure of enterprise performance, in recent years Intel’s senior executives who exercise strategic control have lacked both the incentive and, increasingly we would argue, the ability, to implement innovative investment strategies through organizational integration. 

    Executive stock-based pay, in the form of stock options and stock awards, has created incentives for Intel’s CEOs to do large-scale buybacks to give manipulative boosts to the company’s stock price. Table 3 documents the total compensation, including realized gains from stock options and stock awards, of Intel’s CEOs over the past three decades

    Ireland

    Irish Times under fire for page of China propaganda | Ireland | The Sunday Times – The newspaper, whose rate card sets a full-page colour ad at €34,000, ran the paid-for-content on page five of its news section under an “advertisement” heading last Thursday. The accompanying article by He Xiangdong, the Chinese ambassador, claimed the CCP enjoyed “solid” support from its people, and highlighted China’s vastly improved standards of living in recent decades – propaganda from draconian empires doesn’t go down that well in Ireland

    Luxury

    Supreme Italia Founders Sentences to Jail in Court | High Snobriety – this has been running for a long time. The key challenge was that they were headquartered in the UK. They could have got around this by being headquartered in a market that allows first registration as legitimacy for brands. More related content here.

    Philippines

    Duterte’s Pivot to China Yet to Deliver Promised Billions in Infrastructure – Bloomberg – from a Chinese communist perspective, why should they? They aren’t that good at being good to their word. Secondly, they are likely to view the Duterte regime as a vassal state and are getting everything they want out of the Philippines anyway

    Security

    Update Regarding VSA Security Incident | Kaseya – over 1,500 companies affected

    Code in huge ransomware attack written to avoid computers that use Russian, says new report – which begs the following questions / hypotheses? Are they in cahoots with Russian government? Was it that they didn’t want their own lives disrupted? Or are they petrified of the Russian security services coming after them, but relatively sanguine about foreign security services and law enforcement

    Technology

    The AI Wolf that Refuses to Play the Game Goes Viral – Google Docs – surely an issue of game design in terms of the way behaviours were rewarded and penalised rather than machine learning?

    The Tech Cold War’s ‘Most Complicated Machine’ That’s Out of China’s Reach – The New York Times – a great profile of ASML

    Musk has ‘mesmerised’ UK over electric power, says JCB chair | Financial Times – there’s a lot not to like about Lord Anthony Bamford, but I agree with him on this. Companies like BMW managed to extend this to cars. Bamford should be pitching this where there are hydrogen power plans like ireland

  • Life Bread & other things this week

    Life Bread homage by craft beer brand

    Life Bread is a brand icon. For Hong Kongers the blue or red checked wrappers mean western style bread. Life Bread is as Hong Kong as the Lion Rock – a granite peak that overlooks the city. Life Bread became an emotive icon used in the 2019 Hong Kong protests as an celebration of Hong Kong identity. It has even been celebrated in art. So when a local craft brewer FoamBeerBrewery was launching a bread based IPA it made sense that it would go with packaging that linked back to the Hong Konger lingua franca for bread.

    Foam Brewery Bread IPA
    FoamBeerBrewery Bread IPA packaging evoking the wrappers of Garden Bakery Life Bread – a local hero brand for Hong Kong

    FoamBeerBrewery Bread IPA is available from local high-end supermarket citysuper.

    Everybody’s business

    I came across this cold war era animated film that explains capitalism and extols its virtues. Nowadays there isn’t the same efforts to promote capitalism in the face of millennial socialism. As these things go, it’s not a bad explainer for economics neophytes.

    Immersive billboards

    A number of Asian cities have fitted high definition digital billboards that go around the corner of a building. The latest one overlooks Tokyo’s Shibuya crossing.

    The content has varied by market, including a golden bull to celebrate lunar new year in Kuala Lumpur. The Tokyo board taps into the Japanese love of cats. Here’s what the animation looks like. It appears sporadically to encourage bystanders to keep watching the adverts that stream on the billboard.

    There is a live stream of the billboard available.

    https://youtu.be/HX9pROOvTzA

    Brand China

    The communist party of China had its 100 year anniversary celebration to focus on past accomplishments and project its current strength. TL;DR China wants to smash your head into a wall of steel that has been made by 1.4 billion or so Chinese people.

    Meanwhile Pew Research was looking at ‘Brand China’

    While Xi Jingping might not care, it makes trade harder to do with more developed economy.

    The one segment where China does seem to have unwavering support is from the progressive left, particularly in American politics. This advocacy seems to be based more on their wishful thinking than any messages delivered by China as Noah Smith discusses in their newsletter.

  • George Gilderism + more things

    George Gilderism

    An interesting debate on what I would term “George Gilderism” of the techno-utopia is just around the corner versus the concern that innovation is slowing. George Gilder is the author of Telecosm; which encapsulated techno-utopian optimism at its peak in the mid-1990s; just as the web was coming into its own. ‘George Gilderism’ has since been brought to issues such photo and video imaging through to a blockchain based web.

    I’ve been making my way slowly through The Rise and Fall of American Growth which makes a convincing argument against ‘George Gilderism’. Stewart Brand in his work The Whole Earth Discipline makes a tepid case for ‘George Gilderism’. Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants suggests that technological progress almost has a will to happen. And that will or technium as he puts it is running at increasing cadence which seems to counter the idea of slowing innovation. Kelly doesn’t make a compelling case for ‘George Gilderism’ either, technological progress brings its own problems. Innovation runs at different speeds at different times, in different fields.

    Here’s Intel executive Stacy Smith on what would have happened to the car industry if it had been able to reap the benefits of innovation in the same what the semiconductor field had:

    If you apply the same metric to something like gas mileage, it says you could drive to the sun from Earth on a single gallon of gas.’

    If there were a Moore’s Law in the car industry, you could drive to the sun on a gallon of gas – MarketWatch (April 1, 2017)

    Noah Smith makes the case for optimism here: Answering the Techno-Pessimists (complete) – Noahpinion and the Applied Divinity Studies blog makes the case for the great stagnation – Isolated Demands for Rigour in New Optimism | Applied Divinity Studies

    Finance

    The rise of crypto laundries: how criminals cash out of bitcoin | Financial Times – so it’s a threat to offshore financial industry? There are so many things wrong with cryptocurrencies, but this seems like an odd flaw to pick on.

    Share price ‘pop’ in US IPOs falls by half | Financial Times – this could be a good thing, as it shows that IPOs are closer to being optimally priced rather than management teams leaving a large amount of money on the table

    FMCG

    Nestlé document says majority of its food portfolio is unhealthy | Financial Times – they’re ok in moderation, but this will bring in a lot of shareholder pressure

    Ideas

    We Need More Public Space for Teen Girls – Bloomberg – “We had nothing to do and there was nowhere to go. So we’d go and hang out on the swings in the early evening and chat as the light slowly faded into dusk. It was better than sitting around at home.” – but why are spaces failing now where they didn’t in the past? I talked this through with a few friends of both genders who thought it odd. It sounded more like a law enforcement issue around public safety than a space issue. I could see an argument for a safe online space, for girls, boys and everyone in between – but that comes with its own complexity. I thought that the problem was that kids are the PlayStation generation or have their lives stuffed with activities by middle class parents.

    BUSINESS: Warren Buffett sinks climate measure, says world will adapt – www.eenews.net – completely missed this when it originally came out. On a related note I was listening to a podcast interview with Niall Ferguson promoting his book Doom and he mentioned that we have seen remarkably little volcanic activity over the past 200 years. When that picked up again, we could be dealing with global cooling. (This also explains why when I was a kid; the concern wasn’t global warming, but a new ice age). But even at that time, although the media missed it; the general consensus that carbon dioxide causing global warming was a bigger effect than short lived particles in the air reducing sun and causing global cooling. Even Richard Turco’s A Path Where No Man Thought which posited the idea of a nuclear winter has been proven wrong in subsequent analysis. There may be some cooling effect but not the kind of effect envisaged by massive nuclear conflicts.

    Xi Jinping on external propaganda and discursive power – China Neican 内参 – aka more and better Wolf Warrior. It was interested that this was misinterpreted by many people as a softening in tone by China. The reality is that the CPC views everything in terms of struggle, which is means their strategic approach is like a ratchet. It was interesting to read alongside the below article in The Spectator

    China is not as strong as it appears | The Spectator – The truth is that China is not as strong as it appears. As the Stanford scholar Elizabeth Economy points out, the country spent $216 billion on domestic security in 2019 — three times its expenditure of a decade before, and even more than what it spends on the People’s Liberation Army. Yet if Beijing’s internal problems continue to get worse, it will fall back on nationalism as a source of legitimacy. This will not be a comfortable experience for the West. ‘Communist China is bad, Han nationalist China will be worse,’ – the party is already validated by Han nationalism and has been a good while, so this worst case scenario is already here.

    Intellectual property

    Maine man sues his company, claiming it allowed Chinese access to US trade secrets | War Is Boring

    Luxury

    Busan’s Rich Have Only Malls to Spend Money on – The Chosun Ilbo

    Marketing

    Miller Lite, New Balance team up on ‘dad shoe’ beer koozie | Marketing Dive – Through the Shoezie, Miller Lite is hoping to appeal to the middle-aged men who represent an important cohort of beer drinkers and those who embrace dad fashion, which has become a trend as consumers retro looks. New Balance’s 624 Trainer — the model on which the koozie is based — is referred to as the classic “Dad Shoe” in the announcement. DDB San Francisco organized a modeling session for the Shoezie in which dads were placed in typical dad scenarios, such as cleaning the garage and searing a steak. By combining these elements of dad culture, Miller Lite is taking a lighthearted, relatable approach to Father’s Day

    Modern brands have forgotten that good ad slogans work (rest and play) | Business | The Times – Lloyds Banking Group, Pepsi and the food division of Marks & Spencer have brought some or all of their marketing in-house, partly as a cost-saving exercise. But partly, as Richard Warren, Lloyds’ head of marketing, claims: “No one can write in ad agencies any more.” Ouch. – So much here in factors causing this move. Relentless cost cutting has reduced agency talent bench, if you’re 40 you’re done. Agency focus on disruption and innovation over craft because of the media buying profits offered from online.

    Retailing

    How the Depop generation thinks | Vogue Business – so a lot of similarities with earlier generations at their age then. the Etsy acquisition of Depop is more about consolidating crafting and thrifting rather than a generational play per se.

    Tymbals – The edge @ ROI – The latest wonder to be rolled out of Nigel Scott’s RoboVC investment model. The DTC Dropship Arbitrage for evaluating the relative efficiency of eCommerce biz models

    Security

    Polish trial begins in Huawei-linked China espionage case | Reuters – Huawei, which fired Wang after his arrest but has helped finance his legal fees, told Reuters in a statement last month that its activities are “in accordance with the highest standards of transparency and adherence to laws and regulation.” – some interesting bits in the article. First of all, Huawei picking up a good deal of the legal fees for an employee that they ‘fired’. Secondly, Wang was interested in tapping of military optical fibres in Poland, which hints at technology theft and the depth of military and intelligence alliance between Russia and China

    Technology

    Huawei’s HarmonyOS: “Fake it till you make it” meets OS development | Ars Technica – All the evidence points to HarmonyOS being built on top of Android; but with Android mentions removed. Knowing Huawei they are probably violating GPL as well

    RISC vs. CISC Is the Wrong Lens for Comparing Modern x86, ARM CPUs – ExtremeTech

    Telecoms

    Bandwidth Boosts Could Help Unclog Space Communications | EE Times 

    Web of no web

    Killer drone ‘hunted down a human target’ without being told to – The March 2020 attack was in Libya and perpetrated by a Kargu-2 quadcopter drone produced by Turkish military tech company STM “during a conflict between Libyan government forces and a breakaway military faction led by Khalifa Haftar, commander of the Libyan National Army,” the Star reports, adding: “The Kargu-2 is fitted with an explosive charge and the drone can be directed at a target in a kamikaze attack, detonating on impact.” – At the start of my agency career, autonomous software agents would aid the consumer. I had a German dot com client called DealTime who had a Windows-only app for consumers. It would go out and find the best price on the web for items that they where interested in and keep an eye on those prices over time. Now we have Amazon and suicide drones.