What constitutes a gadget? The dictionary definition would be a small mechanical or electronic device or tool, especially an ingenious or novel one.
When I started writing this blog the gadget section focused on personal digital assistants such as the Palm PDA and Sony’s Clie devices. Or the Anoto digital pen that allowed you to record digitally what had been written on a specially marked out paper page, giving the best of both experiences.
Some of the ideas I shared weren’t so small like a Panasonic sleeping room for sleep starved, but well heeled Japanese.
When cutting edge technology failed me, I periodically went back to older technology such as the Nokia 8850 cellphone or my love of the Nokia E90 Communicator.
I also started looking back to discontinued products like the Sony Walkman WM-D6C Pro, one of the best cassette decks ever made of any size. I knew people who used it in their hi-fi systems as well as for portable audio.
Some of the technology that I looked at were products that marked a particular point in my life such as my college days with the Apple StyleWriter II. While my college peers were worried about getting on laser printers to submit assignments, I had a stack of cartridges cotton buds and isopropyl alcohol to deal with any non catastrophic printer issues and so could print during the evening in the comfort of my lodgings.
Alongside the demise in prominence of the gadget, there has been a rise in the trend of everyday carry or EDC.
LIHKG forum became famous beyond Hong Kong when it was at the centre of the leaderless protest movement during the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Hong Kong’s local internet has a history of Reddit like forums since the late 1990s.
HKGolden
Prior to 2016, there was the HKGolden Forum named after the Golden Computer shopping centre in Sham Shui Po. Golden Computer shopping centre considered one of the cheapest places in Hong Kong to purchase a computer. Products on sale range from complete PC systems, smartphones and peripherals. Unlike purely consumer-oriented IT shopping centres, Golden features several stores specialising in professional grade networking equipment as well.
The HKGolden forum fell out of a site put up in the late 1990s by stall owners at the Golden Computer centre to show people what were the typical prices for computer parts. The HKGolden Forum served as a creator and distributor of memetic ideas in Hong Kong including new slang terms of the local Cantonese vernacular and promoting discussions of societal topics.
LIHKG
LIHKG forum seemed rise in prominence once it was launched in 2016, quickly eclipsing HKGolden. It is restricted to contributors having an email address from a Hong Kong ISP (like Netvigator) or a local higher education institution. The LIHKG forum pig icon became a familiar motif on 2019 Hong Kong protest posters and artwork.
Since the national security law in Hong Kong it has has been a source of some anti-vaccination / public health programme discussions. Today the LIHKG forum app has been taken down from the Android and iOS app store.
Most Hong Kong political discussions have already moved on to various Telegram channels.
China has a fateful choice to make – by Noah Smith – An angry, chauvinistic nationalism has become a deeply rooted force in China’s society. Even as China’s government has wavered on whether to support Putin, there has been a massive outpouring of support for the invasion on Chinese social media. Of course that nationalistic sentiment isn’t unanimous, and it’s hard to tell what percent holds it, but for now they seem to have the upper hand. In fact, at this point it’s not clear that China’s top leadership could stop the nationalist tide even if they wanted to; like the generals of Imperial Japan, they could end up getting pushed into aggressive action by a populace that had no idea of the risks. – interesting that we’re starting to see this kind of rhetoric beyond reactionary elements
Park Island. (For Peter Moss, May 2018) | by Aidyn F | Medium – my friend Aidyn’s poetry. We were introduced by a former colleague of mine from Yahoo! who had worked in Hong Kong as a TV presenter before the handover. Aidyn introduced me to the Foreign Correspondents Club and gave me a different perspective on Hong Kong
Big Tobacco’s future in Russia goes up in smoke | Financial Times – a classic case of consumer globalisation: they made sophisticated products, marketed them expertly and raised quality standards. It would be fine apart from one problem: the product was cigarettes and the World Health Organization estimates that more than 19m Russian smokers will die prematurely. Hence the global pivot that companies have been trying to make towards vaping and heat-treated tobacco devices, including Philip Morris’s IQOS and BAT’s Glo. Russia has been vital to the “smoke-free future” that Philip Morris now promises and one executive last year hailed its “truly very spectacular progress” there. It is not clear how much safer heat-treating tobacco is to produce a nicotine vapour rather than smoking it in cigarettes. One analysis concluded that users of the devices inhale “substantially fewer” toxicants, but the results were mixed and most studies are done by tobacco companies. Nor is the purpose of heat-treated tobacco devices obvious. Philip Morris says that 72 per cent of IQOS users switched entirely from cigarettes in 2020, but it leaves many who carry on using both. There is an echo of the past transition from Belomorkanals to Marlboro Golds: better, but not good
Gadgets
Sound On Sound Issues (Active) – Amazing archive of the early issues from Sound on Sound magazine including amazing Japanese synthesisers like the Roland D-50
MTR sees Covid tester in action | The Standard – LIHKG forum users shared candid photos of Hong Kong people testing themselves for COVID in public including on the MTR and while out having a meal
Why the Chechen Warlord Wears Designer Boots | GQ – As Russia invades Ukraine, murderous Chechen leader and Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov is using designer pieces to demonstrate his power. I don’t think Prada really wants Ramzan Kadyrov as a brand ambassador
3G graduation sees DoCoMo celebrating 3G wireless services and how they fitted into consumers lives. While DoCoMo has its service running for another couple of years, rival Au has shut down its 3G network this year. The ‘Graduation’ in 3G graduation is used in a similar way to how US technology companies use ‘sunset’ as a euphemism for shutting down a service.
In sectors outside technology like the 3G graduation film, the term graduation is signify an artist leaving an idol group. Japanese Idol groups like AKB48 and Morning Musume mirror the interchangeable team nature of Puerto Rican boy bandma Menudo. Like Japanese idol groups, Menudo appeared in adverts for big brands like Pepsi and McDonalds across Latin and South America (including Portuguese speaking Brazil). They even appeared in a Pepsi ad that ran in the Philippines. They also did two TV specials. Japanese idol groups contain pop stars with the following characteristics:
a type of entertainer marketed for image, attractiveness, and personality in Japanese pop culture. Idols are primarily singers with training in acting, dancing, and modeling. Idols are commercialized through merchandise and endorsements by talent agencies, while maintaining a parasocial relationship with a financially loyal consumer fan base.
When members leave the group due to contract violations, ageing out, or wanting to build a career of their own, they ‘graduate’. Like the 3G graduation film idols share an association with school imagery.
https://youtu.be/dKxjw3YntBk
Kit-Kat anime advert
Nestlé Kit-Kats are popular in Japan. They are especially popular during exam time. The reason for this is that the Japanese pronunciation of KitKat, “Kitto Katto,” sounds similar to the phrase “Kitto katsu,” which means “I believe you will win/you can do it.” The homophone nature of Kitto Katto meant that Kit-Kats became a good luck charm, with people having them or giving them as gifts for big days such as school entrance exams or even job interviews.
This explains why this anime advert directed by Naoko Yamada is around the theme of “Kikkake wa Kit Kat de,” or “Kit-Kat Creates the Chance,” and has a school related setting.
This is apparently the first of what promises to be a series of adverts being done by Yamada for Kit-Kat.
Modern car mechanical design
For someone who hasn’t bought a car in 25 years, hearing about how unreliable BMWS and Mercedes cars have become is a bit of a shock. I have driven hire cars and am aware that cars are now heavily reliant on computers. What I hadn’t realised was how cheap mechanical parts had become under the hood. The reason why they had been engineered down to a price, was to allow for the price of all the new electronics that make up the car driving experience now.
I started my work life off in a corporate research lab were we were developing a way of making a plastic manifold cover for a small Ford of Europe engine. This engine was destined for the Ford Fiesta and the first Ka if we had managed to get everything to work. The idea was that the engine would be a sealed unit. When it needed to be replaced it would undergo a factory recondition, or would be recycled. This was about reducing environmental impact, without impacting profits. But looking at some of the parts going into these cars now, I am shocked.
More in this video here.
Amazon luxury watch copies
Amazon is a den of iniquity in terms of shoddy products and fakes. German watch YouTuber shows the variety of watches that steal the design language of watches from the likes of:
Nomos
TAG Heuer
Breitling
Rolex
Audemars Piguet
Patek Philippe
All of these come in at about $100 price. It is interesting how the Chinese factories turning these watches out have managed to get their way around the brand police. Finally, I am surprised to see Chinese manufacturers relying on a cheap, but reliable Seiko movement for the most part. Which is probably down to the weird deficiencies in Chinese engineering that means that you don’t see Chinese made rollerball pen refills.
The amazing design of the jerry can
Great video by a Scottish YouTuber who covers why the jerry can was such a clever product design and the history of the fuel container. I did not realise that they were tested in the Spanish civil war. More here.
NFTs and Ralph Bakshi’s animated adaptation of The Lord of The Rings
The problems with NFTs. NFTs sprung out of the move to decentralised finance or cryptocurrency. NFT are smart contract linked artefacts. These were seen as a panacea for creatives to make money during COVID. This video is an interesting discussion on NFTs, and uses the analogy of investors buying real estate that drove the 2008 mortgage crisis. The crypto-economy has many of the same drivers.
The guy who made this video also did a really good exhaustive history of Ralph Bakshi‘s The Lord of The Rings film that preceded Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy by a couple of decades, and the BBC’s radio adaptation by a few years. I am a fan of all three, but am in no doubt that Peter Jackson’s film in some places is a shot-for-shot copy of Bakshi’s film and borrows dialogue from both Bakshi and the BBC.
Animoca Brands is the face of a NFT bubble that feels curiously like the dot com era. Will there be a place for NFTs? Possibly. Will Animoca Brands be its Amazon or its Pets.com? I don’t know. But I feel queasy about the Hong Kong NFT wave that Animoca Brands are the poster child for. Particularly when on most other economic and societal metrics Hong Kong is running the other way; with a brain drain and economic decline.
Shedding some light on “dark patterns” and advertising regulation – ASA | CAP – “dark patterns” encompass a range of misleading advertising practices that have long been regulated under the CAP Code, and some of which reflect practices that are banned in all circumstances under consumer protection law. The CAP Code has long applied to online advertising (including companies’ own websites), and many of the common “dark patterns” align with issues that the ASA is well-versed in regulating
Ronn Torossian Admits To “Ethical Lapses” Amid News Site Controversy – PRSA-NY’s board of directors unanimously voted to condemn Torossian and 5WPR in response to the story. “In addition to being a cowardly and blatant violation of PRSA’s Code of Ethics, Ronn’s actions are a stain on our profession and undermine our role as guardians of facts and integrity for those we serve. We strongly condemn his and his firm’s direct role in perpetrating disinformation while pretending to be a legitimate industry news site,” said PRSA-NY’s board said in a statement. Torossian is no stranger to controversy, having been criticized over the years for his aggressive PR tactics, and is taking steps to remain in the public eye amid this one. Doing that has included issuing two press releases since the story broke — one offering Torossian’s list of “PR Rules” and another with marketing podcast recommendations. – so the lesson is basically break the rules while you’re small, apologise with no repercussions when you get larger
Depicting older people in ads – ASA | CAP – Communicating about ageing and older people in a positive way can help to tackle negative perceptions of ageing, and older people, but negative and offensive stereotypes about ageing and older people are still common. Using stereotypes about age in advertising may breach the CAP Code, and our guidance is designed to help advertisers ensure that they do not include offensive depictions of, or references to age in their advertising. – but is this really going to change in the ad industry when ageism is endemic from the top down in the industry – from hiring policies and representation to board level views held by the likes of Mark Read
FMCG
Advertising zero alcohol products – ASA | CAP – Marketers should, however, take care not to mislead consumers by implying that a product contains no alcohol at all if it contains any. For some consumers, whether for health, religious, or other reasons, the presence of a small amount of alcohol may be material information and therefore required to be present with reasonable prominence. Although the ASA has not formally ruled on such a circumstance, marketers are best advised to take a cautious approach when marketing a drink that is usually alcoholic (such as a non-alcoholic beer) but has been adjusted to bring it below the 0.5% ABV threshold. For instance, we would strongly recommend that ads contain a reference to the ABV alongside any ‘alcohol free’ or similar claims. – interesting that the ASA felt the need to put this notice out
Lecturers admit self-censoring classes with Chinese students | The Times – Academics are self-censoring to avoid causing offence to students from authoritarian states such as China, a new report has said. Two thirds said they believed that academic freedom was under threat in higher education and more than two fifths felt the same about their freedom to select teaching content. The survey of 1,500 social science faculty members across a range of British institutions was conducted by academics from Oxford, Exeter and Portsmouth universities.
Toronto bakery is burnt by a cultural appropriation feud | Financial Times – it is interesting to read about how Chinese cultural appropriation of Korean intangible national treasures has spilled over on to the western social networks. Naturally Vancouver seems to be at the centre of this maelstrom
Inside Facebook’s $10 Billion Breakup With Advertisers – WSJ – Apple’s privacy settings have affected e-commerce advertising on Facebook and advertising sales have dropped. It would be interesting to see if there was a geographic breakdown on this. If this is people like the Chinese online direct to consumer commerce and drop shippers, thats a big issue for Facebook. It already has issues with big brands in terms of ad quality, brand safety and skepticism over the reliability of Facebook’s ad metrics that is based on past behaviour
Online
Google Search Is Dying | DKB – interesting discussion on the Google search experience for early adopters. It is the kind of things that I have complained to friends about. It also shows the relative power of Reddit – which brings us back to the Yahoo! ideas around knowledge search circa 2005/6
TikTok Wants to Avoid Facebook’s Mess. Its Corporate Culture Could Complicate That — The Information – Two years ago, a team of TikTok employees in China—where the hit video-sharing app’s parent company, ByteDance, is based—were excited to show their colleagues in the U.S. a preview of some new features they’d been working on. But the Americans were troubled when they saw one of them, which would let TikTok users darken or lighten their skin tone—a feature the U.S. employees feared would spur the creation of culturally insensitive videos featuring blackface, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter. In another meeting, the China TikTok team showed their American counterparts a different feature that used an algorithm to scan users’ faces and tell them whether they were “beautiful” or not, according to one person who saw the presentation. After some employees raised concerns about the features, TikTok decided against launching them in the U.S.
Facebook Changes Corporate Name to Meta – The New York Times – Zuckerberg has been committed to building the metaverse, a composite universe melding online, virtual and augmented worlds that people can seamlessly traverse. He has said the metaverse can be the next major social platform and that several tech companies will build it over the next 10-plus years. The name Meta is indicative of Facebook’s ambition for being the platform that is the metaverse.
The problems facing the metaverse aren’t going to be just solved by Moores law and software alone. There are needed to be technology improvements in battery chemistry and optics. Hardware engineers from Meta have their own concerns about developing the metaverse.
Facebook’s Meta mission was laid out in a 2018 paper on The Metaverse – Oculus executives highlighted what a commercial metaverse would look like, that some think is a blueprint for Meta’s ambitions today. Meta won’t be a move away from Facebook’s current problems with regards privacy and social cohesion. Though one of the first moves of Meta was to shut down Facebook’s legacy facial recognition system.
Interesting debate on the competing viewpoints of the Biden administration and China
Asia Society panel discussion featuring Lingling Wei, chief China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and co-author of Superpower Showdown; Ryan Hass, senior fellow and the Michael H. Armacost Chair in the foreign policy program at Brookings; and Yasheng Huang, Epoch Foundation Professor of Global Economics and Management at MIT Sloan School of Management
What if Xi Jinping just isn’t that competent? – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion – you can’t argue that Xi Jingping isn’t at least competent as a political operator, but some of the other points in here are valid to a point. But part of it is better understood if one asks if Xi Jingping is a true believer in Stalinism and the answer would be yes. You could also use it to argue that we’re close to hitting peak China and then the country will decline disgracefully rather like the UK did post British empire
Sex Differences in Work Aspirations – Marginal REVOLUTION – more developed and gender equal nations are better than less developed nations in attracting boys to more established things-oriented (often blue-collar) occupations, but they fail to attract girls to these areas. This problem is also occurring for the subset of things-oriented STEM occupations. In fact, the problem for STEM is even more profound, given that interest in STEM declines for both boys and girls in more developed, innovative, and gender equal nations.
Mobile internet and political polarization – Marginal REVOLUTION – the mobile internet polarized the Left, but not so much the Right. What polarized the Right was…the polarization of the Left, and not the mobile internet. And please do note this sentence: “This increase in polarization largely did not take place among social media users.” It seems that on-line versions of older school media did a lot of the work
Data Shows Younger People Aren’t Reporting Cybercrimes / Digital Information World – members of the younger generations, namely Gen Z and Millennials, are less likely to report a cybercrime once it gets committed against them. Baby boomers are the most likely to report a cybercrime since 64% of them said that they had done so, and the proportion was much lower for Millennials who only report cybercrime 32% of the time. Things become even more dismal when you look at Gen Z, colloquially known as “zoomers” in internet parlance, who only report cybercrimes 21% of the time. One reason for this might be the fact that, having grown up with the internet, Millennials and Gen Z members don’t realize that online security is not something that you can take for granted – or that they believe that insecurity is part and parcel of internet life now
Culture
‘Italo Disco’ Was About More Than Boogie Nights: Alessandro Melazzini – Variety – his analytical doc makes clear, it’s easy to underestimate the importance of independent, non-ideological escape music. The 80s have been seen as a superficial decade,” Melazzini says. “With time you have another approach to that period, which was more than just silly. It was also a time of optimism, experimentations, promises, illusion. And genius creativity.”
Design
New Japan-Only Miata Asks You To Trade Power For Lightness | Jalopnik – I love this design philosophy: “horsepower and fun are not proportional, but lightness and fun are proportional, and if horsepower is increased, the body etc. must be strengthened, so it will inevitably become heavier. The lighter the car, the more fun the car is, and I think this Roadster is the best now if you enjoy driving.”
Secretive MoD ‘banking’ unit helps UK wage economic warfare | Financial Times – “People who worked in banking in the late 1980s will tell you that between Friday and Monday when the Berlin wall came down, people they thought were West Germans working on trading floors and in M&A departments just disappeared,” Keatinge said. “They were actually working for [East Germany’s] Stasi, gathering information about the financial activity in the City of London. You can be sure the same thing is happening now with the Chinese.”
Opinion: Everybody Is Still Greenwashing, But That’s Not What ESG Stands For. – the recent announcement from Kering banning the use of fur from all its collections and all its brands. It clearly did not have the impact that Kering would have hoped for. Although this would have been a big move internally, the public is now expecting more and is calling for a genuine rethinking of global systems and metrics that define success beyond financial gains to shareholders. Banning fur just isn’t enough for the Greta Generation – but how important are they for customers?
Germany’s Economy, Once Europe’s Engine, Is Holding It Back – WSJ – After years of belt-tightening aimed at honing competitiveness, German businesses and the country’s public infrastructure are suffering from underinvestment, economists say. Germany’s net investment rate has been around 0.5% of economic output since the turn of the century, compared with about 1% for Italy and 1.5% for the U.S., according to the World Bank. German net public investment has fallen below zero as existing assets depreciate
Reforms in Hong Kong Encourage Homecoming of Offshore Funds | Winston & Strawn LLP – In July 2021, the Hong Kong government gazetted a fund re‑domiciliation mechanism to encourage offshore funds set up in corporate or limited-partnership form to register in Hong Kong as OFCs and LPFs, respectively. This mechanism does not create any new legal entity; therefore, it does not require the dissolution of the original funds or require investors to exchange their interests from the old fund to the new fund. Upon re‑domiciliation, these funds would be de‑registered in the original place of incorporation and would have the same rights and obligations as any other newly established OFCs and LPFs in Hong Kong. The Wealth Connect, which formally commenced trading on September 10, 2021, allows Hong Kong-domiciled funds to be offered to mainland Chinese investors in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. This adds to the Mutual Recognition of Funds scheme, which started in 2015, allowing Hong Kong-domiciled funds to be distributed in mainland China. These connect schemes serve as another incentive to encourage fund managers to re‑domicile offshore funds to Hong Kong
The soft bigotry of America’s cultural left | Financial Times – imposing conformity through intimidation is not what is supposed to happen in democracies, still less on their most-prized campuses. Crushing free thought is McCarthyism. This new consensus is profoundly illiberal. It treats a person’s race as their primary fixed identity and assigns roles on that basis. This obliterates the individual moral autonomy on which liberalism rests. Since everything in society boils down to race, everything must change. California, for example, is trying to alter its mathematics curriculum to downplay the idea there are right and wrong answers in the science. The debate is fuelled by a proposal for new math standards called “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction”. The framework states that “objectivity”, “worship of the written word”, and “either/or thinking” are tools of white supremacy
The Deep Dive: “Hyper-Customisation In Health and Wellness Has Become The New Luxury.” – Another is working out which kind of digital technology will enable the clinic to stay connected with its clients, for example, wearables. “This is going to be a big challenge for us in the future because we have to have a tool which really works and that is really used by our clients.” Whatever the future of health and wellness may look like, what remains certain is that it will be driven by what the client demands. And what the client demands, Clinique La Prairie delivers. “At the end of the day, what our customers want are benefits to their wellbeing, not just during their time at the clinic but when they are back home,” said Gibertoni.
Media
Banker Guy Hands: ‘I’m scared of ending my life having not achieved’ | The Times – We had an enormous number of people working on the Stones and we weren’t making much money – they are a catalogue band. The new albums didn’t sell, and the income from old CDs was small. What really worked for the Stones was touring. The bid we had in mind for their new contract – the bid we thought made economic sense – was unlikely to be what they were hoping to achieve. The only way we could pay them more was if they did some TV work for us, put their name on a computer game and gave us a share of their concert revenues
New Facebook Storm Nears as CNN, Fox Business and Other Outlets Team Up on Whistleblower Docs — The Information – Upcoming news stories based on thousands of Facebook documents—which whistleblower Frances Haugen worked to release to more than a dozen news organizations as diverse as the Associated Press, CNN, Le Monde, Reuters and the Fox Business network—aren’t likely to be as revelatory as those epic leaks of time past – this drop has been carefully thought through to maximise scrutiny of Meta
Haugen claims backed by new Facebook whistleblower filing with SEC – The Washington Post – Facebook officials routinely undermined efforts to fight misinformation, hate speech and other problematic content out of fear of angering then-President Donald Trump and his political allies, or out of concern about potentially dampening the user growth key to Facebook’s multi-billion-dollar profits.- drip, drip, drip and the Meta rebrand won’t stop it. At least in America it can rely on bipartisan disagreement to keep it from being regulated.
Facebook Conducted An Experiment In Which It Turned Off The News Feed Algorithm, To Surprising Results / Digital Information World – Engagement dropped like a stone in an ocean, Groups ended up becoming more popular than ever before, and Facebook made even more money per user, once they actually went through their News Feeds. This sort of behavior seems to almost mirror the internet landscape we have today. Platforms such as Reddit have skyrocketed in relevancy, because they provide an enhanced version of Groups. They also make a lot of money on this premise, despite having much fewer active users than Facebook did back in 2018. – It will be really hard for Meta to live these findings down
US intelligence officials warn companies in critical sectors on China | Financial Times – many businesses were not aware of the direct and hidden links between Chinese companies and universities and state security, or that Beijing was using a “whole of government approach” to obtain technology – more likely that these businesses don’t care and they will continue not to care unless financial and judicial penalties are put in place
Exclusive: Amid national security concerns, US slaps overhead time limits on satellites – Breaking Defense – Industry officials further argue NOAA’s ruling will stifle the ability of US firms to claim a leading edge in the growing global market for near real-time imagery products. The use of sat imagery to track terrestrial change has long been in use by the US government and even commercial firms. The ability to do so with ever increasing timeliness is what is new in the commercial market, and what is worrying DoD and IC officials is that those burgeoning capabilities mean there soon will be no place safe from prying satellite eyes.
Adobe is dropping PostScript Type 1 font support. Be prepared for the change – huge move, given the amount of time that PostScript had been at the centre of design and print. There must be brands out there still using Type 1 fonts for standard print design work that haven’t changed style in 30 years beyond a logo tweak. Without PostScript fonts you couldn’t have had the laser printer or modern design software tools
Business
Amazon Exploding Hoverboard Case Could Forever Change Company – Bloomberg – Last month, a California appeals court ruled that Amazon can be held liable, even though the seller stored and shipped the device itself. The decision sent shockwaves through the e-commerce world. Though it will probably be appealed again, the ruling raises the possibility that Amazon might have to exert more control over the activity on its own website. “Courts are rejecting the internet exceptionalism idea when it comes to a company like Amazon,” Agnieszka McPeak, a Gonzaga University professor, told Bloomberg Law. – It could also have implications for companies like Shopify
Why SoftBank’s THG deal has more questions than answers | Financial Times – What exactly the Ingenuity business does is something of a riddle: chief executive Matthew Moulding described it as a “social media influencer platform” but it also handles the prosaic business of logistics and translations for third parties launching in new markets – I don’t get The Hut Group (THG), maybe they’re bad about telling their story?
Luxury
Why Victoria’s Secret Body Positivity Spin Won’t Work in China | Jing Daily – Victoria’s Secret’s has a long history of glamorous supermodel perfection, therefore this choice is seen as inauthentic for the Chinese consumer and has left many citizens bewildered. Global brands need a localized approach in China, but one that resonates convincingly with the company – on Victoria’s Secret trying be more inclusive and body positive