Ged Carroll

Category: hong kong | 香港 | 홍콩 | 香港

哈囉 – here you’ll find posts related to Hong Kong. That includes the territory, the culture, business, creativity and history. I lived and travelled to Hong Kong a number of times, so sometimes the content can be quite random.

In addition, I have long loved Cantonese culture and cuisine, so these might make more appearances on this category. I am saddened by the decline in the film and music production sectors.

I tend to avoid discussing local politics, and the external influence of China’s interference in said politics beyond how it relates to business and consumer behaviour in its broadest context.

Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Apple Daily launched a new ad format that I thought was particularly notable that might appear in branding as well as Hong Kong.

If there are subjects that you think would fit with this category of the blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.

  • Yiminjian

    Yiminjian

    Canada

    One of the most popular articles on the South China Morning Post website this year was about the phenomenon of yiminjian or ‘immigration jail’. Canada has been a popular destination for wealthy Chinese to set up their homes. The scions of the Huawei business had a couple of mansions in Vancouver. They were following a well trod path. Li Ka-shing had his family living in Canada since the early 1970s and the South China Morning Post had a permanent Vancouver correspondent for 25 years.

    I guess mainland Chinese are less enamoured with Vancouver and other Canadian cities than their Hong Kong counterparts, hence the phrase yiminjian.

    That anyone should immigrate to Canada while regarding living there as a burdensome task to be endured or avoided might sound weird, but the concept is so common among some Chinese immigrant circles that there is a word for it: yiminjian, or “immigration jail”. The term refers to the period of compulsory Canadian residency (now, four years out of the previous six) which one must suffer before applying for citizenship. Think of a Canadian passport as the get-out-of-jail card.

    It needs to be emphasised that this mindset does not apply to all Chinese immigrants – only that subset for whom greater opportunities exist back in China (and only a subset of those).

    The problem that confronts these migrants is that Canada promises safety from the pace of change that has swept across China since the start of the cultural revolution to the rise of Mr Xi’s ‘tigers & flies’ programme. But China offers an opportunity to make out like a proverbial bandit and accumulate fantastic amounts of wealth.

    But creating that much wealth means ties of an often murky nature with authority figures. If you need land to build a factory, only the local government can sell you that land. If you need permits (which you will), or utility services such as power and water – you need government cooperation.

    Government cooperation comes at a cost and is facilitated through layers of bribery. The system of bribery even extends into business disputes as powerful government friends are called upon to smite the opponents business. All you need is a shift in power, like the one that happened under Xi Jinping and you could find yourself on the run. This kind of collaboration and corruption at the highest levels was outlined in Desmond Shum’s autobiographical account Red Roulette.

    More jargon explained here.

    More information
    Immigration mega-fraud: The rich Chinese immigrants to Canada who don’t really want to live there | South China Morning Post  – paywall

  • Demographics of social + more

    Demographics Of Social Media By Gender – Business Insider – interesting opportunities for smart mass targeting by using the demographics of social outlined in the article. More content related to the demographics of social here.

    Samsung Addresses a Growing Mobile Health Market with Industry’s First Smart Bio-Processor – Samsung Blog – am sure Apple already has custom silicon that does similar, at least since the M7 motion co-processor in the Apple iPhone 5S or the Apple Watch’s S1 SiP. It feels like they might be a little disingenuous or even dishonest claim by Samsung to call it the first ‘bio processor’ without a much narrower definition

    NO.1 A10 Rugged Smartwatch – closer to what I would want a smart watch to be in terms of ruggedness, lacks the style of Casio’s G-Shock at the moment

    Chinese Communist Party Modernizes its Message — With Rap-aganda – China Real Time Report – WSJ – more Cassette Boy style than Jay Z (paywall)

    Hong Kong MTR payphones to be pulled from all subway stations – SCMP – universal wireless coverage on MTR and universal cellphone ownership in population. One of the first clients that I worked with was a company called iMagic who made PowerPhones –  a cross between a payphone and an internet enabled kiosk. These PowerPhones were rolled out across the MTR network and in Chep Lap Kok  (paywall)

    Daring Fireball: Doomsaying Apple Analyst Loses Job – as was once attributed to an IRA spokesperson about the Brighton bombing of the Conservative party conference in 1985 ‘…we only have to be lucky once, you have to be lucky always‘. Eventually expect a story that Adnaan Ahmad is eventually vindicated when Apple misses a quarter or two on its numbers

    A look at how Australian Bank ANZ is creating their own quality content via @ANZ_BlueNotes | Andrew Grill | LinkedIn – more of a wake-up call for PRs than a revelation for digital marketers

    Google, HP, Oracle Join RISC-V | EE Times – interesting developments as ‘anything but ARM’ grouping forms in data centre giants

    Why Snapchat is ‘the one to watch in 2016’ — at the expense of Twitter – Business Insider – at least in the US, according to MEC

    There’s An App That Takes Care Of Your Customer Service Woes | Refinery 29 – interesting, mediated customer service experiences

    China to Require Internet TVs to Use Homegrown Smart TV OS | Marbridge Consulting – China’s State Administration of Press and Publication, Radio, Film and Television’s (SAPPRFT) Science and Technology Department and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT)’s Electronic Information Department recently announced a new smart TV operating system, TVOS 2.0 – (paywall)

    Samsung will reportedly make 5M Galaxy S7 phones ahead of February launch | VentureBeat – relatively small beer when you think that Huawei alone sold 100 million handsets this year

    China Antiterror Law Doesn’t Require Encryption Code Handovers – WSJ – China passed a new antiterrorism law that stepped back from previous language of concern to global technology firms, however its still very similar to Teresa May’s nosey parker powers in the UK (paywall)

    Delivery Rates on Kickstarter by Ethan R. Mollick :: SSRN – Using a large survey with 47,188 backers of Kickstarter projects, I examined the factors that led to projects failing to deliver their promised rewards. Among funded projects, a failure to deliver seems relatively rare, accounting for around 9% of all projects, with a possible range of 5% to 14%. There are few indicators at the time of project funding as to which projects might ultimately fail to deliver rewards, though small projects (and to a lesser extent very large projects) are more likely to fail to deliver rewards, as are some project categories.

    A Brief Introduction to the Basics of Game Theory by Matthew O. Jackson :: SSRN – really nice primer

    Mobile Web – Opinion – Quinn: Living our lives from inside a messaging app – US adoption on Facebook Messenger over 30 percent of population, surprised Skype is a mere 19 million monthly UUs

    LeBron James releases virtual reality film for Oculus and Samsung Gear VR – Months after it had been used in football by Vincent Kompany and Aaron Ramsey

    GQ is now blocking its readers running ad blockers – Digiday – Conde Naste taking action against ad blockers

    Thai prime minister releases New Year song to appeal directly to the people | PR Week – (reg wall)

  • San Bernardino + more news

    San Bernardino Shooters’ Phones Had ‘Built-In Encryption,’ Just Like Every Phone | Motherboard – all of this smacks of the WMD report in Iraq. The FBI are trying to use the tragedy of San Bernardino to get mass-access. This would be unwise. It sets a precedent and even a technology framework for other countries to demand access – like Saudi Arabia or China… It means US products wouldn’t be trusted abroad. The US government has a international trust deficit due to disclosures from ECHELON to Wikileaks. More cryptography posts here.

    Settlement in suit over ‘Happy Birthday’ copyright | The Japan Times – So basically Warner Chappell had been asserting rights that it didn’t have to make $2 million a year… And kept going until they were taken to court

    How Chinese manufacturers are adjusting to the new normal | HKEJ Insight – move from OEM to ODM – taking over design. It makes sense for Chinese manufacturers to want to do this. They can simplify manufacturing, reduce the bill of materials and over time build their own brands. Though brand building is probably the hardest aspect of this for them

    Alibaba buys the South China Morning Post: Full Q&A with executive vice chairman Joseph Tsai | South China Morning Post – The newspaper, the broadsheet, is iconic. And there are still a lot of subscribers. Lots of people still want to touch and feel that paper in their hands. What we hope to do is to build on that and add more digital subscriptions and digital distribution. – artefacts still matter, though the South China Morning Post isn’t a social signifier or tool in the way that the FT  or The Economist is

    China’s Hippest Smartphone Maker Warns Shakeout Will Get Worse – Bloomberg Business – its like watching 15 years in the PC industry in time lapse as the smartphone industry has got commoditised and grown so fast at the same time

    An introduction to the trippy, far-out world of quantum computers

    Panetone de Oreo — The Sandwich Cookie Hijacks the Traditional Christmas Treat – Video – Creativity Online – new product usage occasion – baking desserts

  • Scratching + more things

    History of scratching

    A brief history of scratching | FACT magazine – a great piece on scratching but skips over many of the greats prior to Q-Bert et al such as Mr Mixx, Cash Money, DJ Supreme and DJ Pogo. Scratching went through massive changes from the mid-1980s to the mid 1990s. Q-Bert et al were standing on the shoulders of other scratching innovators

    Consumer behaviour

    Researchers reveal millennials will take a 25,000 photos of themselves in their lifetime | Daily Mail Online – lifeblogging or qualitative ‘quantified self’?

    Bill Drummond (of The KLF) fame did this really good talk about how the iPod (and you could add smartphones) have changed our relationship with music

    Marketing

    Tic-Tac have put together a great tie-in with local Hong Kong independent musicians and music festival Clockenflap (Hong Kong’s answer to Glastonbury). Budding artists can submit their own video with a chance to play at Clockenflap.

    FutureDeluxe did this great bit of CGI work for the adidas X Primeknit football boot.

    Media

    Cross Device Tracking Creates New Privacy Concerns, FTC Says | Advertising Age – “They do this under the veil of anonymous identifiers and hashed P.I.I. [personally-identifiable information], but these identifiers are still persistent and can provide a strong link to the same individual online and offline,” Ms. Ramirez said, in language that challenges the typical rhetoric from companies that track consumers.”Not only can these profiles be used to draw sensitive inferences about consumers, there is also a risk of unexpected and unwelcome use of data generated from cross device tracking” (paywall) – interesting that cross device tracking is seen as a ‘new privacy concern’ rather than an established one. This delay between regulatory attention and development is why cross device tracking companies have such an advantage over governments and consumers

    TBS is giving eSports its mainstream moment with new weekly program – Digiday – interesting move, US media following normal practice in Korea

    Retailing

    Here’s where teens shop as old favorite stores go extinct | Fusion – Malls still are super important to teen culture as physical spaces you can go to hangout without parents

    Security

    From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users’ Online Identities | The Intercept – basically you have no privacy, presumably this would allow them to zoom in on Tor users at some point?

    Software

    Google faces new US antitrust scrutiny, this time over smartphones – CNET – the US antitrust scrutiny could turn to action that would  fragment Android distributions quite dramatically… More Google related content here.

  • MANifeste + other things

    Hermès MANifeste is a short motion graphics based video aimed at their menswear collection

    Hermès MANifeste has got an Eames or Rand feel to it. It is full of clean mid-century modern imagery with icons that would have been in the library of every letterpress and hot metal print works prior to digitisation. This gives the animation a clean masculine feel, that doesn’t feel too old world or conservative. Which is different to the way many male consumers might see Hermès.

    The Project Apollo archive on Flickr gives us access to all the NASA photography from the project. What people don’t appreciate is how comprehensively Project Apollo and the moon landings were documented

    The Spirit of Buffalo video by Dazed Digital featuring Jamie Morgan and Neneh Cherry is a documentary about the Buffalo Collective who influenced the way modern streetwear is styled. The centre of the Buffalo Collective was Ray Petri, who pretty much invented the stylist as a modern concept in the fashion industry. Petri partnered with photogaphers Jamie Morgan, Mark Lebon and Cameron McVey. Models included Barry and Nick Kamen, Naomi Campbell and 13 year old Felix Howard in the iconic Killer picture taken by Jamie Morgan. You can blame Buffalo for the whole Pharrell Williams look which borrows from late 1980s London.

    More content on the buffalo collective here.

    (1) 香港警察 Hong Kong Police | Facebook – acts as lightning rod for the divisions in society made apparent during the Occupy protests, but its also very surreal. Full disclosure: I ran training on social media for the Hong Kong civil service including what they call the disciplined services (this included the police, government flying service, emergency ambulance service, prison service, customs and immigration). The people that I came across were smarter than whoever is managing this page.

    A great remix by The Avalanches which has been on heavy rotation during my dipping into Soundcloud