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.

  • Smartphone zombies

    Digital engagement

    Hong Kong was the first place that I had every been where on the mass transit system specifically warns you to not look over intently at your phone and pay sufficient attention to riding the escalator. So it makes sense that I first read about smartphone zombies in the South China Morning Post.

    Over 80 per cent of Hongkongers between the ages of 15 and 34 own a smartphone; so South China Morning Post‘s article about the perils of smartphone zombies roaming around seemed appropriate. Add to the ownership, the excellent reception that you can get in most part of Hong Kong compared to Europe and the you can see why it happens. 

    The term describes someone cocooned in their own world of mobile social updates, email or games who  is distracted in walking or travelling on public transport. You don’t tend to see these people using voice services though in this cocooned state with their devices.

    The devices are used all hours of the day and the night, it wasn’t unusual to get messages from colleagues after midnight most days on WhatsApp. The zombie impression is probably magnified by the bleary eyed Hong Kongers on a morning commute.  

    The Cantonese for the phenomenon is dai tau juk or ‘head down tribe’.  It would be wrong to portray this as a purely a Hong Kong phenomena, with articles covering it in China, the US and Japan over the past year alone.

    The US talked about it in terms of an addiction, whereas coverage of China, Japan and Hong Kong looked at it as being broadly anti-social behaviour. More jargon related posts here.

    More information
    Beware the smartphone zombies blindly wandering around Hong Kong | SCMP (paywall)
    Japan’s smartphone ‘zombies’ turn urban areas into human pinball | Japan Times
    Putting Smartphone Zombies In Their Place | TechCrunch
    How your smartphone is turning you into a zombie | The Tennessean

  • Macau gaming revenue + more

    Macau gaming revenue

    Macau Gambling Revenue Continues to Drop – WSJ  – A little over a year ago, in February 2014, Macau gaming revenue rose 40%. Now it is regularly falling by around that much (paywall) – Macau gaming is alleged to be a vehicle for money laundering. Even if that wasn’t the truth about Macau gaming, it still remains a tempting vehicle for capital flight from China. At the moment Macau gaming is even bigger than the gambling mecca of Las Vegas

    FMCG

    P&G; Always Mobile App: BackMeApp – really smart application by P&G to market Always sanitary towels

    Ideas

    Azeem’s Exponential View – Revue – great email newsletter. Azeem has ben involved with a number of start-ups including Peer Index. In his newsletter Azeem covers a mix of deep future gazing with concern about climate change. He has a particular focus on  the carbon economy as a distinct area within his newsletter

    Innovation

    The scientist who designed the fake interfaces in “Minority Report” and “Iron Man” is now building real ones – interesting link on the feedback loop between science fiction and technology

    Ford Redefines Innovation in Aerodynamics, EcoBoost and Light-Weighting with All-New Ford GT Carbon Fiber Supercar | Ford Media Centre – some of the design choices in this is very interesting. More design related content here.

    Media

    Yahoo to Let Brands Fact-Check Its Viewability, Fraud Numbers | Advertising Age – I presume that this is due to pressure from large consumer brands only willing to pay for true views

    WPP’s Bessie Lee: PR Industry Must Embrace Technology In China | The Holmes Report – calling Blue Focus a PR group is like calling WPP a PR group. PR needs to do technology better, but other disciplines already own that part of the client relationship. China has even faster change going on

    Engineering Director Lars Rasmussen Leaving Facebook To Co-Found A Music Startup | TechCrunch – a long time Googler who developed Google Maps and worked in search at Facebook. Interesting move

    Yahoo just threw investors a bone: It’s hiring advisors to figure out what to do with Yahoo Japan (YHOO) – the bigger question is what to do with what’s left surely?

    Google, Microsoft and Amazon pay to get around ad blocking tool – FT.com – as well as Taboola – the annoying content remarketing network

    Online

    David Cameron wants to block porn but the EU won’t let him | Dazed Digital – the UKIP vote will be torn over this one. More online related content here

    Bradley Horowitz Says That Google Photos is Gmail for Your Images. And That Google Plus Is Not Dead… — Backchannel — Medium – Bradley is brilliant, this does feel like trying to reinvent flickr, it would be a shame if this did kill flickr

    Retailing

    Audi to Test Plan to Deliver Amazon Packages to Drivers’ Trunks – NYTimes.com – so thieves will know that there is a master key, which will give them an incentive to find it. More related content here.

    Software

    Above Avalon: The Apple and Google Battle Has Changed – good long read on the dynamics between Apple and Google. Apple and Google cooperate because Apple has richer, more valuable customers than Google based operating system products. 

    Technology

    Russian ‘Uber for Boobs’ Start-Up Tittygram Sees Business Boom | Moscow Times – you could not make this up <holds head in hands in despair at industry>

  • Drones in advertising and things that caught my eye this week

    Pepsi has got in on drones in advertising before it all goes a bit lame and tired. Some really interesting projection mapping type effects as well

    Drones in advertising builds on work that has been done since the Beijing olympics on the use of drone swarms for massed visuals that are complementary to fireworks and 3D projections

    Audi advert: Kevin Smith, Jason Meyes. Enough said (oh and some cameos from actors who’ve appeared in Marvel comic film adaptations including pioneer Stan Lee)

    Enterprise storage outfit Box.net have a great interview with Stewart Butterfield of Slack (and Flickr fame). Some interesting comments on how a GUI isn’t always the right interface for people who use keyboards. This is so right. I remember working on terminal screens when I worked in a call centre and the ease with which I could quickly tab around screens, rather than having to reach for a mouse to click a multitude of radio buttons. More design related posts here.

    Scottish National Party member of parliament Mhairi Black gave an interview back in March. I found it interesting as it shows that kind of impact social media will have on future political careers, particularly when it it will provide greater clarity than the 2009 debate around David Cameron’s raving history. Imagine if you were presented at the age of 50 with selected fringe thoughts you had at 19 years old?

    As Black notes:

    My uncle summed it up when he said that, when he was a teenager, he just used to shout at the telly. My generation tweets and there is a record of it.

    What adult doesn’t look back to things they said when they were 16 or 17 and go, ‘Oh my God?’

    The difference is my comments are being dragged out for the whole world to see.

    No trite social media analysis or fantastic technical wizardry just a great idea, client belief and a budget made 3M Korea’s Unforgettable Post-It Proposal

    Finally Helios is a new Hong Kong film gaining traction in the Chinese box office. In the face of a lack of new Hong Kong actors coming through, it was interesting that the new blood came in the form of Korean boy band member Choi Siwon who also performs some of Super Junior’s mandarin repertoire

  • Virtual cockpit & things from this week

    Razorfish Berlin’s interactive brochure for Audi to promote the TT coupe’s virtual cockpit. I was reminded of an ad that Mercedes did where the phone became the rear view mirror of a car, emphasising performance. Also McDonald’s had used the mix of print and circuits with phones to create beat making place mats.

    But I find the intersection of print and digital an exciting space, even if the virtual cockpit concept doesn’t appeal to me that much.

    More related content here.

    Leo Burnett Italy created an app for P&G’s Always brand that directly addresses the insecurity women may feel in an unfamiliar area at night time; it connects them with a friend, to protect them on your way home.

    It is a smart play for the brand to maximise how it can be useful to consumers.

    Celebrity music streaming service Tidal faced critics at launch, this was probably the best of them

    I love this old video about Bell Laboratories’ complex in Holmdel, New Jersey that AT&T have put on YouTube as part of their efforts to digitise their archives. This is Silicon Valley before Silicon Valley

    At the other end of the spectrum, Ogilvy Hong Kong for Hong Kong Clean-Up produced a campaign that puts DNA analysis into an Orwellian future.

  • Rooster sauce & things that made my day this week

    David Tran, the founder and CEO of Huy Fong Foods, on how Rooster sauce came about

    David Tran is a Vietnamese man of Chinese ethnic origin. Sriracha sauce actually has its origins in Thai cooking where is also called man phrik. The Vietnamese use it as a condiment for pho and fried Noodles. Huy Fong Foods is named after the Taiwanese owned freighter that got Mr Tran out of Vietnam in 1979. It is called Rooster sauce because of the rooster on the bottle. The rooster is on the bottle because Mr Tran was born in the year of the rooster. 

    Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz | 16 Things looks at the trends shaping the companies that they invest in.

    Rendering fractals using CSS3 and HTML (without the help of JavaScript) | Snowflake – they had me at fractal.

    DLD15 – The Four Horsemen: Amazon/Apple/Facebook & Google–Who Wins/Loses (Scott Galloway) – his delivery is almost like freestyle rap. Galloway highlights real concerns about the business models of Amazon, Facebook and Google; which are destroying wider economic value.

    Amazon has decimated whole industry sectors: retail and retail real estate. It has tried to disrupt publishing and media production. Galloway’s book The Four is less engaging than his keynote delivery. More on The Four here. 

    To support the launch of the film Doraemon: Stand By Me in Hong Kong, a mobile merchandise shop was created that paid homage to the robot cat.

    Hong Kong like other Asian markets (Japan, Korea, Thailand) is a huge market for cute character franchise merchandise.