Ged Carroll

Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

 

  • Burning NFTs + more news

    Burning NFTs

    Why brands are burning NFTs | Vogue Business – Burning NFTs, which are tokens stored on a blockchain, is the process of permanently removing a token from circulation. This can be done to eliminate unsold or problematic inventory from an NFT drop, or it can be used to engage collectors and fans through “upgrades” that replace an original NFT with something else. For fashion and beauty brands, burning NFTs could offer a way to manipulate scarcity, and therefore price. It could also lead to more intriguing NFT projects, in which consumers must weigh risk and reward by burning an NFT in exchange for something else. These scenarios, among others, are already playing out among artists and gaming startups, paving the way for fashion. Already, Adidas is using a burn mechanism to change the state of its NFTs when NFT owners make a purchase. Apparel brand Champion recently partnered with Daz 3D’s NFT collection, Non-Fungible People, and will use burning to enable peoples’ profile picture NFTs to digitally dress in Champion gear, while Unisocks invites NFT owners to burn them in exchange for physical products. – burning NFTs sounds like a dangerous precedent

    China

    How China is using black sites in the UAE as they target Uyghurs abroad | Sky News – particularly interesting when one thinks about how much of a surveillance state that the UAE is. It is very hard to do anything like this there without the government knowing

    Consumer behaviour

    Environment | Gallup Historical Trends – interesting longitudinal data set. Environmental messaging effectiveness is proportional to consumer disposable income and financial security at the time

    Design

    Defining character: A Hong Kong font designer’s bold effort to preserve Cantonese culture – Hong Kong Free Press HKFP – based on the past toughness of Hong Kong…

    Economics

    Lithium price squeeze adds to cost of the energy transition | Financial Times – China has a lock on the world’s lithium supply through mining acquisitions, so this squeeze has been coming for at least five years

    UK engineer Renishaw expects chip crunch to last another 2 years | Financial Times – expects semiconductor supply chain problems until at least 2024

    When will the music stop? | Financial Times – bill being called due on financialisation and post-industrialisation of western economies and a move from globalisation to regionalisation

    Germany

    Mercedes accused of using cheat-devices with ‘500%’ higher NOx emissions | CAR Magazine – the interesting thing about this is that Mercedes is a more financially precarious position than Volkswagen is due to lower profit margins and less of a war chest to draw on if this case gets serious

    Hong Kong

    Australia denied access to dual citizen detained for alleged ‘subversion’ in Hong Kong | The Guardian – the interesting thing about this is that dual citizenship is no longer allowed in Hong Kong, which is at odds to the way things had been in the colony

    Ideas

    Twee fashion: will the revival bring back toxic body image? – The Face – intersectionality impacting nostalgia

    Chen Qiufan on Science Fiction as a Weapon of Storytelling – The Wire China – defining the future is exceptionally important (paywall)

    How Can We Talk about China and against Sinophobia without Feeling Guilty, Apologetic or Defensive? | British Journal of Chinese Studies 

    Ireland

    US embassy warns TU Dublin about risks of ties with Chinese university | Ireland | The Sunday Times – China wants Ireland to host international campus of Harbin University. Ireland should be looking at the experience of Hungary who were made to foot the bill for a campus that only benefit Chinese students – In 2020 HIT was added to an “entity list” by the US Department of Commerce, which identifies people or organisations that it believes are involved in activities contrary to US security or foreign policy interests. Last week the American embassy in Dublin said it was still concerned about HIT’s ties with the People’s Liberation Army and its efforts to acquire foreign technology in support of its defence aims 

    Online

    Mark Zuckerberg and team consider shutting down Facebook and Instagram in Europe if Meta can not process Europeans’ data on US servers 

    When scientific conferences went online, diversity and inclusion soared | Careers | Chemistry World

    Security

    China and Russia’s hypersonic weaponry threatens US early warning system | Financial Times

    China companies try to list in US in test for regulators after clampdown | Financial Times 

    British research ‘could help China build superweapons’ | News | The Times – The number of research collaborations between scientists in the UK and Chinese institutes with deep connections to the country’s defence forces has tripled to more than 1,000 in six years, a figure that lays bare the scale of cooperation with the hostile state. The university funding includes £60 million from sources now sanctioned by the US government for supplying the Chinese military with fighter jets, communications technology and missiles. The article was published with this opinion piece: Is getting into bed with President Xi for science . . . or just sleazy? | News | The Times  – It is 1914 and our scientists, encouraged by government and big business, have been co-operating with their German opposites on machine-gun technology, ballistics and aeroplane design — all in the name of exciting new technology and with a rising country with an important market and close ties with the UK. Now return to the present, but with an eye to the future. As The Times reveals today, UK scientists are working closely with Chinese scientists from institutes intimately associated with weapons development

    Australia-China relations: US, allies ‘acquiesced and allowed’ China’s South China Sea expansion, Australian minister says | South China Morning Post 

    South Korea to track travel by chip engineers as tech leaks grow – Nikkei Asia – reading this made me think of the scientific brain drain in Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File. It also give you an idea of the lengths that the Koreans think China will go to

    US adds 33 Chinese companies to red flag list, unseals Hytera indictment | South China Morning Post – Being added to the Commerce Department’s ‘unverified list’ means a firm faces tougher rules on doing business with American companies. The Hytera indictment details a 13-year effort by the company and a group of former Motorola employees to steal technology

    Foreign Office hit by “serious cybersecurity incident” | The Stack – not much information on the nature of the breach or who was likely to be behind it

    Telecoms

    Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2021 | Morgan Stanley 

    Web of no web

    Why gamers hate crypto, and music fans don’t – gamers feel that they are being ripped off, music fans look at NFTs like as if they are souvenirs or trading cards. This has important implications for mechanisms governing the metaverse

    Axios Login | Beijing Olympics in VR 

  • Site revamp

    I have been going back through the content on this website as part of a site revamp. I conducted the content aspect of the site revamp while I created new content, did work and general life stuff. So it took a while as the content went as far back as March 2004.

    site revamp of content

    I ended up paring the number of blog posts down from almost six thousand posts to just under eighteen hundred. I deleted a few posts because in retrospect I didn’t have much to say. 

    But the bulk of the posts that I deleted was where I was consolidating posts that focused on curating content from around the web, similar to this one. 

    The primary reason why I was consolidating these posts together was link rot. Links that went out to dead sites and the pages hadn’t managed to be indexed in the Wayback Machine. 

    So what did I learn from this content site revamp process? 

    Ephemera

    While the maxim that ‘everything stays somewhere online forever’ is useful life advice, it doesn’t accurately reflect the ephemeral nature of online content. Even many of the largest media companies seem to prune their older content on a regular basis. The exceptions to this seem to be the FT and the New York Times. 

    Companies are usually really bad at handling their redirects from the now dead pages of old content. With zero consideration being given to context.  Of course, memes and revenge porn tend not to be as ephemeral unfortunately.

    2014

    2014 seems to have been a cataclysmic year for personal website content. Prior this year there were all kinds of interesting professional and corporate blogs being run. But in 2014, things seem to have changed dramatically. This seems to have occurred across sectors and specialisms. Companies seem to have given up on their content strategies. 

    My current working hypothesis is that part of this was probably due to the rise of social media and a secondary aspect of this must have been the declining returns of on network and off network search engine optimisation.  I also think that at least some personal bloggers grew out of their sites. They probably found that their interests had changed, or no longer had time to write. I managed to avoid that fate for a number of reasons:

    • Writing helped me work out ideas
    • I don’t think that I am a good writer, but writing became a habit, one that was so engrained it survived when I moved to live in Hong Kong and back again
    • I deliberately never put this blog in a box, in terms of what I wanted to write about beyond what caught my interest. Part of this came down to my belief in the connected post-modern nature of the world. Previously I have talked about how understanding the dynamics of social media can be traced back to the rituals and structures of ancient Rome. People like Jed Hallam had since articulated this idea much better in his discussions about marketing existing inside culture and acting on culture
    • Between 2003 and 2012, there seemed to be more events and conferences that I got to go to during and after work that provided inspiration for content. This seems to have tailed off somewhat now
    • I thought the process of curation was as important as the process of creation. I never had to create content completely in a vacuum. Using social bookmarking tools and newsreader services helped enormously in this process.
    • The pattern of my writing has evolved. I publish less frequently, but tend to do longer posts now. At one stage I was developing two posts a day for this site, content for a blog on PR Week that was regularly featured in their print edition, the corporate blog of the agency that I worked for at the time and contributing a few posts to Econsultancy on marketing related issues. I also provided some content to political site Left Foot Forward at the behest of a policy wonk colleague of mine, this content focused on the intersection of technology, media and regulation. My writing had been driving a good deal of my career progression from 2005 through to 2014

    Finally, I think that there has been a decline in the spirit of generosity in the exchange of ideas. I am not sure if this is an increase in ‘meaness’ – though more and more content is now behind a paywall, or a larger decline in ideas.

    I don’t think that Medium and LinkedIn have managed to plug the gap on brands and consumers looking to publish quality long form content for various reasons. Secondly, email newsletters while looking like the new blogs are likely to be equally ephemeral and may be a step backward in time; though I am still subscribed to listservs that I originally looked at in college. 

    As I write this, even Facebook looks as if it has finally started on its downward slope to irrelevance , where it will eventually join former online titans like Geocities, Friendster, MySpace and Bebo. Facebook content is already largely hidden from the open web behinds its wall garden. The way things are going, It is likely to disappear completely in the next decade or so. 

    The content site revamp brought home to me, the importance of having your own personal website, to have control over your content.  Looking back strengthened my belief in the advice that I gave Omincom’s David Gallagher four years ago

    Why have a website as part of your personal online brand?

    LinkedIn and Facebook don’t have the same agenda as you. Your content becomes a hostage to their business whims
    It is hard for users to discover your content, Facebook and Google make it so
    Even on Medium you no longer really own your content. It can’t be easily exported like content on the Blogger platform
    Even in the world of Facebook, Google is still a reputation engine

    Personal online brand (January 23, 2018)

    Better notes

    The content process that I went through on the site revamp taught me that I need to make better notes about the significance of a particular piece of content because years later I won’t have any idea why I’d saved it. I have been getting better at this over years, but I still need to do better.

  • Alexa whistleblower + more news

    Alexa whistleblower

    Alexa whistleblower demands Amazon apology after being jailed and tortured | Amazon | The Guardian – A whistleblower who exposed illegal working conditions in a factory making Amazon’s Alexa devices says he was tortured before being jailed by Chinese authorities. Tang Mingfang, 43, was jailed after he revealed how the Foxconn factory in the southern Chinese city of Hengyang used schoolchildren working illegally long hours to manufacture Amazon’s popular Echo, Echo Dot and Kindle devices. Now, after spending two years in prison, he is appealing to the higher courts to clear his name. He has taken the difficult decision to talk publicly, despite being aware of the risks of reprisals, because he believes Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, have a responsibility to support his appeal and that the Observer also has a responsibility to highlight his case – the Alexa whistleblower didn’t only expose labour issues in its Chinese factories. By implication, the Alexa whistleblower also exposed the inhuman nature of Amazon’s calculations in making the Alexa. Taking an Alexa apart you can see how Amazon skimped on parts like an on / off switch on the Alexa microphone, but the Alexa whistleblower exposed so much more.

    China

    China’s Domestic Politics Are Driving the Belt and Road Initiative – The Diplomat – The geopolitical effects of the BRI are incidental; its driving force is found in domestic political imperatives, also getting rid of production surpluses in areas like construction, railways and steel manufacturing

    Consumer behaviour

    The Age of the Unique Baby Name – The Atlantic – I would see the internet accelerating this trend in order to stop their kid from having an identity like JoeSmith928765354@icloud.com which in turn feeds into salience and distinctiveness – individual as brand

    The rise and rise of media on your mobile phone – in one chart | World Economic Forum – this doesn’t show how multi-screening plays out

    Design

    Carmakers shift gear on using recycled materials | Financial Times – this ignores the fact that a lot of steel used in automotive manufacture comes from recycling

    Why modular housing is stubbornly small-scale | Financial Times – its harder to do modular in smaller brownfield plots

    How to deal with farmers’ love of plastic | Financial Times – I too grew up on a farm in the 1970s and 1980s. Spare baling twine was gathered up to create fake electric fencing, hold things together and even support gates. Fertiliser bags were reused to carry turf or waterproof equipment. Silage covers were used to waterproof equipment and any small tear off pieces found went into the range (a solid fuel heating stove).

    three frank lloyd wright unbuilt houses brought to life as digital reconstructions – I was looking at these renderings and the first thing that popped into my mind was the vintage Mac game Myst, it evoked a similar feeling to the game play

    Economics

    The above video is based on CBInsights State of Venture 2021 report. An increase in venture funding would in general be a good thing, if it was being spent on the right kind of innovation to solve the right problems. It isn’t. And if there were enough good entrepreneurs and ideas to take advantage of it. There aren’t. Instead this looks like the dotcom bubble and the subprime mortgage sector pre bust together, at once. And that’s likely to be part of your pension funds. Why Is Silicon Valley Still Waiting for the Next Big Thing? – The New York Times

    Ethics

    Noom: how the Silver Lake-backed wellness app handles vulnerable users | Financial Times – staff can’t scale, neither can their processes and the algorithms don’t seem to work properly in terms of target calories

    FMCG

    Nestlé confirms Fawdon sweets factory closure in move to EU production | Food & drink industry | The Guardian – Brexit, not called that of course

    Germany

    Germany Rethinks Position on Beijing: Government in Berlin Classifies China as a “Systemic Rival” – DER SPIEGEL

    Hong Kong

    A couple of articles on Hong Kong’s brain drain: From Lantau to Ealing: Hong Kong’s homesick exiles in Britain greet the Year of the Tiger – POLITICO and Young and skilled have fled Hong Kong for UK | News | The Times 

    Ideas

    The Depressing Rise of ‘Wordcels’ and ‘Numbercels’ | Mel magazine – on how the language of grievance and frustration is shaping every aspect of our discourse (and probably hardwiring our thinking as well)

    Olympic legacy of Japan’s experiment in urban mining | Financial Times – this is highlighted as something new, but instead reminds me of the recycling efforts in Germany, Japan, the UK and US during the second world war – to get war materials ready and bond society into the fight

    Russia’s revamped military learns from failures of the past | Financial Times

    Experts Warn of “Quantum Apocalypse” – its like the plot of the hacking movie Sneakers. The plot centres around trying to gain possession of a black box called ‘Setec Astronomy’which is an anagram of ‘too many secrets’ is able to crack all current cryptographic schemes. The crypto that secures your credit card transactions or my computer laptop hard drive. Quantum Apocalypse is when someone gets quantum computing to a point were it can complete the same feat

    Innovation

    99% of common chemicals aren’t sustainable – Futurity – people think that oil is just about petrol and diesel and will have a rude shock. Oil companies and the petrochemical sector still have a future ahead of them. As do mines and quarries.

    MIT Creates Material Stronger Than Steel But as Light as Plastic – but they’re decade away from commercialisation

    EETimes – Quantum Computer Technology Assessment 

    EETimes – Samsung Readies Gate-All-Around Ramp 

    EETimes – Quantum-Engineered Material Boosts Transistor Performance 

    Glencore plans UK recycling plant for lithium-ion batteries | Financial Times – how effective this will be is another question

    ‘Why have we not grown any giant companies?’ The UK’s attempt to take on Silicon Valley | Financial Times 

    China sets the pace in adoption of AI in healthcare technology | Financial Times – interesting points on a shortage of different specialists in an ageing society already. The rural | city living split is also raising difficulties – China’s demographic bomb has already gone off. This means a declining China rather than a strong China

    Japan

    Weak supply chain link: Japan reliant on Chinese phones, laptops – Nikkei Asia

    Luxury

    Rolexes Outperformed Stocks, Real Estate and Gold Over the Last Decade – Robb Report – not good investment advice to follow, but an interesting read

    Tiffany’s Alexandre Arnault joins the NFT Cryptopunks community | Vogue Business – His endorsement of the profile picture phenomenon comes days after his father LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault expressed caution over the metaverse “bubble”.

    Marketing

    1969 vintage ad for General Mills Lucky Charms and Cheerios show the power of a character figure. Use of characters in advertising is declining, and is yet one of the most powerful creative devices available to advertising creatives. More on this on Look Out by Orlando Wood

    Media

    Japanese Olympic sponsors avoid spotlight fearing backlash – Nikkei Asia – so far they have not run any Olympics-linked TV advertisements in Japan. As of Friday, there has been no Olympic-themed ads, including ones using the logo, according to CM Soken Consulting. This compares with ads by about 30 companies that ran roughly 2,650 times from late January through February during the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics in South Korea.  The Olympics has not provided the usual boost to TV sales this time. Japanese sales of TVs since mid-January have been down 5-6% on the year, according to BCN, reflecting the lack of excitement among consumers.  The U.S., the U.K., and Australia decided on diplomatic boycotts of the Games by refusing to send government representatives, citing the alleged detention of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang and other concerns. Sponsor companies are worried that aggressively supporting the Games could affect their business in those countries. Only a limited number of corporate representatives, including Panasonic Chairman Kazuhiro Tsuga, attended the opening ceremony.”We have no choice but to tone down our PR activity,” said a source at one sponsor company. “This was totally unexpected.” This comes after last year’s Tokyo Summer Olympics, during which sponsor companies dialed down their advertising out of consideration for public opinion critical of holding the Games amid a pandemic – apparently viewing numbers on NBC is down 43% across TV and streaming compared to the 2018 winter olympics hosted in Korea (paywall)

    Online

    How Alphabet’s Q4 was a savior, Google search and YouTube make parent company’s 2022 good / Digital Information World 

    Facebook to Lose $10 Billion This Year Because of Apple’s New Policies / Digital Information World

    The Death of Rusty n Edie’s, One of the Horniest Places on the 90s Internet

    The day Facebook started to shrink – by Casey Newton – models suggest that this should have happened years ago, but Facebook has been surprisingly good at pivoting, retaining data on its platform and buying up rival platforms (Instagram, WhatsApp etc). Its going to be a while before Facebook is the Geocities of social, but this was inevitable. The reaction of shareholders was less predictable: Investors wipe almost $200bn from value of Facebook owner Meta | Financial Times 

    Security

    Japan to screen power, gas and oil equipment for hacking risk – Nikkei Asia 

    Revealed: Tory links to the Chinese spy operating in the heart of Westminster | The Telegraph

    Intel Expands its Bug Bounty Program, Says its CPUs are Safer than AMD’s – ExtremeTech

    Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp hit by cyber attack | Financial Times – Chinese hacking project. How things have come from Murdoch being seriously invested in Star Asian satellite broadcasting targeting China and based out of Hong Kong to being an ‘enemy’ of China

    China more ‘brazen and damaging’ than ever, says FBI director | China | The Guardian

    The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon – The New York Times – ok their definition of ‘most powerful’ is way off, but an interesting analysis of NSO and Pegasus

    Technology

    EETimes – AMD Acquisition of Xilinx Heats Up Competition with Intel 

    Sony buys video game maker Bungie for $3.6bn as dealmaking accelerates | Financial Times

    Web of no web

    EETimes – The Metaverse: Pleasure Island Revisited 

  • Rundle in Korea

    The rundle as a term was popularised by business academic Scott Galloway.

    Overvalued unicorns, by Scott Galloway

    It means ‘recurring revenue bundle’. In the technology world bundling meant concealing the real price and value of a product, and or maximising leverage from one industry into another. Here are two bundle examples:

    • Mobile carrier combined text, data and call plans were originally designed to make it harder to compare one carriers offering with another. That was supposed to reduce customer churn because it was like comparing apples and oranges, rather than voice minutes, cost per text or cost per MB of data used
    • Microsoft integrated its web browser in with its operating system Windows. This meant that life was appreciably harder for Netscape to build its web browser business. Web developers in large corporates optimised their websites for Internet Explorer. Western Mac users like me couldn’t use online banking. Korean Mac users couldn’t get online because they couldn’t verify their identity. Korean cybersecurity was based on a common identity platform that relied on Microsoft ActiveX – which got hacked by North Korea….

    Back to rundle

    Remember the ‘recurring revenue’ bit?

    The classic example of a rundle that Scott Galloway uses is Amazon Prime. A one-off annual payment made by Amazon customers for free postage. There are also some ancillary benefits such as content from the Amazon Prime Video service. But Amazon Prime has a secondary effect, Prime customers spend more with Amazon over a year. This made increased profits for Amazon and less profits for its competitors, further strengthening Amazon’s hand. By 2019, 82 percent of US households have an Amazon Prime membership.

    Another example would be Apple’s service businesses:

    • Apple TV+
    • iCloud+
    • Apple Music

    So what’s the Korea connection?

    korea temple

    The rundle in Korea story started with a flower market.

    The Seoul wholesale flower market. The first thing that you need to know about Korean flower sales is how small they are. Here’s a rough and ready industry comparison. On average per person, per market on an annual basis:

    • The UK sells about $150 worth of flowers per year, per person
    • Japan sells about $50 worth of flowers per year, per person
    • South Korea sells about $15 worth of flowers per year, per person

    The first week in January meant that the trade was starting to get back to normal. Imports of flowers from around the world had started up again as foreign businesses reopened from the Christmas break. This is when things started to go weird. Wholesalers claimed that an online-only mail order flower company was cornering the market across a wide range of flowers driving prices up. The company that they alleged was doing this was Kukka. According to their allegations, Kukka had managed to get a wholesalers licence so that the could bid directly on the spot market for flowers. There is some anecdotal evidence that this drove florists already operating on meagre margins into the wall.

    At the time, this story didn’t make the local Korean media. Why? There are a few hypotheses:

    • Korean journalists weren’t interested because Koreans don’t buy that much flowers
    • Korean journalists couldn’t get enough sources to make the story fly
    • Korean news media publishers tend to be leery of stories that involve large corporates. What the Koreans call chaebols, unless they can’t really ignore the story any longer

    So why would Kukka have allegedly done this now? A few changes happened at Kukka the previous year. At least one of the founders left, a new management team was put in place and Kukka signed up to be part of T-Universe in August 2021.

    SK Telecom's T Universe

    SK Telecom officially launched T Universe at the end of August last year with a number of subscription services. Think of T Universe as a platform for bundles. It encompassed a number of Korean and international brands into rundles:

    • Amazon Global Store: remember that Amazon Prime won’t cover buying items on Amazon Japan or US? Well for $7.20 per month Koreans can get an Amazon Prime like free shipping. Frankly that would scare the crap out of my bank manager, given the amount of vinyl records, Blu-Rays and books that I would be buying
    • Starbucks: unlike most of the rest of the world, Starbucks isn’t the cock of the walk in Korea. It has a range of fierce domestic and international competitors in Korea. Koreans are big coffee drinkers and pay more than people in the UK for their coffee to go
    • Paris Baguette: despite the name, this company is as Korean as Shin spicy ramen noodles. Think of it as falling somewhere between Pret a Manger and Paul in terms of its offerings.
    • AIA insurance: AIA is an American-founded Hong Kong multinational insurance and finance corporation. It is the largest public listed life insurance and securities group in Asia-Pacific. It formerly used to be part of AIG

    Kukka is also part of these subscription plans with consumer being able to get 9000 Korean won vouchers every month.

    SKT

    SK Telecom (or SKT as its often known) is a vast business in its own right and is part of an even larger group SK.

    SK or as it was originally known Sunkyong Group started off in textiles and then became vertically integrated from petroleum to polyester fibres. Now the business covers:

    • Construction: aka SK Ecoplant does a wide range of projects across oil and gas, chemical plants, power generation and infrastructure, environmental protection, industrial buildings, civil engineering and housing
    • Pharmaceuticals with a focus on drug discovery and development
    • Chemicals also known as SK Innovation. SKC specialises in making polyester films for LCDs and solar cells.
    • Energy from oil and gas to electric battery production
    • Telecommunications
    • Trading and services: loyalty schemes (similar to Tesco Clubcard or Nectar points), a wedding consulting firm and an IT services provider with a particular focus on mobile commerce products. Their US arm launched Google Wallet
    • Semiconductors. SK Hynix is the world’s third largest semiconductor manufacturer

    Even SKT on its own is vast in its own right

    • Mobile carrier
    • E-banking and mobile payments
    • E-commerce platform (Shopify analogue with a loyalty programme)
    • Nate online portal (think Google services but Korean)
    • Satellite communications
    • Broadcast networks
    • Cable TV and brandband
    • T-Map (an Uber like service in partnership with Uber)
    • Dreamus: the people who make the Astell & Kern music players beloved of digital hi-fi enthusiasts

    Market distortions

    SKT brings a number of strengths to the T-Universe rundle series.

    It already handles 100,000,000 customer service calls a year

    • A huge existing customer base
    • CRM software and marketing data-mining expertise
    • It has the scale to bring on a 1,000 (sales) consultants to just focus on growing and upselling T-Universe

    SKT also doesn’t care about margin at the moment, instead focusing on market making:

    “Instead of a profit margin, we are thinking about expanding customer services and believe that new business models will emerge in the process. Margin is not a priority at this early stage,” Ryu said.

    SKT executive Ryu Young-sang quoted in the Korea Times: SKT to boost commerce biz with subscription platform (August 25, 2021)

    All of which is likely to mean a bump in potential customers for flowers, that probably haven’t bought flowers previously. It is easy to see how this rundle could create a market distortion. For businesses like Starbucks and Paris Baguette this would mean reduced margins on higher foot traffic, nothing that they couldn’t manage.

    However in a smaller market scenario like flowers, things could get more interesting. Huge demand from new customers that Kukka would be obliged to fulfil at ANY cost, because being sued in a Korean court by a chaebol would be disastrous.

    Korean business environment

    Korea is a relatively unique business environment. A few large businesses drive the country. You can literally live a Samsung life:

    • Work at Samsung
    • Shop at Shinsagae
    • Commute in your Samsung car
    • Stay in a Samsung hotel paid for with your Samsung card
    • Watch entertainment from CJ on your Samsung TV, tablet or phone
    • Ensure your safety with Samsung insurance for your Samsung built apartment and should you feel ill go to a Samsung hospital

    Online brought additional pressure to large businesses. Internet giant Kakao moved from internet media and communications to taxi bookings and mobile payments. Korean banks feeling under threat have moved into online services. So it was only a matter of time for SKT to build its rundle series for consumers to pick and choose from. Unlike many businesses (Apple and Amazon) who have moved from a transactional to a hybrid transactional and recurring revenue model, SKT was always a recurring revenue model because of its sector. So the only way for it to grow would be to expand the number of sectors that it got recurring revenue from with its ‘subscriptions of everyday things’ in T-Universe. SKT and the flower industry (let alone Kukka) look like apocryphal story of a hippo and a chick sharing the same bed.

  • Handspring + more things

    Springboard a documentary on Handspring

    Handspring was a key part of my first agency job. It was the dot com era, Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky, and Ed Colligan had founded Palm Inc. and left after it was sold to 3Com. They then went on to make modular PDAs with the Handspring Visor – which tapped into the clear plastic designs pioneered by Apple’s iMac. And then they built the PDA with smartphone capability called Treo. 3Com had made a Palm device in 1999 that used the Mobitex mobile data network, which was more analogous to a two way pager with a limited walled garden of content a la vintage AOL. Palm’s version of the Palm PDA has a common connector that could be used to connect external peripherals, such as the OmniSky sled which converted your PDA into an internet connected smartphone.

    But it was Handspring who had the ‘heat’ and the wherewithal to provide a neat connectivity slot for its peripherals to sit in, providing a neater experience. Springboard is a documentary about Handspring

    Of course, the outcome of PDA based smartphones isn’t all sweetness and light as Scott Galloway shows with our modern mobile device usage.

    Myst

    Ars Technical are doing some great oral histories of games creation. This one on Myst is very close to my heart. What’s particularly interesting is how the game was developed at a moment in time with the transition to CD ROM media. This resulted in a huge leap forward in what the technology was capable of doing, comparable to the early web in terms of creative disruption. It also made me really, really miss HyperCard.

    Jimmy Wang Yu

    Taiwanese martial artist, actor and gangster Jimmy Wang Yu carved the way for Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee in Hong Kong cinema. This documentary on him is first rate.

    Windows

    Interesting CNBC documentary on the hegemonic position of Microsoft Windows in personal computers.

    Audi S1 Hoonitron and vehicles of Cyberpunk 2077

    Ken Block’s collaboration with Audi has produced some interesting material. Growing up in the 1980s, group B rallying held a fascination for me, so that’s what got me interested in the Block / Audi collaboration at first. But what’s interesting about Block’s prototype electric Audi Quattro S1 is the speed at which Audi is able to put together a prototype working car with modern technologies. All of which implies ever more opportunities for automotive customisation for customers and the potential for additive manufacturing at the luxury end of the market. Hoonitron does sound like a late 1970s Taiwanese or Korean copy of a Sony television set.

    While we’re on about car design, there is also this great video on the vehicles in Cyberpunk 2077. 14 out of 10 for pure style.

    Tudor Pelagos FXD

    Tudor have been on point in their marketing. Their new version of the Pelagos has some lovely design cues, even if its modern day association with the French navy is marketing fluff. PELAGOS FXD – more from the Tudor press room.

    Fake socialite

    A graduation project by an art student from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing did an experiment that has sparked a debate about class, inequality and the massive wealth gap in modern China. In the video you see her attempt to live 21 days for free in Beijing. She disguised herself as a socialite and slept in the halls of extravagant hotels and enjoyed free food and drinks. What surprised me is that the work hasn’t been suppressed and that she hadn’t been arrested. It also shows how Xi Jingping’s concept of common prosperity is designed to tap into a deep tension in society at the moment.

    Paper and glue

    MSNBC put together an amazing documentary on French street artist JR who does giant photo collages as street art. Here’s the trailer.

    https://youtu.be/7NmxynGAmrM

    Hong Kong Christmas

    Hong Kong’s relationship with Christmas is a complicated one. A substantial minority of Hong Kongers are practicing Christians. Until the opening up of China in the late 1970s, Hong Kong was a substantial supplier of toys, Christmas decorations and lights. And then there is the multinational community living alongside Hong Kongers, which brings the western commercialism of Christmas. For many Christmas is a ‘pre-lunar new year celebration, both are big on the colour red and the decorations for one used to bleed into the other in public spaces. So I thought the joy of this Christmas street market might appeal to readers here.

    https://youtu.be/Dpwm7nQGxcg