Category: 日本 | japan | 일본

Five for Friday | 五日（星期五) | 금요일에 다섯 가지

Post author By admin
Post date January 11, 2020

Reading Time: < 1 minute

A gorgeous unreleased adaption of Akira for the Sega MegaDrive. I presume that these visuals are designed to move the game play from level to level.

As technology has improved computer graphics has become more prosaic. You no longer see the kind of surreal computer graphics visuals that you enjoyed from the late 1970s to late 1990s. VintageCG has archived a lot of early CG demos on YouTube.

The Witcher was the must watch show on Netflix at the end of last year. It was inevitable that the memeable power ballad Throw A Coin To The Witcher gets the inevitable remixes. Amongst the best is this remix by Whitestone.

Donald Knuth features in Robert X Cringely’s history of computing from post-World War II to the rise of the personal computer. While Knuth never made a fortune, his ideas facilitated a lot of modern computing. Here’s a great interview with Knuth that will make you appreciate the computing power in the power of your hand today.

Strange Parts did an amazing video on how lithium polymer ion batteries are made during a recent trip to Shenzhen, China.

Strange Parts at the Pisen Group battery factory

Things that made my day this week

Post author By admin
Post date September 30, 2019

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Mastertape volume six by The Reflex was on heavy rotation for me over the past few weeks.

Valerie Plume’s ‘Undercover’ ad makes use of her CIA heritage in a political ad that breaks new ground

Retail and food services at an architectural level often lack theatre and experience. Once you’ve looked past faux Edison bulbs and raw brick walls, there isn’t much difference between a WeWork office, a clothing boutique and a burger joint. So its nice to see innovation like this – a giant circular juice machine that turns discarded peels of squeezed oranges into 3D printed juice cups

The baked goods market in china by Daxue consulting – baked goods sales in China are interesting because of their direct link with middle class consumer style consumption

Keanu Reeves speaks Japanese to Cyberpunk 2077 fans at Tokyo Game Show【Video】 | SoraNews24 -Japan News- – can Keanu Reeves become even more legendary? Yes, because he’s Keanu Reeves

Web services I use

Post author By admin
Post date June 20, 2019

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Web services I use everyday has evolved over time. I thought I’d explore what I use now, compared to my essential services nine years ago.

Bloglines – I have an eclectic and wide range of online reading material that I like to keep up with. Whilst I have a Google Reader account, it is set up as insurance against IAC shutting down Bloglines. I find Google Reader intrusive and not as productive as Bloglines. In addition, Bloglines works better on a mobile phone and power my blogroll
Delicious – is my memory. I am a web pack rat and it comes in handy for research or pulling together case studies for presentations. I keep a minimal amount of bookmarks on my computer, mostly bookmarklets to take advantage of Google Translate, subscribe to a blog and pull up the local weather
Google – as well as it being my default search engine, Google is also my currency converter, calculator, spell checker and timezone checker. The site has a surprising amount of shortcuts that make my life a lot easier. They don’t require any technical skill, more details here
Teoma – one of the best kept secrets of the web, Teoma is my back-up search engine if Google isn’t giving me the kind of results that I want. If anything Teoma is more relevant than Google is on its search responses. It naturally doesn’t trawl as much of the web as Google and it isn’t as good for real-time or semi real-time content like the latest blog posts. But it does have a clean interface reminiscent of Google previously. If you hit the ‘Google found approximately 150,000 results’ and you can’t find what you are looking for in the first page (which you should have set to 100 results per page) then give Teoma a go
Email – my primary personal email account is an Apple IMAP account (now sold as MobileMe), but I’m old school so I have a .mac address. I also have a couple of other IMAP accounts with a more limited circulation. IMAP is great as it allows you to sync your account across multiple devices and not pay a fortune for Microsoft Exchange
iDisk – I know lots of people swear that Dropbox is the best, but I still like to use iDisk for large file transfers like presentations. Apple has progressively improved the product and I know it inside out
Flickr – if Delicious is my memory of facts and figures then Flickr is my visual memory I use it as an aide memoire, image storage for my blog and as a kind of photo scrapbook
Twitter – is the new IM. Instant messaging on my iPhone and on corporate networks can be a bit haphazard. Twitter gives you the direct message capability of IM but also allows for broadcast messages and syndication of content
Skype – whilst all the fuss is happening in the iPhone world about Facetime I am more interested in Skype. Its combination of reasonably-priced VoIP calls and free Skype calling together with robust file transfer and chat messaging has made it ideal for business communications and keeping in touch with friends in far flung places
LinkedIn – I’ve got business out of LinkedIn, polled opinions on the best content management system for a particular purpose and received recommendations on a web hosting company in Hong Kong. LinkedIn is an invaluable business tool
Ten Web Services I Can’t Do Without | renaissance chambara

Lets have a look this in terms of numbers. In the space of nine years:

3/10 services no longer exist in a meaningful way
4/10 services I no longer use
3/10 services I still use, but are just not important to me anymore

The key lessons to take away from these are:

The importance of data portability. Which is one of the reasons why I am minimally invested in Facebook
Always be looking out for new services that serve as a plan B
Steady but niche beats aspirational mass services every time. Ok so services like del.icio.us had a mass expectation pushed on them by large corporates post acquisition
It’s easier to make a service less useful than more useful – Skype definitely had a tipping point into the second tier for me following a user experience redesign around about the time of the Microsoft acquisition

What does my list look like now?

Newsblur is my RSS reader of choice. Bloglines was shut down by IAC, so I had a choice of moving to Google Reader or FastLadder. FastLadder was an English language version of their iconic Japanese RSS reader. Livedoor got wrapped up in a financial scandal. The English language service was a distraction and eventually got shut down. Thankfully, RSS readers have a standard format to export your list of sites that you want to read called OPML files. The downside is that it has become fashionable for web designers to turn off RSS feeds on websites
Pinboard is my social bookmark platform of choice. Yahoo! started stripping the delicious team of its developers and they eventually transitioned their personal accounts to Pinboard. That was enough of a recommendation for me
Duck.com is now my first string search engine. Google is bumped to second tier. The key reason for Duck.com is privacy. It’s search quality is good enough, the search engine results page has a clean design rather like Google used to. Google still has handy vertical search options like Google Scholar and Google Translate are still top class.
Email – my use of email hasn’t changed at all. It has been a constant in a sea of change.
WeTransfer – Apple’s move from iDisk as a file system on the web to more of a tight integration with the company’s productivity apps (Keynote, Numbers, Pages)
Flickr is still my visual memory. It’s just an awful lot more web friendly than Instagram or Pinterest. It’s longevity is remarkable given all its been through with Yahoo!
Messaging got a lot more fragmented. I work with friends in China so WeChat is needed, as is KakaoTalk, Messages, WhatsApp and Slack. None of which offer a perfect fit
Skype has been replaced by a bridging conference call number and some people that I work with use Zoom. Skype still has some uses but my use has declined
LinkedIn is still an important business tool. Despite constant fiddling with the format, the spam on the platform and declining candidate functionality

Listing this out it makes depressing reading. Declining functionality, good products (almost) sunk by large corporate shenanigans and corporate investors. In many respects things have stood still rather than moved forward with web services.

Five for Friday | 五日（星期五) | 금요일에 다섯 가지

Post author By admin
Post date June 3, 2019

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Japan Wants to Launch Gundam Into Space for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics – I am looking forward to the next Tokyo Olympics. Not for the athletics but everything else that the Japanese organising committee wraps around it.

Challenging stereotypes has become a key trend in advertising recently. Part of it is down to the movements supporting diversity and LGBTQ communities. GS Caltex have chosen to challenge the stereotypes surrounding stepmothers in Korean society with this advert. These were run on YouTube and distributed via online fairy tale platform “Iwing” and on Naver, a leading portal in Korea. You don’t need to speak Korean to understand the gist of where campaign was going.

A bit of oil history for you. GS Caltex is a joint venture business between what was then GoldStar (now LG) and Caltex. Caltex was an joint international joint venture between Chevron (Standard Oil of California or SOCal) and Texaco. Both of which were part of the Seven Sisters of western oil companies who dominated exploration, production and refining until the 1970s.

We’re starting to see an increased focus on craft in advertising after a decade of obsession with performance marketing to the detriment of brand. So now is as good time as any to revisit London agency CDP (Collett Dickenson Pearce) work on Hamlet cigars during the 1970s

I love this cheeky send-off and backhanded tribute that BMW gave Dieter Zetsche when he retired as CEO of Mercedes-Benz.

IDEO has commissioned an oral history of itself as a corporate video.

ICYMI | 万一你错过了| 당신이 그것을 놓친 경우에 대비해서

Post author By admin
Post date May 26, 2019

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Toxic masculinity P&G exec behind viral Gillette ad interview — Quartzy – I’d argue that some of this work shows poor judgement in the way its executed that damaged rather than helped

Reputation Inflation | National Bureau of Economic Research – A solution to marketplace information asymmetries is to have trading partners publicly rate each other post-transaction. Many have shown that these ratings are effective; we show that their effectiveness deteriorates over time. The problem is that ratings are prone to inflation, with raters feeling pressure to leave “above average” ratings, which in turn pushes the average higher. This pressure stems from raters’ desire to not harm the rated seller. As the potential to harm is what makes ratings effective, reputation systems, as currently designed, sow the seeds of their own irrelevance. Or in plain language how ratings programmes fail over time as they get bigger.

Toyota Already Has Upgrades for the New Supra • Gear Patrol – really interesting tension in the Supra – leave space for tuning – which is where the passion for the car grew out of whilst not gouging customers with a shonky value proposition versus rivals

Streetwear Global Market Research | Hypebeast – this was done in association with PWC’s consulting arm

How Streetwear Brands and Consumers are Toppling Previously Understood Notions of Luxury and Exclusivity — The Fashion Law – great 101 guide to streetwear from the perspective of people working in luxury brands. I’d also recommend this piece I wrote that would provide a lot of context around the two

My Way or the Huawei – Peter Zeihan – I’m not a blinkered fan of Huawei, but even I’ll admit that there’s not a great deal of balance in this article

To Many Chinese, America Was Like ‘Heaven.’ Now They’re Not So Sure. – The New York Times – “…the perspective of young Chinese is different. They don’t respect you. Nor are they afraid of you.”