Ni hao – welcome to the Taiwan category of this blog. This is where I share anything that relates to the island of Taiwan, business issues relating to Taiwan, people from the island of Taiwan, or Taiwanese-specific culture. I don’t post that often about Taiwan but given its strategic location, vibrant culture and importance in global manufacturing I’d like to remedy that.
Taiwan has a range of cultural exports including music, but most of that is focused addressing a Chinese speaking audience. Many of China’s stars actually come from across the strait. Many Chinese factories are actually owned and run by Taiwanese companies with many managers and engineers crossing the straits to work. They were as responsible for the success and opening up as their Hong Kong brethren who moved their factories upstream along the Pearl river delta.
The Republic of China to give it its formal name has had a complex history, acting as a cradle of traditional Chinese culture that was destroyed and remade on the mainland under Mao Zetong. He was looking to build a new country, while Chiang Kai-shek was looking to preserve as much of an old country as he could. The island across the strait was like a seed bank ready to regenerate the mainland at some point in the future.
Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if the Palace museum launched a collaboration with a brand that had great design chops and that I thought was particularly notable that might appear in design as well as Taiwan. Or if there was a new white paper from the government of Taiwan, that might appear in ideas and Taiwan. If there are Taiwanese related subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.
HNA in chaos as internal divisions erupt in public | Financial Times – One investor who sought to buy a large real estate portfolio from HNA in late 2018 said that the deal fell through because it was no longer clear who was in control of the assets – this is interesting when you start about thinking allegations of all Chinese businesses (like Huawei) essentially being state-directed businesses. Especially when you consider it in the context
What really happens to the clothes you donate | Macleans – interesting complex supply chain for fibres and nothing. Also interesting how grading of garments stayed within the Asian diaspora formerly based in the British colonies of East Africa
Google acquires Pointy, a startup to help brick-and-mortar retailers list products online, for $163M | TechCrunch – built hardware and software technology to help physical retailers — specifically those that might not already have an extensive e-commerce storefront detailing in-store inventory — get their products discoverable online without any extra work – reminds me of the kind of thing you’d expect Tencent or Alibaba to do as China has led in O2O e-tailing. Pointy also fits into Google’s mission to organising all the worlds information. Over time, I can only see Pointy as being bad for retail margins.
The problem with the idea of Pointy is that it treats all stock as equal, in reality the cost of an item isn’t only its price. A point that Pointy misses. There are also transport costs, time and convenience costs involved. For a real world story indexed by Pointy, the consideration of being able to drive to a nearby story and get something immediately isn’t a factor. How does Pointy know about the hassle of that same trip if one has to walk there and back instead? Does Pointy consider how heavy or bulky a product might be?
Mediatel: Newsline: How the UK is quietly importing a sinister political phenomenon – “I have read so many predictions and trends about journalism in the past few weeks. The most significant trend, mostly unacknowledged, is that of politicians realizing they do not need to provide access or engagement with journalists, or even tell the truth, to be electable.” – where is this going?
Make your China marketing pop with these pop culture tips – POP MART: the designer toy market in China is booming. Not that surprising given historic popularity in Hong Kong and Japan – in many respects culturally China is a laggard
Framed — Pixel Envy – three paragraphs in and it is already setting up the idea that personal privacy and public safety are two opposing ends of a gradient. That’s simply not true. A society that has less personal privacy does not inherently have better public safety; Russia and Saudi Arabia are countries with respectable HDI scores, brutal censorship and surveillance, and higher murder rates than Australia, Denmark, France, and the United Kingdom
Sugar Bear’s Don’t Scandalize Mine was a go to record for me, but I’ve never seen a music video of it until now
What Does Taiwan’s Public Think About Election Interference From China? – The Diplomat – hyper-polarization in views between DPP and KMT supporters highlights the difficulty in addressing cybersecurity and China more broadly. To reach a consensus requires first acknowledging and disrupting the echo chambers in which disinformation campaigns thrive, then the government must implement election transparency policies to more easily expose disinformation efforts. However, with increasing animosity between parties, this consensus may be hard to reach. Citizens may also be concerned that any steps the government takes are limiting their freedom of speech or other rights (paywall)
Try as It Might, Germany Isn’t Warming to Huawei – The Diplomat – Highest on their list of concerns has been the risk of exposing the future German 5G network to large-scale espionage and data theft on behalf of corporate and political actors in China. In recent years, Germany’s intelligence agencies have reported a steady increase in Chinese government-directed espionage and hacking activities against German targets, primarily with the aim of acquiring corporate secrets. China is now considered the source of the majority of cyberattacks against Germany. In 2019, some of the largest German companies confirmed that they had been targeted by a new wave of cyberattacks that likely originated with the Chinese government. During a parliamentary hearing on the issue of Huawei in October, Thomas Haldenwang, the president of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (Bundesverfassungsschutz), claimed that Chinese espionage and cyberattacks have been expanding into more and more sectors of the economy and the state. According to Haldenwang, while Chinese cyberattacks in Germany were previously focused primarily on private corporations and technology
China Manufacturing:”Elvis Has Left the Building” | China Law Blog – “China’s rising costs, tricky regulations and increasingly unstable geopolitical situation are forcing more manufacturers to move production elsewhere” and we should expect this exodus to gain speed in 2020, “despite the prospect of a minor US-China trade truce.”
Bose and HERE Fuel AR Experience Innovation By Combining Location and Audio Technologies – Semiconductor Digest – HERE Technologies, a global leader in mapping and location platform services, today announced a collaboration with Bose Corporation to jointly enable their respective developer communities to deploy augmented reality (AR) location applications and services. This collaboration gives HERE developers access to the Bose AR platform and spatial-audio capabilities, and extends the HERE platform, positioning and mobile SDK location technologies to developers building audio AR applications and experiences. – ok so turn by turn direction or tourist style apps probably. The most interesting thing for me was that Bose AR isn’t just the audio enabled frames but recent noise cancelling headsets as well
SPH print newspaper ad sales dive 20% on year | Media | Campaign Asia – Singapore Press Holdings, the parent company of The Straits Times, Lianhe Zaobao, and other news publications, saw overall revenue drop 3.8% in the first quarter of fiscal 2020 – interesting acceleration. Part of which is down to media agencies making more money from digital and some due to changing consumer habits. I’ve started taking a print newspaper subscription again as I value the juxtaposition good print design can bring
NYT: Russian hackers successfully targeted Ukrainian gas company Burisma – Axios – Public awareness of the Burisma hack cuts both ways politically. For former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign, it means document dumps could happen at any time, with accompanying media frenzy and potentially damaging revelations. For the Trump campaign, it means that any such revelations will come pre-tainted with a Russian label
John Lewis marketing boss Paula Nickolds departs before starting | The Drum – Anusha Couttigane, principal fashion analyst at Kantar, said that whoever takes the lead will need to rethink its long-running, and arguably tired, festive advertising strategy which has relied on blockbuster, tear-jerker creative to encourage shoppers into stores. “John Lewis needs to continue evolving its digital marketing efforts. While the company’s Christmas mascot, the accident-prone dragon Excitable Edgar, was warmly received, the debut of the brand’s Christmas advert is simply not the event it once was,” – quite a burn right there.
Sonos hits Google with lawsuit over wireless speaker patents – “Google has been blatantly and knowingly copying our patented technology” for years. Sonos and Google collaborated in 2013 to add the Play Music service to Sonos speakers, and more recently, the two worked to bring Google’s digital assistant to Sonos speakers, alongside Amazon’s counterpart, Alexa. “Despite our repeated and extensive efforts over the last few years,” Spence told the Times, “Google has not shown any willingness to work with us on a mutually beneficial solution. We’re left with no choice but to litigate,”
With nothing to lose, loners build future in China’s hollowed-out north – Reuters – “Social classes are fixed,” Li said. “The poor can never achieve anything. When you encounter problems, if you can solve it, great. There’s not much you can do otherwise.” – interesting consumer comments that explain the slow down in China’s economic growth
Dark Patterns after the GDPR: Scraping Consent Pop-ups and Demonstrating their Influence by Nouns, Liccardi, Veal, Karger and Kagal – The results of our empirical survey of CMPs today illustrates the extent to which illegal practices prevail, with vendors of CMPs turning a blind eye to — or worse, incentivising —- clearly illegal configurations of their systems. Enforcement in this area is sorely lacking. Data protection authorities should make use of automated tools like the one we have designed to expedite discovery and enforcement. Designers might help here to design tools for regulators, rather than just for users or for websites. Reg- ulators should also work further upstream and consider placing requirements on the vendors of CMPs to only allow compliant designs to be placed on the market. (PDF)
Men Know It’s Better to Carry Nothing – The Cut – Medium – women clean up because fashion allows it. She pointed to the size of women’s bags, which allow us — like sherpas or packhorses — to lug around the tool kits of servitude. A woman is expected to be prepared for every eventuality, and culture has formalized that expectation. Online, lists of necessities proliferate: 12, 14, 17, 19, 30 things a woman should keep in her purse. Almost all include tissues, breath mints, hand sanitizer, and tampons — but also “a condom, because this is her responsibility, too.” (A woman’s responsibility for everyone else’s spills extends to the most primal level.) – I don’t think that this ‘carry nothing’ mentality of men is true any more. One only has to look at the backpacks carried around. Or the whole EDC culture of over-engineered products to optimise the carry experience, making a lie of carry nothing as a concept. For a lot of men, the car is the handbag, but that’s a whole other discussion around the idea of carry nothing. More consumer behaviour related content here
Silicon Valley’s China Paradox | East West Center – the period from 2014 to 2017 as a time of “segmentation and synergy,” two words that on their face are opposites of each other. Their juxtaposition forms the core of what Sheehan labels “Silicon Valley’s China paradox.” While at a corporate level US and Chinese companies were entirely separate, the flow of money, people, and ideas reached an all-time high during this period. “This is when you saw a lot of investors from China showing up in Silicon Valley, some prominent US researchers and engineers joining Chinese companies in positions of leadership, and ideas flowing in two directions,” said Sheehan. He noted that the concept of shared bicycles, now popular in US cities, started in China, and both Chinese and US companies have been active in the development of autonomous vehicles. Even while the relationship between the two national governments was in many ways going sour, “the relationship at the grassroots level, the technology relationship, was still very free-flowing,” he noted. Sheehan suggested that the relationship has now entered a new and uncharted phase, which he termed the new “technology cold war,” with the US government asserting national policies in what was previously considered a private arena. This new phase has three dimensions, he said. The first is an effort to disentangle the interconnected technology com- munities that bind the two countries together. In 2018, the US Congress passed the Foreign Investment Risk Review and Modernization Act (FIRRMA). This new legislation increases US government oversight and supervision of Chinese investment in Silicon Valley, Sheehan pointed out. The US State Department also began restricting visas for Chinese graduate students working in sensitive fields of science and technology. The second dimension is height- ened competition between US and Chinese companies in other countries. In general, “American companies know they can’t win in China, and Chinese companies know they can’t make a dent in the US market,” according to Sheehan. So US and Chinese companies are competing in markets such as India, Brazil, and Southeast Asia. (PDF)
The Spy craft Revolution – Foreign Policy – really interesting to read from a privacy perspective, spy craft affected as much as general public. Intelligence agencies are apparently just like the rest of us and spy craft reflects this. More security related posts here.
Algocurios – this is what happens when you plug Matt Muir into a machine learning algorithm. I’m just thankful SkyNet didn’t evolve. It doesn’t capture the desperation, profane language and ennui prevalent in Matt’s real posts
Opinion | Is China the World’s Loan Shark? – The New York Times – academics who have studied China’s practices in detail have found scant evidence of a pattern indicating that Chinese banks, acting at the government’s behest, are deliberately over-lending or funding loss-making projects to secure strategic advantages for China.
Ralph Lauren Unveils The Super Woke Polo Shirt | Luxury Insider – a debut line of polo shirts made from recycled plastic bottles and dyed using a waterless production process. Besides being environmentally woke, the initiative has the noble aim of eradicating 170 million plastic bottles from landfills and oceans by 2025
Apple reportedly shifting more iPhone XR orders to Foxconn from Pegatron, says paper – Pegatron’s production has been affected by a lower-than-expected yield rate and shortages of workers at its plants in China – the manpower issue at Pegatron is very interesting and implies a possible rift between the factories and local government. Historically local governments have gone out of their way to facilitate large Taiwanese employers China has just begun to see a decline in worker numbers overall in its population. Pegatron used to be part of ASUSTek. When that business reorganised its OEM manufacturing business became what we now know as Pegatron.
Deepfakes web α | Generate your own Deepfakes – Japanese currency denominated service to create your own deep fakes. This service looks as if its designed for the curious, rather than virtual revenge porn creators, the accessibility of this capability brings with it a variety of issues
Smart cities — too clever by half? | Financial Times – hell is other people’s technology. Smart cities don’t have the attendant ethical considerations because that would dull their ‘smartness’. In addition law enforcement would prefer to have maximum choices on data. It was interesting that China Mobile’s key use case for 5G was urban crime fighting in the first adverts that they ran.
