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VR Headset + more things

Apple’s first VR headset will reportedly be powerful and pricey – CNET – its a rumour so take with a pinch of salt, the approach outlined reminded me of being rather similar the way Oculus was in their early model VR headset devices. It is also interesting how they consider a VR headset as a stepping stone to AR glasses. Will Apple be enough to mainstream the VR headset? More related content here.

Next drops bid to buy Topshop after Arcadia’s breakup | Philip Green | The Guardian – The Next consortium was pitted against Shein, a Chinese online fashion retailer and Authentic Brands, the US owner of the Barneys department store, which has been linked to a joint bid with JD Sports. The online retailers Asos and Boohoo are also thought to be involved in the mix. Shein tabled an offer worth in excess of £300m for Topshop and Topman, according to Sky News which first reported the development. It added that a separate process was being run for other Arcadia brands such as Burton and Dorothy Perkins

‎Finding Genius Podcast: Telehealth Technology Breaking the Barrier of Geography on Apple Podcasts – practitioner discussion on the realities of telehealth for diabetes and obesity management treatment

Asians dump WhatsApp for Signal and Telegram on privacy concerns – Nikkei Asia

TSMC hikes capex to record $28bn as chip race heats up – Nikkei Asia

‘Absolute carnage’: EU hauliers reject UK jobs over Brexit rules | Brexit | The Guardian – data showed that an increasing number of freight groups rejected contracts to move goods from France to Britain in the second week of January. Transporeon, a German software company that works with 100,000 logistics service providers, said freight forwarders had rejected jobs to move goods from Germany, Italy and Poland into Britain. In the second week of January the rejection rate for transport to the UK was up 168% on the third quarter of 2020 and had doubled in the first calendar week of the year

Battle of the Robots Still Favors Japan and Europe—For Now – WSJ – Covid-19 has accelerated automation in factories, especially in manufacturing powerhouse China. Foreign companies have long dominated the market for industrial robots and automation tools there—but there are signs that dominance is fraying around the edges. As the factory for the world, China is unsurprisingly far and away the largest market for industrial robots. Before the pandemic, however, the U.S.-China trade war was slowing growth. New installations of industrial robots amounted to 140,500 in 2019, a 9% decline from the previous year, but still almost three times the number for second-place Japan, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Last year was likely much better: Credit Suisse estimates that China’s industrial-robotics market grew 9.5% in 2020.

Audi and BMW shut down car subscription programs | Engadget – When Mercedes-Benz shuttered Collection, however, it cited mediocre demand and complaints about the hassles of switching personal items between vehicles. While it wasn’t mentioned at the time, the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t helped matters. People are commuting less if at all, and may be more interested in saving money than the flexibility of swapping cars.Subscription ervices like Volvo Care are still going, although it’s not certain how well they’re faring.There may be a slight revival. Automotive News claims Cadillac is testing a resurrected Book service with dealers, although it would arrive a year after the brand’s hoped-for early 2020 revival. However, the overall market appears to be contracting

Majority of Europeans fear Biden unable to fix ‘broken’ US | World news | The Guardian – “Europeans like Biden, but they don’t think America will come back as a global leader,” said the thinktank’s director, Mark Leonard. “When George W Bush was president, they were divided about how America should use its power. With Biden entering the White House, they are divided about whether America has power at all.” The survey of 15,000 people in 11 European countries, conducted at the end of last year, found that the shift in European sentiment towards the US in the wake of the Trump presidency had led to a corresponding unwillingness to support Washington in potential international disputes

Exclusive: City of London Corp boss says ‘not our place’ to criticise China : CityAM – Nathan Law, one of the leaders of the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests in the territory and now in exile in London, told City A.M.’s City View podcast yesterday that UK firms’ “compliance and collusion” with the Chinese Communist Party’s agenda threatened the West’s “democratic values”. The pointed criticism comes after firms including HSBC and Standard Chartered, headquartered in London but who see significant revenues in Asia, backed the imposition of a draconian National Security Law in Hong Kong

Damaging brand image is rarely harmful because it matters so little – In the age of Trump, what people think of you is far less important than the more brutal objective of getting people to think about you. – Salience is so important

Zoom spy claims a warning for multinationals in China | Financial Times – the point is that every MNC is compromised because of the pressure that China brings on employees in their country

IWC’s Christopher Grainger-Herr: “We Are Currently Experiencing Extraordinary Times.” – part of the issue with IWC is pre-COVID product related including using movements that watch fans look down on

China-US rivalry: how the Gulf War sparked Beijing’s military revolution | South China Morning Post

January 23, 2021
Mask shops & things that caught my eye this week

Mask Shops In Hong Kong

Mask shops have now become a thing. When I lived in Hong Kong, you would buy your masks from the local pharmacy chain store depending whether you were near a Watsons or a Mannings. It was good form among locals to wear a mask when you felt unwell; particularly with cold like symptoms. COVID-19 drove the importance of masks. With this has come dedicated mask shops.

New mask companies sprang up to deal with the need for locally made trusted, good quality masks. Mask Lab built their own factory in the leased space of a former garment factory, now vacant due to the deindustrialisation of Hong Kong with China’s opening up. Mask shops started in residential areas with lower retail rents alongside online sales.

Now these businesses have managed to move into flagship retail locations. Looking at this photo Mask Lab seems to be in the Central district of Hong Kong, close to luxury retail stores and the high-end Landmark shopping mall. More related posts here.

Mattel collaboration with Stüssy

The eight ball motif has been a design staple for Stüssy since at least the late 1980s. It was only a matter of time before they did a collaboration with Mattel – maker of the Magic Eight-Ball. There is a capsule clothes collection and a co-branded magic eight ball with a special dice inside it. Magic “8” Ball™ Tee – Mattel Collaboration | Stussy

Climate crisis font

Climate crisis font | Helsingin Sanomat – is a lovely free font that visualises the impact of climate change. Helsingin Sanomat is the largest subscription newspaper in Finland.

Appalachian Mountain Music

David Hoffman shot this great documentary on Appalachian mountain music and one of its prime advocates during the early to mid-20th century. The film’s protagonist Bascom Lamar Lunsford collected and promoted Appalachian mountain music and dance in poetry and storytelling.

Bandulu

Bandulu Street Couture use customised embroidery on Nike and Nike ACG garments that is sympathetic to the base garments. In their own words:

‘Bandulu means fake, bootleg, ghetto. Like that white tee from Marshall’s with the name of some couturier, screenprinted in gold. That little bit of luxury gives clothing a story, with or without vanity. Bandulu believes in adding this quality to the clothes of our world, through upcycling and craftsmanship. Bandulu takes quality, vintage clothing and rejuvenate life into them through hand embellishments. Quality therefore becomes less about reputation, and more about integrity. You know its real if its fake.’
Bandulu Street Couture

January 22, 2021
Doughnutism

Doughnutism is a phrase that I found out about from a presentation of Carat’s 2021 trends paper. In the paper itself it is called the donut problem, but when talked about the phrase doughnutism was used.

COVID-19 has changed behaviours. More people are telecommuting, which has changed people’s travel needs. As a consequence, there has been an uptake in locally bought products and services.

Carat found data that suggested there was a common phenomenon in multiple cities. Lots of activities on the peripheral, where the bulk of people live, but a sharp decline in footfall in the middle. This would be shops that catered for commuters in central business districts, urban tourist traffic or destination shopping areas.

This void in the centre is where doughnutism comes from.

Carat cited CACI research that showed retail footfall returned to only 25 per cent of pre-COVID levels after the spring lockdown was lifted. This was in sharp contrast to the return to pre-COVID levels of activity in residential areas.

As the report says:

In a way, it’s the idea of the ‘fifteen-minute city’ brought to life. In Sorbonne University professor Carlos Moreno’s model, people would be able to access everything they need for everyday living within a 15-minute walk and have everything else delivered.
Carat Trends 2021 – The Year of Emotionally Intelligent Marketing

There were some indications that local-oriented social media like site Nextdoor rose in user activity. Facebook is developing a competitor. It also offers an opportunity for digital out of home media to thrive.

Carat thinks that doughnutism will continue. If it does depend on how long COVID lasts and how it affects knowledge workers in the long run. There was a piece in the FT that talked about how creativity might be being adversely affected with the move to remote working.

Creativity often comes out of having an itch that you can’t scratch. A classic example of that would be the story behind Post-It notes.

The idea for the Post-it note was conceived in 1974 by Arthur Fry as a way of holding bookmarks in his hymnal while singing in the church choir. He was aware of an adhesive accidentally developed in 1968 by fellow 3M employee Spencer Silver. No application for the lightly sticky stuff was apparent until Fry’s idea.
9 Things Invented or Discovered by Accident – howstuffworks

Six years later the Post-it note was brought to market and the rest as they say was history.

But it can also come out of serendipity, whether its a conversation whilst in the coffee queue or in an ideation meeting. Experiences that Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack or Google Duo don’t perform that well.

“Exposure to new and different experiences — sounds, smells, environments, ideas, people — is a key source of creative spark,”… “These external stimuli are fuel for our imaginations and the imagined, made real, is what we typically mean by creativity.” “Homeworking can starve us of many of these creative raw ingredients — the chance conversation, the new person or idea or environment. Homeworking means serendipity is supplanted by scheduling, face-to-face by Zoom.” “Homeworking can starve us of many of these creative raw ingredients — the chance conversation, the new person or idea or environment. Homeworking means serendipity is supplanted by scheduling, face-to-face by Zoom.”
Where’s the spark? How lockdown caused a creativity crisis – FT

This quote was attributed by the FT to Andy Haldane, an economist at the Bank of England.

A longer term driver of doughnutism in London and other world cities is more likely to be the gradual conversion of office blocks, retail spaces and nightlife venues into investment properties. Many of these investment properties have overseas owners, who leave them vacant rather than living in them, renting them out or doing short term letting (a la AirBnB).

More jargon watch related content here.

January 21, 2021
Stott on Hong Kong + more things

Clifford Stott did a call with the Hong Kong Democrat Party on the Hong Kong protests. His responses also cover issues around COVID-19 and how western nations handle crises. Stott believes that China will be a malign authoritarian influence beyond Hong Kong.

https://youtu.be/-yr41blUudU

Clifford Stoff is an expert on deescalation and riot prevention. He came to prominence when he was one of a number of international experts who stepped aside from the Hong Kong government IPCC enquiry. Instead he cowrote Patterns of ‘Disorder’ During the 2019 Protests in Hong Kong: Policing, Social Identity, Intergroup Dynamics, and Radicalization

Probably one of the darkest aspects of the video is when Stott points out that he visited Hong Kong at the invitation of the Hong Kong Police and wouldn’t be able to go back due to the National Security Law. More security related content here.

DuckDuckGo surpasses 100 million daily search queries for the first time | ZDNet

Safari 14 added WebExtensions support. So where are the extensions? – Six Colors – extensions offer the kind of functionality that push apps used to provide

How Social Media’s Obsession with Scale Supercharged Disinformation | HBR

The Opposite of Mercedes’ Hyperscreen: The Heavily Analog Dashboards of Rally Cars – Core77 – in criticism of convergence in product design

Where’s the spark? How lockdown caused a creativity crisis | Financial Times – “I don’t look back on the past year and think the collaborations I’ve been involved in are any less creative than before. But I don’t know what I’ve missed.”

Tory rebels seek to block trade deal with China over Uighurs | Financial Times – Boris Johnson faces a rebellion by about 30 Tory MPs on Tuesday who are seeking to block a potential post-Brexit trade deal with China over its human rights record. The amendment to the trade deal — promoting a UK trade policy that upholds human rights — is co-sponsored by one-time Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith and former minister Nusrat Ghani. It would stop ministers from cutting trade deals with countries found guilty of genocide by the High Court. It is backed by all the opposition parties as well as the Muslim Council of Britain and the Board of Deputies of British Jews

Beijing spying fears as it emerges airframes of new MoD spy planes were previously used by Chinese airlines – and what was the MoD procurement people doing?

We don’t need strategists, we need planners – good op-ed by Dave Trott

Making Sense of the Facebook Menace | The New Republic – interesting but flawed analysis of Facebook

Behind a Secret Deal Between Google and Facebook – The New York Times

As Adobe Flash stops running, so do some railroads in China – Tuesday’s chaos arose after China Railway Shenyang failed to deactivate Flash in time, leading to a complete shutdown of its railroads in Dalian, Liaoning province. Staffers were reportedly unable to view train operation diagrams, formulate train sequencing schedules and arrange shunting plans.Authorities fixed the issue by installing a pirated version of Flash at 4:30 a.m. the following day.

January 20, 2021
CES 2021
CES 2021 – the Consumer Electronics Show usually sets the tone at the start of the year for consumer-oriented technology. It usually fills up Las Vegas’ hotels and conference facilities.

CES 2021 went online only. Like attending online conferencing the experience was lacking. Networking and informal conversations aren’t something that technology has managed to solve.

Consumer electronics manufacturers didn’t let the virtual nature of CES 2021 put them off though. LG and Samsung went gangbusters rolling out new products. One can understand their enthusiasm based on CTA research for US TV sales in 2020:

Televisions: Households channeled discretionary dollars into upgrading TVs in a record-setting year for shipments in 2020. CTA expects steady demand for displays in 2021 as TVs remain the centerpiece for entertainment in homes. Television shipments will drop 8% to 43 million units in 2021, the second-highest volume on record, while revenues will decline just 1% to $22 billion. Growth areas for TVs in 2021 include sets over 70-inches (3.3 million units, up 6%) and 8K Ultra High-Definition TVs (1.7 million units, up 300%).
U.S. Tech Industry Revenue to Jump 4.3% in 2021 After Record Year in 2020, Says CTA

According Parks Associates, smart TVs were the most popular devices for streaming content. This has been on the rise since 2018. This offers a business opportunity for TV manufacturers and also a potential point of differentiation.

Based on research by Park Associates

TV vendors were looking at differentiating their products from the increasing amount of competition.

Looking at the change in TV design; where there is less distinction from the display technology, cabinet or frame design, even OS (with Android) has become commoditised – new sources of differentiation become important.

LG has been soldiering on with with version 6 of webOS, originally derived from Palm’s attempt to meld HTML 5 web service based apps on top of Linux during the mid to late noughties. (It was also interesting that Samsung didn’t do a similar thing with their Tizen OS; which is derived work done by Intel and Nokia on Linux for mobile and consumer electronics applications.)

Google Duo tried to get a jump on Zoom by having support in smart TVs. TVs were found to be supporting multiple voice assistants which implies that there has been a stalemate amongst the major players. Whether or not that will result in voice service customer us promiscuity in the home is an interesting question.

On the hardware front, Japanese manufacturers Sony & Panasonic were promoting the use of onboard machine learning to optimise image processing in real time.

SWAS – screen with a subscription

LG expanded its support of content streaming services to include streaming games platforms. Looking at the Parks Associates data, one can understand why they think that the games console market is ripe for disruption.

Samsung looked to get into the digital art market, with subscription based imagery available on its Lifestyle TV line, which look like a picture frame when off. This is only three decades after Bill Gates Xanadu 2.0 home was filled with digital art. He patented the e-picture hanging in 2003.

Samsung has gone into coopetition with Peloton with new functionality within the Samsung Health function on its TVs. But also integrating with the fitness training service. The camera and machine learning provides guidance and advice on form for exercisers. This mirrors where Apple has gone with its fitness offerings that are included in the Apple One subscription.

Sony doubled down on its content business with the Bravia CORE streaming service for its top of the range TVs. A few things with this announcement:
- CORE uses up to 118Mbits/sec for ‘IMAX enhanced’ content
- It is initially only a 2-year project, which implies that it might be a reaction to COVID limited box office numbers rather than an ongoing Netflix killer
It is also interesting that Sony is still hamstrung by its different lines of business and hasn’t launched a streaming games service in its TVs for fear of cannibalising PlayStation sales.

Other revenue streams on screen

LG Shop Time 2.0 built on the Shop Time app launched late last year. ShopTime allows you to buy what you see on screen with 1-click in partnership with the Home Shopping Network. Korea has a large TV shopping culture, with mobile commerce and TV experience integration, so this move seems to be a logical progression.

Picture I took on a trip to Ulsan in 2012, TV home shopping integrated with mobile commerce by scanning QRcode to buy item currently being sold on the show.

However the launch of Shop Time 2.0 is a decade on from the pioneering work by Japanese media house Girlwalker; that mixed live and streamed entertainment with 1-click shopping. Their Tokyo Girls Collection and Shibuya Girls Collection events set the standard in this kind of retail experience.

Samsung TV Plus focused on new targeted advertising capabilities with its own DSP and DMP solution. Ad tracking provides a record of everything that you watch on TV for better ad targeting.

SWAS and the other revenue streams change the game for TV manufacturers at CES 2021. Previously, a TV was once in a decade purchase. Now manufacturers have the opportunity in the upfront purchase and in multiple recurring revenue streams. The increased amount of technology in the devices, implies an expectation of faster upgrade cycles. However device security and data privacy still don’t seem to be issues on the radar of TV manufacturers.

AIoT – artificial intelligence of things

In the same way that fuzzy logic made its way into consumer electronics from rice cookers and cameras to lifts, connected machine learning is now taking a similar path with variable results. Machine learning seemed to feature in CTA Innovation Award Honorees across categories at CES 2021.

The COVID-19 factor

CES 2021 itself went virtual because of the pandemic. And two trends became apparent. Machines replaced service staff with devices like an autonomous shopping trolley that would follow the consumer around a supermarket. The second was disinfection, with UV light used as a the go-to germ-killing technique. LG had a number of robots for aiding in hotel room service functions such as delivering items including food packages. There was also a bot for sterilising empty rooms with UV. Accessories company Targus won an award for its UV-C desktop disinfection lamp.

More information

U.S. Tech Industry Revenue to Jump 4.3% in 2021 After Record Year in 2020, Says CTA

CES 2021: TV Brands Seek Differentiation Amid Competition – Park Associates

Technology autopsies – renaissance chambara – on the long suffering webOS

Gates patents e-picture hanging | ZDNet

Sony’s new Bravia CORE streaming service goes big on IMAX Enhanced movies – What HiFi

Use Your LG TV to Make Purchases Directly From Popular Video Retailers QVC, HSN and Others – Yahoo! Finance

Tokyo Girls collection: shopping with a Japanese mobile twist – renaissance chambara

A few thoughts on innovation – renaissance chambara – primer on fuzzy logic

CES Innovation Awards
January 19, 2021