The train of thought to this post about Hong Kong measurements started with a friend’s class learning do-it-yourself skills. I had rented an apartment when I lived in the city and had no need to do home repairs myself. I wondered past hardware stores, saw metric drill bits and rules.
Metric
My supermarket-bought groceries had their measurements on in metric. Hong Kong measurements go back to history and culture. I knew more about traditional measurements from traditional Chinese medicine shops and period Hong Kong cinema than the local ‘wet’ markets.
I didn’t drive, but the speed limits were all in Km/H like Ireland. Pedestrian signs for the most part didn’t need distances because everything is so compact and the public transport so good.
If I had driven, I would have seen distances in kilometres on the expressway. In fact, the only time I can remember using distances on pedestrian signs were on hikes like this one below, with distances in kilometres and approximate time that the walk should take.
What became apparent in my discussion that that Hong Kong measurements are more complex than would appear at a cursory glance.
Inches and pints
The method of instruction in the do-it-yourself was predominantly imperial measures with a metric equivalent being secondary. Timber could still be provided in 2×4 inch planks. Both imperial and metric drill bits were available to buy.
You could order a pint, though like many other countries, you will be served a 1/2 litre glass in most bars.
The laws governing weights and measures in trade is covered by the Weights and Measures Ordinance. This was drafted in 1988, came into force in 1989 and has been amended for formatting since. The related Weights and Measures Order of 2021 added US units were different alongside imperial measures, metric and traditional Chinese measurements. Though this seemed to be for reference, rather than encouraging the active use of American measures in Hong Kong. American products usually come with the equivalent metric sizing for items like drinks cans volume.
Taels and Cattis
Hong Kong uses Chinese traditional measures alongside more standard measures in certain markets – from fresh produce bought in the ‘wet’ markets to sales of gold and silver.
Before I had got to Hong Kong I had hear of taels and cattis. Taels is the traditional unit by which gold (and silver) had been sold amongst the wider Chinese community from Liverpool to Shanghai. If you’ve sat through enough old kung fu movies, you will have heard of a bounty or reward to be paid in taels.
However like other pre-Metric weights like hundredweights and tons; taels and cattis now mean different dimensions in different markets.
Hong Kong hews to the traditional weights and measures for this. Taiwan’s taels and cattis are more related to the measures of the Imperial Japanese empire. Taiwan may even refer to taels and cattis using different words. Mainland China went through a period of simplification during communist rule from Chinese characters to measures. Their taels and cattis are more aligned to metric measures.
Singapore struck much more closely to the metric system which it has adopted from 1968 – 1970. While traditional measures are included in the statutes for reference and fabric discussions still happen in terms of square yards, you will be charged for the metric measure. This was because post-independence Singapore had to make its own way in the world without the mother country of empire. China was closed off at the time and the city state had to think of its place in terms of global scale.
So why is this all important?
Measurements are essential to our points of reference in everyday life. The variance of points of reference can affect perceptions around attributes like value for money, or whether something is big or small. It affects how we think about tasks to be done or distances to be walked and things to be carried.
It can be a ‘grain of sand’ in the shoe level of dissonance, familiar, yet different. Rather like the average European pondering the American distance definition of ‘a block’. Our cities aren’t built on grid systems for the most part, so we don’t have the same feel for the measure. Speaking to a New Yorker friend; a block was considered by them to about a tenth of a mile. BUT, different cities have different sized blocks and it isn’t a formal definition. It’s a quintessential American cultural artifact and yet very inexact.
For a business there are additional factors to consider
Complexity of regulations.
Additional complexity in terms of product instructions.
Descriptive copywriting and advertising claims.
Pricing strategies and arbitrage opportunities. For instance, while Hong Kong gold might be duty free – does the differing weight from one’s home affect price considerations?
While Hong Kong is being reintegrated back into mainland China, even apparently small issues like measurement units could become political in nature.
As they are product of a unique history and emergent culture not shared with the mainland, rather like modern Hong Kong Cantonese. The Cantonese language evolved from being similar to that spoke in Guangdong province in the early 1960s to develop its own Hong Kong-specific idioms, lone words (from English, Japanese and South Asian languages spoken in the territory by minorities). Now with the increasing influx of mainland immigrants there is use of mandarin code switching added into the mix.
The use of multiple measures allows Hong Kongers and their businesses to be commercial ‘citizens of the world’ in their transactions. Hong Kongers have also taken these measures abroad. Going to a China town jeweller or pawn shop will allow you to buy gold taels, even though the weight on your receipt might be in troy ounces or grams.
Alongside Hong Kong-specific cuisine, the unique mix of measurement units may be its unique informal contribution to the world alongside archive films, long after the city becomes just another city in China.
I discovered something at the end of last year. The belatedly missed Yahoo Pipes was, in fact, officially called “Pipes by Yahoo.” I made that mistake, despite being well-versed in the brand guidelines, having spent a year working there with a copy consistently at my side.
Now, why this journey down the memory superhighway? That’s a valid question. The inspiration for this post came from Bradley Horowitz’s initial post on Threads. (I had to go back and re-edit the reference to post from tweet to include it in the previous sentence, force of habit). In his post, Bradley shared the history of Pipes by Yahoo. I’m acquainted with Bradley from my time at Yahoo!. During that period, he was one of the senior executives in Jeff Weiner’s Yahoo! Search and Marketplace team.
Consider this article as complementary to the Pipes by Yahoo history that Bradley pointed out. I will share the link where it makes sense to go over and read it in my depth. My commentary provides context prior to Pipes by Yahoo launching, the impact it had and why it’s pertinent now.
Origins
To comprehend Pipes by Yahoo, a fair amount of scene-setting is necessary. The contemporary web experience is now a world apart from the open web of Pipes, just as Pipes was distant from the pre-web days of the early 1990s.
Boom to bust
During the mid-1990s through the dot-com bust, Yahoo! generated substantial revenue from various sources, with online display advertising being the most pivotal. Launching a blockbuster film from the late 1990s to the early 2010s often involved a page takeover on Yahoo! and featuring the trailer on the Yahoo! Movies channel and Apple’s QuickTime.com. A similar approach applied to major FMCG marketing campaigns, with large display advertising initiatives.
Yahoo! profited significantly during this period, as the internet was the new trend, and display advertising was a cornerstone for brand building. Money was spent generously, akin to contemporary budgets for influencer marketing programmes.
Yahoo! occupied a space between TV, magazine advertising, and newspaper advertising. The design of the My Yahoo! page mirrored the multi-column layout of a traditional newspaper.
Similar to a newspaper, Yahoo! developed various departments and services:
Search
News (including finance)
Music services
Shopping, featuring a store for small businesses, auctions, and a shopping mall-type offering
Sports
Communications (email, instant messaging, voice calls, early video calling)
Web hosting
Then came the dot-com crash. Advertising revenue plummeted by around a third to 40 percent, depending on who you ask. Deals like the acquisition of Broadcast.com shifted from appearing speculative and experimental to extravagant wastes of money as the bust unfolded. This experience left scars on the organization, restraining the size of deals and the scope of ambition. Opportunities were second and third-guessed.
Yahoo! Europe narrowly survived, thanks to a white-label dating product. Love proved to be a more dependable revenue source than display advertising. A new CEO from the media industry was appointed to address shareholder and advertiser concerns.
The advertising industry was in a constant state of learning. Performance marketing emerged as a significant trend, and search advertising gained prominence.
The initial cast in this story
Weiner was hired into Yahoo! by then CEO Terry Semel. Semel knew Weiner from his work getting Warner Brothers into the online space.
Yahoo! had started getting serious about search by acquiring a number of search technology companies and hiring talented people in the field. Bradley Horowitz had found an image and video search startup called Virage and joined Yahoo! (a year before I got there) as director of media search.
There was former Overture executive Tim Mayer who was VP of search products and drove an initiative to blow out Yahoo!’s search index as part of a feature and quality battle with Google, Bing and Ask Jeeves. It was a great product, but with the best effort in the world we didn’t have the heat. The majority of Yahoos internally used Google because of muscle memory.
Vish Makhijani was ex-Inktomi and was VP – international search and has more of a focus on operations. He worked on getting non-US Yahoo! users feature parity – at least in search products.
Former Netscaper, Eckhart Walther was the VP in charge of product management.
Aside: where did Ged sit?
Where did I sit? Low on the totem pole. To understand my position in the organisation, imagine a Venn diagram with two interlocking circles: the European central marketing team and Vish’s team. I would have sat in the interlocking bit. If that all sounds confusing, yes it was.
Search wars and web 2.0
Pipes by Yahoo emerged from the confluence of two technological trends that developed in parallel, extending all the way to early social media platforms.
Search wars
I had been discussing the prospect of working at Yahoo! with a couple of people since around 2003. I had an online and technology brand and product marketing background. I had been blogging regularly since late 2002 / early 2003 and managed to incorporate online reviews and forum seeding into campaigns for the likes of Aljazeera and BT. The business was emerging from survival mode. As an outsider, it wasn’t immediately apparent how precarious Yahoo!’s situation had been. However, the threat posed by Google was undeniable.
At that time, Google didn’t have the extensive workforce it boasts today. One of my friends served as their PR person for Europe. Nevertheless, Google had embedded itself into the zeitgeist, seemingly launching a new product or feature every week. If there wasn’t a new product, stories would sometimes ‘write themselves,’ such as the time the face of Jesus was supposedly found on Google Maps photography of Peruvian sand dunes. The closest contemporary comparison might be the cultural impact of TikTok.
The geographical impact of Google’s cultural dominance was uneven. In the US, Yahoo! was a beloved brand that many netizens were accustomed to using. Yahoo! held double the market share in search there compared to Europe. Part of this discrepancy was due to Europeans coming online a bit later and immediately discovering Google. But Google didn’t do that well with non-Roman derived European languages like Czech. It has similar problems with symbolic languages like Korean, Chinese and Japanese.
Google explosion
I can vividly remember the first time I used Google. At that time I was using a hodge podge of search engines, usually starting with AltaVista and then trying others if I didn’t get what I wanted. This was before tabbed browsers were a thing, so you can imagine how involved the process became.
Google appeared in an online article, which I think was on Hotwired some time during late 1998, less than a year after it had been founded. I clicked on a link to use the search engine. Google looked every different to now. It had a clean page with three boxes beneath. The first one was a few special searches, I think one of them was Linux-related, which tells you a lot about the audience at the time. The second was set of corporate links including a link explaining why you would want to use Google – although experiencing one search was enough for most people that I knew. The final box was to sign up to a monthly newsletter that would give updates on what developments Google was up to.
From then on, I very rarely searched on Alta Vista, though my home page was still My Excite for a long time. This was more because I had my clients news set up on the page already and they had decent finance overage at the time.
The difference in searches was really profound, there were a number of factors at work:
Google’s approach seemed to give consistently better results than the vectored approach taken by Excite or AltaVista.
There was no advertising on the SERP (search engine results page), but that was to soon change.
You could use very directed Boolean search strings, which isn’t possible any more since Google optimised for mobile.
Search engine optimisation wasn’t a thing yet.
The web while seeming vast at the time, was actually small compared to its size now. Web culture at the time was quirky and in aggregate nicer and more useful than it is now. Part of this was was down to the fact that early web had a good deal of 1960s counterculture about it. Wired magazine would write about the latest tech thing and also profile psychedelic experimenters like Alexander Shulgin. Cyberpunk, rave and psychedelic tribes blended and found a place online. You can see the carcass of this today with Silicon Valley’s continued love of Burning Man. (Note: there were rich dark seams if that was the kind of thing you were into. There wasn’t the same degree of social agglomeration that we now have, nor were there algorithms that needed constant new content to feed diverse realities.)
Content creation on the web was harder than it is now. Blogging was at best a marginal interest, the likes of Angelfire, AOL Hometown, Geocities and Tripod provided free hosting, but you couldn’t put up that much content to pollute the search index even if you wanted to.
The impact was instantaneous and by early 1999, it was much a part of the nascent netizen culture as Terence McKenna.
McKenna spent the last bit of his life interrogating the search engine for four to five hours a day. He was convinced that the online world it provided access to represented some sort of global mind.
Sometimes he treats the Net like a crystal ball, entering strange phrases into Google’s search field just to see what comes up. “Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind,” says McKenna. “That’s what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you’re dealing with.”
As our society weaves itself ever more deeply into this colossal thinking machine, McKenna worries that we’ll lose our grasp on the tiller. That’s where psychedelics come in. “I don’t think human beings can keep up with what they’ve set loose unless they augment themselves, chemically, mechanically, or otherwise,” he says. “You can think of psychedelics as enzymes or catalysts for the production of mental structure – without them you can’t understand what you are putting in place. Who would want to do machine architecture or write software without taking psychedelics at some point in the design process?”
A year after that McKenna interview, Google was running over 5,000 Linux servers to power the search engine.
At first, Google also powered search on some of the web portals and saw itself as a competitor to search appliance businesses like Inktomi and Autonomy. The advertising kaiju started operation in 2000 and it was tiny. This violated patents held by GoTo.com – a business subsequently acquired by Yahoo!.
Post-bust
Once Yahoo! had disentangled itself from the carnage of the dot com bust, search was a much bigger deal. And Google had become a behemoth in the space of a few years. In 2002, Google launched Google News – a direct challenge to web portals like Yahoo!, MSN and Excite. Around about this time Google started to be used as a verb for using a web search engine.
While display advertising had taken a dive, search advertising had took off for several reasons:
It was performance marketing, even when a business is just surviving sales are important
Behavioural intent – if you were searching for something you were likely interested in it and may even purchase it
So easy to do at a basic level, even small and medium sized businesses could do it
Advertising dashboard – Google did a good job at helping marketers show where the advertising spend had gone.
We’ll ignore on the difficult facts for the time being, for instance:
The role of brand building versus brand activating media
What attribution might actually look like
That Google advertising is a rentier tax, rather than a business generator
Google listed on the stock market in August 2004. Investors ignored governance red flags like the dual share structure so the founders could retain voting rights.
Yahoo! in the search wars
Yahoo! had come out of the dot com bust battered but largely intact. Yahoo! was scarred in a few important ways.
Identity crisis
Yahoo! came about pre-Judge Jackson trial when Microsoft spread terror and fear into the boardroom of most sensible technology companies. I know that sounds weird in our iPhone and Android world. Rather than the bright cuddly people who give us Xbox, it was a rabid rentier with a penchant for tactics that organised crime bosses would have approved of. It took a long time to work that out of their system.
Another big factor was the fear of Microsoft. If anyone at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a technology company, the next thought would have been that Microsoft would crush them.
It’s hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a company with several times the power Google has now, but way meaner. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of them. Yahoo watched them crush the first hot Internet company, Netscape. It was reasonable to worry that if they tried to be the next Netscape, they’d suffer the same fate. How were they to know that Netscape would turn out to be Microsoft’s last victim?
Paul Taylor – ex Yahoo and founder of Y-Combinator
Yet Yahoo! went on to hire media mogul Terry Semel as it went through the dot com bust, shows that this thinking must have coloured views somewhat.
Cheque book shy
Even Mark Cuban would admit that Broadcast.com was not worth the billion dollar price tag that Yahoo! paid for it. It was a high profile mistake at the wrong point in the economic cycle which haunted Yahoo! acquisition plans for years. Which is one of the reasons why may have Yahoo! dropped the ball when it had the chance to buy Google and Facebook.
The game has changed
But the game had changed. Display advertising was no longer as profitable as it had been. Search advertising was the new hotness, fuelled by online commerce. By early 2004, Yahoo! is confident enough in its own search offering to drop Google who had been providing its search function.
Yahoo! acquired search appliance business Inktomi in 2002 and then Overture Services in 2003. Overture services provides the basic ad buying experience for Yahoo! search advertising.
In 2004, Yahoo! realises having search is not enough, you have to offer at least as good as product as Google, if not better. This is where Tim Mayer comes in and for the next couple of years he leads a project to build and maintain search parity with Google.
You had a corresponding project on the search advertising side to bring the Overture buying experience up to par with Google with a large team of engineers. That became a veritable saga in its own right and the project name ‘Panama‘ became widely known in the online advertising industry before the service launched.
Search differently
Googling is a habit. In order to illicit behavioural change you would have to
Have an alternative
Change what it means to search in a positive way
Yahoo! approached this from two directions:
Allowing different kinds of information to be searched, notably tacit knowledge. I worked on the global launch of what was to become Yahoo! Answers, that was in turn influenced by Asian services notably Naver Knowledge IN. This approach was championed internally by Jerry Yang.
Getting better contextual data to improve search quality providing a more semantic web. This would be done by labels or tags. In bookmarking services they allowed for a folksonomy to be created. In photographs it provided information about what the pictures or video content might be, style or genres, age, location or who might be in them.
Web 2.0
Alongside a search war there was a dramatic change happening in the underpinnings of the web and how it was created. While the dot com bust caused turmoil, it also let loose a stream of creativity:
Office space was reasonably priced in San Francisco only a couple of years after startups and interactive agencies had refurbished former industrial buildings South of Market Street (SoMo).
Office furniture was cheap, there was a surplus of Herman Miller Aeron chairs and assorted desks floating around due to bankruptcies and lay-offs.
IT and networking equipment was available at very reasonable prices on the second hand market for similar reasons. You could buy top of the range Cisco Catalyst routers and Sun Microsystems servers for pennies on the dollar that their former owners had paid for them less than one computing generation before. This surplus of supplies be bought online from eBay or GoIndustry.com.
Just in time for the internet boom wi-fi had started to be adopted in computers. The first wi-fi enabled laptop was the Apple iBook. Soon it became ubiquitous. Co-working spaces and coffee shops started to provide wi-fi access connected to nascent mainstream broadband. Which meant that your neighbourhood coffee shop could be a workspace, a meeting space and a place to collaborate. We take this for granted now, but it was only really in the past 25 years that it became a thing. It also didn’t do Apple’s laptop sales any harm either.
Open source software and standards gave developers the building blocks to build something online at relatively little financial cost. Newspapers like the Financial Times would have spent 100,000s of pounds on software licences to launch the paper online. In 2003, WordPress was released as open source software.
Amazon launched its web services platform that allowed developers a more flexible way for putting a product online.
The corresponding telecoms bust provided access to cheaper bandwidth and data centre capacity.
All of these factors also changed the way people wrote services. They used web APIs building new things, rather than digital versions of offline media. APIs were made increasingly accessible for a few reasons:
Adoption of services was increased if useful stuff was built on top of them. Flickr and Twitter were just two services that benefited from third party applications, integrations and mashups. Mashups were two or more services put together to make something larger than the ingredients. The integration process would be much faster than building something from scratch. It worked well when you wanted to visualise or aggregate inputs together.
Having a core API set allowed a service to quickly build out new things based on common plumbing. Flickr’s APIs were as much for internal development as external development. Another example was the Yahoo! UK’s local search product combining business directory data, location data and mapping.
There was also a mindset shift, you had more real-world conferences facilitating the rapid exchange of ideas, alongside an explosion of technical book publishing. One of the most important nodes in this shift was Tim O’Reilly and business O’Reilly Publishing. Given O’Reilly’s ringside seat to what was happening, he got to name this all web 2.0.
Finally, a lot of the people driving web 2.0 from a technological point of view were seasoned netizens who had been exposed to early web values. The following cohort of founders like Mark Zuckerberg were more yuppie-like in their cultural outlook, as were many of the suits in the online business like Steve Case or Terry Semel. But the suits weren’t jacked into the innovation stream in the way that Zuckerberg and his peers – but that would come later.
This was the zeitgeist that begat Pipes by Yahoo.
The approach to a new type of search needed the foundational skills of web 2.0 and its ‘web of data’ approach. Yahoo! acquired number of companies including Flickr, Upcoming.org and Delicious. At the time developers and engineers were looking to join Yahoo! because they liked what they saw at Flickr, even though the photo service was only a small part of the roles at the business.
Web 2.0 talent
The kind of people who were building new services over APIs were usually more comfortable in a scrappy start-up than the large corporate enterprise that Yahoo! had become. Yet these were the same people that Yahoo! needed to hire to develop new products across knowledge search, social and new services.
There were some exceptions to this, for instance the 26-person team at Whereonearth who operated a global geocoded database and related technology had a number of clients in the insurance sector and Hutchison Telecom prior to being acquired by Yahoo!. The reason why Yahoo! became so interested was a specific Whereonearth product called Location Probability Query Analyser. The technology went on to help both the Panama advertising project and Yahoo! search efforts. George Hadjigeorgiou was tasked with helping them get on board.
I knew some of the first Flickr staff based out of London, they sat alongside technologist Tom Coates who would later work on FireEagle. They all sat in a windowless meeting room on a floor below the European marketing team sat in.
Most people didn’t even know that they were there, working away thinking about thinks like geotagging – a key consideration in where 2.0 services and mobile search.
Going over to the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale made it clear to me that the difference in cultural styles was equally different over there, from just one cigarette break with Stewart Butterfield of Flickr.
Secondly, there was the locale. The best way I found to help British and Irish people get the environment of Silicon Valley was to describe it as a more expansive version of Milton Keynes with wider roads and a lot more sunshine. One of the biggest shocks for me on my first visit to the Bay Area was how ordinary Apple and Google’s offices felt. (This was 1 Infinite Loop before Apple Park construction started). The canopy over the main building entrance looked like an airport Novotel, or every shopping centre throughout the UK.
In the same way that Milton Keynes is not London; Silicon Valley’s quintessential campus laden town Sunnyvale is not San Francisco.
This is not the dystopian doom spiral San Francisco city of today with failed governance and pedestrianisation projects. At this time, San Francisco was on the up, having been clobbered by the dot com bust in the early noughties, financial services had kept the city ticking over. Technology was on the rise again. Home town streetwear brand HUF was making a name for itself with its first shop in the Tenderloin, the DNA Lounge had consistently great nights from west coast rave and goth sounds to being a haven for mashup culture with its Bootie nights.
There was great cinemas, vibrant gay night life and the sleaze of the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell theatre. The Barry Bonds era San Francisco Giants won more than their fair share of baseball matches.
If Yahoo! were going to keep talent, they’d need a place in the city. It makes sense that setting up the San Francisco space fell to Caterina Fake. Fake was co-founder of Flickr and was given a mandate by Jerry Yang to ‘make Yahoo! more like Flickr’. So she decided to set up an accelerator for new products.
Brickhouse
According to Caterina Fake on Threads:
I dug around on the company intranet and exhumed an old deck for an initiative called “Brickhouse” which had been approved by the mgmt, but never launched.
This tracks with my experience in the firm, projects would form make rapid progress and then disappear. And during the first dot com boom, San Francisco was home to online media companies, such as Plastic (Razorfish SF), Organic and Agency.com, many of whom also had offices in New York. Wired magazine had its office there, as did a plethora of start-ups.
Fake goes on to say that Brickhouse managed to use the same office space she had worked in while she had worked at Organic over a decade earlier.
The 60 Minutes episode Dot-com Kids marked an acme in this evolution of San Francisco. At the time Fake was doing this exercise, there was probably a Yahoo! sales team based in San Francisco proper, but that would be it.
Fake cleans up the Brickhouse deck and gets it through the board again with Bradley Horowitz with the then Chief Product Officers Ash Patel and Geoff Ralston, president Sue Decker and chief Yahoo Jerry Yang being the board champions of the project.
Fake hands off to Chad Dickerson to realise Brickhouse as she heads off on maternity leave. Fake, Dickerson and Horowitz assemble the Brickhouse team (aka the TechDev group) and ideas that would eventually build Pipes by Yahoo!, Fire Eagle and other projects.
This is where my origins viewpoint on Pipes by Yahoo finishes. For the download on its creation, go here now; the link should open in a new tab and I will still be here when you get back to discuss the service’s impact.
Pipes by Yahoo was launched to the public as a beta product on February 7 2007. Below is how it was introduced on the first post added to the (now defunct) Yahoo Pipes Blog. At this time product blogs became more important than press releases for product launches as information sources to both tech media and early adopters.
Introducing Pipes
What Is Pipes? Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.
Philosophy Behind the Project There is a rapidly-growing body of well-structured data available online in the form of XML feeds. These feeds range from simple lists of blog entries and news stories to more structured, machine-generated data sources like the Yahoo! Maps Traffic RSS feed. Because of the dearth of tools for manipulating these data sources in meaningful ways, their use has so far largely been limited to feed readers.
What Can Pipes Do Today? Pipes’ initial set of modules lets you assemble personalized information sources out of existing Web services and data feeds. Pipes outputs standard RSS 2.0, so you can subscribe to and read your pipes in your favorite aggregator. You can also create pipes that accept user input and run them on our servers as a kind of miniature Web application.
Here are a few example Pipes to give you an idea of what’s possible:
Pasha’s Apartment Search pipe combines Craigslist listings with data from Yahoo! Local to display apartments available for rent near any business.
Daniel’s News Aggregator pipe combines feeds from Bloglines, Findory, Google News, Microsoft Live News, Technorati, and Yahoo! News, letting you subscribe to persistent searches on any topic across all of these data sources.
What’s Coming Soon? Today’s initial release includes a basic set of modules for retrieving and manipulating RSS and Atom feeds. With your help, we hope to identify and add support for many other kinds of data formats, Web services, processing modules and output renderings.
Here are some of the things we’re already got planned for future releases:
Programmatic access to the Pipes engine
Support for additional data sources (such as KML)
More built-in processing modules
The ability to extend Pipes with external, user-contributed modules
More ways to render output (Badges, Maps, etc…)
Pipes is a work in progress and we’ll need your help to make it a success. Try building some simple pipes and advise us what works well and what doesn’t in the online editor. Tell us how you’d like use Pipes, what we can do to make cool things possible, and show us ways you’ve found to use Pipes that never even occurred to us. In return, we promise to do our best to make Pipes a useful and enjoyable platform for creating the next generation of great Web projects.
And please have fun!
The Pipes Development Team
Pipes impact
I had a good, if exhausting time at Yahoo! It was first inhouse role and my part of the central marketing team had an exhausting workload. By the time Pipes by Yahoo launched, I had left Yahoo! Europe. There has been a re-organisation of European arm and the business had been ‘Kelkoo-ised’; a few of us on the European central marketing team took the opportunity to take the money and run.
I remember bringing Salim (who headed the European search team) up to speed and getting his support to push for me getting a payout, rather than fighting my corner.
Peanut Butter Memo
Brad Garlinghouse’s peanut butter manifesto was made public towards the end of the year portraying a game of thrones type power play which would have seen the kind of structures that were put in place in the European organisation rolled out globally.
On the face of it, some of it was pertinent, but it lacked a wider vision.
While Garlinghouse has gone on to have a really successful career at Ripple; the Yahoo! business unit he ran had several problems. He was in charge of Music and the Comms & Community BU. At the time it had a poor record of building products fit for early adopters like music properties that aren’t Mac-compatiable, this was when the iTunes store and Apple iPod springboard off the Mac community and into the mainstream.
The then new Yahoo! Mail which didn’t work on Safari and a Messenger client which was worse to use than third party clients like Trillium or Adium. All of which made it hard to build a buzz that will bridge to mainstream users. Yahoo! Messenger, could have been Skype or WhatsApp. It became neither.
For a more modern example, think about the way Instagram and Threads were Apple iPhone first to build a core audience.
At the time, I was less charitable about the memo. And the memo raised wider questions about the business; like was the CEO facing an executive revolt?
The launch of Pipes by Yahoo helped to inject some more positive energy back into the Yahoo! brand. Remember what I said earlier on how talent wanted to join Yahoo!’s engineering and development teams because of Flickr. They started to want to join Yahoo! because of Pipes.
The outside world
I was back agency side when Pipes launched. I had friends within Yahoo! still and kept an eye on the various product blogs. I got the heads-up on Pipes and put aside an afternoon and an evening to explore it fully. A quick exploration gave one an idea of how powerful Pipes by Yahoo could be. While Pipes was powerful, it was also relatively user friendly, like Lego for data. It was more user friendly than Apple’s Automator, which inspired Pipes by Yahoo! in the first place.
At this time in London the amount of people working on social media and online things was still relatively small. Knowledge was shared rather than hoarded at grassroots events and on an ecosystem of personal blogs. This was a group of eople with enquiring minds, a number of whom I can still call friends.
We shared some of the public recipes on Pipes by Yahoo and learned from them, just as I had learned about Lotus 1-2-3 macros in the early 1990s, by picking through other peoples examples. (I put this to use automating data records in the Corning optical fibre sales support laboratory that I worked in at the time.)
The agency I worked with had a number of large technology clients including AMD, Fujitsu Siemens personal computing devices – notably smartphones, parts of Microsoft and LG.
AMD and Microsoft were keen to keep track on any mention of their brand in a number of priority blogs or news sites at the time. Social listening was in its infancy and there were a number of free tools available, which I got adept at using.
We managed to build and sell both AMD and Microsoft respectively a custom feed which provided them with links to relevant content in near real-time, which they then published on an internal site so that key audiences always had their fingers on the pulse.
This was all built on top of two free Pipes by Yahoo accounts which used a similar but tweaked recipes to make this happen.
On the back of that work, we managed to sell in a couple of small websites to the Microsoft team based on WordPress. I had long moved on to another agency role by the time the Pipes by Yahoo feeds would have died.
Discussing Pipes by Yahoo with friends, they said it had inspired them to learn to code. Pipes by Yahoo spurred creativity and creation in a similar way to HyperCard.
Zeitgeist
While all of this has talked about Pipes by Yahoo! and how great the launch was, the ending of Pipes was much more humdrum. The service had been glitchy at the best of times and wasn’t being maintained in the end. In conversations I had with friends, it was compared to a British sports car: unreliable but loveable. Yahoo! closed it down on September 30, 2015.
Which begs the question, why is Pipes by Yahoo, which was shut down eight and a half years ago being celebrated amongst the digerati?
I think that the answer to this is in the current online zeitgeist. The modern web isn’t something that anyone involved in web 2.0 would have signed up for. Algorithms have fragmented the global town hall archetype envisaged for social. The web no longer makes sense in aggregate, as it’s splintered by design.
The modern web feels ephemeral in nature. This seems to have gone hand-in-hand with a video first web exemplified by TikTok.
The social platforms the fragmentation seem to be declining in relevance and its isn’t clear what’s next. The people-driven web of knowledge search and web 2.0 is under pressure from AI content providing a mass of ‘just good enough’ content. Even influencers are being usurped by digital avatars. Even the audience engagement is often synthetic. All of which leaves the netizen in a state of confusion rather than the control that Pipes by Yahoo offered.
Taylor Lorenz is a journalist who made net culture and platforms her beat. Taylor Lorenz’ book Extremely Online feels like she is reporting from another planet rather than the recent web and it was published in October last year.
My mind cast back to one of the first modules I studied at college. There was a lecture on the role of complaint resolution as part of customer services. The idea was that effective complaint resolution engendered trust in a customer service function and was more likely to increase brand loyalty and recommendation to other people. In reality Ehrensberg-Bass Institute have explored this area in more depth and found that customer penetration is more important than customer loyalty.
US National Archives: Approaching Logan Airport. 05/1973 by Michael Manheim
I suspect that the benefit in complaint resolution is more around a premium brand positioning rather than the business benefits of loyalty. This is an interesting frame to consider AirHelp’s global airline ranking. Unlike SkyTrax that focuses on experience, AirHelp weighs its ranking heavily on complaint resolution.
British Airways came 82nd out of 83 airlines assessed, which won’t be a surprise to anyone who has flown with them over the past four years.
Many airlines that would have a high SkyTrax service ranking, didn’t perform as well on complaint resolution.
So there wasn’t a clear correlation between experience resolving lots of customer complaints or a highly evolved service offering.
Emerging car brands scrutinised by Bloomberg and Grant Thornton | Manufacturer – “Chinese brands are dominating the scene with good products, big screens, and impressive interfaces.” However, the challenge arises when considering pricing, as Chinese EVs like the XPeng’s G9 SUV was 72,000 euros competing against the likes of BMW and Mercedes. So they’re going to find it very, difficult and it’s going to come down to price.” Dean pointed out MG’s success in the UK market was achieved by hitting exactly the right sweet spot in terms of pricing. The MG ZS, the second-best-selling battery electric vehicle in the UK, is priced at an average of £31,000, making it compelling in terms of competitive pricing especially in a country where consumers are not fiercely loyal to specific brands. – interesting reading. The way for Chinese vendors to win would be to have Chinese incentivised lease financing, particularly in a time of higher interest rates a la Huawei in the telecoms markets.
American men are dying younger. – by Richard V Reeves – I just don’t think this can be addressed in the current climate of othering and privilege. It would be like trying to hold a meaningful discussion on immigration a few decades ago.
Xi in Nanning; Shanghai and Beijing real estate tweaks; More Hong Kong bounties; Sim Love | Sinocism – the Hong Kong puts bounty on the head of US citizen who has criticised the Hong Kong government in the US. They are all ethic Chinese. So China and the Hong Kong government think that ethnic Chinese wherever they are should be loyal to their respective administrations – in essence their face is their passport. Not even Israel does something similar with the the world’s Jewish community, or Ireland with our diaspora.
Innovation
Quantum Breakthrough: Caltech Scientists Unveil New Way To Erase Quantum Computer Errors – Researchers from Caltech have developed a quantum eraser to correct “erasure” errors in quantum computing systems. This technique, which involves manipulating alkaline-earth neutral atoms in laser light “tweezers,” allows for the detection and correction of errors through fluorescence. The innovation leads to a tenfold improvement in entanglement rates in Rydberg neutral atom systems, representing a crucial step forward in making quantum computers more reliable and scalable.
CNY 2024 or the Chinese new year is celebrated across east and south east Asia as it marks the new year according to the lunar calendar. It is as important an advertising spot as Christmas in the UK or the Super Bowl advertising slots in America.
This Saturday marks the new year. This year is the year of the dragon, it is a time for family and for cementing relationships through gift giving. Packaging and promotions will lean heavily on red, gold or yellow colours signifying good luck and general positive vibes.
The packaging can often be very ornate as this example by Shanghai design agency The Orangeblowfish for client Chow Sang Sang shows.
In many small businesses red or Christmas decorations are often left up and enhance the lunar new year decorations. Corporate florists will bring in miniature orange trees that are also a symbol of the season. (Pro-tip, don’t try one of the fruit).
Given it’s such an important time in the marketing calendar, you see some of the most creative campaigns conducted in the region. Here’s a sampling of this year’s advertisements broken down by country.
China
China’s ‘Galapagos Syndrome‘ social platforms mean that it’s really hard for me to share campaigns with you here. In addition, many of the main advertising agencies no longer seem to share their work on more accessible platforms in the west any more. Each year it becomes harder to write a post like this. It’s almost like they’re ashamed of it.
Amushi
Food brand Amushi worked with Leo Burnett on an advert that conveys the main elements of new year celebrations. You need to watch it on Campaign Asia.
Apple
Apple has done some really interesting Chinese new year films documenting different aspects of Chinese new year and this focuses on the trials of childhood and the magic of new year. The protagonist is ‘Little Garlic’, a young girl with special shape-shifting powers.
Coca-Cola
By January 2nd, Coca-Cola already had year of the dragon cans for sale in Beijing. They created a mini-film around a family gathering, but its on WeChat. Contact me if you would like me to share it in-app with you.
Lululemon
I am guessing that Lululemon’s campaign was planned to be running across Mandarin-speaking markets as well as appealing to Asian Americans. The theme of spring is an analogue for the new year, but it is a celebration of traditional Chinese culture rather than lunar new year traditions per se. Michelle Yeoh is Malaysian but has global recognition amongst Asian cinema fans and her Hollywood appearances.
The problem is that Lululemon has fallen foul of Asian Americans and this ad might have its media spend pulled outside Asia? If it happens it would be a shame, as this is the most ‘high concept’, artistic and cinematic of the ads that I have watched so far.
Nike
Nike in partnership with Wieden + Kennedy Shanghai have been turning out high quality Chinese New Year adverts for a number of years now and this year was no exception. It took me so long to get a copy of it, that it almost missed going into this post.
If you have been in a rush to do your Christmas shopping you can empathise with the struggle of getting ready for lunar new year and the vignettes are really nicely done.
Prada
Prada did a photo shoot which is shared on Sina Weibo microblogging platform. The photographs were designed to emulate the classic mid-century elegance of Wong Ka wai’s film In The Mood For Love. This also ties into the popularity of Wong Ka wai’s recent mainland Chinese TV series Blossom set in Shanghai during the early 1990s that is similarly visually rich.
Hong Kong
Hong Kong usually doesn’t have a rich source of lunar new year video advertising. You will see print and poster ads though as sales promotions are the main driver of marketing activities.
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola HK
Coca-Cola Hong Kong went with really short takes, a celebration, fireworks, a branded giveaway and dragon-branded cans make it feel as if the creative was literally dialled in. Where’s the magic that’s integral to the brand?
Watsons
Hong Kong’s ubiquitous pharmacy and beauty care retailer has a brief ad promoting their new year sales promotions and the potential to win a Mofusand co-branded ‘Jenga’-style game – which would be ideal when you have young family members over for CNY 2024.
Their associated web page has promotional price offers containing 688 which its considered to be lucky.
Macau
Macau government tourist board
I am not even going to try and explain what you are about to see. It’s special. But once you watch it, it can’t be unseen. I will leave it at that.
Malaysia
Astro
Astro is a Malaysian satellite TV and OTT broadcaster. As is common with other media businesses in Hong Kong and Singapore they rolled out a song to celebrate Chinese new year. This video showcases their varied broadcast talent.
Cetaphil
Cetaphil is a range of skincare products from Galderma. Chinese new year means looking your best, including new clothes. This combined with gifting is why the holiday makes so much sense for Cetaphil.
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola made use of high profile 3D OOH spaces such as this one in Malaysia with a very traditional dragon motive. It’s nicely executed and fits into the magic of the brand.
Eu San Yang is a traditional Chinese medicine retailer originally from Malaysia, that now has branches in Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore. It’s advert talks about relationships particularly assumptions like ‘I thought’ or ‘I took for granted’. Click the link, as they aren’t allowing embedding. It touches on the tension between tradition and modernity that is generational and is quite meta in the way it references lunar new year adverts as a popular trope in the dialogue between father and son.
Loong Kee
Malaysian dried meat brand Loong Kee put together a music video featuring ethnic Chinese influencers and celebrities.
Mr DIY
Mr DIY is kind of like Homebase or Wilkinsons but with an extended product range. Their film has a Christmas Carol type transformation to it. I’ll leave it at that for you to enjoy.
This comedy clip explains the universal insight above really well.
Pepsi: Finish The Unfinished
Pepsi’s campaign is built around the insight that during new year meals and celebrations there are lots of partly finished cans of drinks left around. The idea of finishing something is an important part of Chinese new year, echoed in the series of Hong Kong family entertainment films released for the new year called ‘Alls Well That Ends Well‘. The original film was released in 1992 featuring Maggie Cheung, Leslie Cheung and Stephen Chow – and spawned seven sequels. The advertisement connects with a gold cup giveaway that is also tied into this the theme of ‘finish the unfinished’.
Petronas
Malaysian government-owned energy company Petronas promotes its corporate brand with a short film that riffs on the harmony of Chinese new year. They were careful to cast talent from the countries three main ethic groups: Malays, Chinese and South Asians.
Tune Talk
Malaysian mobile provider Tune Talk focuses on filial piety and the high level of change that’s signified by the Dragon in the horoscope. At first when I saw the ad I thought that it would be warning about online scams, but the story is much more straight forward. It’s fun and high energy, just what you need for lunar new year.
Watsons CNY 2024 campaign – Enter The Dragons
Watsons is part of AS Watson, the retail arm of CK Hutchison Holdings and the owner of Superdrug. They have their own branded pharmacy stores with a large range of beauty products throughout China, Dubai, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Macau, the Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Ukraine, Vietnam and Malaysia as you can see.
Yee Lee
Yee Lee is a Malaysian manufacturing and packaging company – imagine an analogue of Unilever and Tetrapak. Their products include food, bottled water, oral care, household cleaners, and industrial products. It also manufactures corrugated cartons and aerosol cans for a wide range of customers. The music video is notable for its use of rap lyrics. Also, notice how the cast is older than Loong Kee’s music video.
Yeo’s
Yeo’s is a local FMCG brand with a range of products including drinks, teas, instant noodles, canned food sauces and dairy products. Every household has some Yeo’s products in the pantry or the fridge. This advert neatly captures the stress and joys of new year celebrations.
Singapore
Mediacorp
Mediacorp is a Singapore government-owned commercial media company that would be analogous to the BBC in terms of the media footprint, and Channel 5 in the way it takes advertising. Chinese new year songs are a thing, with new ones launched each year. Mediacorp’s song is also an advertisement for its talent and the company’s OTT service – kind of equivalent to BBC Sounds and iPlayer.
SingTel
Singapore’s dominant telecoms provider SingTel have a reputation for delivering high quality Chinese New Year ads and this year was no exception. This time the ad focuses not only on reunion, but also remembering those people who we can no longer enjoy CNY 2024 with Mr DIY’s campaign we see greater than expected evolution of a senior citizen.
Taiwan
7-Eleven
Convenience store 7-Eleven created a 30-second spot to promote its range of Chinese new year products.
Here are the examples that I found in previous years:
I work alongside Craft Associates and together have helped a number of clients including Oxford Nanopore Technologies on their successful China GTM approach and SK-II on their content strategy for Hong Kong. I have also worked with the team to help advise Chinese enterprises on going international over the years in the consumer technology space.
Whether you want to advertise to a Chinese audience, or advertise a breakfast cereal to people in Wolverhampton, you can contact us here.
Innovation signalling has some similarities with its counterpart virtue signalling in terms of authenticity in terms of behaviour and the projected image. An organisation looks to demonstrate its ‘high degree’ of innovation with actions and projects with the external image firmly in mind. There may be an internal learning, or business benefit to this as well, but the image projected is the main objective.
As I wrote this post a collaboration between Moncler and Adidas dropped putting innovation signalling at its core involving both involving NFTs and AI generated designs and models.
Open Sea has an NFT where the owner gets a Rolex watch on submission of the NFT. This has since been extended into the US market by CRM Jewellers in Miami.
AI has its place for instance, simulating and optimising product design based on physical properties. NASA has used AI for just this purpose in conjunction with additive manufacturing techniques for small production runs of parts needed for the space programme.
It’s not just the luxury sector
This might read like I have been picking excessively on the luxury sector. I use them as exemplars mainly because their examples are so high profile. But there are examples in other sectors. For instance, Walmart partnering with IBM to use block chain to track individual lettuce heads from farm to customer trolley.
There were similar partnerships that IBM hatched with Unilever, Nestlé and Dole Foods as well, but the fruits of these projects were not publicised to the same degree.
You can find similar posts here and this metaverse discussion paper that helps to cut through the blockchain and metaverse hype.
An Outfit to Match Your Chain – Google Drive – Highsnobriety has interviews where these intersect with luxury and fashion. It will be probably handy for a couple of client presentations
