After some research, I discovered that YouTube offers a privacy-enhanced way of embedding videos. Instead of linking to youtube.com, link to youtube-nocookie.com, and no data-collecting HTTP cookie will be sent. This is Google’s way of providing GDPR-compliant YouTube videos.
Time to go update your links. This ties in with removing Google Analytics from sites that don’t benefit much from the tracking.
China controls at least 73% of Indian Smartphone Market. 4 out of 5 top selling brands in India are Chinese. The only prominent non-Chinese player in Indian Smartphone Market is Samsung.
[…]
3 out of top 5 Chinese Smartphone brands are owned by BBK electronics.
Brands under BBK electronics: Oppo, RealMe, Vivo, Oneplus, and recently it launched Iqoo; another brand that will focus on the Indian market, while RealMe is a sub-brand of Oppo.
Collectively BBK has around 50% of Indian Smartphone Market beating Xioami as the biggest brand in India.
Unsurprisingly, many consumers are still not familiar with BBK Electronics. The company has surpassed Xiaomi with its sub brand strategy.
(“Microsoft”) today announced a strategic change in its retail operations, including closing Microsoft Store physical locations. The company’s retail team members will continue to serve customers from Microsoft corporate facilities and remotely providing sales, training, and support. Microsoft will continue to invest in its digital storefronts on Microsoft.com, and stores in Xbox and Windows, reaching more than 1.2 billion people every month in 190 markets. The company will also reimagine spaces that serve all customers, including operating Microsoft Experience Centers in London, NYC, Sydney, and Redmond campus locations. The closing of Microsoft Store physical locations will result in a pre-tax charge of approximately 0.05 per share, to be recorded in the current quarter ending June 30, 2020. The charge includes primarily asset write-offs and impairments.
“Our sales have grown online as our product portfolio has evolved to largely digital offerings, and our talented team has proven success serving customers beyond any physical location,” said Microsoft Corporate Vice President David Porter. “We are grateful to our Microsoft Store customers and we look forward to continuing to serve them online and with our retail sales team at Microsoft corporate locations.”
I’ve seen comments about how this is a PR spin and that the new approach is to move away from retail. Online retail is still retail. This has been the trend in the booming ecommerce market in China. Unless the products on sale are impulse buys, physical retail stores nowadays are more of a place to showcase items where potential buyers can test out the items before the purchase.
However, this has increasingly become less important of an issue in China due to the high quality of customer service. You can purchase many items to try for 7 days and return with no questions asked as long as you retain the original packaging and keep the item in mint condition. So there’s no need to go into a retail store. Order your item, it gets delivered to your doorstep for you to take it for a spin for a week. If you don’t like it, the delivery person comes to your door to pick up the return on the same or following day.
In huge news within the camera industry, it has been announced that Olympus Corporation will be divesting its imaging business to a Japanese private equity fund.
Olympus’ camera division will be owned by Japan Industrial Partners (JIP), with an agreement expected to be finalized by 30 September 2020.
According to 43 Rumors, JIP specializes in restructuring loss-making businesses to make them profitable before reselling them to “corporate acquirers” (such as purchasing Sony’s PC business, Vaio).
Olympus has fallen. After 84 years, Olympus ends its camera division. The company founded the Micro Four Thirds standard with Panasonic and remained committed to the system that has helped many beginners and enthusiasts dabble in photography by lowering the barrier of entry.
As a photographer and camera lover, I have always been fond of Olympus camera designs. My favourite is the Olympus Pen F film camera. It is a sad day, though we have to see what direction Olympus will continue to take in terms of camera making.
Jeff Johnson via Michael Tsai:
DuckDuckGo still uses JavaScript to intercept your link clicks, and there’s no good reason for it. One consequence of this clickjacking is that your Safari browsing history gets messed up.
This explains why some sites are missing in Safari history. Also, when I type in the search bar and then open a suggested link that was discovered via a DuckDuckGo search it brings me back to the search results instead of the site.
A large number of multi-channel networks (MCNs), which are like incubators for new KOLs and online personalities, have appeared and the competition is fierce.
There were around 14,500 MCNs in China in 2019. It’s estimated that by the end of 2020, there will be more than 20,000 and might be as many as 28,000.
The MCN market is saturated and it’s becoming less and less cost-effective for the MCNs to create popular KOLs. Beauty ONE’s “BA Celebrity” plan selected 200 amateurs and spent two years developing only one top celebrity—Li Jiaqi. A report from online news site Xinkuaibao claimed that labor costs for training a celebrity are at least RMB 1 million a year.
The costs is high because of how the MCNs try to game the system to go viral. They seed dozens of different cuts of the same video across hundreds of accounts on different platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou and other video platforms to see which cut gets picked up by the algorithm. Then the cut that has the higher chance of going viral goes on the KOL account.