Despite the fact that UN has made a huge progress in helping with communities and tackling poverty and human rights for the past century, it is still however, very necessary for the Arc and social enterprise to exist for now and for always, even when the UN is fully funded.

Speaking of funds, money has always been associated with power and authority, as well as constraints. Because there is only so many things in the world that are priceless, which makes money vain. Insight and intelligence are two vital factors for our world today. This is one of the top reasons why the world still needs social entrepreneurs. Their distinct view of value and insight are matchless; their resources and intellect are things the world solely need.

On the other hand, you should start with walking before you want to run. Mindless investments in developing countries, rural areas and places of poverty doesn’t work. The development of the human society and of an economy needs to be moderated, combined with a sense of omniscience insight guiding the way. For instance, the Cape Town football stadium built for the 2014 world cup in Africa can hold up to 64,000 people. But once the world cup was over and the parade and cheering was gone, the town was back to its old days where no one would rent such a huge stadium. The stadium now only holds serval events that has a minimum effect on local residents and only manages to attract serval thousands of people. The economic condition has determined that the town can’t host such big assets like this. A rough attempt as such will only result in a liability for the community, as the town now needs to pay hundreds of thousands of maintenance and protection fee.

Infinite amounts of funds would yet seem useless when it’s not used wisely with an industrial insight. Social enterprise and projects such as the Arc is able to find such small places that’s too small for the UN to attempt to help and make slight differences to our economy. With a whole lot of them doing this all together, it makes a big difference. And this is why social enterprise plays a vital role in this, even when the UN is fully funded.

The leap from imitator to innovator

The Chinese economy has been developing rapidly for the past decade, and I agree to some extent that China is eventually taking its step to become an innovator. However, I must confess that China still has a long way to go until it is really able to be regarded as a true innovator.

http://consumer.huawei.com/minisite/worldwide/Ascend-Mate7/

Looking at this year’s Huawei Flagship, the Ascend-Mate, it’s not hard to find that it looks incredibly non-innovative. The phone, from it’s design, to the OS, the screen or the processor, even the built in accessibilities, I find it hard not to relate to the iPhone, or the Samsung. In fact, if you take a look at all the Chinese Smartphone manufacturers, with absolutely no exceptions, they have been adopting either Apple’s designs or features or all of them; The reason why companies like XIAOMI, MEIZU, YIJIA, HAMMER TECH and HUAWEI can achieve such astonishing success in the Chinese market is due to nothing but two reasons:

1. China is a HUGE market.

2. There’s a very large gap in the low-end market ($50 or less) that companies such as Apple and Samsung don’t pursue.

Personally, I find it sad when the industry (in China) regarding themselves as innovators and sell millions on the market left over by other market leaders. It’s also kind of sad when they can blazingly copy from others and promote as if they were the first to achieve such amazingness. (Not specifically talking about Huawei but the whole of the industry in China)

Here is an example:

The Lenovo Flagship S90(I think currently it’s only available on the Lenovo China Website):

Snapshots from: http://www.lenovomobile.com/imodel-cn/zh/打开目录/手机/VIBE系列/S90-小笋尖-宝石银/p/s90?intcmp=L20141106_2

And Apple’s iPhone 6:

Snapshots from: http://www.apple.com/iphone-6/design/

I genuine hope that one day China’s smartphone manufacturers grasp the true meaning of innovation and think outside the box. Innovating doesn’t just mean taking what’s originally called “Touch ID” and put it straight into an Android Phone and changing its name to 360° fingerprint scan. Engineers should start looking forward rather than looking at others. Apple introduced Siri and Touch ID. Maybe we can innovate some new features that other manufacturers haven’t thought of. And up to this point I don’t think it’s about the technology; It’s about thinking instead. Don’t “innovate” like Apple, think like Apple, think different(ly).

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-08-26/electro-optic-systems-shares-in-orbit-after-space-junk-deal-wit/5697544

Amongst all news I’ve read about recently, I find this Australian firm EOS(Electro Optic Systems) the most interesting. It is great to see companies starting to care about these environmental issues, especially issues like this that people aren’t so familiar with. And yet I was shocked when the article mentioned that due to the space junk issue, it was expected that a global catastrophe may occur in 5 to 15 years! I’m also very curious why governments didn’t step up and act against it until quite recently, knowing this issue is so lethal? I think it’s credible that EOS and Lockheed Martin stepped up and took the action, and this type of action should be widely promoted and supported.  In such a busy world today, maybe it’s time to stop the work ahead and think about what we can leave for our future generations, and how can we develop on a basis that does not compromise the well-being of future mankind. EOS and lockheed Martin sets a great example for the world, and they shouldn’t be the only ones doing the job. EOS invested 1 trillion dollars into this project, but this does’t mean that ordinary companies can’t do anything to help. Companies can start from small things such as reducing waste, preventing pollution or innovative ideas to become more sustainable and environmentally friendly. I believe with millions of companies all working together, there shall be a big difference.

http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us   Last Thursday, Microsoft quietly announced its first wearable hardware, the Microsoft Band. It started shipping the next day and could be purchased at Microsoft retails stores. This action makes me wonder the strategy Microsoft is adopting behind it. As we are all aware of, a vast majority of Microsoft’s revenue comes from business and OEM(other equipment manufacturer) sales. Microsoft authorizes other PC manufacturers to pre-install windows and at the same time, hopes that the manufacturers can make great products. But when manufacturers failed to do so (like the PC sales downturn a couple of years ago), Microsoft launched the Surface. Surface was never an act of competing with the others, it was made to stimulate PC manufacturers to make better products. This is the reason why the performance of Surface isn’t the key issue for Microsoft, the more truthful meaning behind was other manufacturers managed to make tablet-pcs, making PC even more portable and even “touchable”. In my opinion, Microsoft Band adopts this strategy as well. Microsoft probably never expected its Band leading the fitness wearable industry, the company hopes that the OEMs purchase its hardware and software license, just like what they did to PCs. The Band itself may be an excellence in the field, but it would never be so outstanding that it scares away its potential partners.     Another thing, just one day before the announcement of the Microsoft Band, Microsoft uploaded its app Microsoft Health Vault in most mobile app stores. This may be a sign indicating Microsoft is willing to use the Band as its first attempt to the market, attracting attentions from other OEMs and as well as compete against Google Fitness and Apple HealthKit by using Microsoft Band to partner with other OEMs to enhance its platform — Microsoft Health. I also noticed that there isn’t an icon or any labeling saying Microsoft on the Microsoft Band. This might be another sign showing Microsoft’s long-term strategy.

Tomorrow, the 5th of October, 2014 will mark the 3rd anniversary of the passing of Steve Jobs. On October 4th, 2011, which was 3 years ago from today, for the first time, Tim Cook stood on stage and announced the new generation of iPhone, the iPhone 4s.

The world has moved on since 2011 and things has changed a lot in 3 years; the iPhone 4s isn’t even on stock anymore. It has joined the line of history, along with the 4, 3GS, the first iMac, the Apple I and II. But looking at Apple today, as I am right now, outside of an Apple Store downtown, I know that Steve is still in there somewhere. He has never left.

People say Steve Jobs changed the world with his devices: the first Personal Computer, the mouse, the iPod iPhone and iPad that make up our everyday life. But what’s behind all those, is what truly changed the world: Steve’s greatest invention of all, Apple.

Steve’s visions have far outlived himself, and his legacy shall always be with Apple. And his influence is on all the projects and ideas that Apple’s working on today, even the ones that started after his death.

“Technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that makes our hearts sing. We think we are on the right track with this. We think we have the right architecture not just in silicon but in the organization to build these kinds of products.”

—– Steve Jobs, after the launch of the iPad

Referring back to what we’re using today, this can’t be more true. Steve left a huge legacy for Apple; he has built Apple so well that it doesn’t just make certain devices regarded as great products which are easy to use in the PC and smartphone industry, but indeed grasps the algorithm to design and build series of great products, not only in the pc and smartphone industry. Apple’s attempt in making iTV, Apple Watch, better chip architecture design, better camera performance, screen resolutions and the acts of involving the health and fitness industries, newer ways of retail stores, sports, earphones and audio systems, music industry, car-mounted display and systems and so many more have been a total refection of Apple’s DNA, to think different(ly), which has a way to make every product easy and convenient to use, and delivers the best customer experience.

But Steve didn’t stop just there; he left a legacy for all his competitors too. By setting up the competition, introducing the product development structure to the whole world: Microsoft didn’t have retail stores that are a bluer replica of Apple’s in 2010; non of the computers were using high resolution displays and, without iPhone and iOS, Android and billions of phones won’t exist as they do like today. Without this pioneer, I wonder how many more years will the world envelop under Nokia and Blackberry, who were satisfied with what they had, and how many more anti-human-like designs, such as marketing and sales focused innovation with no effect upon enhancing user experience, and fancy add-ons that disobey the true meaning of being productive.

The true lesson that other companies should learn from Apple is to be multi-dimentional.  Steve has lead Apple in a glorious battle, not just to win and lead with competition, leaving other’s copying afterwards, but to show the world to innovate with true meanings and to think from another prospectives. The business, marketing and sales focus should be turned around; the design process should be accompanied by disruptive innovation, along with artistic and obsession. Companies should focus on how Apple used the creativity and technology to create meaningful features and enhanced user experience, not how many sales and profit Apple has achieved through them.

THANK YOU FOR CHANGING OUR LIVES IN SUCH AN EXTRAORDINARY WAY.

MAY YOU REST IN PEACE, STEVE.

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/First+Nation+chiefs+stage+Site+showdown/10215965/story.html

The Pipeline issue has been widely discussed recently and indeed Enbridge is facing a hard time with its pipelines, since the project can only proceed with the agreement of the First Nation leaders. This would be considered as both a political and a social factor in the PEST analysis model. While changes in these factors could bring threats as well as opportunities for companies, this one may be more threat focused.

The reason why Marriott Hotel is not in people’s wish list

———–From Zhenzhen Wang’s post

This is ridiculous! I was looking through other’s blogs about how people were making “fancy” decisions for a reason such as giving its employees any length holidays and such (I do admit I didn’t check out many) to simply be different, to reposition itself and gain attention maybe (just like Tesla, Southwest airlines and Blackberry) but this one makes absolutely no sense to me. You could’ve just used the usual BS saying you wanted to drag people out from drowning and getting addicted to their devices and social networks! So what’s this “Yeah you could be hacked man, we’re doing you good” and I have to pay up to 1000 bucks to appreciate your nice thoughts all about? I do understand the threats and hazards behind public wireless, but how come consumers are getting charged 3 times the price of the room per night. This is absolutely absurd.

Actually, giving this a second thought, is this a real life example of a company failing to be different or to attract public awareness? Or is it a example of how you should take proper care of your stakeholders and if you don’t you get fined… I find this post particularly interesting and I wonder what the original blogger was thinking when posting this.

Ps: I’m actually quite amazed by how many people actually went to this hotel and accepted to pay the incredibly overpriced wifi fee to make this news so big and actually getting them fined for it. They must be very persistent and steadfast for getting something out of their payment.

While it’s only been a week since the launch of Blackberry’s newest flagship, the company has been doing some keen planning forward.

“In an interview for Reuters, Blackberry’s Ron Louks confirmed that his company was already working on an “unconventional” smartphone that should be officially introduced at MWC 2015″————-http://news.softpedia.com/news/BlackBerry-Will-Announce-a-New-Unconventional-Smartphone-at-MWC-2015-460460.shtml

It is said to be a device that can be easily operated with one hand. Unfortunately, Ron Louks did not give any further information. However, it was reported in the news last month that Blackberry is about to announce a new phone called Blackberry Victoria or Visa.

It was reported that the phone came with Blackberry’s newest keyboard patents, specially designed for this phone which includes very fancy keyboard hiding abilities. Generally, it was said to be a ordinary touch screen “phablet” design but the keyboard  normally shows only one row of keys and with the other two rows hidden inside the device itself. Users may slide or rotate the hidden keyboards to make up the complete keyboard when needed.

Ever since John Chen, Blackberry’s new CEO stepped up and took the position, the company was revamped in terms of its manufacturing and production, human resources, customer segment, value propositions and many others. By changing the outsourcing production to Foxconn, Blackberry was able to get rid of old production lines and focus on only a few of its production lines. Along with its act of changing its focus to enterprise customers, John resized the firm and optimized it for better processing, just like optimizing a PC that was previously filled with junk and not important cache. What’s more, John is optimizing the processor, making it perform better with calculations (enterprise consumer needs) other than graphics (fancy mass customer features).

John Chen was able to perform a successful turnaround for he’s previous job at Sybase, making the company retrofittable again, generating $2.8B of cash by 2010, just before being acquired by SAP AG. However, his previous performance took over 10 years. Can he do it this time and I wonder how long will it take.

About a week ago, Blackberry launched its newest flagship, the Blackberry Passport. A smartphone aiming especially for business and enterprise markets. It is the first product launched by the new CEO John Chen. Will this act be Blackberry’s end game or will this lead to the prelude of its reborn?

On its launch day, Blackberry was able to get up to 200,000 preorders for it’s freshly launched Passport model in HOURS, which were very promising results for the company. However, as the world today is scattered by Android and iPhone users, more is expected from Blackberry to fight its way through.

“This is by far the most depressing BlackBerry analysis you’ll read this week”

http://bgr.com/2014/09/29/blackberry-passport-launch-sales/

The blog above used Gassée’s full analysis to come to a similar conclusion stating that John Chen is eventually going to sell the company, if worse, in parts perhaps. However, the article also says that the company is doing better since failing to find a buyer during summer 2013. Recent financial statement shows a decrease in the budget of loss(losing less money than before). Although Blackberry has been running a budget deficit for the past three months (with a net loss of $210,000,000), it was 78.5% lower than this time last year. As a result, the stock price rose by 5%.

It has no doubt that most of the rising performance came from Blackberry’s new CEO, John Chen. After taking up the post of being CEO, John reconstructed the company’s human resources, refocusing all the company has on enterprise mobile communication and security rather than competing directly with Apple and other android phone manufacturers. John is confident about the reform and believes the firm is able to start regenerating profit in 2016.

So what makes it possible for Blackberry to do that? Its new strategy is definitely one of the factors. As we all know, Blackberry is famous for its software security, keyboard and world class (until everyone caught up) PIM services. Blackberry now mainly focuses on governments and organizations, providing them with their exclusive mobile communication and security services, which is a focus (differentiation) strategy. After years of competition with Apple, Samsung, Google HTC and such, Blackberry realizes that it’s impossible to compete directly and push Apple off the table. By offering different and exclusive value propositions and aiming narrowly on governments and business organizations, Blackberry is able to change the game in the industry by repositioning itself at the top of the ladder of a variety of new priorities established. Just like the Milkshake marketing, Blackberry was able to find out what its consumers hire their devices for. It wasn’t because Blackberry was cool and fancy like Apple’s iPhone (at least not anymore or very unlikely), it was it could offer the consumers an exclusive service that Blackberry’s competitors does not have such advantage in and may not be capable of offering with such quality. This provides Blackberry with the capital to win the fight against consumer minds with Apple’s iPhone and Android phones at top prior in some of the most pervasive categories.

On the other hand, one of Blackberry’s strengths is that is has it’s own Blackberry OS for its devices. This means the company has complete (except for android app simulation part) control over its devices. And with the comparison of Android, this could be a huge advantage against Android users leaving only with Apple at top.

Since Android is an open source system, one of its deadly weaknesses is its “fragmentization”. Since any smartphone manufacturer is allowed to launch their devices with customized Android running in it, app developer would have to design apps compatible with all sorts of screen sizes and even operating background, different button layouts, ppi (pixel per inch) of screens and there’s also an awful lot of debugging needed to do. The other factor causing “fragmentization” would be the pain in updating. Since the systems are customized by different manufactures and even different tele-carriers, the updating process goes from Google announcing the update and releasing packages allowing secondary customizers (different manufactures like Samsung Electronics or carriers like AT&T) to customize. Then each secondary party adopts the changes and selects a few models of devices and gets working on them. After at least a month of work, the newest flagships gets the update release from their second party. This process may take from 39 to 180 days, depending on how popular the device is. This is the main reason why the newest Android 4.4 Kitkat only occupies 13% of all android phones. In contrast, all Apple’s devices gets their update immediately after release, and iOS 8 is already installed in over 87% of Apple devices . This is because Apple has full control over the iOS and it capable of releasing for all models of devices at the same time. Fortunately, just like Apple, Blackberry also has its own advanced smartphone operating system and in the future, Blackberry should make full advantage of that. With further promotions on public awareness, this should help it climb up the ladder and compete directly with Apple.

There are still many other aspects that makes Blackberry capable enough to retain its profitability and market share. More will be coming soon 😀 I need to work on my mid-term and HW, I edit when I have time.

Financial Statement Source: http://tech.feng.com/2014-09-26/Sword_pay_blackberry_new_machine_200_596218.shtml

“According to other Research by Chan, “Foxconn’s operating margins have declined steadily over the past six years, from 3.7 percent in the first quarter of 2007 to a mere 1.5 percent in the third quarter of 2012, even as total revenues rose in the same period with the expansion of orders.”          

From: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-happened-after-the-foxconn-suicides/

Foxconn should definitely start recognising the importance of taking better care of its employees and rehabilitating the working environments. It is vital for them to focus less on the company’s production capacity, revenue and shareholders, and, instead, start focusing more on its stakeholders, in this case, its employees.

The suicides a few years ago is a sign reflecting how the employees are not in much of the same interest with its employer. Ironically, what the managers at Foxconn has done was to set up nets to prevent its employees from “successfully” committing a suicide, other than trying to resolve the issue from its origin — interests of stakeholders not being met.

According to the stakeholder theory, since the interests of the stakeholders are not being met and the firm does not pay enough attention to them, the business is likely to be in decline. And according to the quote above, it is.