There are 700m subscribers. This is growing by 8m a month.

China Mobile has more subscribers than the population of the USA (307m+).

“Many would rather pay their mobile bill than their rent.”

The mobile-using population is twice the Internet population.

From the Discovery Channel programme: Revealed: Behind China’s Digital Wall

Yes you can!

I spotted this at a supermarket recently. Yes those are little crabs – fried to a crisp, with shell on. Since I had already broken a filling just the day before, I did not buy any so I can’t tell you what they taste like (crabby and splintery?)

It just goes to show how there is a market for probably just about anything you …

Big Oil hires PR agencies to spread lies about climate change. Phillip Morris used PR to spread lies about how cigarette smoking is healthy. The Hawthorn Group PR agency as well as other “service providers” are named in this concisely written Yes Magazine article.

It is appallingly bad behaviour. And yet no one seems to give a damn. “It’s just business…” It seems like the religion of …

If you give a damn about anything, this is a must-watch: The Age of Stupid. You owe it to yourself, your children and your species.

I saw this at a screening this week put on by the UK High Commission in Singapore and WWF Singapore. It put a lot of things into stark perspective for me.

It is time to sharpen the …

Funny – but also telling. As a symptom of increasing failure to understand and work with the big picture. And extremely myopic. Talk about extreme myopic compartmentalisation!

Big business does it too. Departments do different things with opposing micro-goals; goals that are cumulatively detrimental to the business as a whole. The system seems to encourage and support this divisive behaviour with internal politicking, isolated reporting, targets …

[In] a classic psychological study on group norms … students assigned [randomly] to … liberal dormitories became less conservative as the group’s norms seeped into their consciousness, [and vice versa.] …

Participants [in another study] equated creativity with following the group norm… The unwritten rules of the group … determined what its members considered creative. In effect groups had redefined creativity as conformity. …

When people’s individuality rather than their …

Designers should be advocating for end users; these being the users of the actual final outcomes (a product, a process, a services etc), and not the users of the designer’s services.

It can be all to easy to get caught up in advocating for the users of the designer’s services – also called the client. Especially if the client is the noisier wheel. Doing so is detrimental to the …

The city of Malmö is criss-crossed by canals. Loads of people ride bicycles here even in the depths of winter. This floating bike parking platform installed in a canal next to central station is a great use of space.

(The canal has frozen since I took this picture.)

Conventional businesses are designed from the ground up to run gravy trains. Research and development is kept as short as possible. It’s primary intention is to quickly developing a gravy train to run.

Once a train is up and running, all new thinking stops. The default behaviour is keep things running as smoothly and consistently as possible. Occasional incremental improvements aside, changes are kept to a minimum. “All aboard…” …

Little tags like these are mounted in Japanese hotels rooms – in room corners, behind the doors or on the ceilings.

What are they? What is their purpose?

My limited deciphering tells me these tags have something to do with the fire department, and they are a form of “definitive identification” useful during the course of disasters.

Like the fire hydrants in Perth, these identity …