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nanny, for a few minutes a day. There are even examples of husbands, eager to spend time
with their wives, who travel with them on business trips as a way to maintain contact.
§ There is also a deep-rooted sense of frugality. You don’t see $700 office chairs or large
flat panel computer screens at most of the leading technology companies. Instead, the
furniture tends to be spartan and everyone works on laptops. It is common for facility
managers to allocate 80-100 square feet to each employee, compared with two to three
times that amount in California. On long-haul business flights most employees will fly
economy and many share hotel rooms to save costs. It is also striking to the western eye
how frequently a tea bag is reused or how, in winter, employees dress in coats and scarves
at their desks to ward off the bone-chilling temperature. There are plenty of workplaces in
China insulated from these sorts of sensibilities — particularly within the large, statecontrolled
companies. The pace is also slower outside Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and
Guangdong. There is also no doubt that the roots of this work ethic spring from memories of
privation and the desire to improve personal circumstances. Some of it is also due to the
disregard paid to physical fitness — a pursuit that can chew up eight to 10 hours a week in
Silicon Valley.
§ The Chinese approach may seem unhealthy and unappealing to westerners and, as
China’s gross domestic product rises the collective thirst for improvement may start to wane
— but for now it’s a fact of life. Western investors may complain that there are some
companies from which they are excluded but, for the most part, investment opportunities in
the best companies are available and, in many respects, doing business in China is easier
than doing business in California. As the Chinese technology companies push ever harder
outside the mainland, the habits of western companies will start to seem antique.
3) Warrior tribe enlists lawyers in battle for Maasai ‘brand’ [Source: Financial
Times] (https://goo.gl/VP1Sqs)
§ The Maasai, known for their red-checked togas, fine beadwork and proud warrior history,
are an attractive icon for firms wishing to establish particular brand values. Light Years IP, a
Washington-based advocacy group, estimates that more than 1,000 companies, including
Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Jaguar Land Rover and Masai Barefoot
Technology, a shoe company, have used Maasai imagery or iconography to project their
brand. The Maasai are now taking a legalistic approach to protecting — and monetising —
their cultural heritage. They are working with Position Business, a spin-off from Light Years
IP, whose founder, Ron Layton, helped Ethiopian coffee growers build trademark protection
around their premium coffee. That involved a battle with Starbucks, the US coffee chain,
which sought to block the registration of Ethiopian coffee trademarks on the grounds that
they had become generic. Mr. Layton estimates that Ethiopian farmers, who used to earn “a
fraction of the retail value of their premium product”, have gained at least $100m because of
the trademark protection.
§ He says royalties that could be claimed by the Maasai are worth hundreds of millions of
dollars. He adds that they could eventually use their brand to strike deals across a range of
products from fashion to vehicles, in which a typical licensing fee would be 5% of the retail
value. “If someone were using Taylor Swift’s image, she would ask for at least 5% and she
would get it,” Mr. Layton says, referring to the American singer-songwriter. “A human being
can stop others from using their image. With the Maasai this is an asset that belongs to 2m
people,” he argues. The Maasai recently struck their first deal with Koy Clothing, a UK retail
company, which has agreed to pay a licence fee for clothes based on Maasai designs. They
are hoping to persuade other companies using their brand to pay a royalty. Masai Barefoot
Technology, a Singaporean company, is one of the Maasai’s first targets. It markets a
popular brand of sports shoe whose destabilising-sole design is intended to build muscle by
emulating the Maasai gait over soft ground. Some of its shoes resemble those that the
Maasai fashion from old tires.
§ The Maasai are not the first community to seek to protect and profit from their brand.
Aboriginal Australians have, after years of struggle, established protocols that mean they
are now routinely paid fees when companies use their image or ancestral lands for
commercial or marketing purposes. However, the Maasai have a long battle ahead of them.
It could cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to register trademarks in every jurisdiction
and for every category of product, she adds. “If you are the Maasai and you want to prevent
people using your trademark, you are going to have to pay,” Ms. Cornell says. “And you’re
up against commercial players with deep pockets.”
4) Why the alt-right is winning America’s meme war [Financial Times]
(https://goo.gl/MESyME)
Text for google: The memes are so potent because they are designed to be subversive
§ Almost a decade ago, Matt Goerzen, a Canadian artist and social scientist, stumbled into
the world of subversive internet chatrooms. He was fascinated — and alarmed. Goerzen
could see that the anonymity of the internet was enabling a virulently angry, antiestablishment
community to emerge on platforms, such as “4chan”, where users post under
pseudonyms with little or no moderation. And while these groups did not initially seem very
political (the message boards were notorious instead for puerile humour and pornography),
as the years passed they became infused with an “alt-right” agenda — that of the white
nationalist movement. They also became adept at launching online attacks on their
opponents, or “trolling”. The artist in Goerzen observed something else: what made the altright
so influential was that the users were not just using words to communicate their
messages, but snappy visual images too. Alt-right users had become adept at creating
visual “memes”, to use the phrase coined by Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist,
back in the 1970s, to describe a “unit of cultural transmission” that spread from “mind to
mind”.