Hard News: Singapore, I have a problem
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Brilliant write up Russell. I was at the schools stage challenge in Wellington last night. Talk about creativity. I think the future of NZ is in good hands, even if they can't vote yet.
Oddly enough, he said, because the two big carriers, SingTel and StarHub, were so "competitive" - in other words, they won't peer sensibly - the fastest path between sites on either network a few kilometres apart was via the United States.
If ever there was a (missed but maybe recoverable) opportunity for NZ to sieze a competitive advantage this is it.
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Brilliant write up Russell. I was at the schools stage challenge in Wellington last night. Talk about creativity. I think the future of NZ is in good hands, even if they can't vote yet
I was talking to some advertising industry people last night: they have a big problem with creativity, or the lack of it, with local staff. They sometimes get bright kids, who have to go off for their compulsory national service (two years in either the military or the police, and two weeks a year thereafter) -- and come back as drones.
The official recognition of the problem -- the new official "Creative City" policy, under which the government decrees creativity - is somewhat ironic.
That's not to say there isn't a creative community - Mr Brown and his buddies Imaginary Friends (comic artists for Marvel and DC, concept art for games) are examples - but it seems very marginalised.
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The official recognition of the problem -- the new official "Creative City" policy, under which the government decrees creativity - is somewhat ironic.
I had a look at a Singapore government creativity website. It seems like the National Party's wet dream of what an arts/creativity policy would be. Must... generate... income.
But I like that the Singapore government has its own dating agency to encourage the young single people of Singapore to hook up and have babies. (Must... generate... babies.)
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Given Singapore's position as the number one model of how globalisation should be, I get quite frightened at times.
And don't worry about Mike Moore - these days people take his pronouncements about as seriously as they do Michael Bassets. -
That dating agency is great, for example, check out some of the membership rules. If I read it correctly one must call the agency to get membership if one isn't a university graduate.
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I had a look at a Singapore government creativity website. It seems like the National Party's wet dream of what an arts/creativity policy would be. Must... generate... income.
Actually I think that's a bit unfair to Chris Finlayson.
But from that site:
For decades, Singapore’s prosperity has been accredited to the investment-led economy, focusing primarily on manufacturing and service industries. To reinvigorate Singapore as an innovation-fuelled economy, a prime directive has been issued to cultivate the landscape with imagination, creativity and knowledge. Multi-dimensional creativity - artistic creativity, business entrepreneurship and technological innovation - will be the new currency of success.
Worldwide, the creative cluster (arts and culture, design and media) has been observed to be among the fastest growing sectors of developed economies such as the UK and the US. Creative industries not only contribute towards the economy directly, they also have a powerful, indirect impact on the rest of the economy - by adding style, aesthetics and freshness to differentiate products and services. Singapore must tap on the creative cluster (arts and culture, design, media) to flourish, and recognise it as one of the vanguards of economic growth.
Prime Directive: y'know, like in Robocop.
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Singapore creative community is undoubtedly marginalised (which is what happens when you have no freedom of speech), but those who are genuinely creative produce some fantastic (and incredibly subversive) work - such as the brilliant W!ld Rice theatre company who brought over Animal Farm to the International Festival two festivals ago.
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I had a look at a Singapore government creativity website. It seems like the National Party's wet dream of what an arts/creativity policy would be. Must... generate... income.
*sigh* Robyn,I'm not even going to bother getting into a partisan slap-fest on that but I'd respectfully suggest that the incumbent minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage might find the quote Russell provided from that site oddly familiar.
I want to reach for a gun when any government tries to reduce 'creativity' to a nice, shiny marketable brand is quite another question. The folks at Creative New Zealand, the New Zealand Film Commission, and New Zealand on Air may well be a little more enthusiastic for the notion.
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I want to reach for a gun when any government tries to reduce 'creativity' to a nice, shiny marketable brand is quite another question. The folks at Creative New Zealand, the New Zealand Film Commission, and New Zealand on Air may well be a little more enthusiastic for the notion.
Most western countries have some sort of creative indistries rhetoric. Buit's a bit different here. It's not like New Zealand's arts hippies have to be ordered to go forth and be creative. (You half expect the announcment of an official creativity target - 15% more creative in 2007!) And Helen hasn't quite got to the stage of issuing "prime directives" ...
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I had a look at a Singapore government creativity website.
Yep so did I....you could have warned me about the sound.
Had the surround rig turned up loud...disturbing !
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. . . without a single content person in the house. Not one.
Wow. Sounds just like a Film Commission outreach-to-Auckland-filmmakers event of nearly 20 years ago. All Coopers & Lybrand types, bugger all filmmakers.
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It's not like New Zealand's arts hippies have to be ordered to go forth and be creative. (You half expect the announcment of an official creativity target - 15% more creative in 2007!) And Helen hasn't quite got to the stage of issuing "prime directives" ...
Fair enough, and I'm rather thankful William Gibson was never moved to describe New Zealand as 'Disneyland with the death penalty'. :) But I just wonder if (as you put it) "creative industries rhetoric" misses the point too, though without the funny-peculiar comic relief of Creative Community Singapore. You don't have to trigger Godwin's Law to just cringe a little at the memory of Tony Blair's 'Cool Britannia' cocktail parties, or every time Helen Clark craps on about creative industries being an engine of economic transformation or fostering a sense of national identity in partnership with government.
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I've been to both Singapore and Zimbabwe - and you know, I think I prefer Mugabe's madness..
Sounds like Akamai have a brilliant business - aren't they basically delivering peering under the guise of "delivery optimisation" and charging for it? A P/E of 125 suggests that the market thinks that...
Telcos really don't understand content. Look at how the technology has been pretty much there for excellent mobile applications for the last 5 years, and what do we have - Vodafone Live - do me a favour!
(as we say in Shoreditch). -
Fair enough, and I'm rather thankful William Gibson was never moved to describe New Zealand as 'Disneyland with the death penalty'. :) But I just wonder if (as you put it) "creative industries rhetoric" misses the point too, though without the funny-peculiar comic relief of Creative Community Singapore. You don't have to trigger Godwin's Law to just cringe a little at the memory of Tony Blair's 'Cool Britannia' cocktail parties, or every time Helen Clark craps on about creative industries being an engine of economic transformation or fostering a sense of national identity in partnership with government.
And yet even Singapore, which surely ranks as the opposite of of Richard Florida's "creative city" exemplar, is now feeling the need to get itself a creative class. I'm not qualified to pronounce on the merits of his economic theory (and some people think it's tosh), but it seems clear enough that places with a reasonable stock of bohemians, artists and poofs are more interesting places to live.
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Sounds like Akamai have a brilliant business - aren't they basically delivering peering under the guise of "delivery optimisation" and charging for it? A P/E of 125 suggests that the market thinks that...
What they do is move content from one edge of the network to the other -- not using internet protocols on the way -- and try and deliver it from the nearest node to its destination. But yeah, as I understand it, if everyone played nice with NZ's national peering network, the effect would be similar.
Telcos really don't understand content. Look at how the technology has been pretty much there for excellent mobile applications for the last 5 years, and what do we have - Vodafone Live - do me a favour!
Yep. I've been covering this sector long enough to have heard Telecom executives pronouncing about "value chains" involving the internet in the early 90s, without apparently really having much idea of what was going on.
The original Xtra home page was a prime example of not getting content: it might have looked great on the sides of buses, but a home page that was exactly the same every single day was supremely sucky from a content point of view.
Now that they're all fizzed up about "quadruple play", they're still ignoring the lessons of the internet. They seem to think they can offer exactly the same video content people can already get on other TV platforms, only probably less reliably and at poorer quality.
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but it seems clear enough that places with a reasonable stock of bohemians, artists and poofs are more interesting places to live.
Must invite you round on laundry day - fun, fun, fun. :) But things let really interesting when 'creativity' is just a wee bit anarchic, and has the great and the good reaching for the aspirin rather than canapés. Jeebs, when I turn into such a big hippie. :) Still, any day when creative folks are being asked to submit grant applications rather than being chucked into a cell and having their work burnt isn't too bad, in the grand scheme of things.
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Must invite you round on laundry day - fun, fun, fun. :)
Have you thought about applying for a grant for that? ;-)
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Folding socks as a multi-media, site-specific post-colonialist critique of consumerist heterosexism? I'm up for that - and I guess you'll be wanting a commission for coming up with the idea, you filthy mercenary swine. ;)
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Hold it, hold it... I lived and worked in Singapore for almost four years. And that was before it got liberal like it is now. Seriously, it's not that bad... almost ended up staying there. The advertising circuit in Singapore is pretty damn good, and while I thought the Straits Times was the worst paper in the world, it was only because I hadn't seen the NZ Herald yet.
Granted, Singapore is restricted in many ways, but it's not the navel-gazing backwater of NZ.
And the food... OMG, I miss it.
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The advertising circuit in Singapore is pretty damn good . . .
As in Batey/Singapore Airlines being a license to print money? From my recollections of '87-'89, practically all creatives were expats. As, I'm willing to bet, were the 'industry people' Russell mentions. The complaints back then sound eerily similar - little room for creative challenge in catering to a target market whose prime interests were 'eating and shopping, in that order.' Most TV Singaporeans were portrayed by Honkie (Hong Kong) impersonators. 'Put a Singaporean in front of a camera, ask them to act, they smile and nod.'
I'm absolutely certain that there was some kind of state initiative in place back then aimed at fostering local creativity - the only result seemed to be an insipid theme-park recreation of Bugis Street. -
Ugh, don't get me started on triple/quadruple play...seems like nearly every advertisment in London is from some company offering their version of it. Between them and the free newspaper hawkers I'm begining to go a little mad.
The only way to centre myself is to remember that back home I was begging for such choice, in both senses. Oh and Juha, read an article last week that you wrote about ULL. How very depressing and I hope you are wrong but fear that you are right. Oh and google news loved you last week, not once but twice I saw your stories leading on the GnewsNZ front page for Sci/Tech. I do believe you've made it!
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I was there in the 90s, and Batey Ads... well, they were world famous in Singapore, but that's it. Batey produced shite like the Tiger beer campaigns apart from SIA. Now they've lost SIA to TBWA, a switch that should've happened maybe two decades ago as it might have saved generations of Singapore Girls from mile high bogosity.
Saatchi Singapore was good though. Perhaps they still are, and there's always... dare I say it? Neil French.
New Bugis St was a giggle, in Singapore as well. Apparently, the Singapore Tourist Board decided the sanitisation of the area had gone too far, and it was boring. Did they bring back the sailors' Dance of the Flaming Arseholes atop the loo on Vic and Queen St? No. How about getting tourists ripped on cocaine and sending them out for a night of high buggery with the Ah Quas? No... in Singapore, they hang you for drugs and police officers in tight trousers cruise the parks to entrap gay men. Well, I'm not sure that happens any more, to be honest.
Never saw it myself, but apparently they paid a few ladyboys to be gawked at by the tourists, some in airconditioned booths, others on platforms. They were monitored by CCTV and microphones, in case they became nostalgic and wanted to relive the past. Went down like a lead balloon.
Did I mention the food? Oh yes I did.
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Triple-Quad Play... no. Too little, too late. It's the Telco Wet Dream, resurrected by Alcatel-Lucent, and it's been around since the 90s. ADSL was designed for that purpose (ATM transport, high downstream/moderate upstream speeds) in fact, and not for Internet Protocol traffic. With Bittorrent, different types of VoIP, P2PTV etc, why would anyone want WhateverPlay where the content is controlled by the telcos?
ULL/LLU is happening at Telecom's pace, which was to be expected. It's in Telecom's interest to delay it as much as possible for a variety of reasons. They key one being of course that Telecom doesn't make as much money out of broadband as it does out of the line rental.
Must go and look at Google News now :)
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I'd love to continue the conversation but I have returned from my travels to what appears to be a logic board failure on my main computer.
Repaired disk damage with Disk Warrior (seven hours!) and now have it started up in Firewire target disk mode and am conducting the lengthy but merciful process of a full backup (hadn't done one for a while because I kept getting directory errors when I tried), after which I will take it into the shop and hope I qualify for a free replacement under Apple's extended warranty scheme.
You may feel sorry for me. And I think I will now watch the test match again ...
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They sometimes get bright kids, who have to go off for their compulsory national service (two years in either the military or the police, and two weeks a year thereafter) -- and come back as drones.
NZ has it's own version of that. It's called the Massey MBA. You can pretty much guarantee most companies in NZ have installed one or more of these in their middle management and they work brilliantly to suppress any kind of creative development.
"Can you describe the path to market and return on investment for your idea....."
cheers
Bart
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