My friends at McKinsey just released their annual look at the Chinese consumer. As always, they have interviewed thousands across China to draw out “what is different this year?” They start however from the key point that has not changed – that over the 2000s China has accounted for almost one third of the growth in global household… Read More





Don’t Blame Trump for Auto Downturn
There is a temptation to blame U.S. President Donald J. Trump for everything that is right or for everything that is wrong in the world today. Either that or blame Brexit. It’s just possible that Uber, instead, ought to be considered the target of shame for everything from traffic fatalities to global warming.
The automotive… Read More
Samsung spend is up but can it offest TSMC slowing?
Samsung is warming up and spending again
Samsung gave its preliminary report for Q4 and it was well better than prior muted expectations. It doesn’t take long for Samsung’s business units to respond to business trends in either direction and we have already heard of increased spending plans on the part of Samsung.… Read More
Cycling and CES 2020
It’s a new year, so time to share with you all things cycling being shown at CES. Yes, most of CES is devoted to new TV displays, futuristic automobiles, all things 5G, laptops and mobile phones, but there’s a growing segment of consumer products for fitness, and cycling happens to be my fitness passion. Riding a bike … Read More
Banks are Developing Digital Currencies and Opening Themselves to Cyber Risk!
Cybersecurity will be hard pressed to take on the new challenges of bank managed digital currencies.
Banks are developing their own digital currencies. The introduction of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) is the beginning of an interesting trend that will change the cybersecurity dynamic for banking as it opens up an … Read More
China in 2020: Lower profits, more bankruptcies, and new challenges doing business
This is the fifth and final part of the series
For many industrial businesses, 2019 has been tough. Profits lower across the board – light and heavy industry, state-owned and private businesses. Labor costs rising while ex-factory prices are not. Access to debt restricted. The gap between high performers and laggards widened
A Bundle of Goodies in Bluetooth 5.2, LE Audio
You know that a technology is becoming a trend to watch when the Economist writes a piece on the topic. We know how big an investment goes into monetizing visual content for our phones, pads and TVs, through the likes of Warner Media, Disney and Netflix. Now there’s a big push into monetizing our ears, driven by Apple and others on the… Read More
Even California Can’t Save Hydrogen
Fisita World Mobility Summit 2019 in Nagoya, Japan, brought together powerful perspectives on everything from vehicle architectures (Visteon), to open source software (Synopsys), mobility (METI), and connectivity (Bosch). The most enigmatic juxtaposition at the event, however, came in a panel discussion I moderated
Physical design team tackles challenging SoC
When describing the complexity of deep sub-micron systems on chip (SoCs), most engineers and their managers tend to refer to a combination of gate count, amount of embedded memory, and frequency of operation. If one’s task is to assess the complexity of the physical design effort for a given SoC, then there are numerous additional… Read More
Digital Retaliation of Iran – Top 6 Likely Cyber Attacks
The United States and allies’ national cyber response may soon be tested with the latest escalating conflict in the middle east. The U.S. conducted an airstrike that killed a revered Iranian general while in Iraq. This was in retaliation to a number of attacks against U.S. personnel and most recently the U.S. embassy in… Read More
Weebit Nano Moves into the Mainstream with Customer Adoption