The Hunt for Old LG ACs After Logos Turn Out to be Pure Gold

An old LG air-conditioner from more than two decades ago is suddenly the hottest commodity in South Korea right now, after a viral video showed that its brand logo is made of pure gold. 

This long-forgotten detail resurfaced after YouTuber Ringring Unni, a retail jewellery shop owner in Seoul, uploaded a video on December 11 that shows her appraising the six-letter “Whisen” logo pieces removed from an LG Electronics air-con model released in 2005.

In the video, the customer who brought the logo letters for appraisal said: “The logo was attached to the front of the air-conditioner, and it was advertised at the time as being made of gold”. 

After analysing the pieces, the YouTuber confirmed that they were indeed gold and offered an appraisal value of 713,000 won (RM1,973). All together, the six letters weighed just under one “don”, she told the client in the video. 

A “don” is a South Korean unit of gold weight equivalent to 3.75g. According to the Korea Standard Gold Exchange, one don of gold was quoted at 890,000 won on Wednesday. 

After the video went viral with more than one million views, another customer visited the jewellery shop on December 15 with another Whisen logo, which the YouTuber later featured in a follow-up video. In the second clip, the appraised value of the gold logo piece was 748,000 won. 

According to LG Electronics, a limited run of 10,000 Whisen air-cons bearing gold logos were sold in 2005, celebrating the brand’s position as the world’s top-selling air-con brand. 

Social media users have been buzzing over the video, prompting many to hunt for old Whisen air-cons. One person rightly wrote: “LG turned air-conditioners into a gold investment 20 years ago”!

The Crawl Back to Russia

Foreign businesses that left Russia three years ago are crawling back to the country, Kirill Dmitriev, who is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s investment envoy, has said. 

These companies pulled out of Russia, either due to supply problems caused by unprecedented sanctions imposed on Moscow by the West after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, or the risk of facing secondary sanctions or even public relations pressures. 

"The trend is there, we see that some firms are already returning. It’s just that there is no publicity around it. The process, however, is certainly underway", Dmitriev told journalists on Thursday. 

According to the investment envoy, American businesses alone lost over $300 billion from leaving the Russian market. 

When asked about conditions for the return of Western businesses to Russia, the president’s economic aide noted that the government are actively engaged in “setting the rules” for the process. According to Dmitriev (right), it's not about putting up barriers, but giving priority to protecting domestic businesses. 

In recent months foreign companies that had left Russia have begun to register new trademarks in the country, signaling their potential return. Among them are McDonald's, Hyundai, Intel, Microsoft, LG, IKEA, Chanel, Rolex, and Louis Vuitton, according to data from the Russian patent office, Rospatent.

Yesterday, Arsenal fought back from 2-0 down to salvage a 2-2 draw against Premier League champions Liverpool at Anfield. 

Andy Robertson had floated in a cross and an unmarked Cody Gakpo six yards out was there at the near post to power a header into the net in the twentieth minute. Then, Mohamed Salah's wonderful pass found Dominik Szoboszlai, who squared for Luis Diaz to tap into an empty net just 87 seconds later.

After half-time, Arsenal came roaring back. On forty-six minutes, they glanced a header into the far corner. And in the seventieth minute, the Gunners scored again to level the score.

But with a trip to Brighton & Hove Albion and a home game against Crystal Palace with a trophy presentation to come, Arne Slot's side have two opportunities to make more memories before the season is through.

Huawei's Move to Totally Abandon Android

Huawei have hinted a major release of their HarmonyOS that will see the Chinese giant break with the Linux ecosystem. 

 

HarmonyOS was launched in 2019 – initially as an OS for IoT devices, but later adapted to run on smartphones and other hardware. Huawei suggested the OS could run on their wearables, tablet computers, smartphones, and smart TVs, and offer a unified experience across all. That's a lot like the sort of thing Google can deliver with Android, with which HarmonyOS was compatible. 

 

But between the geopolitical difficulties of cross-border tech transfers, and a desire to build the best possible offering, through 2023, Huawei indicated that they would build a version of HarmonyOS that broke with the Android ecosystem – even if that meant pain for developers and users.

 

Last week, Huawei launched that Android-free offering: HarmonyOS Next. And they claimed they've also created the kernel to power it – meaning Huawei have divorced themselves from both Android and Linux. 

 

Huawei are committed to seeing HarmonyOS Next making a debut for consumers in Q4 of 2024, and that by then they will have trained millions of developers and secured thousands of native apps to run on the OS. A version for developers has been promised for imminent release. 

 

In sessions for developers, Huawei detailed the innards of the OS and how it will ship with all the basic apps and services consumers will expect – stuff like maps, photo management, and a calculator – and the developer tools they've created. 

 

Huawei have also developed an "open" version of HarmonyOS Next – presumably in the hope that third parties might consider the OS to power their own devices. The developer push and possible OEM adoption of HarmonyOS Next are as significant as the software itself. 

 

If Huawei can develop an ecosystem of third-party players, they could create a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly. 

 

Huawei's revived smartphone range has been hailed as a patriotic alternative for Chinese buyers. Yet even a couple of hundred million Huawei devices running HarmonyOS Next would not be a significant challenge to Apple and Google outside China. Nor would other Chinese handset-makers adopting the OS necessarily make a difference. 

 

Recall that Microsoft signed up the likes of HTC, LG, and Samsung to build Windows Phone handsets, but couldn't crack the market. Only Samsung remains a force in the handset market – and it's all-in on Android.

 

That may be so, but I don't think anybody should underestimate Huawei!

TikTok Get Blamed for Guzzling Energy in Norway

TikTok are being blamed for being an energy-guzzler! 

 

At Raufoss (about 120 kilometers north of Oslo in Norway), a weapons firm co-owned by the Norwegian government and a Finnish state-controlled defence company, said they can’t meet the surging demand for artillery shells because a TikTok data center there is using up the electricity! 

 

Elvia, the local energy company, confirmed that the electricity network has no spare capacity after promising it to the data center as they allocate it on a first come, first served basis. 

 

Experts say fights over which companies and which type of industry get priority access to electricity grids are likely to increase across Europe. Data centres have flourished in the Nordic countries because of once-plentiful and cheap electricity, as well as a colder climate that keeps cooling costs down. 

 

“We are concerned because we see our future growth is challenged by the storage of cat videos", Morten Brandtzæg, the CEO of Nammo AS, said in an interview with the Financial Times. (I guess he doesn't like cats!)

 

Brandtzæg said that the demand for artillery rounds was 15 times higher than normal – a trend driven by the war in Ukraine, which has featured heavy artillery use. Ukraine, for instance, would like to increase its daily usage of rounds from 6,000 to 65,000, he explained. 

 

It isn’t known if Nammo shells are being used in Ukraine – their customer base, as described in a 2021 annual report, is overwhelmingly EU and NATO states, which have been making huge donations to Ukraine since Russia launched its Special Military Operation. 

 

TikTok and other tech giants have faced criticism for their energy use. Back in July, a report from the FT found that the electricity usage of large companies – including Microsoft, Oracle, LG, Huawei, Amazon, and Dell – was making it harder to build more homes in London, UK. Due to the electricity grid running out of capacity, the report stated that the capital could face a ban on new housing projects until 2035. 

 

An earlier report from 2019 by EirGrid, Ireland's electrical grid operator, found similar conclusions for Ireland, which is a popular base for global companies' European data centers. It found that data centers can often require the "same amount of energy as a large town", and could account for "29% of electricity demand in Ireland by 2028".

US Slaps Google with Antitrust Suit

It’s a fair comment to make that Big Tech enjoy "monopoly power" and have wielded their dominance in distortive and restrictive ways. 

Amazon have mistreated third-party sellers. Apple's app store fees and policies are anti-competitive. Facebook have sought to eliminate future rivals through targeted acquisitions. 

And Google, instead of competing on the quality of their search results, bought their success – they pay billions of dollars a year to device manufacturers like Apple, LG, Motorola, and Samsung and browser developers like Mozilla and Opera to be their default search engine and in many cases to prohibit them from dealing with Google's competitors. 

As a result, Google effectively own or control search distribution channels accounting for nearly 90 percent of all general search engine queries in the United States and almost 95 percent of searches on mobile. 

In other words, Google harm competition and prevent rivals from gaining a meaningful audience. 

And so, the US government finally decided to do something about the elephant in the room. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice sued Google, in the most aggressive legal challenge to the power and influence of Big Tech in more than two decades. 

The much-anticipated lawsuit could lead to the break-up of an iconic company that has become all but synonymous with the Internet and assumed a primary role in the day-to-day lives of billions of people around the globe.

Such an outcome is far from assured, however, and the case is likely to take years to resolve. The last time the US took up the cudgels was when it sued Microsoft for anti-competitive practices in 1998. A settlement left the company intact, though the government's prior foray into Big Tech anti-trust – the 1974 case against AT&T – led to the breakup of the Bell System. 

Google called the lawsuit "deeply flawed", adding that people "use Google because they choose to – not because they're forced to or because they can't find alternatives" – and insisting that it "would do nothing to help consumers".

Smartphone Sales Overtake Feature Phones

Smartphone’s took a majority of mobile phone sales worldwide for the first time in the April-June quarter, a survey showed Wednesday. I am acutely aware that I am a member of a dwindling minority because I am still refusing to buy a smartphone.

The report by the research firm Gartner found smartphone sales totaled 225 million in the second quarter, or 51.8 percent of all mobile phones sold in the period. It was the first time smartphone sales exceeded those of feature phones, which are more basic phones with limited or no access to the Internet and applications.

Gartner's data showed Samsung sold 71.3 million smartphones in the quarter, representing a market share of 31.7 percent. Apple was second with 31.9 million, followed by South Korea's LG, with 11.4 million and a share of 5.1 percent, and China's Lenovo and ZTE.

Samsung was also the top seller of all mobile phones, with a total of 107 million in the period, or 24.7 percent.

Sunway University hosted a one-day workshop “Discover How To Become A Professional Master of Ceremonies” today. I had wanted to attend because I have two emceeing jobs next week but I had to give it a miss because I was at MIMKL’s Humorous Speech & Speech Evaluation contests. The facilitator was the affable Jon Tan and the event was organized by Division B. Sunway University Toastmasters, i.e. Nawal Lyana, Marilyn Lai, Thinesh Naidu and Wong Jia Wei who went for the workshop told me they have learned a great deal.

Smartphones 2013

The mobile ecosystem is transforming at lightning speed, with endless innovation and new applications of mobile technology. Already the rumor mill is working overtime in the run-up to the Mobile World Congress (February 25-28, 2013) in Barcelona, Spain and, if the stories are true, consumers in the market for a new smartphone are going to be really spoiled for choice in 2013.

LG is rumored to be showcasing its LG Optimus G Pro handset which, keeping with the latest trend for ever-growing screens is expected to have a 5.5-inch display, a huge battery to ensure all-day use, and a 1.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon processor.

It will also boast a 13 megapixel rear-facing camera and 32GB of internal storage, which can be doubled to 64GB via an SD memory slot.

Perhaps most intriguing of all is that it will offer HDMI output for connecting with HD TVs, tablets and other multimedia devices. LG has been winning many fans recently with the LG Nexus-4 smartphone handset and the company is committed to challenging Samsung’s dominance in the smartphone market.

So expect an impressive device.

The company made headlines earlier when it announced its new handset’s camera would capture ultrapixels, rather than megapixels.

The name change was an attempt to draw attention to HTC’s new image sensor and processing technology that uses a number of 4.3 megapixel sensors laid on top of each other to ‘over process’ an image to ensure optimum results.

This technology is expected to make its debut on the HTC M7 handset which, according to a print advertisement from the Phone House in France, will be on sale as early as March 08.

It will cost €649 (RM2,687) without a contract but offers a 4.7-inch full HD display, 32GB of internal storage, and Beats audio speakers as well as the 13 megapixel ‘ultrapixel’ camera technology.

 

Moving away from Android, but staying with cameras with a high resolution, further details have emerged about Nokia’s next Windows Phone. Originally codenamed EOS and rumoured to have a 41-megapixel image sensor for professional-quality photographs, China Mobile is claiming that the handset will be called the Lumia 1000 when it launches at this year’s event.

As well as incredible image-capturing abilities, the phone is expected to have an alumininum case and will supplant the Lumia 920 as the flagship device.

Also rumoured is a Lumia 520 handset which would become a new entry-level handset and path for consumers into the Windows Phone 8 ecosystem. Further details are patchy but the 520 could be powered by 1GHz dual-core processor, a 4-inch touch screen and 4GB of internal storage, plus the option for expansion via a micro SD card slot.

Last, but by no means least, is Samsung, which is expected to launch a number of tablets and other accessories at the event, but is going to wait until March to launch the replacement for its all-conquering Galaxy SIII handset, originally named the Galaxy SIV.

It is expected to have a 5-inch full HD display and use something called maXTouch S, a controller that enables users to interact with their handsets via gestures alone, meaning there will be no need to touch the screen to execute certain commands. The technology may sound sci-fi but Sony has already used it on its Xperia Sola smartphone.

One word to describe all of the above. Cool.