Blog – brqnd

Young & Dangerøus

Post author By Nat
Post date January 21, 2020

At the height of the EDM craze, when DJs were getting over $250,000 dollars for a two-hour set, the world’s number one DJ was scheduled to play in Macau.

The manager for the DJ had a bit of extra time passing through Hong Kong and wanted to explore the city. Known as a local expert, due to my site Hong Kong Hustle, and having a music background myself, the organizer contacted me and asked if I would play tour guide, to which I agreed.

Sitting down for lunch, after a whirlwind trip exploring Kowloon’s wild markets, I happened to ask the manager if they had anyone doing their social media for China. He went into an explanation about how opaque the social media landscape is for foreign artists, and what a challenge it is to gather any actionable insights.

This was the number one DJ in the world, with easily tens of millions of fans in China, and yet, here he was, flying blind with no measurement of his audience to speak of.

The gears in my head immediately began to spin as I thought of a way to turn this problem into an opportunity.

Thinking over the situation, I had several breakthrough insights. The first major issue for foreign music acts in China is that none of their existing social media platforms work.

Imagine trying to promote your music in a country where Spotify, YouTube, Soundcloud, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat, are all blocked.

A second issue is that China doesn’t have a culture of paying for music. As the country became consumers of international music, it was already in digital format, being downloaded freely. In fact, Baidu, the “Google” of China, owes its early success to being an excellent mp3 search engine!

Music rights in China are weak compared to other territories, and some tiny countries still contribute more revenue to the global music industry then China does, even with its massive population.

So I set about trying to solve this issue, and create a service that would help foreign acts monetize their music in China. The key breakthrough here was, you don’t monetize music, you monetize popularity.

You don’t monetize music, you monetize popularity

With no presence on Chinese social platforms, artists are missing out on their ability to acquire analytics which give them leverage to generate deals and bargaining power. For top stars, this translates into leaving huge sums on the table. After understanding this concept, I put together a plan to create an onramp to help music stars build an official presence on Chinese social media platforms.

The name I came up with for the service was Young & Dangerous, and I picked up the domain name: danger0us.com. Have a look at the site to get more details!

young and dangerous china social media agency

Uncategorized

OMG Pink Store

Post author By Nat
Post date January 12, 2020

Do people who love pink clothes also buy pink backpacks, pink cameras, and pink skateboards?

I asked myself this question in 2017, and after doing some brief research on Instagram, I decided to build an online store that only sold pink products.

The initial step for this project was to be able to answer three main questions. Where would the products come from? Which e-commerce platform should I use? And how can I attract customers?

The answers revealed themselves after a bit more research. I would create the site as an affiliate store, so I wouldn’t need to carry inventory. I chose WooCommerce for the e-commerce platform, as it offers the ability to customize in numerous ways. And I would use Instagram to drive traffic (and hopefully sales) to my online store.

The OMG Pink Store Instagram account is filled with bold graphics that make best use of the heavily visual platform. The actual products being sold are integrated into the feed and are ‘shoppable’

The potential items for a color-themed store are nearly limitless. The more unexpected the product, the more eye-catching, like these pink appliances!

Any business on today’s Internet is fighting for attention against several massive platforms that take up the majority of users’ time spent online. Instead of competing against them, why not use this concentration of users to your advantage?

The visual nature of the platform meant that bold, color-themed graphics would resonate with Instagram audiences, who often meticulously curate their feeds. Researching pink hashtags, I descended down the rabbit hole of Instagram’s pink aesthetic. From here I was able to begin unraveling methods to target fans of the color.

Soon I began to identify users with a high probability of being interested in pink products. The ultimate goal was to drive these high-quality sales leads to the shop. I experimented with strategies to identify fans of the color pink by their images, bios, user names, and in one particularly clever approach, by location.

Have a quick look at the Instagram channel I created for a better understanding of the concept and a peek at how it works. If you’re browsing with a mobile phone, you’ll see that the Instagram account @omgpinkstore is made up of eye-catching graphics along with ‘shoppable’ posts.

Shoppable posts allow you to go directly from browsing an Instagram feed to purchasing an item that you desire. There used to be an intermediary step, where you were taken to an online store first, but that is quickly disappearing, as the process is getting streamlined into more direct, one-shot purchases from within the Instagram app.

Building and running the store as an experiment for a short amount of time, I was able to confirm the strength of this concept and the techniques that I devised to generate traffic. Running over several months I tried out multiple Instagram strategies which worked well. On one occasion, I woke up to a flood of Instagram ‘Likes’. It turns out that the brand Moschino re-posted one of my images to their account with over 9 million followers.

“My Little Pony” got re-posted by Moschino to their 9 million followers!

As a one-person project this was getting time consuming. I started to wonder if this was a viable business, due to the amount of time it took to research products, create colorful images, and post to both the web and Instagram. This pushed me towards investigating automation, which lead me to a whole new series of discoveries!

omgpinkstore instagram — Instagram Stories also provide an interesting outlet to reach shoppers

deep learning

Dim Sum Detective

Post author By Nat
Post date January 1, 2020

It’s a foodie’s worst nightmare: you find yourself surrounded by baskets of fine delicacies, but unable to order due to a language barrier and a lack of familiarity with the dishes

In real life, this happens every day, as travelers to Southern China, Hong Kong, or even your local Chinatown, have difficulty ordering dim sum.

The Problem

There’s frequently a knowledge gap between the restaurant and the patrons, as people who didn’t grow up eating dim sum lack a visual familiarity with the offerings. On top of that, if there’s a language gap, and no multi-lingual menu, the ordering process quickly falls apart.

As a customer, it’s difficult to tell what’s inside a basket of dumplings before you actually take a bite. Imagine if you’re dining out with people with food allergies, or dietary restrictions. If you can’t communicate with your waiter effectively, it becomes a big problem.

The Solution

Instead of the scenarios above, what if you could simply reach into your pocket, pull out your phone and immediately identify each of the dozens of dishes?

As you wave your phone over the steaming baskets, the names pop up on screen, quickly allowing you to identify what’s inside. Have friends that don’t eat pork? No problem. Need a substitute for steamed pork buns? The app can show you common alternatives, directing you towards vegetarian or chicken options that you can point to, or search the menu for.

With real-time identification of dishes, Dim Sum Detective enables an entirely new way to communicate with servers. Now instead of a grumpy smirk, the old ladies who push the carts might even give you half a smile.

Creating a deep learning model to identify dim sum

O.K., so we’ve identified a problem and a potential solution, now how do we go about making it?

There are many steps, but just three major ones: build a custom dataset, train a model, and deploy it as an app.

Feeling anxious to try it? You can test how the model performs using the demo app linked below. The current version can identify: shrimp dumplings ‘har gow’, steamed bbq pork buns ‘charsiu bao’, pork and shrimp dumplings ‘siu mai’, and “soup dumplings” xiao long bao.

The web-based interface allows you to submit an image from your phone’s library, or by taking a photo with your camera. If you’re on a laptop, you press ‘Select Image’ to upload an image, and then submit it by pressing ‘Analyze’.

Good sample photos to test the model contain just one type of dim sum at a time, like the three below:

~~Feel free to use these images to test it out.~~ Update: The demo version is currently offline, but I’ll add a video of it in action here soon.

Telling one dish from another is not as easy as you think! The model works by learning to identify patterns that provide clues as to what an object is.

While some dim sum dishes look quite distinct, others are very similar!

Next Steps

There are several steps I’d like to take to develop Dim Sum Detective further in 2020. I’m going to train the model on more types of dim sum and then design a full user interface for the app. This is just the early stages of the app’s development! Stay tuned for part II.