BP & more news

3 minutes estimated reading time

BP

How the Gulf crisis made BP British again. – By Daniel Gross – Slate Magazine – interesting study in crisis communications. BP is one of the oil industry’s ‘seven sisters’ or supermajors. Although that term doesn’t reflect the power of national oil companies in places like China, Saudi Arabia, Norway, India and Qatar. BP is vertically integrated in all areas of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and extraction, refining, distribution and marketing, power generation, and trading. It has been steadily building out interests in alternative energy such as solar as well. The British positioning of BP is at odds with the fact that the company operates in 80+ countries. The company came out of British efforts at oil exploration in what’s now Iran at the beginning of the 20th century. BP has been in Alaska since 1959 and was one of the first majors in the North Sea.

BP

Culture

Sissy Bounce, New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap – NYTimes.com – Derek B’s 808 roll on Rock the Beat is a cornerstone, immortalised like The Winston’s Amen Brother. Really interesting sound very similar in spirit to the roots of hip-hop like the live shows back in the day at Harlem World

80 Blocks From Tiffany’s – gangland culture in 1970s New York

Economics

Long-term unemployment: Leaving the labour force, bit by bit | The Economist – interesting article on the economic impact of the long term unemployed

How to

Apple – Support – Manuals – goldmine of Mac stuff

Japan

中古レコード・CDの販売/買取 COCONUTS DISK – awesome Tokyo record store

飛騨高山 留之助商店 本店 – amazing Japanese store full of modern pop art and cool kitsch stuff

As Some Vow to Scale Back, Panasonic Pushes Vast Catalog – NYTimes.com – similar challenges to what Sony faces

FT.com / Companies / Automobiles – Japan’s new rules change face of AGMs – will this make it harder for Yakusa to disrupt and hassle Japanese company AGMs and will it help corporate governance?

In a Partnership of Unequals, a Start-Up Suffers – NYTimes.com – Bill Gates-owned Corbis convicted of fraud and ‘misappropriation of trade secrets’ – basically piracy

Media

People worry about over-sharing location from mobiles, study finds | Technology | guardian.co.uk – may hamper adoption of where2.0. Yahoo!’s FireEagle project was precient in the way it allowed users control over how exact location data was

Online

Will Zynga Become the Google of Games? – NYTimes.com – nice profile of Zynga

People worry about over-sharing location from mobiles, study finds | Technology | guardian.co.uk – may hamper adoption of where2.0. Yahoo!’s FireEagle project was precient in the way it allowed users control over how exact location data was

Yummly – Think outside the recipe box. – interesting take on the recipe site using semantic technologies

Software

Digital Domain – Even With All Its Profits, Microsoft Has a Popularity Problem – NYTimes.com – Microsoft’s financial performance is not not reflected in its share price and a far bit of that has to do with the corporate communications letting the organisation down

Windows Phone 7 a ‘disaster’ says Infoworld after developer demo | Technology | guardian.co.uk – could Microsoft have a completely screwed ‘Vista-like’ mobile strategy on its hands? This isn’t the first time that a Windows demo had gone wrong for Microsoft, in the past the company still managed to do really well selling the Windows product in question