3 minutes estimated reading time
Dopplr
The slow death of Dopplr | guardian.co.uk – on its own the death of Dopplr is not really news, the interesting timing of this article by The Guardian put out this evisceration of Nokia’s web service ambitions. I’m not saying that Jemima Kiss got it wrong, but the timing was interesting: published last Friday – right on the eve of Nokia World. Dopplr is similar to other startups that have gotten lost after having been acquired. Dopplr allowed users to create itineraries of their travel plans and spot correlations with their contacts’ travel plans in order to arrange meetings at any point on their journey. It was known for the quality of its user experience design in comparison to other apps.
China
String of Holidays in China Bring Time Off, With Complications – NYTimes.com – complex yes, but I can’t help feeling for the bureaucrats who came up with this who thought that they were doing the best they could for the people and now must be as popular as tax collectors
Economics
Inflation in China Is Rising at a Fast Pace – NYTimes.com – the downside of continual double digit growth
Environment
MIT: We’ve Got Plenty of Uranium | Fast Company – nuclear power not the washout environment naysayers think
FMCG
Deal Profile: Unilever to Buy Alberto-Culver for $3.7 Billion – WSJ – interesting move that strengthens Unilever by taking out a competitor. It does make me wonder about all the brands that Unilever sold a few years ago though
Japan
Japan Surrenders – The Atlantic – interesting though very American focused article on changes in Japanese society over the past three decades
Marketing
Some of Sharecare.com’s Health Advice Will Be From Advertisers – NYTimes.com – this was where I thought Hunch and Yahoo! Answers could have done more. Ideal opportunity for branded content as trusted brands are experts in some areas and expertise could help imbue trust in a new brand
Media
Jason Calacanis: Revenge is a new editorial project to rival TechCrunch | guardian.co.uk – interesting that he is going down an email newsletter route. It potentially cuts social sharing a la Twitter and Facebook as well as social bookmarking off at the knees
The real cost of free | guardian.co.uk – Cory Doctorow in praise of free and dealing with ill-informed critics
Online
Yahoo: Is Carol Bartz in the process of being replaced? – Quora – insightful answer. Possibly yes as part of a process to take Yahoo! private. The critique of Bartz is telling:
- She has not articulated a coherent product or vision for the company
- She wasted over $120M on an ad campaign (no material impact on any user engagement metric)
- She promoted executives like Hillary Schneider after failing miserably with APT (Yahoo ad exchange system).
- Yahoo left between $500M to $1B of value on the table as part of the search agreement with Microsoft (Carol made Hillary the POC for the Yahoo deal team – lets just say that Microsoft had their way with the Yahoo deal team)
- She used odd (my gentle way of saying they didn’t work) PR tactics to recast Yahoo in the tech and business community
Alibaba and Yahoo quagmire: a battle of the wills | FT.com – the FT is very slow to this story. I suspect that this isn’t only about corporate wills, but also about Ma pleasing the Chinese government as well and if he manages to get even richer by doing so: win-win
Combing Your Friends’ Tastes, Not the Whole Web’s – NYTimes.com – social search market analysis
Software
N900 plug-in for OSX iSync – makes Nokia N900 into a a viable option
Technology
China Catching India As Asia’s Service Provider? – WSJ – China’s technology service industry catching up with India
Web of no web
DOCOMO and University of Tokyo to Conduct Joint Research for Urban Planning Based on Mobile Spatial Statistics | Press Center | NTT DOCOMO Global – really interesting work here, kind of reminds me of The Dark Knight were Batman maps out the building in Hong Kong using mobile phone signals and captures mafia money man Lau
Wireless
Nokia’s problem – QuirksBlog – interesting thoughts on Nokia from a software developer