Month: July 2011
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Facial recognition – ethics
Former CEO Eric Schmidt made a big deal of facial recognition databases being the one technology that Google wouldn’t deploying as it is an ethical and privacy set too far. Face recognition is currently used in law enforcement situations from policing football matches to anti-terrorism detection and surveillance amongst crowds. Google does use a certain…
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Hackgate & UK audience
Much has been made this week on the Murdoch’s appearing at a parliamentary inquiry into hackgate: a scandal involving phone hacking and other nefarious practices by the media in order to get stories. What is less getting less to no real discussion is what hackgate says about the UK audience. News International is a business,…
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Aspiration of flight
Inter-city rail services increasingly define themselves in terms of comparison to airlines. Take for instance the Chinese attendants recruited for the countries new Beijing-Shanghai ‘bullet-train’ route. The 403 women inductees look like classic air stewardess material and have gone through a similar kind of polishing process. The Chinese describe these attendees as ‘high-speed sisters’ 高姐.…
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Maze restaurant
In many other countries the best restaurants are often found in a good quality hotel; in London you have a lot of restaurants out of hotels in areas like Mayfair and Soho. Gordon Ramsay’s Maze restaurant is inside the London Marriott Grosvenor Square hotel. Grosvenor Square is a bit out of my stomping ground, but…
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London through a tourist’s eyes
My friend Tomoko was in London the other week and it was interesting seeing what excited her about London, as Tomoko’s London is very different from my own. Firstly ‘knowing London’ means knowing central and Northwest London rather than central and East London. Shoreditch, Clerkenwell and Soho aren’t attractive; St Johns Wood and Mayfair are…
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Pepsi cola + more news
Pepsi cola PepsiCo Gives Pepsi-Cola a Renewed Marketing Push – WSJ.com – You just can’t go dark on brands and expect them to hold their value (paywall). At a corporate level PepsiCo had tried to focus more on functional / healthy foods and so had under invested in Pepsi cola as a brand. Market share…
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Idea Man by Paul Allen
Self-described ‘Idea Man‘ Paul Allen was the technical foil to Bill Gates’ when he founded Microsoft. Much of the Microsoft story is the story of Bill Gates – partly due to the way the company’s PR machine built Gates up as a software superman. The wheels came off the wagon with the Judge Jackson trial…
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News Of The World
I was getting ready to give my presentation at the CIPR the other evening when the news broke on Twitter about the News of The World. There was a sense (which I personally believe to be wrong) that this was going to result in a revolution that would: I want to hear a revolution out…
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MySpace
This has taken longer to write than I would have liked since TalkTalk Business still has me living the analogue lifestyle at home. I wanted to put finger to keyboard because much of the coverage around MySpace acquistion focused on: There was less attention paid to the Specific Media side of the story and what…