Month: June 2012

  • Carlos Slim + more news

    Carlos Slim What is Carlos Slim up to? | beyondbrics – Carlos Slim has been buying distressed mobile telecom assets in Europe and Argentina. Carlos Slim is a Mexican businessman. Grupo Carso is the holding company that Carlos Slim uses to buy these firms. Beauty American women most likely to use anti-aging face creams, the…

  • Expandables

    BBC documentary series The Men Who Made Us Fat is a fascinating mix of health, marketing history and the law of unintended consequences that has affected the modern diet. One phrase struck me as being a quite interesting. Expandables was a term to use a category of food products that would be part of multi-pack…

  • Microsoft Surface

    Some thoughts on the implications of the Microsoft Surface launch: Microsoft and tablets I found the Microsoft a curious device full of interesting design choices. It was interesting because it seemed to be defined by what it wasn’t. The device was a world way from the clunky tablet keyboard combos by the likes of Fujitsu…

  • Retina screens

    Unlike most long-term Apple customers, I was disappointed by the new Apple MacBook Pro models with the retina screens. What are Retina screens? Retina screens aren’t a distinct display technology, they are Apple marketing catchall term for new screens that have a number of distinct properties. A pixel density that would be comparable to your…

  • Worm by Mark Bowden

    Worm author Mark Bowden is better known for his other non-fiction (non-technology) books Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo. He has a background as a journalist and has contributed to The Atlantic magazine. I was curious to know how a non-tech journalist would handle a story as complex as the Conficker botnet as some of…

  • London 2012 + more news

    London 2012 London 2012 brought into sharp focus the high cost and low benefit of hosting the Olympics. The Olympics has a low to negative economic impact. London 2012 was a way of seizing land for redevelopment that benefited a few investors. To do this the organising committee of London 2012 closed down a plethora…

  • Facebook IPO postmortem

    This post is a collection of thoughts that I’ve had about the Facebook IPO, I realise that there may not be a cohesiveness to some of this but I wanted to put it all down in one place. In less than two months, Facebook has gone from being the technology sector darling to its typhoid…

  • Ellen Pao + more news

    Ellen Pao Ellen Pao, the protagonist in the Kleiner Perkins law suit doesn’t sound like the typical kind of person one would think of in terms of coercion and harassment. She is the child of middle class Taiwanese immigrants to the US. Ellen Pao has an educational background in law and technology topped with an…