Category: gadget | 小工具 | 가제트 | ガジェット

What constitutes a gadget? The dictionary definition would be a small mechanical or electronic device or tool, especially an ingenious or novel one.

When I started writing this blog the gadget section focused on personal digital assistants such as the Palm PDA and Sony’s Clie devices. Or the Anoto digital pen that allowed you to record digitally what had been written on a specially marked out paper page, giving the best of both experiences.

Some of the ideas I shared weren’t so small like a Panasonic sleeping room for sleep starved, but well heeled Japanese.

When cutting edge technology failed me, I periodically went back to older technology such as the Nokia 8850 cellphone or my love of the Nokia E90 Communicator.

I also started looking back to discontinued products like the Sony Walkman WM-D6C Pro, one of the best cassette decks ever made of any size. I knew people who used it in their hi-fi systems as well as for portable audio.

Some of the technology that I looked at were products that marked a particular point in my life such as my college days with the Apple StyleWriter II. While my college peers were worried about getting on laser printers to submit assignments, I had a stack of cartridges cotton buds and isopropyl alcohol to deal with any non catastrophic printer issues and so could print during the evening in the comfort of my lodgings.

Alongside the demise in prominence of the gadget, there has been a rise in the trend of everyday carry or EDC.

Apple’s MacBook Pro at 20.
Apple’s MacBook Pro turned 20 this year. Steve Jobs introduced the move to Intel processors that made the original Apple MacBook Pro possible at WWDC 2005. The reason revolved around computing power per watt. PowerPC’s offered 15 units of performance per watt, Intel’s future roadmap at the time offered 70 units of performance per watt.

This impacted energy efficiency and heat management as much of raw processing power – both of which were important for portable devices and smaller desktop units. Those metrics were a symptom of IBM’s inability to push the PowerPC architecture and fabrication processes as far as Intel could. Here’s Steve Jobs’ from his keynote address:

Because we want to make the best computers for our customers looking forward. Now, I stood up here two years ago in front of you and I promised you [a 3 GHz Power Macintosh G5], and we haven’t been able to deliver that to you yet. I think a lot of you would like a G5 in your PowerBook and we haven’t been able to deliver that to you yet. But these aren’t even the most important reasons. The most important reasons are that as we look ahead, though we may have great products right now, and we’ve got some great PowerPC product[s] still yet to come, as we look ahead we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you and we don’t know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map. And that’s why we’re going to do this. When we look at Intel, they’ve got great performance, yes, but they’ve got something else that’s very important to us. Just as important as performance, is power consumption. And the way we look at it is performance per watt. For one watt of power how much performance do you get? And when we look at the future road maps projected out in mid-2006 and beyond, what we see is the PowerPC gives us sort of 15 units of performance per watt, but the Intel road map in the future gives us 70, and so this tells us what we have to do.

My journey with Apple’s MacBook Pro.

I was leaving Yahoo! to go to an agency then called Waggener Edstrom, bringing my experience working on digital campaigns and using blogs as a product communications channel. My redundancy cheque was in my bank account and my Mac Mini was of limited use due to it being a desktop computer.

Based on what I had seen the previous year and conversations I had with Yahoo! engineers there was only one laptop for me to get: the Apple MacBook Pro.

The Apple MacBook Pro represented a step change in what you could do. You were longer tethered by your power cord to your machine. At Yahoo! we had a bad cultural habit of using our laptops in meetings, not only for presenting, but to retrieve relevant files, take notes and have sideline conversations on Yahoo! Messenger that may have been apropos to the meeting going on, or organising what to have for lunch.

While you could access Yahoo! Messenger on your phone, it was much slower and less user friendly than iMessage, Signal or WhatsApp would be now.

If you had two meetings back-to-back there was a dash back to your desk to plug into your charger. Going to a conference meant a scramble for those seats next to a power socket.

The MagSafe connector meant that your laptop would no longer get dragged onto the floor by the power cable if someone brushed past your table. Instead it would be secured magnetically and easily disconnected.

If your Apple MacBook Pro was plummeting to the floor, an accelerometer onboard would at least park the hard drive heads to minimise any damage on landing. It wasn’t fool proof but it was step out on options previously available.

On the Apple MacBook Pro, the laptop lid closed and stayed in place, once Apple moved way from using the last generation PowerBook design case. Many Windows laptops had to have their screens locked with a latch or a button, a number still do. Previous PowerBooks were only slight more elegant with a flush mechanical push-button placed on the front edge of the lower case. Pressing it pushed a small internal bar that unhooked a latch extending down from the display bezel.

In a darkened room the keyboard would light up. This was a game changer when you were watching a projected presentation, or in my case, going through emails while watching CSI DVD boxsets of an evening.

Apple’s MacBook Pro was a game changer for me. I didn’t need to work at my desk. I could work in a local coffee shop, or a different part of the office without bringing my power pack.

Apple’s MacBook Pro radically changed working from home. You no longer had to worry about a separate webcam perching precariously on the top of your screen. Instead, the MacBook Pro had it built into the top of the laptop screen. Giving you an integrated video studio that we now take for granted but was revolutionary when it was launched.

An aside on laptop cameras

So IBM made the first laptop with an integrated laptop with a webcam back in 1996 called the ThinkPad 850 which was a PowerPC workstation in a laptop format.

There was also the Sony VAIO PCG-C1 PictureBook which was a Windows sub notebook that had a camera which could be rotated to look towards the user or in front of the laptop lid. Both were very expensive for the time and saw limited usage. The MD in my first agency had a PCG-C1 and it was a beautiful piece of industrial design for the time.

It’s the kind of laptop that would have looked right at home in Ghost In The Shell. Neither of them models could be considered to mainstream products. But the Apple MacBook Pro brought the built-in camera into the mainstream of laptop design.

Remote working.

Skype was only a few years old at this point, allowing for video calls with clients, distributed teams and remote working. With a MacBook Pro, you had it all together in a seamless package. Twenty years ago we were pretty close to what became the new normal during COVID and in the post-COVID work world.

Battery life

Early on in my agency career, a lot of my clients had Tumi leather bags. The Tumi Alpha bag became a corporate rite-of-passage. You were a corporate traveller. Tumi had benefits for air travellers, being soft enough to squeeze into an overseas bin, but tough enough to protect the contents and not burst at the seams while you waited at the checked baggage carousel.

Beyond the social signalling Tumi bags became useful as a repository for spare batteries and a charging block with cable. There was probably a note pad and some pens in there as well, along with travel documents.

That’s what a work day outside the office needed. One of the pleasures of people watching in an airline lounge at the time was watching the passive aggressive conflict over a limited amount of electric sockets available.

The Apple MacBook Pro started off with a solid 4 1/2 hours of battery life making it ideal if you went to a conference like I ended up doing at the time. Or you could take it along to a pitch, present and head back to the office without your power brick. Things changed when Apple introduced the unibody model. You could no longer swap out a spare battery. Apple eventually compromised with a low price battery replacement for aged out batteries. This also meant that Apple pivoted to a full working day on batteries – a game changer in laptop computing.

The move to ARM-based Apple silicon

In the same way that Steve Jobs announced the move to Intel in 2005, that reasoning was mirrored in the 2020 move to ARM-based Apple silicon focus on performance per watt, which made the MacBook Pro even more ‘road warrior’ friendly.

ARM also offered other opportunities
- Custom silicon including on-silicon neural networks and security enclaves.
- Common architectures with iPads, iPhones and the AppleTV.
- Control over its own silicon roadmap, rather than being tied to Intel’s chip-making process delays.
What’s also changed over the 15 years of the MacBook Pro is their ubquity. In coffee shops like the ones near my home, the few people that seem to use non-Apple laptops are usually mainland Chinese students. And their laptops borrow a lot design cues from the MacBook Pro.

More information

Macworld Podcast: The history and future of the MacBook | Macworld

More related posts here.
September 9, 2026
August 2026 – the more than eleven edition
August 2026 introduction – (37)

Welcome to the 37th edition of my newsletter or as a bingo caller would say ‘more than eleven’.

37 in Chinese is largely considered positive as a number, based on its component numbers of 3 and 7. On the Chinese internet 37 is used to say thank you because of its similarity in sound to the English phrase.

37 seemed appropriate given the searing heat we’ve experienced across Europe during July and August.

It was roughly this time three years ago when I started writing Strategic Outcomes. I was burnt out working far too many hours at an ad agency due to being massively oversold (150 – 200% utilisation rate during a typical week with new business pitches on top) to clients.

So took myself to Paris for a short break to recharge, truth be told it took until the end of the year for me to recharge fully.

I watched programmes, finally finished a great book I had been trudging through for months, while enjoying coffee and cake in the lobby of the George V Hotel.

The first issue was written in 20 minutes and I didn’t think I would still be writing some three years later. Since then over 600 people have subscribed, I had no expectations – so it was definitely more than I had expected and I am deeply appreciative that it gets a glance, let alone a read; from so many people in such attention-poor times 🙏.

Over time Strategic Outcomes has developed a format and a voice, but now takes longer to write despite me being more practiced in writing each episode. Secondly, the length of the episode doesn’t equate to the amount of time that it takes to write.

Onwards.

The soundtrack this month isn’t the usual track selection or mix, but a podcast from the European Space Agency highlighting sounds that are literally out of this world. If that isn’t your cup of tea then I also offer this live concert recorded in the US by Cabaret Voltaire for radio station KEXP. Think of it as a modern-day version of the BBC’s Peel Sessions.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things that I’ve written

Back in 2015, Stephen Waddington invited people to submit a media diary based on a common set of questions. I revisited during the middle of the CoVID lockdown when we were in peak-Zoom usages. And I decided to revisit again this month to compare and contrast with my past installments.

Apple is launching a TV adaptation of Neuromancer, William Gibson’s seminal novel and you can see the trailers online. I had been been thinking a lot about Gibson recently from the saturation of the Neo Tokyo aesthetic in mainstream culture to the surreal nature of Silicon Valley which sounds more like Wintermute at every turn. So I curated some video interviews that Gibson had done down through the years; as well as miscellaneous things from around the web.

ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
1. I wrote about Aston Martin putting up for sale the majority of its non-automotive naming rights. It’s an important issue for marketers, but the attraction of the Aston Martin brand for people interested in cars had my post seen much more widely than I expected.
2. I posted a video where Les Binet discussed brand loyalty from a marketing science perspective and the trap marketers face by focusing on the loyalty of generation-Z customers.
3. A breakdown of the BBC Research & Development’s research report on the state of the social Internet.
4. Michael Farmer triangulated advertising agency problems: big workloads, plummeting fees, clients trapped in low growth or de-growth.
5. Temporal mismatches can affect corporate innovation as much as it can affect hedge fund strategies like Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness LP.
Books that I have read

Like many people I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby at school. At the time I was uneasy at the class interpretation of the book as a portrait of a tragedy set in 1920s excess. Re-reading it years later, I thought of it more as a clash of antiheroes dripping of prejudice and latent racism. The book is full of grifters and cads. What makes the narrator a more likeable at a surface level is that he’s a more inexperienced grifter who hasn’t managed to exorcise his own conscience at the time of the incident. Now, more than ever, it feels very of our times.

It was unintentional that I read Regime Change: Inside The Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump in tandem with The Great Gatsby. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan craft a book that is a blow-by-blow account of the second Trump administration over its first 18 months in office. It’s gossipy without the analysis one got from Bob Woodward’s books on previous administrations. What struck me was the illusion of coherence.

A lot was made in the media about the publication of Mandate for Leadership The Conservative Promise Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project published by The Heritage Foundation as a plan for government. But Haberman and Swan’s book paint a picture of a government improvising it up as they went along with appointees who were often drowning in their roles. One thing stuck with me more than anything else was how partners like GCC nations and Jeff Bezos who courted the administration were bilked. This didn’t seem to be out of malice but incompetence and ineptitude.

Finally in a time of a thin skinned administration taking action against its critics, it’s a wonder Haberman and Swan haven’t been embroiled in legal disputes.

Things I have been inspired by.

I was thinking a lot about the rise of betting culture, from the rise of Robinhood and crypto wallets or prediction markets to ‘trading courses’ promoted extensively across social media. IPSOS encapsulates the why elegantly with its trend of Nouveau Nihilism. It becomes a rational response to constrained circumstances.

Luxury brand CHANEL has been doing some interesting fireside chats in their CHANEL Connects project. I was particularly interested in their interview with Thomas Bangalter. He framed Daft Punk in terms of an experiment in anonymity. They were initially inspired by Detroit’s Underground Resistance but that evolved into cinematic science fiction.

Bangalter’s critiqued streaming media as eroding the ritualistic and symbolic power of listening space. Bangalter avoided generative AI because it reduces art to verbal prompting and pre-calculated outputs. He considered creation as an intuitive, non-verbal journey; bypassing the process misses the entire point of art. More from Bangalter here.

Chart of the month.

Growing up we were a family who read. My Mum was the first person to sit the Irish leaving certificate and civil service examinations in her family. My Dad, left school at 13 to serve an apprenticeship, but had a love of books. One of the books we had was an account of The Kennedy Family by Joseph Dinneen.

In the book there is one section where Joseph Kennedy Sr talks about the inciting incident that encouraged him to sell all his shares. Kennedy goes to get his shoes shined near his office. The boy shining his shoes immediately took him for an investor and began offering specific stock picks and market tips.

Kennedy then realised if a shoeshine boy knows as much about the market as he did, then it was time for him to sell up. Kennedy goes back to his office, closes out his portfolio and starts to short the market in advance of Black Thursday. How true the story was is a whole other story, but the ‘late’ buyer market theory underpinning it is sound enough. When those with the least disposable income are highly leveraged in the market, it means that the pool of ‘new buyers’ no longer exists to push prices higher.

Thinking about Joseph Kennedy’s story I dived into how Americans hold wealth. On the face of it Kennedy’s rule doesn’t seem to be coming through at the moment. However there might be several other factors:
- The massive appreciation in house prices.
- The hollowing out of the middle class wealth.
- Wealthy people make dumb money mistakes too (Bernie Madoff, Situational Awareness LP, Bear Stearns and Neil Woodford’s funds).
Things I have watched.

Many people of heard of Akira, which was originally a manga and then an anime film written and directed by Katsushiro Otomo. Later on Otomo wrote and designed Roujin Z that was directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo. Roujin Z on the surface of it is social satire that addresses concerns about caring for the elderly population in the early 21st century, there are concerns about technology and the possibility of a resurgent military being authoritarianism.

The film taps into the phenomenon of social hospitalisation for the elderly where their families would sign them away to hospitals once they were admitted and refused to take them back. This happened because care homes carried a stigma that hospitals didn’t. This stigma came from the post-war collapse of the le system, where the eldest son and his wife lived with his elderly parents taking care of them to the end.

Stylistically, Roujin Z is interesting for its use of mixed media techniques including live film and photo-reference photogrammetry layout. This was part of a stylistic movement in anime called 90s realism. It includes Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Patlabor 2: The Movie and Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade.

Watching it 35 years after the film was produced was interesting in terms of the foreshadowing within the film.
- At the time Sony was secretly designing the Apple PowerBook 100 for Apple. Its design appears in the film with a Sony logo. The film launched in cinemas at least a month before Apple launched the laptop.
- Sony appears all over the film and throughout the hospital equipment. It foreshadows Sony’s pivot into elderly care and its abandonment of its iconic consumer electronics business.
- The film shows a ubiquitous, always-on network with messaging and what we’d now call artificial intelligence. This was way before the web was commonplace.
The film matches all these heavy themes with great physical comedy.

Useful tools.

Copynpaste is a single purpose website that acts as an intermediary moving copy between applications. It’s more of a lifesaver than you realise and works just as well on mobile devices as it does on desktop.

Googler is a cleaner way of experiencing search. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and people came into work hungover, Google was separated from search rivals like Infoseek, Excite and AltaVista by its clean interface. Now you have lots of things on a search engine results page fighting for your attention. If you install Homebrew on your computer, you can then install Googler which gives you the Google search experience without distractions in your terminal window.

The sales pitch.

I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”. The kind where complexity, business goals, and human culture collide, requiring synthesis into actionable insights.

I have a decade-plus of expertise across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I have been embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots with the rapid rise of Gen AI. Following the completion of this engagement, I have continued to partner with agencies and founders on high-impact projects. My recent freelance work includes architecting the brand narrative for a fast-moving startup, driving strategic creative for new business pitches, and developing a dynamic sports partnership activation.

I focus on what works: balancing long-term brand growth with short-term sales. I don’t just write presentation decks; I build campaigns that actually ship. I’m hired to develop, or strategy QA their ideas before they go live, helping leadership teams avoid expensive mistakes. I prioritise commercial reality, smart budgets, and measurable results over cosmetic solutions.

How I help leadership teams:
- Strategy QA: I put clarity into complex roadmaps before you commit capital.
- Cultural Translation: I bridge the gap between technical infrastructure and human adoption, across EMEA/JAPAC.
- Commercial Grounding: I build strategy for campaigns that ship, prioritising measurable ROI over “hype” metrics.
The Strategic Toolkit:
- Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
- AI-Enhanced Planning: Literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
- Modular Strategic Leadership: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am an operator who reads—using a deep archive of industry expertise to ensure your next pivot isn’t just “new,” but actually sustainable. If you have a challenge that requires an all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my August 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other, stay cool and enjoy the well deserved bank holiday.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on my blog, Substack as well as LinkedIn.
August 27, 2026
William Gibson + more things
William Gibson

I have been thinking a lot about William Gibson recently. Judging by my social feeds, the Neo Tokyo aesthetic has saturated mainstream culture (from 90s anime clips, tech wear, creator built cyber decks and Hong Kong at night) and our Silicon Valley elites sound more like Wintermute at every turn.

The K-shaped economy described by Gary Stevenson in his thesis, feels very much like the have-nots of the sprawl trilogy.

Finally, Apple is on the cusp of releasing a TV adaptation of Gibson’s first novel Neuromancer next year. So I had to post these vintage videos of Gibson as they feel so ‘now’ despite being decades old.

William Gibson talking about cyberpunk as a genre in 1990. He calls a distinctively post-modern fiction genre. In a prophetic turn they talk about the unique way in which cyberpunk has been manifested into the real world; just not in the countercultural way that Gibson envisaged. Although the relationship now between Gibson’s work and the real world are probably too close for comfort. And there is a great interview with Timothy Leary.

Related to that was the cypherpunk movement who realised that cryptography was essential to online worlds.

Cypherpunks were concerned about the government a quarter century before the Edward Snowden leaks and the algorithmic web with a web of data for sale to advertisers and bad actors.

And in this clip, William Gibson contextualises the early web in this interview

Business

The Technology Industry Is Stumbling Down The Path To Becoming A Proper Supply Chain | Forrester – I think is a polite way of saying that the industry has moved from growth to value investment. Whether the industry has a maturity in thinking that reflects this new position is something else.

China

Spain’s largest Chinese investment to rely on workers from China | Investment Monitor – very similar to the belt-and-road model elsewhere. Interesting the lack of pushback that came from Spain, given the size of the country’s construction industry.

Design

30 Years of Micro Motors to Robot Dexterous Hands: MINDSYNC TECH and Jiangsu Leili Solve the Mechanical Stiffness Problem in Humanoid Gripping – interesting article in Pandaily. It’s basically smaller sizes of strain wave gears. Back when I went to the launch of Automata’s EVA robotic arm launch, strain wave gears came up as a topic of conversation. Robotic precision focused on software because only standardised strain wave gears were available from a limited amount of suppliers like Harmonic Drive. The Chinese seem to have sidestepped this innovation pinch point with powered strain wave gears small enough to operate a robotic hand with a high degree of dexterity.

Gadgets

Open Source Vacuum Avoids Cloud | Hackaday – thanks to open source software, a Raspberry Pi board, off the shelf parts and accessible additive manufacturing there is now an open source Roomba style vacuum cleaner.

ŌURA and LillyDirect to Expand Support for People Using GLP-1 Therapies with New Tools and Savings Options – The Pulse Blog – I was there when wearables were proposed as a digital kit to another obesity management product years before this deal was announced. I am surprised that it took so long. The partner selection implies a heavy female bias to the expected customer base.

ChinAI #366: Most Companion Robots Die by Day 30 – model capabilities will become increasingly cheap, while scenario-specific evaluation datasets will become increasingly expensive. Most companion products will not die because their AI models lack power, but because users stop opening the app by Day 30.

Germany

Watching China in Europe – August 2026 – by Noah Barkin – Volkswagen is now pursuing a strategy that consists of:
- Doubling down on manufacturing at its EV hub in Hefei, China as part of what Blume describes as an “in China for China” approach.
- Exporting the cars it produces in China, in Blume’s own words, to Southeast Asia, Australia, India, South America, Africa and Europe, in what looks more like an “in China for the world” strategy (minus the US market).
- Pursuing mass layoffs in Germany, while luring Chinese carmakers into the German factories that Volkswagen is struggling to sustain.
- Urging the EU to accelerate and broaden its trade defense measures against Chinese competitors that are seizing market share for plug-in hybrids at an astonishing rate.
If your head is spinning, you are not alone …

Ideas

FCC approves orbital space mirrors, first test satellites will launch this year — large spacecraft reflects sunlight to Earth’s surface for construction sites, search-and-rescue lighting, and more | Tom’s Hardware

Indonesia

Indonesia’s 9 Dragons. Who Are They? Are They Too Rich For Indonesia’s Good? | Dr Wealth

Innovation

Why the US is losing Chinese AI stars | FT – comparable opportunities at home.

Russia’s Newest Kh-101 Cruise Missile Upgrade Points to Chinese Help | Wes O’Donnell – the recent upgrade to Russia’s Kh-101 missile capabilities owes far less to stolen Western secrets than it does to Chinese industrial hardware. Whilst espionage may have ironed out a few technical creases, Russia is quietly acquiring the machine tools and microelectronics from Chinese suppliers. These are needed to turn a dormant Soviet-era innovation into a mass-produced reality.

The rationale for putting such high-spec, durable components like single-crystal engine blades into a single-use weapon comes down to a recent design trade-off. Having substantially increased the missile’s warhead size at the expense of its fuel capacity, Russian engineers required a hotter, vastly more efficient engine to recoup the lost flight range. Manufacturing equipment sourced from Chinese vendors provided the industrial “kitchen” necessary to make this crucial engineering workaround a reality.

Porous material could pull 1.8 liters of drinking water daily from dry air | TechXplore

IP

The 6 wildest claims in Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI | The Verge – OpenAI allegedly “coached” Apple employees on how to bypass security measures. Apple alleged Tan kept an internal document that outlines employee off-boarding procedures. OpenAI allegedly used this information to warn employees coming from Apple about the company’s security checks and “coached” them on how to avoid it.

OpenAI advised departing Apple workers not to disclose their new employer and also offered tips on how to avoid a “dreaded walk out,” which would result in their immediate removal from the company, preventing them from accessing Apple’s systems for a standard two weeks, the lawsuit alleges. OpenAI is accused of telling Apple employees not to “sign anything at the exit interview,” and if they’re asked to sign a document, to tell OpenAI “asap.”

In the lawsuit, Apple says that OpenAI’s alleged tactics “appear to be having their desired effect.” Apple claims it has noticed “a recent trend of employees who are leaving Apple for OpenAI and taking steps to evade security measures,” including workers “ignoring outreach by security personnel to schedule exit processes and security reviews.”

Luxury

Why luxury brands are falling for Asia’s queer romance shows | FT

Rolex accused of hiring ‘crowds’ for Shanghai centenary exhibition | Reddit r/Watches – the use of gig workers to bulk up footfall numbers is unfortunate but understandable. It’s not a great look. They may have not have been hitting footfall numbers.

Secondly there is a need in Chinese culture for events to be bustling with people. I remember going to the China South City wholesale mall in the Shenzhen region. Some of the car park was converted into basketball courts so that there would be the sound of people there, even if they were having fun rather than purchasing supplies for their business.

The problem for Rolex got much worse when this story breached beyond the Chinese internet into the feeds of western watch enthusiasts.

Security

OpenAI admits AI ‘agent’ caused major cyber breach by itself | FT – I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a certain amount of PR behind this story.

Royal Navy Drops a Drone Boat Out of a Plane | Maritime Executive – this feels like an important step towards more autonomous warfare, particularly in rapid expeditionary deployment.

German firm files for insolvency, blames cybercrims who shut down production for 6 weeks | The Register

UK, EU officially pin Poland energy cyberattack on Russia | The Register

Space Force officially has its own weapon for taking out satellites | Task & Purpose

Five Takeaways From the Times Investigation Into Larry Ellison’s A.I. Gamble – The New York Times – The United States had one major advantage in the A.I. race: China lagged behind in computer chip technology. The Biden administration cut off Chinese access to American-made chips, but China could still obtain computing power remotely through other countries.

In 2024, Oracle made a $6.5 billion deal to build an data centre complex in Malaysia from which it could supply computing power to ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, and other foreign companies. Oracle’s facility in Malaysia was soon on track to become the second-biggest in the world, providing by one estimate more than one-fifth of China’s total A.I. computing power. Ellison is now powering the A.I. ambitions of China aka America’s biggest geopolitical rival.

Cybersecurity expert Steve Sims discusses how hackers are now using AI.

Software

3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber | News from Google – but no Gemini 3.6 Pro yet.

Exclusive-Beijing is looking at curbing overseas access to China’s top AI models, sources say | Yahoo! Finance

Microsoft to axe 4,800 jobs as it resets Xbox | FT

Palantir CEO Alex Karp says ‘something has gone completely wrong’ with how AI is sold | CNBC – Palantir CEO Alex Karp caused a stir by discussing what he says is growing unhappiness among U.S. businesses about the costs to access models from the biggest AI companies, like OpenAI and Anthropic. And he asserted that those customers are getting “no value” from the technology.

Taiwan

China-friendly KMT stunts Taiwan’s attempt to grow into a fully formed hedgehog | The Strategist

Technology

Hyundai buys SoftBank’s Boston Dynamics stake for $325 million | Quartz – Hyundai is using the robots in its own operations from factories to construction sites. They are even being used in Posco’s steel foundries too.

RISC-V Is Inevitable, State of the Union Keynote Argues – EE Times

Axios AI+ |⛽ Trading compute – 1 big thing: Wall Street wants to trade AI compute like oil. This reminded me a lot of Enron’s doomed attempt to trade bandwidth in a similar way, which was the core offering of Enron Broadband Services.

Wireless

OnePlus, the ‘Flagship-Killer’ Smartphone Brand, Is All but Dead | WIRED – this surprised me given that Samsung has been on the ropes and OnePlus had such a good relationship with Qualcomm.
August 13, 2026
April 2026 newsletter – 33rd edition aka ‘dirty knee’
April 2026 introduction – (33) dirty knee

This is the 33rd edition of Strategic Outcomes, I had briefly toyed with calling it 33 1/3rd edition – but parked that foolishness as only Jed Hallam and Alec Samways would have half-heartedly smirked at a rather naff DJ dad joke.

In bingo halls ’33’ was announced as dirty knee. For generations past, this would brought up memories of organised sports like winter football games ad the more real-life social activities of playing outside with friends. According to research conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Save the Children back in 2022, only 27% of UK children now play outside.

However, other data, like the UK government’s own The Children’s People and Nature Survey for England: 2025 update implies that number may be higher than the OnePoll research suggests. The University of Exeter published research which seems to be more in line with the UK government’s research. They found that 34 per cent of children don’t play outdoors on school days, while 20 per cent don’t play outdoors on weekends.

In Chinese culture 33 is considered to be a good number. 3 sounds similar to birth or life. Two 3s is considered to intensify or double this idea. Which seems an appropriate sentiment for spring and the beginning of the financial year. Bring it on!

This month’s soundtrack to the newsletter is a sublime 1980s disco mix by Toronto-based Japanese DJ Sakiko Nagai.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things I’ve written.

A collection of inspiration from Malaysia Airlines mascot Pilot Parker to Sir Martin Sorrell.

Some thoughts how WPP might deal with its Burson dilemma.

ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
1. Aston Martin issued its third profit warning in a year and sold its Formula 1 naming rights for £50 million to raise cash thanks to internal delays and international tariffs.
2. Meta is projected to pass Google in digital advertising spend thanks to Reels, Threads and WhatsApp.
3. The implications of Tottenham Hotspur being relegated from the Premier League has implications beyond the pitch and into sponsor’s boardrooms.
4. Nike made a bold leap for the UEFA Champions League match ball contract with a bid that doubled the value of the previous Adidas contract.
5. Tom Roach outlined frameworks that help navigate the transition to more sustained growth once initial performance marketing channels hit saturation.
Books that I have read.

My friend Ian lent to me Ikenami Shōtarō‘s book The Killer on The Streets which is part of his Samurai Detectives series. The book follows the adventures of a 60-something retired swordsman and his son as they become embroiled in the hunt for what we’d now call a serial killer.

Things I have been inspired by.

Supply chained

Even before the current debacle in the Persian Gulf, globalisation brought logics and supply chains into high focus. Supply Chained is a new podcast with great presenters that provides top quality analysis on different aspects of global supply chains. The first episode looks at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

Generative AI & cooking

I first met Rowan Kisby a decade ago this year at 100 Victoria Embankment, back when I was contracting for Unilever on their Family Brands global range of margarines. Rowan worked for what was then MullenLowe Profero. Recently we reconnected on a shared Slack group. Rowan put together a report on the intersection of generative AI use and cooking.

I found it unsurprising that one of the behaviours consumers are doing is telling the generative AI service what they have in their fridge and asking it for dish / recipe recommendations. Back when I worked for Yahoo! we saw similar behaviours in the search box, particularly amongst US users. Reddit now gave Rowan better qualitative insights on how these results play out.

More interesting from the point of view of retailers was its ability to create and manage a shopping list for weekly groceries. The idea of a retailer or an FMCG building an AI skill (or Gem on Google Gemini) is just begging to be sold in by agencies to their clients.

Praykinson

I got to judge the amazing entries from around the world at Adforum’s PHNX awards. One campaign really stuck with me. A health campaign by Dentsu Creative Thailand and Vajira Hospital in Thailand to help people with Parkinson’s disease was smart, solution-based and had a great insight behind it. More on the project here.

CHESS

I was listening to the MM+M podcast interview with Chris Brandow, head of account management at VCCP Health US and came across the acronym / nemonic CHESS. It comes out of thought leadership research ‘Checking the Memory Code‘ that VCCP did in conjunction with Cowry Consulting.

CHESS looks to encapsulate some of the key attributes that makes marketing creative effective. It codifies marketing science findings that you would be familiar with fromthe likes of, the IPA, System1 and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and provides it in a list that pharma clients and their agency partners can use as a RAG (red-amber-green) guide to evaluating everything from initial creative concepts through to output.
- Character – what be called a fluent object elsewhere. It is a mascot or memorable element like Alexandr the meerkat from Compare The Market. It could also be a spokesperson like Tommy Lee Jones’ appearances in Boss Coffee adverts as ‘Alien Jones‘.
- Humour – the power of humour used to be well known as an advertising device and in recent years has come back on trend at Cannes. It helps create talkability and memorability
- Emotion – Binet and Fields established the power of emotion over rational advertising. Daniel Kahneman conveyed the power of emotional ‘system 1 thinking’ in Thinking Fast and Slow.
- Surprise – the unexpected. Our enjoyment of storytelling is the process understanding which story archetype a tale belongs to. If we guess it easily it falls flat like a Dad joke, on the other hand a twist in the tale makes it memorable.
- Sonic branding – jingles fell out of fashion, yet made ads memorable.
Chart of the month.

Ofcom released their 2026 Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes report, more here. I went back through past reports to look at smartphone only internet access, households with no access to internet and claimed usage of generative AI services.
- Internet access is now at a point comparable to where broadcast television was previously.
- The digital divide is now about the mode of access, with smartphones on mobile internet providing a poorer service.
Things I have watched.

My internet went down on April Fool’s Day, so I revisited Wong Ka wai’s back catalogue. I watched the films the first time after I got a portable DVD player and there was a massive surge in video labels including Artificial Eye and Tartan publishing arthouse titles. This provided a great way to explore and experience world cinema and I gravitated towards Japanese and Hong Kong cinema.

I was familiar with traditional martial arts films and the ‘gun fu’ of John Woo. Wong Ka wai was Hong Kong’s answer to French new wave auteurs. Around the same time, I ended up going out with someone who lived in Hong Kong when we bonded over Faye Wong’s performance in Chungking Express. In a moment of delicious irony, I got to watch Wong Ka wai’s ‘western’ film My Blueberry Nights while staying in Hong Kong.

This time around I was working my way through Curzon’s Wong Kar wai boxset which was bought for my birthday during COVID time. It contained
- As Tears Go By
- Days of Being Wild
- Chungking Express
- Fallen Angels
- Happy Together
- In The Mood For Love
- 2046
More on my time watching The World of Wong Kar wai boxset here. You can enjoy most of the films listed at the Prince Charles cinema ‘The Films of Wong Kar wai season‘.

After all that I needed something a bit lighter, so I watched the Japanese film Supermarket Woman. It is a light hearted comedy caper about a middle aged woman, a poorly performing supermarket, business rivalry and a bit of skullduggery. Nobuko Miyamoto plays Hanako Inouse who brings her customer eye view to revitalising the Honest Goro supermarket. The film was written and directed by Jûzô Itami, better known for Tampopo. Supermarket Woman was made a decade after Tampopo, but both feel of the same time. Itami-san was often compared to the French new wave directors of the 1960s and I can see why.

OSS117 is a series of books and films written from the late 1950s onwards. The films were made in 1963 onwards, with a reinvention and reboot in the 2010s.
- OSS 117 is Unleashed – is a French film about an American agent with French heritage who works for the CIA. Compared to the Bond franchise, its French new wave. No gadgets but a dollop of guile. It’s notable for its underwater scenes, scuba diving was new thing opening up a new world under the waves thanks to Jacques Cousteau.
- OSS 117: Panic in Bangkok – is the first colour film in the series. Our hero goes to Bangkok to investigate a dead colleague who looked into ineffective vaccines.
Useful tools.

PopChar – PopChar is an old but good utility app that has been supporting Mac users since the late 1980s. You are trying to find the right emoji or symbol to type, in each font.

Beats Studio Buds + – while I usually use Shure wired earphones for most applications there are some times that wireless is handier (like reducing wired clutter on a busy desk, or listening to podcasts while cooking or folding laundry).

I was leery of the Beats brand because of their reputation of having a muddy bass sound with a poor sound stage. I was pleasantly surprised by these. They are as balanced sound as a pair of AirPods. They have reasonable noise cancellation, comparable to my old Bose earbuds. They charge on the USB-C cable as my iPhone and MacBook Pro. They are less noticeable than a pair of AirPods and still integrate into Apple’s ‘Find My’ service seamlessly.

Google Gemini app for Mac – I hope that this will help with my current tab and window juggling in Safari. I will let you know how I am getting on in a few months once I have given it a full shakedown.

The sales pitch.

I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.

With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors from narratives and new business pitches to sports partnerships.

My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.

The Strategic Toolkit:
- Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
- AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
- Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my April 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the May bank holiday.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on my blog, Substack as well as LinkedIn.
April 29, 2026
January 2026 newsletter
January 2026 introduction – (30) the dirty Gertie edition

I am now at issue 30, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘dirty gertie’. This phrase was the nickname given in the 1920s to a statue called by La Délivrance by French sculptor Émile Guillaume.

https://flic.kr/p/7fTrty

The statue was created to celebrate the German army having being stopped before Paris in World War 1. It was originally called La Victoire – there is a matching statue in Nantes, France.

1960s student activists claimed that you shouldn’t trust anyone over the age of 30, making a virtue of ageism. While activists were deeply suspicious, 30 in Cantonese is considered to be lucky as the number three sounds like alive or life.

It might be winter outside, but it doesn’t need to be winter in your head thanks to Graeme Park’s Best of 2025 part 1 which is two and a half hours of goodness. Now we have a sound track, let’s get into it.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things I’ve written.

Each year, I try and write an account of year as it happens. It provides a perspective on what appeared important at the time rather than in retrospect. Here’s the one I did for 2025.

The Dot LLM Era came out of my thinking about the massive expenditure in building infrastructure and the computing power needed by AI services like OpenAI and Anthropic, asking how it will be paid for and what it means for for business, consumers, investors and technologies.

There was so much happening from childhood beauty product usage alarming dermatologists to corporate and national moves in AI sovereignty. So I captured some of the most interesting of them here.

Books that I have read.

https://flic.kr/p/2rQ353G

Mariana Mazzucato’s The Value of Everything. Mazzucato’s work was reflected in the Labour Party’s economic manifesto during the 2024 general election. The book does a good job of diagnosing the current challenges that the UK economy faces at the present time. More on the book here.

How to Write a Good Advertisement: a short course in copywriting by Victor O. Schwab. During the CoVID lockdown, I picked up several books on my craft. This was one of them. Schwab wrote this book in 1962, when his audience would have been predominantly writing advertising copy for campaigns run predominantly in newspapers – but all of the principles in the book remain solid. More on the book here.

Things I have been inspired by.

Every time I get a brief that defines an audience as a generation my heart sinks a bit for several reasons. Which is why I was glad to read this Ipsos View Point and share it as widely as possible. Generational Marketing: Breaking free from stereotypes provides research on the nuances missed by a generational approach, how we differ by age cohort and life stage, alongside what brings us together as common challenges.

While it won’t get as much ink as Christmas or Super Bowl adverts the CIA kicked off January with another video aimed at recruiting Chinese agents. They advised them to use a VPN and Tor browser to get in touch with them online.

Chart of the month.

After I came back to London after working on various brands including Colgate in Asia, I noticed that all the Colgate adverts followed a standard formula. It puzzled me: the ads were distinctive by their ‘undistinctiveness’. They had no emotion and a limited number of brand cues beyond name checks and a pack shot or two.

If like me, you’ve ever wondered why Colgate toothpaste adverts (in Europe at least) always seem to be based around a dentist or dental nurse (who may, or may not be a generative AI) character, then Ipsos Veracity Index 2025, may have the answer.

The Ipsos Veracity Index, is a great piece of longitudinal research launched in 1983. It does an annual poll studying change in public trust towards leading professions in Britain. Much of the headlines for this year was the low trust position scored by influencers, with just 6% of people generally trusting them to tell the truth.

I think that number has a number of problems with it, to do with the phrase general which would invite them to think about creators they don’t follow at least as much as those that they do follow. Secondly, not all influencer types are supposed to be trusted be it being videos on e-gaming play, humour and general ‘banter’ or shock jock-type content.

As Ipsos themselves noted, there was a tension between the declared trust level with the amount of news consumption that now happens on social channels from influencers.

https://flic.kr/p/2rMXHXK

Getting back to the Colgate question, the answer is at the top of the table. Healthcare professionals and technical experts are at the most trusted professions in the UK.

Things I have watched.

The TV schedule was terrible over the Christmas period and there were only so many reruns of Jessie Stone that even my Dad can sit through. So I entertained him with a mix of streamed films, old VHS tapes, DVDs and Blu-Rays.

https://flic.kr/p/2rNKjdW

Reflection in a Dead Diamond directed by Hélène Cattet and impressed the hell out of me. At its heart it’s a mystery full of illusion, delusion and deception. It oscillates between two timelines one from the late sixties on and the second as an elderly version of the protagonist in the present day. In his day, the protagonist had been a Francophone James Bond-type figure, but darker like Fleming’s novels rather than the version that we see on screen. There are also hints of modern French historical figures like Alfred Sirven and Jean-Claude Veillard. The film has a lot of French new wave motifs particularly at its beginning. I was reminded of Alain Delon’sTraitement de choc , Diabolik and the André Hunebelle directed OSS 117 series of films in the mid-1960s.

Bubblegum Crash – no that isn’t a typo. Bubblegum Crash was a follow on from the Bubblegum Crisis manga and OVA (original video animation – made for direct to video distribution without being broadcast or shown in a cinema first) anime series. I had these on VHS tape at my parent’s house and it was fantastic revisiting them decades later. Bubblegum Crash is less serious and the artwork isn’t as good as the original series, but it’s still great cyberpunk fiction.

It felt surprisingly fresh, wealth inequality, get rich schemes, large corporations behaving badly, an openly gay police officer, autonomous machines from robots to cars and normalised smartphone usage.

All this from an animated series that was produced in 1991, at this time robots were stuck in car plants, AI was image stabilisation in the latest high-end camcorders and handheld mobile phones were over 20cm long in use. Cellphones were only starting to become less than a kilogram in weight with the launch of Motorola’s MicroTAC in 1989.

Detective vs Sleuths – a Johnnie To-adjacent film that a friend in Hong Kong gifted to me. The film was directed by Wai Ka-fai who collaborated with To and co-founded production company Milkyway Image together. Detective vs Sleuths feels thematically and stylistically similar to Mad Detective which Wai co-directed with To in 2007. That similarity brought me back to happier days flying on Cathay Pacific, sipping Hong Kong-style milk tea and watching Mad Detective soon after it had came out for the first time on the airplane entertainment system.

Without spoiling the plot, old cold cases are having new light shone on them by a series of deaths. Sean Lau plays a Nietzsche-quoting former detective with his own sanity in question.

Production-wise, the film was shot in 2018, was in post-production until 2019 and finally released after the worst of CoVID was over in 2022. If you are a passionate Hong Kong film watcher, then you will notice the similarities with Mad Detective; but Detective vs Sleuths still holds up as a really enjoyable inventive film with a number of surprises for the audience.

Useful tools.

Kinopio – quick lightweight service similar to Miro and MilanNote.

Clean Links – for iPhone, iPad and Mac cleans out tracking codes from URLs when you share them, for instance in a Slack conversation.

Not a tool per se, but a technique that started on Chromium browsers and is now more widely supported, scroll to text fragments. Appending to the end of a URL:

#:~:text=startWord,endWord

When someone clicks on the link they are guided directly to a highlighted section on the page, rather than having to search or guess at what you meant. It isn’t perfect, but it’s rather good.

Capacities – an interesting knowledge management and research app similar to Notion, Mendeley, Yojimbo or DEVONThink.

The sales pitch.

i am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.

With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. Most recently, I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI.

My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.

The Strategic Toolkit:
- Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
- AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
- Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a “wholehearted” strategic lead, let’s talk.

https://flic.kr/p/2qK3o4T

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my January 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and good luck with your new year’s resolutions. As an additional treat here is a link to my charts of the month for 2025, in PowerPoint format that you can freely use in your own presentations.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on Substack as well as LinkedIn.
January 28, 2026