It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.
One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.
My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.
I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.
My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.
Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.
That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.
Early last year, fashion started to pillage the late 1990s and early 2000s for fashion inspiration, which became a Y2K trend on social platforms and in the fashion media. But this divorced Y2K from its original meaning. Y2K was technologist short hand for a calendar problem in a lot of legacy systems that were designed around a two digit date for years.
The rise of micro-processors had meant that the world had more computers, but also more computer control of processes from manufacturing to building air conditioning systems.
The HBO documentary Time Bomb Y2K leaned into the American experience of Y2K in an Adam Curtis type archival view, but without his narrative.
Millennium layers
There was so much to unspin from the documentary, beyond the Y2K bug, including the largely alarmist commentary. The run-up to the millennium had so many layers that had nothing to do with Y2K, but were still deeply entwined with anxiety around what might happen with Y2K.
This included:
Internet adoption and more importantly the idea of internet connectedness on culture through the lens of cyberpunk – which in turn influenced the spangliness of fashion around this time and the preference for Oakley mirror shades that looked as if they were part of the wearer. The internet was as much a cultural construct and social object as it was a communications technology. It memed AND then got people online.
Telecommunications deregulation. In the United States the Telecommunications Act of 1996, saw a levelling playing field be set out and allow for new entrants across telecoms networks to television. They also defined ‘information services’ which internet platforms and apps fitted into giving them many freedoms and relatively few responsibilities. You had similar efforts at telecoms deregulation across what was then the EEC. This saw a rise in alternative carriers who then drove telecoms and data commuunications equipment sales, together with a flurry of fibre-optic cables being laid. There was a corresponding construction of data centres and ‘internet hotels‘ to provide data services. With these services came an expectation that the future was being made ‘real’. Which in turn fed into the internet itself as cultural phenomenon. The provision of new data centres, opportunities for computer-to-computer electronic data interchange (EDI) and services that can be delivered using a browser as interface also drove a massive change in business computing.
An echo boom of the hippy back to the land movement, many of the people involved in that movement were early netizens. Hippy favourites The Grateful Dead had been online since at least 1996 and were pioneers in the field of e-commerce. The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (or The WeLL) had founders from hippy bible The Whole Earth Catalog. There was also a strong connection through Stewart Brand to Wired magazine. Long time ‘Dead lyricist Jon Perry Barlow created a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace – a libertarian totem for netizens up to the rise of social media platforms like Facebook.
Millennial religious fervour. The Heaven’s Gate cult committed ritual suicide in 1997, and even posted about it on their website. The disastrous FBI showdown with the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas had happened four years earlier and even today is a point of discussion amongst right-leaning Americans.
The confluence of noise around Y2K drove some anxiety and a lot of media chatter.
Advertisers did their bit to fuel insecurities as well.
However by October 1999, American consumers who responded to a poll by the Gallup Organisation were pretty confident that glitches would be unlikely
55% considered it unlikely ATMs would fail.
59% believed direct deposit processing wouldn’t be a problem.
60% said they felt that temporary loss of access to cash was unlikely.
60% believed credit-card systems were unlikely to fail.
66% felt that problems with check processing were unlikely.
70% had received Y2K-readiness information from their banks.
90% were confident their bank was ready for Y2K.
39% said they would definitely or probably keep extra cash on hand.
Y2K: More Signs of the Time | Computerworld (January 10, 2000)
Experts had felt that the Y2K challenge had largely been beat, but some prudent advice was given. I worked for a number of technology clients at the time including telecoms provider Ericsson and enterprise software company SSA Global Technologies. I had to keep my cellphone with me in case anything went wrong and we would have to go into crisis mode for our clients. Needless to say, I wasn’t disturbed during my night out at Cream by THAT call.
Technology experts like Robert X. Cringely were rolled out to advise consumers on prudent precautions. Have a bit of cash in your wallet in the unlikely event that card merchant services don’t work at your local shop. Have some provisions in that dont need refrigeration in case there is a power cut. And a battery or solar powered radio just in case.
All of these are still eminently sensible precautions for modern-day living.
Why were we ok?
The warning
There were several people who voiced warnings during the 1990s. Some of the most prominent were Ed Yourdon and Peter de Jager.
Risk management
During the 1990s company auditors were informing boards that they had to address Y2K. Failure to follow this would affect their ability to trade. Their public accounts wouldn’t be signed off and there would be implications for the validity the insurance policies need to run a business.
Approaches
IT professionals took Y2K very seriously, which meant that there was little to no impact. Some academics such as UCL’s Anthony Finkelstein posited that the problem was taken too seriously, though it is easier to say that in retrospect. There were a number of approaches taken to combat the risk of failure due to Y2K. In order of least to most ambitious they were:
Systems testing
Rip and replace
Recode
Systems testing
The Russian military had tested their systems for vulnerability to the millennium bug and announced this in the last quarter of 1999. Meanwhile businesses were often passing the testing out to contractors like Accenture with teams based in India, the former Soviet Union or the Philippines. There was a thriving market for auditing software to check if applications used two-digit dates or not. One of these was Peregrine Systems ServiceCenter 2000 Y2K Crisis Management software.
Testing highlighted problems at Oak Ridge Laboratories who process American nuclear weapons, the alarm systems at Japanese nuclear power stations and some kidney dialysis machines.
Problems would then be addressed by ripping and replacing the systems or recoding the software.
Rip and replace
Apple used Y2K as a sales tool to get Macs into businesses, including this campaign from early 1999 where the HAL computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey featured in Apple’s Super Bowl advert.
Two years earlier IBM CEO had the company re-orientate an offering that he called e-business. There was snazzy advertising campaigns ran over an eight year period.
Mainframes and high powered UNIX workstations became internet servers running multiple instances of Linux. IBM Consulting learned as they went building the likes of internet retailer Boxman (which would go bust due to IBM’s cack-handed software and the rise of Amazon).
Timely replacement of business systems with e-business systems, paired with new personal computers like the latest Apple Mac allowed the firm to avoid Y2K and make speedier approaches in digitising their businesses.
German enterprise software company SAP launched SAP Business Connector in association with webMethods in 1999, this provided an integration and migration layer for SAP and other business software applications. It also allowed the business software to be accessed using a web browser and for it to trigger business processes like email updates.
Articles (like Robertson & Powell) highlighted the wider business process benefits that could be generated as part of a move to rip-and-replace existing systems with ones that are Y2K compliant. Reducing the amount of systems in place through rationalisation as part of Y2K preparation would then provide benefits in terms of training and expertise required.
Recode
Where rip and replace wasn’t an option due to cost, complexity or mission criticality recoding was looked at as an approach. For PC networks there were a few off the shelf packages to deal with low level BIOS issues
IntelliFIX 2000 by Intelliquis International, Inc. Their product would check hardware, DOS operating system, and software. This version was free and ran a pass/fail test. The full version, which could be purchased for $79, would report the issues and permanently correct date problems with the BIOS and the CMOS real-time clock. In 1999, Stewart Cheifet of the Computer Chronicles rated the product as a very good all-in-one solution for hardware and software.
National Museum of American History: Y2K collection
Products similar to IntelliFIX included Catch/21 by TSR Inc.
Longtime software makers like Computer Associates and IBM provided large companies with tools to audit their existing code base and repair them. IBM’s software charged $1.25 per line inspected. OpenText estimate that there 800 billion lines of COBOL language code out there. So having one of these tools could be very lucrative at the time.
You might have mainframe code on a system that might not have been altered since the 1970s or earlier. Programmers in the developed world who had skills in legacy languages were looking at the end of their career as more of this work had been outsourced to Indian software factories saw Y2K as a last hurrah.
COBOL is still very robust and runs business processes very fast, so is maintained around the world today.
Y2K impact
Professor Martyn Thomas in a keynote speech given in 2017 documented a number of errors that occurred. From credit card reading failures and process shut downs to of false positive medical test results across the world. But by and large the world carried on as normal.
Academic research (Anderson, Banker et al) suggests that the most entrepreneurially competitive companies leaned hard into the Y2K focus on IT and used the resources spent to transform their IT infrastructure and software. Garcia and Wingender showed that these competitive returns were shown to provide a benefit to publicly listed company stock prices at the time.
There were also some allegations that software companies and consultants over-egged the risks. Hindsight provides 20:20 vision.
IT spending dropped dramatically during 2001 and 2002, and by the middle of 2003 technology started to see replacement of software and equipment bought to address Y2K. But the US department of commerce claimed that was no more than a transient effect on economic growth. This was supported by the Kliesen paper in 2003, which posited that the boom and subsequent economic bust was not as a result of Y2K preparation.
I discovered something at the end of last year. The belatedly missed Yahoo Pipes was, in fact, officially called “Pipes by Yahoo.” I made that mistake, despite being well-versed in the brand guidelines, having spent a year working there with a copy consistently at my side.
Now, why this journey down the memory superhighway? That’s a valid question. The inspiration for this post came from Bradley Horowitz’s initial post on Threads. (I had to go back and re-edit the reference to post from tweet to include it in the previous sentence, force of habit). In his post, Bradley shared the history of Pipes by Yahoo. I’m acquainted with Bradley from my time at Yahoo!. During that period, he was one of the senior executives in Jeff Weiner’s Yahoo! Search and Marketplace team.
Consider this article as complementary to the Pipes by Yahoo history that Bradley pointed out. I will share the link where it makes sense to go over and read it in my depth. My commentary provides context prior to Pipes by Yahoo launching, the impact it had and why it’s pertinent now.
Origins
To comprehend Pipes by Yahoo, a fair amount of scene-setting is necessary. The contemporary web experience is now a world apart from the open web of Pipes, just as Pipes was distant from the pre-web days of the early 1990s.
Boom to bust
During the mid-1990s through the dot-com bust, Yahoo! generated substantial revenue from various sources, with online display advertising being the most pivotal. Launching a blockbuster film from the late 1990s to the early 2010s often involved a page takeover on Yahoo! and featuring the trailer on the Yahoo! Movies channel and Apple’s QuickTime.com. A similar approach applied to major FMCG marketing campaigns, with large display advertising initiatives.
Yahoo! profited significantly during this period, as the internet was the new trend, and display advertising was a cornerstone for brand building. Money was spent generously, akin to contemporary budgets for influencer marketing programmes.
Yahoo! occupied a space between TV, magazine advertising, and newspaper advertising. The design of the My Yahoo! page mirrored the multi-column layout of a traditional newspaper.
Similar to a newspaper, Yahoo! developed various departments and services:
Search
News (including finance)
Music services
Shopping, featuring a store for small businesses, auctions, and a shopping mall-type offering
Sports
Communications (email, instant messaging, voice calls, early video calling)
Web hosting
Then came the dot-com crash. Advertising revenue plummeted by around a third to 40 percent, depending on who you ask. Deals like the acquisition of Broadcast.com shifted from appearing speculative and experimental to extravagant wastes of money as the bust unfolded. This experience left scars on the organization, restraining the size of deals and the scope of ambition. Opportunities were second and third-guessed.
Yahoo! Europe narrowly survived, thanks to a white-label dating product. Love proved to be a more dependable revenue source than display advertising. A new CEO from the media industry was appointed to address shareholder and advertiser concerns.
The advertising industry was in a constant state of learning. Performance marketing emerged as a significant trend, and search advertising gained prominence.
The initial cast in this story
Weiner was hired into Yahoo! by then CEO Terry Semel. Semel knew Weiner from his work getting Warner Brothers into the online space.
Yahoo! had started getting serious about search by acquiring a number of search technology companies and hiring talented people in the field. Bradley Horowitz had found an image and video search startup called Virage and joined Yahoo! (a year before I got there) as director of media search.
There was former Overture executive Tim Mayer who was VP of search products and drove an initiative to blow out Yahoo!’s search index as part of a feature and quality battle with Google, Bing and Ask Jeeves. It was a great product, but with the best effort in the world we didn’t have the heat. The majority of Yahoos internally used Google because of muscle memory.
Vish Makhijani was ex-Inktomi and was VP – international search and has more of a focus on operations. He worked on getting non-US Yahoo! users feature parity – at least in search products.
Former Netscaper, Eckhart Walther was the VP in charge of product management.
Aside: where did Ged sit?
Where did I sit? Low on the totem pole. To understand my position in the organisation, imagine a Venn diagram with two interlocking circles: the European central marketing team and Vish’s team. I would have sat in the interlocking bit. If that all sounds confusing, yes it was.
Search wars and web 2.0
Pipes by Yahoo emerged from the confluence of two technological trends that developed in parallel, extending all the way to early social media platforms.
Search wars
I had been discussing the prospect of working at Yahoo! with a couple of people since around 2003. I had an online and technology brand and product marketing background. I had been blogging regularly since late 2002 / early 2003 and managed to incorporate online reviews and forum seeding into campaigns for the likes of Aljazeera and BT. The business was emerging from survival mode. As an outsider, it wasn’t immediately apparent how precarious Yahoo!’s situation had been. However, the threat posed by Google was undeniable.
At that time, Google didn’t have the extensive workforce it boasts today. One of my friends served as their PR person for Europe. Nevertheless, Google had embedded itself into the zeitgeist, seemingly launching a new product or feature every week. If there wasn’t a new product, stories would sometimes ‘write themselves,’ such as the time the face of Jesus was supposedly found on Google Maps photography of Peruvian sand dunes. The closest contemporary comparison might be the cultural impact of TikTok.
The geographical impact of Google’s cultural dominance was uneven. In the US, Yahoo! was a beloved brand that many netizens were accustomed to using. Yahoo! held double the market share in search there compared to Europe. Part of this discrepancy was due to Europeans coming online a bit later and immediately discovering Google. But Google didn’t do that well with non-Roman derived European languages like Czech. It has similar problems with symbolic languages like Korean, Chinese and Japanese.
Google explosion
I can vividly remember the first time I used Google. At that time I was using a hodge podge of search engines, usually starting with AltaVista and then trying others if I didn’t get what I wanted. This was before tabbed browsers were a thing, so you can imagine how involved the process became.
Google appeared in an online article, which I think was on Hotwired some time during late 1998, less than a year after it had been founded. I clicked on a link to use the search engine. Google looked every different to now. It had a clean page with three boxes beneath. The first one was a few special searches, I think one of them was Linux-related, which tells you a lot about the audience at the time. The second was set of corporate links including a link explaining why you would want to use Google – although experiencing one search was enough for most people that I knew. The final box was to sign up to a monthly newsletter that would give updates on what developments Google was up to.
From then on, I very rarely searched on Alta Vista, though my home page was still My Excite for a long time. This was more because I had my clients news set up on the page already and they had decent finance overage at the time.
The difference in searches was really profound, there were a number of factors at work:
Google’s approach seemed to give consistently better results than the vectored approach taken by Excite or AltaVista.
There was no advertising on the SERP (search engine results page), but that was to soon change.
You could use very directed Boolean search strings, which isn’t possible any more since Google optimised for mobile.
Search engine optimisation wasn’t a thing yet.
The web while seeming vast at the time, was actually small compared to its size now. Web culture at the time was quirky and in aggregate nicer and more useful than it is now. Part of this was was down to the fact that early web had a good deal of 1960s counterculture about it. Wired magazine would write about the latest tech thing and also profile psychedelic experimenters like Alexander Shulgin. Cyberpunk, rave and psychedelic tribes blended and found a place online. You can see the carcass of this today with Silicon Valley’s continued love of Burning Man. (Note: there were rich dark seams if that was the kind of thing you were into. There wasn’t the same degree of social agglomeration that we now have, nor were there algorithms that needed constant new content to feed diverse realities.)
Content creation on the web was harder than it is now. Blogging was at best a marginal interest, the likes of Angelfire, AOL Hometown, Geocities and Tripod provided free hosting, but you couldn’t put up that much content to pollute the search index even if you wanted to.
The impact was instantaneous and by early 1999, it was much a part of the nascent netizen culture as Terence McKenna.
McKenna spent the last bit of his life interrogating the search engine for four to five hours a day. He was convinced that the online world it provided access to represented some sort of global mind.
Sometimes he treats the Net like a crystal ball, entering strange phrases into Google’s search field just to see what comes up. “Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind,” says McKenna. “That’s what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you’re dealing with.”
As our society weaves itself ever more deeply into this colossal thinking machine, McKenna worries that we’ll lose our grasp on the tiller. That’s where psychedelics come in. “I don’t think human beings can keep up with what they’ve set loose unless they augment themselves, chemically, mechanically, or otherwise,” he says. “You can think of psychedelics as enzymes or catalysts for the production of mental structure – without them you can’t understand what you are putting in place. Who would want to do machine architecture or write software without taking psychedelics at some point in the design process?”
A year after that McKenna interview, Google was running over 5,000 Linux servers to power the search engine.
At first, Google also powered search on some of the web portals and saw itself as a competitor to search appliance businesses like Inktomi and Autonomy. The advertising kaiju started operation in 2000 and it was tiny. This violated patents held by GoTo.com – a business subsequently acquired by Yahoo!.
Post-bust
Once Yahoo! had disentangled itself from the carnage of the dot com bust, search was a much bigger deal. And Google had become a behemoth in the space of a few years. In 2002, Google launched Google News – a direct challenge to web portals like Yahoo!, MSN and Excite. Around about this time Google started to be used as a verb for using a web search engine.
While display advertising had taken a dive, search advertising had took off for several reasons:
It was performance marketing, even when a business is just surviving sales are important
Behavioural intent – if you were searching for something you were likely interested in it and may even purchase it
So easy to do at a basic level, even small and medium sized businesses could do it
Advertising dashboard – Google did a good job at helping marketers show where the advertising spend had gone.
We’ll ignore on the difficult facts for the time being, for instance:
The role of brand building versus brand activating media
What attribution might actually look like
That Google advertising is a rentier tax, rather than a business generator
Google listed on the stock market in August 2004. Investors ignored governance red flags like the dual share structure so the founders could retain voting rights.
Yahoo! in the search wars
Yahoo! had come out of the dot com bust battered but largely intact. Yahoo! was scarred in a few important ways.
Identity crisis
Yahoo! came about pre-Judge Jackson trial when Microsoft spread terror and fear into the boardroom of most sensible technology companies. I know that sounds weird in our iPhone and Android world. Rather than the bright cuddly people who give us Xbox, it was a rabid rentier with a penchant for tactics that organised crime bosses would have approved of. It took a long time to work that out of their system.
Another big factor was the fear of Microsoft. If anyone at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a technology company, the next thought would have been that Microsoft would crush them.
It’s hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a company with several times the power Google has now, but way meaner. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of them. Yahoo watched them crush the first hot Internet company, Netscape. It was reasonable to worry that if they tried to be the next Netscape, they’d suffer the same fate. How were they to know that Netscape would turn out to be Microsoft’s last victim?
Paul Taylor – ex Yahoo and founder of Y-Combinator
Yet Yahoo! went on to hire media mogul Terry Semel as it went through the dot com bust, shows that this thinking must have coloured views somewhat.
Cheque book shy
Even Mark Cuban would admit that Broadcast.com was not worth the billion dollar price tag that Yahoo! paid for it. It was a high profile mistake at the wrong point in the economic cycle which haunted Yahoo! acquisition plans for years. Which is one of the reasons why may have Yahoo! dropped the ball when it had the chance to buy Google and Facebook.
The game has changed
But the game had changed. Display advertising was no longer as profitable as it had been. Search advertising was the new hotness, fuelled by online commerce. By early 2004, Yahoo! is confident enough in its own search offering to drop Google who had been providing its search function.
Yahoo! acquired search appliance business Inktomi in 2002 and then Overture Services in 2003. Overture services provides the basic ad buying experience for Yahoo! search advertising.
In 2004, Yahoo! realises having search is not enough, you have to offer at least as good as product as Google, if not better. This is where Tim Mayer comes in and for the next couple of years he leads a project to build and maintain search parity with Google.
You had a corresponding project on the search advertising side to bring the Overture buying experience up to par with Google with a large team of engineers. That became a veritable saga in its own right and the project name ‘Panama‘ became widely known in the online advertising industry before the service launched.
Search differently
Googling is a habit. In order to illicit behavioural change you would have to
Have an alternative
Change what it means to search in a positive way
Yahoo! approached this from two directions:
Allowing different kinds of information to be searched, notably tacit knowledge. I worked on the global launch of what was to become Yahoo! Answers, that was in turn influenced by Asian services notably Naver Knowledge IN. This approach was championed internally by Jerry Yang.
Getting better contextual data to improve search quality providing a more semantic web. This would be done by labels or tags. In bookmarking services they allowed for a folksonomy to be created. In photographs it provided information about what the pictures or video content might be, style or genres, age, location or who might be in them.
Web 2.0
Alongside a search war there was a dramatic change happening in the underpinnings of the web and how it was created. While the dot com bust caused turmoil, it also let loose a stream of creativity:
Office space was reasonably priced in San Francisco only a couple of years after startups and interactive agencies had refurbished former industrial buildings South of Market Street (SoMo).
Office furniture was cheap, there was a surplus of Herman Miller Aeron chairs and assorted desks floating around due to bankruptcies and lay-offs.
IT and networking equipment was available at very reasonable prices on the second hand market for similar reasons. You could buy top of the range Cisco Catalyst routers and Sun Microsystems servers for pennies on the dollar that their former owners had paid for them less than one computing generation before. This surplus of supplies be bought online from eBay or GoIndustry.com.
Just in time for the internet boom wi-fi had started to be adopted in computers. The first wi-fi enabled laptop was the Apple iBook. Soon it became ubiquitous. Co-working spaces and coffee shops started to provide wi-fi access connected to nascent mainstream broadband. Which meant that your neighbourhood coffee shop could be a workspace, a meeting space and a place to collaborate. We take this for granted now, but it was only really in the past 25 years that it became a thing. It also didn’t do Apple’s laptop sales any harm either.
Open source software and standards gave developers the building blocks to build something online at relatively little financial cost. Newspapers like the Financial Times would have spent 100,000s of pounds on software licences to launch the paper online. In 2003, WordPress was released as open source software.
Amazon launched its web services platform that allowed developers a more flexible way for putting a product online.
The corresponding telecoms bust provided access to cheaper bandwidth and data centre capacity.
All of these factors also changed the way people wrote services. They used web APIs building new things, rather than digital versions of offline media. APIs were made increasingly accessible for a few reasons:
Adoption of services was increased if useful stuff was built on top of them. Flickr and Twitter were just two services that benefited from third party applications, integrations and mashups. Mashups were two or more services put together to make something larger than the ingredients. The integration process would be much faster than building something from scratch. It worked well when you wanted to visualise or aggregate inputs together.
Having a core API set allowed a service to quickly build out new things based on common plumbing. Flickr’s APIs were as much for internal development as external development. Another example was the Yahoo! UK’s local search product combining business directory data, location data and mapping.
There was also a mindset shift, you had more real-world conferences facilitating the rapid exchange of ideas, alongside an explosion of technical book publishing. One of the most important nodes in this shift was Tim O’Reilly and business O’Reilly Publishing. Given O’Reilly’s ringside seat to what was happening, he got to name this all web 2.0.
Finally, a lot of the people driving web 2.0 from a technological point of view were seasoned netizens who had been exposed to early web values. The following cohort of founders like Mark Zuckerberg were more yuppie-like in their cultural outlook, as were many of the suits in the online business like Steve Case or Terry Semel. But the suits weren’t jacked into the innovation stream in the way that Zuckerberg and his peers – but that would come later.
This was the zeitgeist that begat Pipes by Yahoo.
The approach to a new type of search needed the foundational skills of web 2.0 and its ‘web of data’ approach. Yahoo! acquired number of companies including Flickr, Upcoming.org and Delicious. At the time developers and engineers were looking to join Yahoo! because they liked what they saw at Flickr, even though the photo service was only a small part of the roles at the business.
Web 2.0 talent
The kind of people who were building new services over APIs were usually more comfortable in a scrappy start-up than the large corporate enterprise that Yahoo! had become. Yet these were the same people that Yahoo! needed to hire to develop new products across knowledge search, social and new services.
There were some exceptions to this, for instance the 26-person team at Whereonearth who operated a global geocoded database and related technology had a number of clients in the insurance sector and Hutchison Telecom prior to being acquired by Yahoo!. The reason why Yahoo! became so interested was a specific Whereonearth product called Location Probability Query Analyser. The technology went on to help both the Panama advertising project and Yahoo! search efforts. George Hadjigeorgiou was tasked with helping them get on board.
I knew some of the first Flickr staff based out of London, they sat alongside technologist Tom Coates who would later work on FireEagle. They all sat in a windowless meeting room on a floor below the European marketing team sat in.
Most people didn’t even know that they were there, working away thinking about thinks like geotagging – a key consideration in where 2.0 services and mobile search.
Going over to the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale made it clear to me that the difference in cultural styles was equally different over there, from just one cigarette break with Stewart Butterfield of Flickr.
Secondly, there was the locale. The best way I found to help British and Irish people get the environment of Silicon Valley was to describe it as a more expansive version of Milton Keynes with wider roads and a lot more sunshine. One of the biggest shocks for me on my first visit to the Bay Area was how ordinary Apple and Google’s offices felt. (This was 1 Infinite Loop before Apple Park construction started). The canopy over the main building entrance looked like an airport Novotel, or every shopping centre throughout the UK.
In the same way that Milton Keynes is not London; Silicon Valley’s quintessential campus laden town Sunnyvale is not San Francisco.
This is not the dystopian doom spiral San Francisco city of today with failed governance and pedestrianisation projects. At this time, San Francisco was on the up, having been clobbered by the dot com bust in the early noughties, financial services had kept the city ticking over. Technology was on the rise again. Home town streetwear brand HUF was making a name for itself with its first shop in the Tenderloin, the DNA Lounge had consistently great nights from west coast rave and goth sounds to being a haven for mashup culture with its Bootie nights.
There was great cinemas, vibrant gay night life and the sleaze of the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell theatre. The Barry Bonds era San Francisco Giants won more than their fair share of baseball matches.
If Yahoo! were going to keep talent, they’d need a place in the city. It makes sense that setting up the San Francisco space fell to Caterina Fake. Fake was co-founder of Flickr and was given a mandate by Jerry Yang to ‘make Yahoo! more like Flickr’. So she decided to set up an accelerator for new products.
Brickhouse
According to Caterina Fake on Threads:
I dug around on the company intranet and exhumed an old deck for an initiative called “Brickhouse” which had been approved by the mgmt, but never launched.
This tracks with my experience in the firm, projects would form make rapid progress and then disappear. And during the first dot com boom, San Francisco was home to online media companies, such as Plastic (Razorfish SF), Organic and Agency.com, many of whom also had offices in New York. Wired magazine had its office there, as did a plethora of start-ups.
Fake goes on to say that Brickhouse managed to use the same office space she had worked in while she had worked at Organic over a decade earlier.
The 60 Minutes episode Dot-com Kids marked an acme in this evolution of San Francisco. At the time Fake was doing this exercise, there was probably a Yahoo! sales team based in San Francisco proper, but that would be it.
Fake cleans up the Brickhouse deck and gets it through the board again with Bradley Horowitz with the then Chief Product Officers Ash Patel and Geoff Ralston, president Sue Decker and chief Yahoo Jerry Yang being the board champions of the project.
Fake hands off to Chad Dickerson to realise Brickhouse as she heads off on maternity leave. Fake, Dickerson and Horowitz assemble the Brickhouse team (aka the TechDev group) and ideas that would eventually build Pipes by Yahoo!, Fire Eagle and other projects.
This is where my origins viewpoint on Pipes by Yahoo finishes. For the download on its creation, go here now; the link should open in a new tab and I will still be here when you get back to discuss the service’s impact.
Pipes by Yahoo was launched to the public as a beta product on February 7 2007. Below is how it was introduced on the first post added to the (now defunct) Yahoo Pipes Blog. At this time product blogs became more important than press releases for product launches as information sources to both tech media and early adopters.
Introducing Pipes
What Is Pipes? Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.
Philosophy Behind the Project There is a rapidly-growing body of well-structured data available online in the form of XML feeds. These feeds range from simple lists of blog entries and news stories to more structured, machine-generated data sources like the Yahoo! Maps Traffic RSS feed. Because of the dearth of tools for manipulating these data sources in meaningful ways, their use has so far largely been limited to feed readers.
What Can Pipes Do Today? Pipes’ initial set of modules lets you assemble personalized information sources out of existing Web services and data feeds. Pipes outputs standard RSS 2.0, so you can subscribe to and read your pipes in your favorite aggregator. You can also create pipes that accept user input and run them on our servers as a kind of miniature Web application.
Here are a few example Pipes to give you an idea of what’s possible:
Pasha’s Apartment Search pipe combines Craigslist listings with data from Yahoo! Local to display apartments available for rent near any business.
Daniel’s News Aggregator pipe combines feeds from Bloglines, Findory, Google News, Microsoft Live News, Technorati, and Yahoo! News, letting you subscribe to persistent searches on any topic across all of these data sources.
What’s Coming Soon? Today’s initial release includes a basic set of modules for retrieving and manipulating RSS and Atom feeds. With your help, we hope to identify and add support for many other kinds of data formats, Web services, processing modules and output renderings.
Here are some of the things we’re already got planned for future releases:
Programmatic access to the Pipes engine
Support for additional data sources (such as KML)
More built-in processing modules
The ability to extend Pipes with external, user-contributed modules
More ways to render output (Badges, Maps, etc…)
Pipes is a work in progress and we’ll need your help to make it a success. Try building some simple pipes and advise us what works well and what doesn’t in the online editor. Tell us how you’d like use Pipes, what we can do to make cool things possible, and show us ways you’ve found to use Pipes that never even occurred to us. In return, we promise to do our best to make Pipes a useful and enjoyable platform for creating the next generation of great Web projects.
And please have fun!
The Pipes Development Team
Pipes impact
I had a good, if exhausting time at Yahoo! It was first inhouse role and my part of the central marketing team had an exhausting workload. By the time Pipes by Yahoo launched, I had left Yahoo! Europe. There has been a re-organisation of European arm and the business had been ‘Kelkoo-ised’; a few of us on the European central marketing team took the opportunity to take the money and run.
I remember bringing Salim (who headed the European search team) up to speed and getting his support to push for me getting a payout, rather than fighting my corner.
Peanut Butter Memo
Brad Garlinghouse’s peanut butter manifesto was made public towards the end of the year portraying a game of thrones type power play which would have seen the kind of structures that were put in place in the European organisation rolled out globally.
On the face of it, some of it was pertinent, but it lacked a wider vision.
While Garlinghouse has gone on to have a really successful career at Ripple; the Yahoo! business unit he ran had several problems. He was in charge of Music and the Comms & Community BU. At the time it had a poor record of building products fit for early adopters like music properties that aren’t Mac-compatiable, this was when the iTunes store and Apple iPod springboard off the Mac community and into the mainstream.
The then new Yahoo! Mail which didn’t work on Safari and a Messenger client which was worse to use than third party clients like Trillium or Adium. All of which made it hard to build a buzz that will bridge to mainstream users. Yahoo! Messenger, could have been Skype or WhatsApp. It became neither.
For a more modern example, think about the way Instagram and Threads were Apple iPhone first to build a core audience.
At the time, I was less charitable about the memo. And the memo raised wider questions about the business; like was the CEO facing an executive revolt?
The launch of Pipes by Yahoo helped to inject some more positive energy back into the Yahoo! brand. Remember what I said earlier on how talent wanted to join Yahoo!’s engineering and development teams because of Flickr. They started to want to join Yahoo! because of Pipes.
The outside world
I was back agency side when Pipes launched. I had friends within Yahoo! still and kept an eye on the various product blogs. I got the heads-up on Pipes and put aside an afternoon and an evening to explore it fully. A quick exploration gave one an idea of how powerful Pipes by Yahoo could be. While Pipes was powerful, it was also relatively user friendly, like Lego for data. It was more user friendly than Apple’s Automator, which inspired Pipes by Yahoo! in the first place.
At this time in London the amount of people working on social media and online things was still relatively small. Knowledge was shared rather than hoarded at grassroots events and on an ecosystem of personal blogs. This was a group of eople with enquiring minds, a number of whom I can still call friends.
We shared some of the public recipes on Pipes by Yahoo and learned from them, just as I had learned about Lotus 1-2-3 macros in the early 1990s, by picking through other peoples examples. (I put this to use automating data records in the Corning optical fibre sales support laboratory that I worked in at the time.)
The agency I worked with had a number of large technology clients including AMD, Fujitsu Siemens personal computing devices – notably smartphones, parts of Microsoft and LG.
AMD and Microsoft were keen to keep track on any mention of their brand in a number of priority blogs or news sites at the time. Social listening was in its infancy and there were a number of free tools available, which I got adept at using.
We managed to build and sell both AMD and Microsoft respectively a custom feed which provided them with links to relevant content in near real-time, which they then published on an internal site so that key audiences always had their fingers on the pulse.
This was all built on top of two free Pipes by Yahoo accounts which used a similar but tweaked recipes to make this happen.
On the back of that work, we managed to sell in a couple of small websites to the Microsoft team based on WordPress. I had long moved on to another agency role by the time the Pipes by Yahoo feeds would have died.
Discussing Pipes by Yahoo with friends, they said it had inspired them to learn to code. Pipes by Yahoo spurred creativity and creation in a similar way to HyperCard.
Zeitgeist
While all of this has talked about Pipes by Yahoo! and how great the launch was, the ending of Pipes was much more humdrum. The service had been glitchy at the best of times and wasn’t being maintained in the end. In conversations I had with friends, it was compared to a British sports car: unreliable but loveable. Yahoo! closed it down on September 30, 2015.
Which begs the question, why is Pipes by Yahoo, which was shut down eight and a half years ago being celebrated amongst the digerati?
I think that the answer to this is in the current online zeitgeist. The modern web isn’t something that anyone involved in web 2.0 would have signed up for. Algorithms have fragmented the global town hall archetype envisaged for social. The web no longer makes sense in aggregate, as it’s splintered by design.
The modern web feels ephemeral in nature. This seems to have gone hand-in-hand with a video first web exemplified by TikTok.
The social platforms the fragmentation seem to be declining in relevance and its isn’t clear what’s next. The people-driven web of knowledge search and web 2.0 is under pressure from AI content providing a mass of ‘just good enough’ content. Even influencers are being usurped by digital avatars. Even the audience engagement is often synthetic. All of which leaves the netizen in a state of confusion rather than the control that Pipes by Yahoo offered.
Taylor Lorenz is a journalist who made net culture and platforms her beat. Taylor Lorenz’ book Extremely Online feels like she is reporting from another planet rather than the recent web and it was published in October last year.
My mind cast back to one of the first modules I studied at college. There was a lecture on the role of complaint resolution as part of customer services. The idea was that effective complaint resolution engendered trust in a customer service function and was more likely to increase brand loyalty and recommendation to other people. In reality Ehrensberg-Bass Institute have explored this area in more depth and found that customer penetration is more important than customer loyalty.
US National Archives: Approaching Logan Airport. 05/1973 by Michael Manheim
I suspect that the benefit in complaint resolution is more around a premium brand positioning rather than the business benefits of loyalty. This is an interesting frame to consider AirHelp’s global airline ranking. Unlike SkyTrax that focuses on experience, AirHelp weighs its ranking heavily on complaint resolution.
British Airways came 82nd out of 83 airlines assessed, which won’t be a surprise to anyone who has flown with them over the past four years.
Many airlines that would have a high SkyTrax service ranking, didn’t perform as well on complaint resolution.
So there wasn’t a clear correlation between experience resolving lots of customer complaints or a highly evolved service offering.
Emerging car brands scrutinised by Bloomberg and Grant Thornton | Manufacturer – “Chinese brands are dominating the scene with good products, big screens, and impressive interfaces.” However, the challenge arises when considering pricing, as Chinese EVs like the XPeng’s G9 SUV was 72,000 euros competing against the likes of BMW and Mercedes. So they’re going to find it very, difficult and it’s going to come down to price.” Dean pointed out MG’s success in the UK market was achieved by hitting exactly the right sweet spot in terms of pricing. The MG ZS, the second-best-selling battery electric vehicle in the UK, is priced at an average of £31,000, making it compelling in terms of competitive pricing especially in a country where consumers are not fiercely loyal to specific brands. – interesting reading. The way for Chinese vendors to win would be to have Chinese incentivised lease financing, particularly in a time of higher interest rates a la Huawei in the telecoms markets.
American men are dying younger. – by Richard V Reeves – I just don’t think this can be addressed in the current climate of othering and privilege. It would be like trying to hold a meaningful discussion on immigration a few decades ago.
Xi in Nanning; Shanghai and Beijing real estate tweaks; More Hong Kong bounties; Sim Love | Sinocism – the Hong Kong puts bounty on the head of US citizen who has criticised the Hong Kong government in the US. They are all ethic Chinese. So China and the Hong Kong government think that ethnic Chinese wherever they are should be loyal to their respective administrations – in essence their face is their passport. Not even Israel does something similar with the the world’s Jewish community, or Ireland with our diaspora.
Innovation
Quantum Breakthrough: Caltech Scientists Unveil New Way To Erase Quantum Computer Errors – Researchers from Caltech have developed a quantum eraser to correct “erasure” errors in quantum computing systems. This technique, which involves manipulating alkaline-earth neutral atoms in laser light “tweezers,” allows for the detection and correction of errors through fluorescence. The innovation leads to a tenfold improvement in entanglement rates in Rydberg neutral atom systems, representing a crucial step forward in making quantum computers more reliable and scalable.
Technonationalism as a term has started to spring up in Chinese policy discussions regarding technology trade with the US and China.
Technonationalism origins
Technonationalism is a term used by economist Robert Reich in 1987 to describe the relationship between technology and national security. Reich used the term in an article that he wrote for The Atlantic. It originally referred to the intervention of the Reagan administration in the United States to prevent the acquisition of Fairchild Semiconductor by Japan’s Fujitsu. Reich felt that the Reagan administration mis-understood the the technology problems faced by the US and blocking the Fujitsu-Fairchild deal was the wrong thing to do.
Elkor Labs photo of Fairchild Semiconductor exhibition stand.
The China effect
In English language usage, it started to be mentioned in publications as far back as 1969 and seems to have had two distinct peaks. The first was from the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union through to 1990. The second peak coincides with China’s rise.
From a Chinese perspective, strategic conflicts between major powers have revitalised the concept in the international political arena. Of course, this ignores China’s own actions and their perceptions by other countries:
Chinese government policies to promote economic independence and induce strategic dependence of other states across all infrastructure technologies – or as the FT calls it ‘Fortress China‘
Today, the competition between China and western democracies is focused on critical materials like pharmaceuticals and a range of strategically important advanced technologies.
These sectors include:
Electric vehicles (or as they are called in China new energy vehicles)
Drones, virtual reality,
Various type of machine learning ‘artificial intelligence’
Big data and data mining
Robotics and automation
5G networks
The Internet of Things (IoT),
Synthetic biology
This conflict is considered more severe than the US – Japanese semiconductor trade friction of the 1980s. But Japan and the US were largely aligned from a political, defence and economic perspectives during this time.
The technology related to disputed sectors are seen as key to the next generation of defense systems, industrial capabilities and information power China and western democracies.
Neo-liberalism & technonationalism
This implies that economics is an extension of defence rather than completely separate, as implied by the western neo-liberal laissez-faire approach to globalisation. This places company leadership dead set against the wider interest of their own western countries. During the cold war with the Soviet bloc western companies were much better aligned with their country’s interests.
Palmer Luckey’s Anduril represents a notable exception in Silicon Valley and its attitude is remarkably different to the likes of Apple or Microsoft.
Post-war Asian miracle model
While technonationalism as a term was given voice in the mid-1980s, one could consider the directed economy efforts by the likes of MITI in Japan and its counterparts in Taiwan and South Korea as being technonationalist in nature.
From this perspective, technonationalism played a crucial role in post-World War II economic and industrial policies, fostering domestic industries, promoting scientific and technological innovation. These polices propelled Japan to become a global technological power. Korea took a similar tack with Park Chung Hee’s compact with the chaebols and the Taiwan government was crucial in the roots of Taiwan’s dominance in semiconductors.
Back to the present
The current increase in technonationalism by China and western democracies means that international trade in many fields will continue to change due to national security concerns evolve. This is often masked in language such as de-risking, de-coupling and de-globalisation.
Welcome to my January 2024 newsletter which marks my 6th issue – bringing us to a half dozen issues in total. Here’s a quick video introduction that I recorded with HeyGen.
Dozen as a word in the English language comes from the french douzaine – meaning an assembly of 12 things of the same nature. This in turn was derived from roots in Latin. Weirdly enough the use of dozen plunged to a nadir in 1983 and then enjoyed steady growth to reach its most recent peak in 2018.
The sun rises reluctantly over the horizon every morning, disappearing each afternoon, but that doesn’t mean that inspiration stops. But each day is getting slightly more daylight here in London and in a few months we could be complaining about the heat.
Watch Registry – how a confluence of EU regulations and surging crime has driven a new category of online service.
Pebble – micro-blogging service Pebble went under in November last year. Here’s what we lost.
Loneliness – its impact and some of the solutions that are evolving to address it.
Backroom – how one of my photos went around the web and ended up in an online game.
Every old idea is new again – a mix of collective amnesia and the less than perfect memory of the web means that old ideas have their time as new creative.
Books that I have read.
Over the new year, I curled up on the sofa with 2034 by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis. Ackerman and Stavridis plot out a political pot boiler about what a future war with China might look like. The realpolitik of the book feels real, the main issue would be the complete passivity of smaller powers like the United Kingdom and France. The rise of India and the fall of China as a global power at the end is an interesting commentary on the current Xi-led government. The book seems to set out to do a few jobs. First and foremost it’s a call to arms about American preparedness (it isn’t prepared). Secondly, it’s a warning about over-relying on technology, over base skills like astral navigation – something that the advertising industry could learn from as we fumble forward across AI, martech and adtech in a time of declining effectiveness. But the book also irritated me and pulled me out of of the story with magical thinking in Chinese technology and having every part of a plane including an ejector seat open to being hacked and disabled. I could imagine car manufacturers leaving their safety systems open, but would have thought that the military would have been more sensible about their safety equipment.
How Did Britain Come to This?: A century of systemic failures of governance by Gwen Bevan. How Clement Attlee’s administration solved issues of minimal government in the post-war period and these solutions held up until the early 1970s. How Margaret Thatcher’s solution of markets for everything suffered from market failures over the years. All of which resulted in geography as destiny in terms of social outcomes.
Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy by Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin – an interesting portrayal of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement from the perspective of foreign journalists in the region. McLaughlin writes for The Atlantic and is based out of Singapore, Mahtani does a similar role for the Washington Post. The whole society movement of the protests is something that comes out in the books and makes me think that the authorities will have a longer term job to keep their illiberal agenda going. But on the flipside the American foreign policy looks weak and ineffective in the face of China. What most surprised me was how the authors uncovered details inside the government and the police force. Probably the most explosive allegation is that the Organised Crime and Triad Bureau of the Hong Kong Police were monitoring the WhatsApp group chat used by multiple rival gangs to organise the attack on Yuen Long train station. There is a large overlap between rural political committees in the Yuen Long area and triads. We know that the police did not prevent it, did nothing about it when it happened and conducted minimal prosecutions. Chief executive Carrie Lam was getting her news from the television rather than intelligence gathered using open source, human intelligence sources and ‘exquisite‘ means. Some members of the government related to mainland affairs seem to have had an indication of what was coming, but there is no evidence that Lam knew.
Things I have been inspired by.
Swiss International Airlines, the city of Geneva and the Grand Prix D’Horologerie de Genève did a classic PR stunt in October 2023. A flight crew member supervised by a watchmaker assembled a mechanical watch mid-flight between Geneva and New York at an altitude at 30,000 feet. In the idea you have precision, innovation, expertise, professionalism, quality and skill. A solid fusion of complementary brands, brand planning and creative ideation.
Unfortunately, the story seems to have been eclipsed by the Israel – HAMAS conflict in the Gaza region. The uncertainty of the news agenda illustrates the weakest point of a campaign relying purely on earned media.
Etsy and agency The Orchard nailed gift buying with their spot ‘Dad’. The insight that family members often don’t want gifts and are concerned about clutter or the ‘wrong type’ of gifts is on-point. There is the additional layer of thriftiness that comes from being part of an immigrant family – be they Irish or Asian.
The idea also had me reflect on the time I spent helping to sort through my late Uncle’s belongings on the family farm back home in Ireland. There were ‘new old stock’ ties still in their packaging and an Insignia aftershave / shower gel gift set from sometime in the early 1990s in his drawers. Stashed there after being gifted, but unneeded.
Thoughtful gifts are priceless.
While the ad is aimed at Christmas, I saw it as I thought about my Dad’s birthday. My own parents exhibit the traits of not wanting gifts and thriftiness. But in my case, no Etsy-sleuthing was required however, with a bit of cajoling he knew precisely what he wanted from the Toolstation catalogue. The collector gene runs deep in the Carroll family.
https://youtu.be/4VI6rgps_Bc?si=pHQpElVLc_KlDecI
The Orchard for Etsy
While a lot of London had their out of office on until January 15th, New Balance had their skates on previewing Scorpius, Rose Water and Medusa Azúl variants of the 1906R in association with Action Bronson. The clever thing that they have done is that each of the colour ways have a variation in brightness, appealing to sneaker heads of different temperaments. For me this was more exciting than Louis Vuitton’s collaboration with Timberland also announced this month.
7-Eleven Hong Kong did one of the first campaigns that merged generative AI techniques with traditional advertising production values including extensive use of green screens and wire work that would have been more at home in the fantasy martial arts films Hong Kong made famous.
4.5 billion years in an hour. A great way to bring data to life in a way that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to fathom. It also works well as a background for writing late at night as well. It did remind me of Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy for some reason, and that’s no bad thing.
I was looking at the underlying code on one of my flickr photo pages and came across this recruitment advert embedded in the code. I thought it was quite cleverly done in terms of targeting a technical audience.
A bit of a late find for me, the Computer History Museum held a 2-hour event interviewing key people in the development of the Apple Mac, in order to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its launch. There is so much that can be still learned today from their experience. You can watch it here.
Finally, Tom Coates shed more light on what we are likely to see platform-wise from a post-Twitter future.
Things I have watched.
It’s cold and dark and I make no apology for my films being unapologetically escapist and and entertaining to try and counterweight the drab conditions.
Something Wicked This Way Comes – Something Wicked This Way Comes was made in the UK during that many Disney fans describe as the studios ‘dark period’. From 1967 – 1984, the Disney family connection to the business was severed through deaths and a resignation. Film quality declined while shows and theme parks supported the business until Michael Eisner . Something Wicked This Way Comes has a fantastic cast including blaxploitation starlet Pam Grier, Broadway and Hollywood veteran Jason Robards and a young Jonathan Pryce, now better known as David Cartwright, former spook and River Cartwright’s grandfather in Slow Horses. The film is based on a book by Ray Bradbury. The film has a similarly surreal nature to Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory.
I sat and watched Wild Palms. I hadn’t watched it all the way through previously and I found it much more rewarding to watch than similar shows like Twin Peaks. There is that slight dissonance and discomfort you have watching it that reminded me of reading JG Ballard’s works.
The Criterion Collection released a sympathetic digital remastering of Frederico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. With a lot of similar projects the work adds little, but The Criterion Collection are no ordinary publisher and the film needed a lot of work. So much so, that it took donations from Gucci and government bodies to ensure that the work was done to a high standards. The results are right there on screen, the sound has had excessive background noise cleaned up as well. It isn’t excessively loud like the audio on the remaster of Sergio Leone’s crowning achievement Once Upon A Time in the West, but it does benefit from the clarity provided. The films commentary on the hollowness of the media industry is timeless as is its tour of Rome: ancient and modern.
Michael Fassbender’s Road to Le Mans – Porsche sponsored online film series that goes through Michael Fassbender’s journey to drive the Le Mans 24 hour race.
I am a huge fan of French police dramas from the 1960s to the present day and was really impressed by Netflix show Blood Coast. It features Olivier Marchal on some of the writing and directing duties. Marchal created Braquo, which ran for three seasons until 2016.
Not exactly something to watch, but the Hot Money: The New Narcos is an amazing high adrenalin podcast with the Kinahan family and the Dubai Super-cartel at the centre of it all.
Useful tools.
ABBYY Business Card Reader.
ABBYY Business Card Reader allows you to convert business cards into contacts.app entries on your iPhone or iPad – this then syncs with my Mac as part of iCloud services. While I don’t receive as many business cards as I used to, this is still a really useful time-saver.
WolframAlpha.
WolframAlpha is a handy shortcut for data points that Statista, WARC etc. doesn’t or won’t have.
Beeper.
Beeper is a multi-protocol messaging client. You can have Slack, LinkedIn, iMessage, WhatsApp and Discord all in one client. It works on both Macs and iPhones.
WaveAI Note taker.
Wave AI is an app that provides call note taking functionality using speech to text conversation. It is based on a freemium business model. Give it a try to see if it works with your style of working. An alternative to consider is Vienna Scribe, both seem to give better results than otter.ai
Portable second monitor.
When working away from the office or home, I have found a second monitor to come in handy. The one I use is from ASUS and comes with a protective cover that doubles as a stand.
Ok this is the end of my January 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Gong hei fat choy for the forthcoming Chinese new year. It will be the year of the dragon on February 10th.
