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  • Pipes by Yahoo

    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.

    San Francisco billboard drive-by

    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

    Jeff explains something to the phone

    Weiner was hired into Yahoo! by then CEO Terry Semel. Semel knew Weiner from his work getting Warner Brothers into the online space.

    Bradley

    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.

    Tim Mayer Yahoo

    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.

    how many points for visiting the metro?

    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.

    Downtown San Jose

    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.

    Homage to 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?”

    Terence McKenna’s Last Trip – Wired.com (May 1, 1999)

    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.
    local

    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.

    Caterina Fake (@cefake on threads)

    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.

    More information

    Mediasaurus no more? The Well

    Let’s Get This Straight: Yes, there is a better search engine | Salon.com (December 21, 1998)

    The Original GOOGLE Computer Storage Page and Brin

    Notre histoire en détail | Google

    How Google Became a Verb | TLF Translation

    Facebook Yahoo! patents case | renaissance chambara

    Yahoo! Answers Adoption | renaissance chambara

    Sadowski, J. (2020). “The Internet of Landlords: Digital Platforms and New Mechanisms of Rentier Capitalism.” Antipode 52 (2): 562-580.

    Amazon.com Launches Web Services; Developers Can Now Incorporate Amazon.com Content and Features into Their Own Web Sites; Extends ”Welcome Mat” for Developers | Amazon.com newsroom

    Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore – The Atlantic

    Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet by Taylor Lorenz

    The Age of Social Media Is Ending | The Atlantic

    AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born | The Verge

    Is the web actually evaporating? | Garbage Day

  • Decivilisation + more things

    Decivilisation

    President Macron

    The Threat of Decivilisation | Quillette – President Macron when having a Chatham House type discussion with sociology experts used the phrase processus de décivilisation – as a descriptor for the widespread civil and political unrest that has rocked France.

    The Prime Minister leaves the Elysee Palace
    Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron

    On the face of it, decivilisation is an appropriate term if Macron believed that there was something rotten at the centre of French society. But the phrase decivilisation is problematic and Macron has been capitalised by French on the political left.

    Renaud Camus

    The crux of the left’s criticism is a work by the author Renaud Camus. Camus became famous writing a book called Tricks about a series of up to 45 stories (depending which edition you read) about one-night stands he had travelling around the world as a gay man in the late 1970s. Decades later Camus became more famous for his contributions to ideas of the far right, notably the great replacement concept in reaction to increased immigration in France from former French colonies. While these works were published in French they were summarised for English readers in his book You Will Not Replace Us!

    In his works he describes the gradual takeover of France as decivilisation.

    The left

    The left drew a line between Camus work and Macron’s phrase and assumed that it was a way to build a bridge to the resurgent far right in France.

    The reality is more complex. The degree of change in French society has driven backlashes in French society, in a similar way that Brexit and small boat immigration did in the UK. The problem for the left is that these reactionaries would have been natural constituents of the left. The left, like in many countries, instead has pivoted to degree educated urban dwellers, abandoning the workers to the far right.

    Is French society really breaking down?

    It’s hard to tell whether ‘decivilisation’ is really happening. Civil disturbances tend to happen during times of economic unrest and in the past has been a reset. There is a body of opinion who believe that social media has its thumb on the scales, driving things harder and faster without a countervailing force to help balance things out over time, like happened in previous decades.

    Beauty

    Shiseido will ‘turn away’ from heavy promotions in China to achieve sustainable sales growth | Cosmetics Design Asia – heavy promotion during China’s shopping festivals just cheapens the brands and educates Chinese consumers to wait until 11.11 and similar

    China

    Most mainland Chinese flying overseas via Hong Kong as talks on adding flights between country and US drag, global airline body says | South China Morning Post 

    China’s New ‘Anti-Espionage Law’ Raises Complex Compliance Issues for Multinational Corporations – Publications | Morgan Lewis – handy paper that you can download

    Microsoft to move top AI experts from China to new lab in Canada | Financial Times – I think there is a question of whether these researchers will be able to leave China or even stay with Microsoft…

    Economics

    Europe’s new success stories are built on high luxury, not high tech | Financial Times

    Greggs and Pret index reveals England’s true north-south divide, say scientists | North-south divide | The Guardian

    Energy

    Japan Recommits to the Hydrogen Society – Akihabara News

    Ethics

    I love electric vehicles – and was an early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped | Rowan Atkinson | The Guardian 

    Finance

    Has China become too cosy with private equity? | Financial Times

    Japan Rail Companies Limit Train Passes Due to Chip Shortage – these stored value cards also allow consumers to buy things in combinis as well as travel. They are similar to Hong Kong’s Octopus cards. What’s happening to the chips through? Japanese YouTubers have published advisory videos around the debacle for tourists to Japan. It seems to be a drive towards registration as much as anything else

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong to review car plate searches after journalist wins final appeal against conviction over accessing info for doc. – interesting that Ms Choy won her case

    ‘Phenomenon’ behind organ donor withdrawals similar to 2019 ‘black riots,’ says Hong Kong’s John Lee

    The rise of Hong Kongers moving abroad: Diaspora, part 2: And shalt be dispersed | Brian Kern 

    Luxury

    From Hèrmes To Bored Ape Yacht Club: The Problem With Protecting Brand IPs In Web3 | Jing Daily – a digital cesspit

    Cigars are still a thing. This looks like a feature length video produced in conjunction between the YouTuber and a cigar manufacturer.

    Marketing

    Multi-factored reasons in nature why campaigns seem to be working less well. We know that as campaigns have become more digital, campaigns have been less effective and marketers being less confident in their campaigns. Interesting the way brand building on digital is danced around. The channels often dont work and measures are BS only a technologist would love.

    Materials

    Rich Rare Earth Elements Deposit Found in Americas | EPS News 

    Media

    Unretiring. (original post) | by John Battelle | May, 2023 | Medium – John Battelle between projects and not willing to engage with VC funding again

    Online

    Are we approaching the age of digital disengagement? MIDIA Research 

    NetEase’s expansion to the West is in full swing | MIDIA Research – avoiding the uncertain home regulatory environment

    Children’s Media Lives – Ofcom 

    Communist party accessed Hong Kong protesters’ TikTok data, former executive says | TikTok | The Guardian 

    After Nissan, Singapore Airlines is the latest brand to take its influence from a popular YouTube channel’s content: The Sound of Singapore Airlines – Beats to relax to – YouTube – Singapore Airlines does its own version of Lo-Fi Girl

    Retailing

    SHEIN Has Bootlegged the Air Jordan 11 | Lifestyle Asia 

    ChatGPT is used in China for Amazon listings, flirting – Rest of World

    Security

    Suspicious Activity: What Are German Fighter Pilots Doing in China? – DER SPIEGEL

    Jamming JDAM: The Threat to US Munitions from Russian Electronic Warfare | Royal United Services Institute 

    Cybersecurity at Risk in Automotive Industry – EE Times – worthwhile reading in the context of the Hyundai | Kia case brought by New York: New York sues Hyundai and Kia over ‘explosion’ of car thefts | Financial Times

    British Airways, Boots and BBC among companies hit by cyber security attack | Financial Times

    University of Manchester suffered a cyber attack | Security Affairs 

    China is building the most powerful warship radar on record: scientists | South China Morning Post – based on technology from a UK semiconductor company a Chinese state owned enterprise bought when it went into administration in 2008

    How hacking could affect food security and jailbreaking agricultural machinery.

    Software

    INFER Public | The Pub Blog – INFER forecasters: Don’t expect GPT-5 anytime soon probably not: Will OpenAI Ever launch GPT-5? Sam Altman Has The Answer / Digital Information World

    The Illusion of China’s AI Prowess | Foreign Affairs and The bearable mediocrity of Baidu’s ChatGPT competitor Ernie Bot | MIT Technology Review

    Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang: ‘The machines we have now are not conscious’ | Financial Times

    Technology

    Marvell Launches Interconnects on TSMC’s 3-nm Process – EE Times 

    Global Rise in Industrial Robot Density: China Surpasses the US – China Internet Watch – interesting. One has to keep an eye out on where the data is from and the tension between current high Chinese young adult and graduate unemployment, aging population and innovation. Finally not all robots are created equal

    Telecoms

    A global satellite blackout is a real threat — can hackers help? | Financial Times

    Web of no web

    Partnership Takes Wi-Fi HaLow to the Next Level – EE Times 

  • Hyundai + more things

    Hyundai

    Hyundai have pushed out a campaign to teach British people how to pronounce the companies name properly. This is a well trodden path for foreign brands like Hyundai. My childhood featured ‘Nestle’s Milky Bars’ as the advertising jingle ignored the é at the end of Nestlé. I can only presume that it would be assumed to be too sophisticated for our palates rather than a playground staple.

    More recently, I spent a couple of minutes coaching Arsenal footballing legend Ian Wright on how to say Huawei prior to him shooting some online video content for a smartphone launch. So I can relate to the challenge that Hyundai faces in gaining the correct pronunciation.

    Getting the pronunciation right will allow Hyundai to use global English language assets, rather than having to do localisation. A small but important saving as it looks to compete for the UK and Irish electric car markets.

    The advertising plays on the common pain-point of Siri and Google Voice failing to pick up on pronunciation in order to use humour to get Hyundai across correctly.

    Branding

    How Brand Loyalty Creates The Future – Branding Strategy Insider

    Business

    Shipping groups press Chinese counterparts for sanctions-proof contracts | Financial Times – concerns about sanctions due to Russia and Taiwan

    The Business Case for DEI Reinforces Anti-Black Sentiment – Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly‘The business case for DEI reinforces the anti-Black sentiment, systemic exclusion, and underrepresentation embedded in capitalism.‘ Apparently the solution is socialism, while not recognising class struggle

    China

    Exclusive: US consulting giant Bain & Company offers China staff 6 months of voluntary leave, sources say | South China Morning PostSome employees have been given the chance to take part in a half-year ‘career enrichment programme’ outside the office. The move comes after Chinese police visited the American company’s offices in Shanghai and questioned its staff – more in the Mintz and Bain police raids here.

    Consumer behaviour

    Older women and younger men relationships explored in this documentary. Prior to going to college in the mid-1990s I worked for a company that put coatings on materials to make stickers, stamps and labels. My boss there was a guy called Mark who married the PE teacher from school, once he’d finished his university degree. At that time Mark’s relationship was considered unusual in nature.

    Design

    Great film compilation of retrofuturist footage

    Watching this film on the intersection of military clothing design and fashion reminded me of William Gibson’s Zero History novel.

    Economics

    The financial structure of motor vehicles is broken and electric vehicles are too expensive. The short life of electric vehicles is also interesting with an average lifespan of about 3 and a half years at the moment – New cars, SUVs, pickups aging: Average age of vehicles hits all-time high 

    Energy

    A Chicken and Egg Problem: How Germany’s Hydrogen Boom Stalled – DER SPIEGEL and similar position for the UK (and Ireland for that matter) – UK at risk of falling behind in race to become green hydrogen global leader, Johnson Matthey says | Business News | Sky News 

    Honeywell looks at synthetic fuel to combat the decarbonisation of the airline industry

    Ethics

    Volkswagen defends China record at turbulent shareholder meeting | Reuters 

    Finance

    Andreessen Horowitz saw the future — but did the future leave it behind? – The Verge – interesting article that looks like the harbinger of a VC winter. I have mad respect for Connie Chan at A16z who really digs into some ecosystems without the BS

    FMCG

    BAT: Jack hits the road as vapes focus fails to ignite valuation | Financial Times

    Fake meat: has-beans suffer a market panning | Financial Times 

    Hong Kong

    ‘My time in the UK has been a disaster’: Hongkongers fear deportation after years left in limbo | Human rights | The Guardian – visa processing issues

    New China-focused think tank staffed and advised by a number of prominent Hong Kong dissidents: China Strategic Risks Institute

    Mainland Chinese visitors start to return to Hong Kong after Covid-19 restrictions lifted, but most tours low-cost and short stay, figures reveal | South China Morning PostTourism figures from February to this month show 86 per cent of tour trips from mainland China lasted one to two days and 54 per cent cost less than 500 yuan. Travel Industry Authority confirms it is investigating allegations of cigarette smuggling by mainland Chinese tour groups – it will be only a matter of time before the impact of this behaviour change ripples out to Hong Kong’s retail landlords and the luxury brands who have stores in the city. Hoteliers and the hospitality industry haven’t benefited from opening up the borders

    Indonesia

    Indonesia is an economic powerhouse in the making, but there are forces ripping away at its society that could leave it as inequitable as its neighbour Malaysia – which has been suffering from a brain drain and political stagnation. Indonesia like Malaysia before it seems to be coming under the sway of Gulf Arab traditions of Islam rather than the indigenous variant of the belief. Singaporean news programme CNA Insider did a good documentary on it all.

    Luxury

    Variety shared this story: Johnny Depp Signs $20 Million-Plus Dior Deal, Marking the Biggest Men’s Fragrance Pact Ever (EXCLUSIVE). Not convinced that men are going to be falling over themselves to smell like Johnny Depp – in that I don’t think celebrity endorsement works in that way. Fragrance is a deeply personal choice 

    To My Studio Team. 3.21.2023 | by Tom Sachs | May, 2023 | Medium – just waiting for the ‘Gordon Ramsay’ moment.

    Marketing

    A nice bit of retail design experience done by my friends at Shanghai agency Orangeblowfish

    Materials

    Merck KGaA aims to build domestic supply chains in China | Reuters 

    Life inside the South African gangs risking everything for copper | Financial Times – copper theft and the dysfunction of South Africa

    How Carbon Fiber Fabric is Being Used in Fashion: Trends and Unique Applications | Carbon Fiber Gear

    Robotic automation and how it can enhance additive manufacturing

    Media

    Hong Kong newspaper axes political comic strip after government criticism — Radio Free Asia

    Online

    Streetwear legend Bobby Hundreds thinks NFTs are a scam–and the future | Fast Company

    Ex-ByteDance worker claims TikTok owner stole content, inflated user numbers in lawsuit over firing | South China Morning PostRoger Yu Yintao claims ByteDance fired him for reporting concerns about a ‘worldwide scheme’ to steal content and fabricate user engagement metrics. Yu, a California resident, joined ByteDance as head of engineering in the US in 2017 and was terminated the following year

    Daring Fireball: Heather Armstrong, Writer of ‘Dooce.com’, Dies of Suicide at 47 – Heather Armstrong was the original mommy blogger. Prior to that she’d shared details of her creative career in California. She was fired by her boss for sharing too much and being ‘dooced’ verbed.

    Security

    Historian Niall Ferguson the strategic vulnerability of Australia to Chinese aggression. Much of the commentary could equally apply to Europe as well.

    Software

    Volkswagen’s Woes Remind Us That Combining Hardware With Software Is Hard | Forrester Research

    AiLONE | No Mercy / No Malice

    Technology

    Why do we use GPUs for AI? | Digits to Dollars 

  • Illicit finance + more stuff

    Illicit finance

    RUSI put together a great presentation on the nature of illicit finance from the perspective of terrorism and terrorist states including Russia and the People’s Republic of China. The foundations of illicit finance seems to be the offshore financial structures that were build up by the United Kingdom in the post-war period to capture the EuroDollar market.

    In some ways this lecture on Illicit finance felt very familiar. It is exactly the same structures that John Le Carre outlined in his post-cold war novel Single and Single. The nature of illicit finance was also covered in Michael Oswald’s documentary The Spider’s Web – Britain’s Second Empire. This linkage was not lost on the audience attending the talk.

    The concerns about illicit finance now are because these structures are being used to attack democracies at their core and buy influence for hostile states such as Russia and China. It is like the west is slowly awakening from a slumber as its enemies try to slit their throat.

    More related content here.

    China

    China’s Top Nuclear-Weapons Lab Used American Computer Chips Decades After Ban – WSJ – sanctions merely raise the cost of acquisition rather than being an outright ban

    Chinese carmakers line up for ‘phenomenal opportunity’ in the UK | Telegraph 

    MERICS EU-China Opinion Pool: Calibrating interdependence with China | Merics and EU warns of ‘unfair’ Chinese subsidies in Green Deal plan – draft | Reuters 

    Fiji suspends top cop, discards police training deal with China | South China Morning Post 

    Riding the slow train in China | The EconomistAs Mr Xi enters his second decade as supreme leader, his sternly paternalist version of Communist Party rule seeks to draw ever more legitimacy from the provision of customer-friendly public services, supplied via modern infrastructure. In the case of China’s railways, at least, that promise of order and efficiency has been kept.

    Consumer behaviour

    Which superstitions are Britons most likely to believe in? | YouGov 

    Economics

    TI points to semiconductor market slowdown | EE Times – Texas Instruments is pointing to the slowdown in the semiconductor market for analog and logic over the next year in its latest results

    Econ Dean at Renmin University: Old ways of stabilizing growth may not work 

    The Great (British) Stagnation – Marginal REVOLUTION

    mainly macro: Should Quantitative Easing be reducing public services? 

    Energy

    Wintershall’s empty bank accounts expose plight of western companies still in Russia | Financial Times“We helped create a very powerful and dangerous Russia without being cognisant of the risk,” he said, while acknowledging that the country had done its best to remedy this in the past 12 months. And he said BASF risked repeating its Russian mistake in China. “What I’m really surprised about, and almost upsets me, is that while this is all happening . . . BASF decides to invest €10bn in China,” he said, referring to a planned chemicals complex that will be the company’s largest ever foreign investment. “That’s the most upsetting part,” he said. “That we don’t learn from it.” – this quote from Thomas Schweppe of 7Square nails the problem neatly

    Finance

    Thousands of offshore companies with UK property still not stating real owners | Tax havens | The Guardianwealthy businessmen, Gulf royalty and states such as China have legally bought up billions of pounds of mostly London property, often via jurisdictions such as the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and the Channel Islands. Stephen Abbott Pugh, head of technology for Open Ownership, a non-governmental organisation focused on beneficial ownership transparency, said the fact that so many of the offshore companies are declared as owned by other companies or trusts means “the public still aren’t able to easily discover the people behind those companies in many cases”. “With access to many European beneficial ownership registers being shut off following a 2022 court ruling, the Register of Overseas Entities shows how useful public data is for tracking how offshore money is used to buy assets,”

    Health

    The 1964 House Report on how smoking affected the health of Americans went around the world. Sales dropped 30 percent in a week, and then picked up back to normal after existing smokers addiction kicked in.

    Hong Kong

    Biden grants Hong Kongers in the U.S. a 2-year deportation reprieve – POLITICO 

    36 pictures that prove Hong Kong’s Canton Disco is a nostalgic time capsule that never ended – Galleries – Mixmag Asia 

    Who is Beijing’s new top gun in Hong Kong? Will Zheng Yanxiong help the city with ‘prosperity’ ambitions or security concerns? | South China Morning Post – lets be honest about it security is going to be easier to address than Hong Kong economics

    Ideas

    Some of the better research and analysis I have seen about Russian sentiment and attitudes.

    This demonstrates a fundamental understanding about influence operations. Its not about persuading you about their truth, but throwin enough mud at your own truth that nobody bothers engaging – Chinese influence operations may lack critical element: influence | CyberScoop 

    Innovation

    NVIDIA Webcam Filter Fakes Your Eye Contact for Video Chats and Presentations – Core77 

    Bosch, APCOA start commercial roll-out of Automated Valet Parking | EE Times – this works because its a specialist use case on automation

    Denso powers up next-gen lidar with AMD Xilinx MPSoCs | Denso – and Toyota seems to be going in a similar direction to Bosch above

    Leoni expands production facility in Mexico | EE Times – the point about changing cable technology driven by electric cars is very interesting

    How Microsoft’s Stumbles Led to Its OpenAI Alliance — The InformationFor more than a decade, Microsoft Research, the company’s in-house research group, has touted artificial intelligence breakthroughs such as translating speech to text and software that could understand human language or recognize objects in images. But the company’s effort to commercialize its AI research moved at more of a crawl – this was at the centre of Microsoft’s innovation narrative for the best part of two decades. It’s embarrassing

    Japan

    Inside Japan’s long experiment in automating eldercare | MIT Technology Review 

    Korea

    China’s ‘sharp increase’ in car exports leaves South Korea searching for a solution | South China Morning Post – Competition is expected to intensify for South Korean car companies as Chinese firms increase exports with governmental support. South Korea can boost competitiveness and develop new markets by signing trade deals and incentivising investment, carmakers say

    Materials

    Solar Panels Disguised As Terracotta Tiles – COOL HUNTING® 

    Media

    Blooming Terror – Building The Last of Us episode 2 – PlayStation.Blog – television adaption more about storytelling and character development than action compared to game

    Online

    Inside the secret Facebook groups where women review men | Dazedthen there’s the whole other side of ‘Are We Dating The Same Guy’, which is a lot more ethically ambiguous. Is it ever OK to publicly share someone’s photos and private conversations without their consent? Or in other words, to ‘doxx’? There’s a clear power differential, but if genders were reversed and guys were exposing females to strangers on the internet, it’s unlikely we’d see the group in such a positive light. “If a boy posted me and people were writing ‘red flag’ in the comments, I would genuinely be quite hurt,” says Tara, 20. She notes how, sometimes, users make particularly unfair remarks: for example, they’ll lambast a date for having “shit chat”, or “[talking] like a 60-year-old dad”.

    Apple beefs up smartphone services in ‘silent war’ against Google | Financial Times – mapping is interesting, Google Maps are ripe for disruption

    We tried to run a social media site and it was awful | Financial Times – the FT experiment running a Mastodon server

    China purges Internet of ‘sexy’ women and ‘overeating’, RT’s Africa plan, and UN debates cyber crime – Coda Story – Chinese ‘campaigns’ are commonplace, there will still be sexy women online within and outside China. Russian media in Africa is a bigger issue led by Russia Today

    Retailing

    Why my bittersweet relationship with Shein had to end | MIT Technology Review 

    Security

    Getting Personal With State Propaganda – China Media ProjectNanchang Aviation University (南昌航空大学), located in China’s southern Jiangxi province, announced that it had launched the “Jiangxi International Communication Research Center” (江西国际传播研究中心) in cooperation with the China Media Group, the state media conglomerate formed in 2018 directly under the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department. According to coverage by China Education Daily, a newspaper directly under the Ministry of Education, the new center is an experiment in combining central CCP media and universities (央媒+高校) to carry out international communication by using the “overseas student resources” (留学生资源) of the university.

    America’s China Policy Is Not Working | Foreign Affairs – author doesn’t realise the game has changed

    Iran Says Face Recognition Will ID Women Breaking Hijab Laws | WIRED 

    Web of no web

    Subject: Focusing on our short- and long-term opportunity – The Official Microsoft Blog – combine these cut to the HoloLens team and shutting down Altspace implies Microsoft’s metaverse ambitions are currently on pause

  • Group B + more things

    Group B rallying

    Group B rallying was the stuff of my childhood. Its history was complex. In the 1970s the motorsport governing body FIA was in dispute with formula one team owners. As a result the FIA reformed one of its own committees related to formula one called CSI, in 1978, into the autonomous Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile (FISA). This came under Jean-Marie Balestre. He was a former journalist and president of the go-karting association.

    Reorganisation

    Just a few years later, FISA re-organised racing and rallying standards. It replaced groups for unmodified and modified production cars. That was largely a like for like swap. Secondly it combined grand touring (sports cars) with a race circuit only production-derived special builds class into Group B.

    Group B allowed really small production runs of really fast cars with only a superficial relationship (if any) to cars that could be sold in a showroom. Regulations had a generous minimum kerb weight and allowed rear wheel drive or four-wheel drive. Audi had just launched its Audi Ur Quattro which showed the potential of four-wheel drive in a normal car package. There was no restrictions on turbo-charged engines ‘boost pressure’ – allowing for small engines in a light car package with immense power.

    1984

    1984 was a crucial year for Group B, when the format would form its ultimate shape.

    Audi Sport Quattro S1

    For the first few years Audi’s production derived Ur Quattro had won loose surface events and a rear-wheel drive Lancia 037 doing better on tarmac roads. Other manufacturers were bringing cars into the championship as well including Toyota, Porsche and Opel. Peugeot brought the first car that fully took advantage of the regulations. A two seater, four wheel drive, mid-engined car in a space frame. A slew of similar competitors followed the year after, including the Ford RS200. This was the stuff my dreams were made of. My exercise books covered in sketches – side profile designs of vehicles that would be optimised for Group B regulations.

    The end

    1986 saw a series of fatal accidents that would result in Group B being shut down for safety and PR reasons. This created the illusion of a safer sport, but the reality was that the body count peaked some three years later in 1989, due to the way rallies were organised back then and how South Europeans conducted themselves as spectators – playing chicken in the road, dropping rocks on the road to hinder non local drivers and trying to touch cars as they went by.

    This is where Richard Madden (of Game of Thrones) short film comes in capturing the difficulties of a driver managing a Group B car and dealing with trauma.

    China

    A reporter exposes China’s influence in Canada – Asia Times and Huang Jing on China’s relations with the world – contrast with FT op-ed Xi Jinping’s plan to reset China’s economy and win back friends | Financial Times 

    US-China tech war: Shenzhen set to become international sourcing hub for semiconductors, electronics with new trading exchange | South China Morning Post – probably beneficial for Russia to get around sanctions as well. Larger perspective on Chinese business pressures: Global Chinese firms try ‘decoupling’ from China as US business climate turns hostile | South China Morning Post Public relations specialists note a growing trend of Chinese companies trying to localise their image and operations to remain competitive in the US. Between perceived security threats and an emphasis on new supply chain alternatives, US policies have left Chinese firms scrambling for cover. This is a world away from the ‘China going global‘ narrative that my former colleague Matt Stafford alongside Chris Reitermann used to talk about just over a decade ago.

    Tesla cuts prices in China for second time in three months to reduce inventory – PingWest – Mercedes and Volkswagen have also been struggling with Chinese electric vehicle sales as well

    Why Isis offshoot is still a threat for China’s businesspeople in Afghanistan | South China Morning Post 

    Japanese electronics giant Sony banned from posting on Chinese microblogging site Weibo for ‘violating laws’ | South China Morning Post 

    Consumer behaviour

    Who are the rioters who stormed Brazil’s government offices? | Financial Timesmany pro-Bolsonaro truckers blocked highways across the country, choking supply chains and at one point forcing the closure of Brazil’s main international airport. These hardline backers are nationalist, socially conservative and often evangelical Christians. They accuse Lula and his Workers’ party of being corrupt and against family values, claiming the left intends to implant socialism in Brazil. 

    How to fix people’s perception that climate news is not useful? – high degree of climate change fatigue

    Economics

    What the UK’s financial district is saying to each other about Brexit

    The End of China’s Magical Credit Machine | Rhodium Group 

    China’s industrial policy has mostly been a flop | Noahpinion  – this assumes that China shared the same priorities as Korea and Japan did in their economic rise. See also Beijing blocks listings of ‘red light’ companies to steer funding to strategic sectors | Financial Times“The Chinese government doesn’t want a market-based stock market,” said Larry Hu, an economist at Macquarie Group in Hong Kong. “It wants one that helps the authority carry out industry policy.” The CSRC did not immediately respond to a request for comment

    The Poland/Malaysia model – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion – Malaysia hasn’t been that successful and has had a lot of crony capitalism

    The Nokia Risk | Phenomenal WorldDenmark, Israel, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, and Taiwan a handful of firms account for a hugely disproportionate share of both profits and R&D spending. The firms which dominate these seven economies have all been extraordinarily successful in the knowledge economy of the past three decades: Samsung Electronics in Korea, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. in Taiwan, Novo Nordisk (pharmaceuticals) in Denmark, and Roche and Novartis (pharmaceuticals) in Switzerland

    Energy

    Market Cap 100: China-based car OEMs proceed on bumpy 2022 – electric cars are a key part of this

    UK still ducking the issue on gas storage | Financial Times – energy is still not being treated by the UK as a strategic consideration

    Finance

    Jack Ma cedes control of Ant Group | Financial Times 

    Gadgets

    Number of Chinese companies at CES event less than half of pre-pandemic level – PingWest 

    Fascinating tech found on Wagner mercenaries: Russia’s unusual laser devices fall into Ukrainian hands | Defence Blog 

    Health

    Transcript – The Myths About Fat People 

    90% of people in China province infected with Covid, says local health official | China | The Guardian 

    Hong Kong

    Is Hong Kong’s ‘2-dish-rice’ phenomenon a dark sign that the city is returning to widespread poverty? | South China Morning Post  – Hong Kong is in recession, this apparently harks back to the 1950s

    Dim Future for Hong Kong’s Rural Industries – Varsitythe government tends to avoid underutilised plots controlled by village gentries and land banks of property developers when it tries to resume lands for urban development. – Hong Kong oligarchs still have some pull for the time being

    Why Beijing Wants Jimmy Lai Locked Up – The AtlanticBeijing has weaponized the courts against its longtime adversaries—just as Chinese state media continues to promote Lai as the poster boy of everything nefarious in Hong Kong. For both purposes, Lai has a sufficiently high profile and is convincingly rich enough to have fomented a subversive uprising; and, amid the nationalist atmosphere that prevails in Beijing, Lai also had highly suspect foreign connections that reached close to the center of power in Washington, particularly during the Trump administration. By turning to its old playbook of assigning blame to a hostile force at home backed by support from abroad, the Chinese Communist Party is falling into a trap of its own creation. Given the sentences that Lai is likely to receive for his alleged crimes, Lai could very well be imprisoned for the rest of his life. In looking for a scapegoat, Beijing may find it has created a martyr.

    Indonesia

    The Liem family and The Salim Group and how crony capitalism busted Indonesia in 1997/8

    Innovation

    How Silicon Valley was build on the back of defence research

    Spotlight CES: Spectricity unveils first multispectral image sensor for smartphones – Tech.eu 

    IBM Loses Top US Patent Spot After Decades as Leader – Bloomberg 

    Japan

    Panasonic to Boost China Investment Significantly, Bucking Decoupling Trend – Bloomberg 

    Luxury

    The Anti-Apple Watches: Silicon Valley’s Other Status Timepieces Are Beautifully Analog — The Information – and that’s because the Apple Watch isn’t a watch, its something else

    What China’s reopening means for luxury | Vogue Business 

    Marketing

    Best of Jeremy Bullmore – Bullmore had been a major force at JWT

    Materials

    This strange metal alloy is the toughest material on Earth | BGR

    Interesting commentary on materials development and the role that the Apollo space programme played to create a chemical and materials science golden age that had applications in other areas.

    A secret self-healing material makes Roman buildings ultra-durable | Interesting Engineering 

    Online

    Whatever happened to Google Search? | Financial Times – echoes some of the thinking I shared here. Worthwhile reading in conjunction with TikTok’s Secret Sauce | Knight First Amendment Institute 

    Retailing

    LVMH-owned DFS eyes travel retail’s post-lockdown future | Vogue Business 

    Security

    Tory MP leads warnings over UK security after Chinese spyware ‘found in Government car’“If these SIM cards have been duplicitously installed, then this is CCP espionage. If the SIM cards are operationally standard, then it is a failure of security not to have removed them to protect the data of our Government and sensitive Government sites.” – I wouldn’t be surprise if it was the latter rather than the former

    The Long War in Ukraine | Foreign AffairsWestern strategists have sought to preempt a military standoff in two ways. Some, such as the leaders of several Baltic countries, have called for arming Kyiv with more of the heavy weapons it would need to expel Russian forces from all Ukrainian territory; others, including Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, have suggested that Ukraine’s political leaders should consider a negotiated solution that falls short of complete victory but would at least end the fighting

    Style

    Lacoste moves to collective model as Louise Trotter exits | Vogue BusinessThe British designer joined Lacoste from Joseph, and previously worked at premium high street brands Whistles and Jigsaw. At Lacoste, she applied her creative vision to both Lacoste’s fashion shows and general collections, bringing “real consistency” across its designs, according to the brand. “She has also accompanied the shift initiated by Lacoste towards womenswear, imagining a new wardrobe combining comfort and style,” the statement reads. Lacoste’s last fashion show was in October 2021 for Spring/Summer 2022, for which Trotter drew inspiration from her passion for cycling. Sales reached €2.5 billion in 2022, according to the brand.

    Taiwan

    Taiwan plans domestic satellite champion to resist any China attack | Financial Times“Our primary concern . . . is facilitating the societal resilience, to make sure for example that journalists can send videos to . . . international viewers even during a large-scale disaster,” Tang said, adding that the system would also support “telephoning and videoconferencing — think [Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelenskyy’s daily addresses.” Starlink, the mobile internet satellite constellation operated by Musk’s SpaceX, has helped Kyiv maintain communications with its forces despite Russian attacks

    Technology

    I wrote a story for a friend – by Julian GoughI wrote the End Poem for Minecraft, the most popular video game of all time. I never signed a contract giving Mojang the rights to the End Poem, and so Microsoft (who bought Minecraft from Mojang) also don’t own it. I do. Rather than sue the company or fight with my old friend, who founded the company and has since gone off in the deep end, I am dedicating the poem to the public domain. You’ll find it at the bottom of this post, along with a Creative Commons Public Domain dedication.

    Taiwan to join WTO chip dispute consultation to understand possible impacts | DigiTimes