Ged Carroll

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  • Anoto digital pen

    Anoto are a bunch of mad Swedes who have invented a digital pen. The magic stuff they have came up with is a special spotted paper with unique markings so the pen can tell what kind of document its writing, the colour the ‘ink’, where it is on the page, should the writing be sent as an email. Despite featuring in a major feature article written for Wired magazine the company is doing quite well and coming up with cool stuff.  (Wired built up a reputation amongst superstitious techies after a preponderance of companies profiled in the magazine hit problems. Let’s hope that this doesn’t happen to Anoto). As any bureaucrat would tell you the pen is a lifesaver for meetings. While the   TabletPC makes more sense for mobile applications such as the UPS man.

    Anoto have licenced this technology to a number of people most notably Logitech; the mouse and speaker people.

    Logitech’s io is a neat piece of kit. Unfortunately they haven’t released any Mac drivers for it and won’t be doing so for the forseeable future. What I’d like you to do is help them forsee the future by completing this form requesting Mac drivers. (Re the product and serial number, they have a very handy prompt that tells you how many digits that you need to fake up). More related posts here.

  • The number

    Whilst catching up on my backlog of mails I came across this from CBS Marketwatch on Yahoo! making the number. The number is the consensus that market analysts think that a company will make in a given quarter:

    NOT MUCH SHOUTING GREETS YAHOO EARNINGSYahoo shares (YHOO) got the boot after the company kicked off a fresh earnings season for the online-media group by only just measuring up to expectations, demonstrating what American Technology Research analyst Mark Mahaney called a mantra: “in-line quarters don’t cut it for Internet stocks.”

    Ok, basically what this guy Mahaney is saying that because Yahoo! managed to get their profit for the quarter in line with what a number of market anlaysts expected them to be (based on a guestimate set maybe 90 to 180 days back) then they deserve a kicking.

    Unbelievable, accountancy despite the use of numbers is not an exact science, why?

    • Bills and sales are constantly coming in and out of a company
    • What does a sale really mean? If you sign a 3 year deal for online advertising, should Yahoo! claim that as a sale all at once or claim as the money comes in
    • When is the money in? When you invoice for it, or when it sits in your bank account
    • Is the capital gains made on the building you own and work out of profit?
    • If you had a bumper quarther this time but you know that the next quarter will be soft, should you avoid booking all the sales in to give you an income cushion next quarter?
    • How should you write off the depreciating value of computer equipment, chairs or a forklift truck? There can be more than one way of doing it that will affect the figures

    With this in mind, I would recommend that you read The Number by Alex Berenson, which takes you through the insanity of it all in greater depth.

  • Be nice to myself

    I received an email from my old partner- in-crime Si. I don’t know where he got ‘Be nice to myself’ and ‘I love every body’.  They sound like how a good Saturday nights in a club feels. Enjoy.

    From:

    To: ged carroll

    Date: Sun Jul 11, 2004 03:42:24 PM BST

    Subject: couldn’t have said it better myself……..

    Remind Me To Be Nice To Myself

    Tower block rises majestically above the picturesque plains, and ever-so-gentle rolling hills of Stepney and Poplar, Bethnal Green and BOW. Bears silent witness to the daily trials and tribulations of the noble plains-people of these ancient provinces.

    By the way, remind me to be nice to myself.

    Tower block by night. It has very bright white lights attached to its top surfaces as a security measure, I can’t imagine what against. These lights, they are wonderful, they serve to illuminate this monument to pointlessness.

    Yes, the night time’s the best time:

    The wind blows furtively, drives the rain irregularly against the windows.

    And all the time the short-wave drones. Beautiful isolation – hermetically sealed surrealism at tow hundred and fifty feet.

    By the way, remind me to be nice to myself.

    There’s a girl lives next door, been to India. She’s an American Swedish hippy at a bus station in Northern Holland sort of a person- vaguely opiate-like – Yeah! Sometimes I scream to her, From my nineteenth floor balcony:

    “I will not continuously qualify and justify what I say”.

    I smile benignly – return to my flat, imagine her demurely murmuring: “Don’t patronised me”. I feel, we’re both happy with this arrangement, as it’s cordiale enough without threatening our own individual, desperate loneliness with any degree of intimacy.

    By the way, remind me to be nice to myself.

    Tower block, external symbol of our inner desolation a scenario so bleak, it brings a tear to your eye. A nostalgic, sentimental tear, as if in vague subliminal remembrance of a barren airless landscape of a different planet,

    one million years ago. Tower block, Oh ancient timeless representative of all that is meaningful, oh nearer my God to thee.

    By the way, remind me to be nice to myself.

    I LOVE EVERY BODY

    And now the buildings change. Now the people change. Everything changing.

    Spirit and matter most apparent. Realised there never was anything to worry about, to doubt was insane. The limited, callow individuals living on housing estates in Chingford, Large detached houses in Kew Tower blocks on the Tottenham marshes, Become my gods. I see an accounts clerk from Tooting: I see Zeus. A sanitary inspector from the London Borough of Haringay, And Brahmin stands resplendent before me.

    For five minutes I love everybody. There is only love. All action ceases.

    The Mile End Road, once a blood-stained battleground of Bacchanalian excess, becomes the Garden of Gethsemane. A bitter, 72-year old ex-docker becomes the ever-compassionate Buddha. A Cypriot minicab driver becomes St Francis of Assissi. The 22-year-old Glaswegian checkout girl IS the divine mother.

    I love everybody. My spirit is free.

    I am limitless in space, time and matter, Simultaneously the planet Neptune, part of the structural support to Vauxhall Bridge. I am your left breast, I am Stepney, I am Peru, I am divine and so are you.

    I love everybody.

    I am nothing except a mere cluster of notes, a road sign in Skelmersdale.

    I ran the Roman Empire. I was a lavatory attendant in Hull. I am everybody and everybody is me. Spirit.

    Who put the spirit in matter? LOVE More related posts here. Si left us in the summer of 2016.

  • State of the Union

    State of the Union seems to be BBC Radio 4’s way of replacing the late Alistair Cooke’s Letters From America. Replacing Letters from America is a really tough role to fill. State of the Union has got really big shoes to fill.

    The 15-minute slot from 20h50 – 21h00 on a Friday and repeated from 08h50 – 09h00 on a Sunday is hosted by a different American journalist each week. You can have a listen here. I was a relatively recent convert to Alistair Cooke; but the short time that I experienced his programmes immediately made me realise what I had missed out on. Cooke was an institution and a relic of when Britishness meant life as a character in an Agatha Christie novel and acting like Cole Porter show tunes were still all the rage. State of the Union is very now, and a good way of ensuring that the presenter doesn’t get unfavourably compared to Mr Cooke’s legacy. It won’t be cult listening, but listenable all the same.

    The BBC’s own spiel: In this US election year, a new series, State of the Union tells the stories that define the American nation. Drawn from the Pacific and the Atlantic coasts, the deep South and the mid-West heartland, each week a distinctive American broadcasting voice reflects on everyday America.

    The first one was done by Betty DeRamus, a Pulitizer prize winning columnist from the Detroit News. State of the Union will continue until November. It will be followed by Letter, first-person reports from Beijing, Delhi, Johannesburg, etc, which already goes out on the World Service at 05h30 on Sundays. More related content here.

  • Getting burned

    Interesting article in Bambi Francisco of CBSMarketwatch’s regular email. It seems despite the dot.com bust, investors are still up for getting burned.

    SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) – Sometimes, you do what you can to stay afloat.As many market watchers have already observed, there are companies out there that appear to be promising candidates in a hot business area, but make their money off of something entirely non-related.

    Some investors may have heard of a company called Mace Security International, whose shares traded to a recent high of $6.68 in mid-June after trading below $2 earlier this year. The stock went gangbusters because the company’s been touting its anti-terrorist, surveillance security products.

    One would think Mace housed a number of technologists in cubicles. Yet those techies weren’t techies at all, unless washing cars requires an engineering degree. Apparently, Mace generated 85 percent of its sales this year from being a car wash, which a big signal that investors will be getting burned.

    Mace shares eventually got washed up a bit as its true colors were exposed. Let’s face it, being a car wash isn’t a competitive advantage for a security company. (Now, if they were impersonating a car wash but were really a security company — I’d say that was impressive.)

    But here’s what we can learn from Mace. Sometimes you have to be creative if you want to stay in business. More related information here.