Month: January 2012

  • Privacy policies + more news

    Google privacy policies Official Google Blog: Updating our privacy policies and terms of service – a confluence of events are affecting Google’s privacy policies. The fact that Google has over 70 different privacy policies implies a whole range of issues with version control and updating. Secondly there is the regulatory pressure to simplify privacy policies…

  • 2012 Chinese social web eco-system

    In many ways the 2012 Chinese social web is richer than our own with a fiercely competitive marketplace and rapid innovation taking place amongst more evenly matched players. Social networks are stratified more along demographic lines which are in flux as developments occur. The brightest star at the moment is Sina’s Weibo service, but its…

  • Lunar new year culture clash

    Just before lunar new year an incident happened on Hong Kong’s MTR mass transit system between a group of ‘mainlanders’ and Hong Kong natives.So what drove this flare up around lunar new year? There are a number of points at which friction occurs between the two societies. The modern city of Hong Kong has largely…

  • The future is divergence

    The future of divergence has been bubbling along for a while. I was chatting to my friend Ian over lunch putting the technological world to right over the hour or so that we had. That coalesced some of the ideas that I have been thinking about for a while and posted about in fragments on…

  • My Rugged 211 and other books

    I am currently reading My Rugged 211, The Quest, Reamde and New Rules for  The New Economy. My Rugged 211 by Minoru Onozato – To be honest with you I am more leafing through this than avidly reading it for reasons that will become apparent. Onozato-san is editor-in-chief of Free&Easy; a Japanese style magazine that…

  • CES 2012 trends

    Early January means CES 2012 in the tech calendar as the media gives its full attention to the consumer electronics sector. With some 2,600 exhibitors there was a lot of news coming out of the event. But I was more interested in some of the more macro trends that you could see from the coverage…

  • Innovation starvation + more news

    Innovation starvation Innovation Starvation | World Policy Institute – in his article Innovation Starvation author Neal Stephenson talks about the decay of innovation in the west. Innovation starvation is about an inability to get big things done – I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic…

  • Product design stalemate?

    Kurt Anderson wrote an essay in Vanity Fair where he argued that product design in everything from fashion to homewares has stood still over the past two decades. It was an interesting that got me thinking about hypothetical reasons why his theory maybe true.There were a number of possible factors that I came up with:…

  • Taoism & social media

    I was watching this video and thinking about taoism and social media. The video is by Irish-Chinese film maker Edwin Lee on the refurbishment of of the Wong Tai Sin Temple in northern Kowloon and thought that it was an excellent metaphor for something I’d been looking to talk about for a while. Sik Sik…