Month: November 2014

Who’s Behind the E-paper FES Watch? – Digits – WSJ – interesting the way Sony has become an internal VC operation. It makes sense since they need disruptive innovation and they still have smart people. The disappointing bit was hearing them working with an external product design agency given the industrial design strength of the company historically

Tightening too frightening for UK | HSBC – interest rate increase and lower than expected economic growth

Oh No They Didn’t: European Parliament Calls For Break Up Of Google | SearchEngineLand – inevitable but not sure it will make an impact, Google must have expected this?

Maglev elevators are coming that can go up, down, and sideways | Quartz – I love this

Flickr is about to sell off your Creative Commons photos | Dazed – Tech entrepreneur Stewart Butterfield left the company in 2008, but says that Yahoo-ordained plan is “a little shortsighted”. He added: “It’s hard to imagine the revenue from selling the prints will cover the cost of lost goodwill”. It’s the equivalent of looking for pennies that may have fallen down a crack in the sofa

Supermarket own-brands generate more than half of UK grocery sales | BrandRepublic – bad news for CPG brands

Things that made my day this week.

A frickin’ laser-cut record. How awesome is this?

A simple but delightful Japanese Vine

A totally awesome Japanese game for the Sony PlayStation featuring Godzilla and all manner of kaiju. The odd thing about this Bandai Namco game is that it is for the PS3 rather than the PS4

A smooth jazz version of Van Halen’s Running With The Devil, which seems to use studio stems of this rock classic. It works amazingly well

Finally a video of park life in Beijing. It is hard to emphasise the amount of smoking that happens in China, so this video shows you instead

China has ‘wasted’ $6.8tn in investment, warn Beijing researchers – FT.com – define wasted

The click-through rate is not dead, it’s morphed into a zombie | Marketing Magazine – interesting that this has been associated with CTR rather than impressions which is a better analogue of cost per hour from the FT’s point-of-view

Edelman, TransCanada to split after Greenpeace strategy document leak | PR Week – “The conversation about Energy East has turned into a debate about our choice of agency partner,” the statement continued. “We need to get back to a conversation about the project itself, and as a result we have agreed that it is in the best interests of the project that we do not extend our contract with Edelman.” I would have thought that move won’t have been good for Greenpeace either in terms of moving the conversation away from the environment

European Identity: Strength or Weakness? | INSEAD – interesting question to pose, as an Irish national my perspective is that it is a definite strength. We are young nation unencumbered the baggage of former glories; having stepped out from having been colonised. Whilst we had corrupt bankers this doesn’t invalidate the idea of Europe

Tumblr Is Now The Fastest Growing Social Media Platform, Edging Out Instagram and Pinterest by @mattsouthern – blogging by another name

MI6 oversight report on Lee Rigby murder: US web giants offer ‘safe haven for TERRORISM’ • The Register – I feel uneasy about this. How would you feel if the Royal Mail or Fedex was responsible for reading your mail?

How Technology Is Changing Media | Buzzfeed – a media pack masquerading as interactive post but lacking in subtlety

2014: The year Facebook organic reach died | The Drum  – made its point clearly

Drone Flights Face FAA Hit – WSJ – increased regulation in the US on commercial usage likely to cramp marketplace in short term, but provide clear framework in the medium-to-long term

Sony Predicts Electronics Recovery | Variety – components rather than finished products

「TOYOTA FUN CHAIN」| DRIVING KIDS with TOYOTA – interesting Toyota effort to make driving relevant for young people

Uber removed blog post from data science team that examined link between prostitution and rides – the gift that keeps on giving for communications professionals

Regin: Top-tier espionage tool enables stealthy surveillance | Symantec Security Response – interesting whitepaper outlining a spying tool. Might it be a UK one? It’s possible given that 9% of the targets were Irish and none where in the US. But Ireland is also a financial centre and has one interesting defence company Timoney Technologies so it would depend who the Irish targets are

Grilled: the Daily Mirror’s deputy 3am editor Hannah Hope | PR Week – interesting traditional media planning cycle (paywall)

White House Push To Allow FBI Phone Hacks Could Hurt Intelligence Gathering – Defense One – very similar to the kind of points made back in the early days of online cryptography

The Grumpy Economist: Dusty corners of the market – anomalies exist in hard to trade paper presumably if they were easy to trade the opportunity would be capitalised upon as it appears