Month: July 2016

WSJ City – Post-Brexit, The City Has English Law on Its Side – “You can think of London as a Silicon Valley of international business law. The robustness of English law and its utility are not going anywhere.” – But Ireland has a similar legal common law system and would still have an EU passport for its financial system

WSJ City – UK and Eurozone Part Ways on Confidence | WSJ – no real surprise there. Waiting for this to be attacked as ‘project fear’

In defence of Byron | FT Alphaville – interesting run down on UK immigration law

Twitter quarterly results – interesting increase in cost of revenue and corresponding reduction in R&D. Sales and marketing costs increased substantially as well

The guy trying to demolish Android with Cyanogen uses an iPhone | TheNextWeb – actual LOL. I get why he might use competitor products to understand them, but the optics on this are bad

Steam On Windows 10 Will Get ‘Progressively Worse’: Gears of War Developer – Slashdot – interesting accusations of ‘antitrust’ busting practices in gaming by the beast of Redmond

I, Cringely Is anyone at Yahoo! paying attention? Probably not. – I, Cringely – unfortunately its already game over. The money is committed to be returned to shareholders, patents will be licensed and approaches to get rid of Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan stakes. I wonder how they will juggle the rights to the Yahoo! name which now sits with the Verizon business for the Japanese JV?

Preliminary EDPS Opinion on the review of the ePrivacy Directive (2002/58/EC) | Europa.eu – interesting pro cryptography stance (pdf)

Companies Are Promoting More Than Ever, With Too Little Success | SocialBakers – interesting Facebook data points

Gigaom | What’s going on in Phoneland? — is leading to consolidation, the classic market maturation that comes right before a new era of breakthroughs and growth. But those breakthroughs won’t be in 2016

Things that made my day this week:

A great summer soundtrack by Amerigo Gazaway who do some of the best blends of hip-hop with soul

I got this from an old college friend who studied industrial design.

Moby did a great mix for Dazed Digital

Weiden & Kennedy for Nike came up with the Unlimited Future campaign. Nike opponents pointed out that it could be construed as a reference to their sweat shop factories. Either way you don’t see other sports apparel brands doing powerful brand anthems like this

Pirate Printers: Shirts and Totes Printed Directly on Urban Utility Covers | Colossal – just waiting for a Stanton Warrior t-shirt…

US public broadcaster has been bringing some of its vintage interviews to life like this video featuring Marlene Dietrich

Departing the wheat from the chaff: identifying fallacies in the pharmaceutical promotion – Shaughnessy, Slawson & Bennett – different logical fallacies deployed in promotional activities (PDF)

Why Armstrong Really Wanted Yahoo — The Information – interesting play but not sure that it will be successful (paywall)

Money as Message – Andreessen Horowitz – Connie Chan’s 101 on WeChat wallet is up there with her other WeChat posts

Three Proposes Protection in UK Spectrum Auction | CCS Insight – I would put good money on it that Three loses this fight as well as an ‘invisible hand’ continues to move against the CK Hutchison Group as a whole

How Putin Weaponized Wikileaks to Influence the Election of an American President – Defense One – where is the evidence that they can leave this at the door of the Russians. Also ‘weaponising Wikileaks’ is a great message to put out there prior to shutting down Wikileaks. It will be more interesting seeing what the FBI investigation comes up with

Neil Young’s PonoMusic Store Goes Offline as It Switches Content Providers – interesting that the UK music technology start-up scene seems to be imploding on itself (Crowdmix, Omnifone) and that Neil Young’s PonoMusic was taking so much time to get on 7Digital’s HD music offering?

Superbook turns your phone into a laptop for $99 | Techinasia – reminds me of the Palm Foleo companion laptop device that was previewed but never launched

GitHub – nerevu/riko: A python stream processing engine modeled after Yahoo! Pipes – interesting tool, BTW who said that RSS is dead?

Decacorns continue to get funding while the rest of the startup investing declines | TechCrunch – funding skewing towards really big funding projects concealing overall drop in funding

Microsoft debuts Bookings, a new Office 365 service for online appointment scheduling | TechCrunch – is it just me or is Microsoft throwing out a lot of services that overlap with its core offering and it feels a bit confusing?

US Congress – Committee on Energy and Commerce – letter to Niantic re Pokemon Go – concerns that consumers understand potential impact on their mobile data allowance (PDF)

Pokémon Go will launch in Japan tomorrow with game’s first sponsored location | TechCrunch – McDonalds coming in with a sponsorship deal for Pokemon gyms

China appliance makers share SoftBank dream | FT – many expect SoftBank to sell ARM on after a decent waiting time to companies like these (paywall)

Things that made my day this week:

Mastercard have redesigned their logo and its struck a nice balance between  change and heritage. Wired magazine has more details on the move and how the logo has changed over the years.

Snoop Dogg on a US game show via Zak Agency’s ‘cool sh*t‘ email newsletter

Masaaki Hiroi’s wooden toys look amazing

Our Iain switched me on to Snoring (music to sleep by) from IGLOOGHOST

I went to see The Avalanches play their new album at Oval Space back in June and there were a number of people in the audience ignorant of their process and exceptionally vocal on social media.

The Avalanches at Oval Space… #notworththewait #theavalanches #getdown pic.twitter.com/5E9acf1180

— Mandi Keighran (@MandiKeighran) June 9, 2016

This is what The Avalanches show looks like now. A fun timez DJ set. @ Oval Space https://t.co/h3NHM4Ld7t

— nikkiaway (@nikkiaway) June 10, 2016

I honestly don’t know what they were expecting – Led Zeppelin type stage antics?
This was in advance of their new album drop Wildflower. Wildflower has been on heavy rotation in/on my iPod. Buy it, gift it to friends and relatives.

The folks at who sampled put together this great run through of where all the pieces came from.