Month: November 2019

  • Media agency interviews & things that made last week

    Media agency interview with Simon Peel of Adidas There is a certain irony in a media agency that promoted just the kind of short-termist platforms for advertising, interviewing Simon Peel. Still we have the echoes of a disruption narrative ripping through advertising spend and and brand equity like a hot knife through butter. More on…

  • Dark mode + more things

    Opinion | Living in Dark Mode – The New York Times – of the Hong Kong liberation movement was a plot device in a William Gibson novel, I would expect him to write a character like Karen. (Paywall) – dark mode is a great metaphor for the dystopian ennui. Yet I find it much easier…

  • Internet freedom

    Sacha Baron Cohen won an award and made a speech on internet freedom at the Anti-Defamation League awards. He’s a really good orator. Sufficiently good that the likes of Alphabet, Facebook and Twitter must be thankful that he doesn’t have a political office (yet). Check it out, its well worth half an hour of your…

  • Car into a smartphone + more

    Horace Dediu on the transformation of the car into a smartphone. Turning a car into a smartphone isn’t a technology revolution that particularly excites me. I prefer things that can kill me to be using highly reliable real time operating systems with no real time network connectivity – if they have to run software at…

  • US military right to repair + more

    Here’s One Reason the US Military Can’t Fix Its Own Equipment – The New York Times – the irony of the US military being restricted by US legislation and lack of ‘right to repair’. US military withdrawal from R&D hasn’t help things either. DARPA does pure research, but the focus on COTS (commercial off the…

  • Electric car issues + more stuff

    Tesla Model 3 Survey: What Owners Think About the Electric Car – interesting read, Toyota and VW Group will eat them alive as their electric car programme take off. I am not going into the dumb nature of Li-ion versus hydrogen powered vehicles… ‘Caveat Emptor:’ State Dept. Mocks Russian, PRC Weapon Sales In ‘Buy American’…

  • Paper phone experiment & things that made last week

    Google goes back to the future with its paper phone experiment. Its an interesting commentary on the questionable benefit provided by smartphones. Google seems to be partly convicted. The paper phone experiment goes back to device prototyping. Handsrping founders used to carry around a block of wood in the shape of the PDA that they…