I wish I was a teenage American girl so I could say “OMG this stuff is the bomb” or even a teenage Welsh girl so I could say “this stuff is lush.*” Because after years of having to eat soy or ‘healthy’ yoghurt to counteract the impact of creaminess on my lactose-intolerant self, the guys at Arla have created a lactose-free yoghurt creation that is absolutely delicious. Highly recommended.
* is this how the kids are talking these days? I’m getting old.
I was talking to @geowgeow about why things cost random prices in shops, on seeing a surprisingly reassuring price-list in a sandwich shop in Victoria station. Everything there cost rounded whole numbers instead of apparently arbitrary digits – 12.64 is a pin code, not a price tag dammit!
Carrying the thought through (as you do) however led us to the fallacy of this – inflation is running at over 4%, so a 1 pound sausage roll would have to cost 1.04 next year and so on. So the silly prices return.
@geowgeow speculated that rounding for tidiness is probably worsening inflation – store managers that don’t like price tags that say 1.04 round up to 1.05 and BANG – up goes inflation by another percentage point.
Alan Sugar might be happy with the entrepreneurial instincts shown here, but Mervyn King? He’s probably unimpressed by the entire situation.
I love technology as much as the next man – my wife would say considerably more than the next man – but I’ve still been moderately baffled by the editorial decisions that planted not one, but two tech stories on the front page of Metro in recent weeks.
First – the Twitpic story (which seems to have been taken off the Metro website but is still visible in the search). In brief: Twitpic changed its terms of service so that it owned the rights to the pictures its users uploaded. Twitpic is a photo service built to work with Twitter. During the course of the day, as Chris charted so well, Twitpic redacted its changes and reverted to the original ToS. All sorts of bits have since emerged, including a letter Tom received from the Twitpic founders stating that the rights to all photos would be available through a specific photo agency (now gone from Twitpic?). So I totally agree there’s an interesting story here. BUT… front page? Twitter is a service used by a growing minority, but still a minority (I don’t believe the stories that say it has hit the mainstream in any meaningful way)… and Twitpic is used by a subset of those users. Doesn’t strike me as front page news by any stretch of the imagination. Still, let’s call it a slow news day.
Second: The dramatic front page: “Android phones ‘all leak secrets'” – later retconned/subedited on the web to “Android phones almost all vulnerable to hackers“Â – I mean whoah. That’s one heck of a front page. PC Pro blogs explaining why people shouldn’t be concerned (I actually think PC Pro’s view of a world where people know they should not connect to an unsecured wifi network is more than a little naive) – but seriously, this is a) a story that affects a relatively small number of people (despite Android’s increasing user base) and b) in no way front page news. Seriously! If, every time Microsoft patched a flaw on Windows (and there have been more serious and more easily exploited vulnerabilities discovered on Windows XP, I’m sure of it) –> well then, we’d have a front page a month that would at least fit the criterion of relevance to the readership, if not one of the slightest bit of interest.
That said: the superinjunctions story (yeah, that one) did bring Twitter to the focus for the whole country, so those front pages – totally make sense. No confusion there.
On the whole, however, a little confused as to what the Metro editor was thinking here, and would love to know if its a tech agenda, a sense that it’s sexy to pick on web 2.0 companies in a Daily-Mail-sort-of-way, or if that really is how they see their readership; Smartphone wielding, picture sharing, Daily-Mail reading digital natives. Which, looking at the history of front pages on Metro that come up in Google images, might make sense: they feature evem more tech stories including £3 Amazon MP3 albums, “Planet Facebook†and an Android scare story from earlier this year.
Damn, tech is so mainstream.
There’s a lot of talk amongst our client base of the new business models and innovation possible thanks to the power of the Internet. There’s also a signficant amount of chat about what it means for the pre-web business models – particularly in the media sector.
Look at Waterstone’s, sold last week for a relative pittance. And the share price of the HMV Group – on a persistent downward spiral over the last 12 months – demonstrates how poorly that business has adapted to the Internet age. Contrast that with Amazon or even B&N and you’ll see that real innovation is needed to translate some of those legacy business models to the new delivery platforms we have for media. Amazon is selling more Kindle books than print books – absolutely astonishing. Who would have guessed that things would move this quickly?
B&N, worth around $1bn, as Tom pointed out on Twitter the other day, has managed maintain its valuation where Waterstones et al haven’t. The analysis points out that it has tried to keep on the edge of things with an innovative eBook portfolio in the US. Tom sums it up neatly:
If that’s not an advert for why old media businesses have to aggressively investing in digital platforms, I don’t know what is.
Waterstones’ e-commerce ventures were hopelessly bumbling – first a partnership with Amazon, then its own webstore, and then perhaps a slightly misjudged ebook strategy which I still don’t fully understand today.
I guess, though – that at least they tried. And establishing what insights are needed to drive appropriate customer-centric innovation requires an understanding of customers that goes beyond what they themselves think they need – three years ago when I first got an e-reader, virtually no-one I spoke to was willing to give up the feel of a rustling paperback. We would never have guessed that so many people would be reading everything on Kindle [apps] this soon – but here we are.
The worse thing anyone can do about the Internet is bury your head in the stand. It’s a rolling force for change, whether we like it or not, and is having a dramatic impact on virtually every business I come across – nowhere more dramatically than in the media sector.
My brother talked about the need for smart, digital people in the film and TV industry over on Screen Daily and the apparent dearth of them in his industry. As someone passionate about the media sector here’s hoping that the digital people find their way out of the woodwork and help with the industry in the evolution of its more traditional business models… so there’s not only aggressive investment, but sensible investment in the development of new business models…
I absolutely blitzed my way through Joe’s First Law trilogy, and made relatively short work of ‘Best Served Cold‘ Â – the first sequel, set across the sea in the same universe. But I’ve been very slow at getting through The Heroes, another follow up featuring many of the characters from the original trilogy.
Normally, compulsive commute blogging and the return to work notwithstanding, I’d have made more progress here – I read very quickly and yet I’ve taken the best part of three weeks to get two thirds of the way through this one. But I think its the slightly experimental narrative style that’s slowing me down.
Unlike the first four books, which covered a relatively long expanse of time and events, the first four hundred pages of Heroes takes place over the course of three days. You might think this makes for a ludicrously high words to event ratio, but instead what it makes for is a large and detailed tableau of a battle, in which we’re provided insight into characters’ inner monologues, doubts and fears; into military strategy, manipulations and intrigues; into insults, wholesale slaughter and semi-wise philosophy. One scene / chapter will take the point of view of three different characters, one of which might end up dead three paragraphs later before passing the torch to another. It reminds me of the Scrubs episodes when the internal monologue was passed to a character other than Zach Braff – a jarring experience on television, it’s even more bizarre in a novel.
For many this might well be the perfect fantasy novel fodder. For me? I like the larger story arcs – the epic quest, the conflict between good and evil that sits at the heart of this. The character in the novel – Bayaz – that is the driving force for one side of the conflict – is himself contemptuous of the detail of the battle. It’s hard for me to be enthralled…
But as the battle progresses and the pre-ambles complete, the novel is picking up its pace. I imagine I’ll be done by the weekend and looking to add the next Joe Abercrombie to my reading list… His dark, cynical view of the world – tempered by the doubts of his heroes – makes for stories that are quite different from your run-of-the-mill epic quest.
Next up? Trudi Canavan’s newest Black Magician book. Then? I might eventually finish the novel in the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant I keep failing to pick up… followed by Eoin Colfer’s take on the Hitchhiker’s guide universe (how did I miss that had been written?), before I wait for the newest book in the Stormlight Archive, Charlie Stross’ Rule 34 and Terry Pratchett’s Snuff to be published – not to mention the latest George R R Martin.
It’s nice to have a few books to look forward to.
I used to spend a lot more time gaming than I do these days – the slightly dormant PS3, Xbox and Wii attest to that. But the iPhone has proved a good platform for the occasional gaming fix.
The newest addition to my games library is Backflip Studios‘ 59p game – Army of Darkness Defense. Based on the 1992 Sam Raimi film Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness – it sees Bruce Campbell‘s character face off against an army of ‘Deadities’ – undead warriors from the film – in a side-scrolling tower-defense game.
Huge fun. Original voices, clever upgrades to weapons and units, decent graphics for the gameplay style and compelling enough that you’ll be able to resist most of the in-game purchases – coins for upgrades – and instead just play the game obsessive compulsively until you clear wave 50 of the Deadites. There’s some slowdown when the waves get big – bring on the dual core iPhone 5 – but it’s not too bad.
My only significant criticism of the game? Only 50 waves… I’m hoping that a software patch will add a bit more variety to it.
Usually, the train guards on Southwest trains are fairly unsympathetic. They’ll barge their way through a massively overcrowded train asking to see people’s tickets, trampling on old ladies and kicking children in the stomach in the process.*
Today, in an inspired moment, our guard told off the people who had left bags on the seats. “No matter how many times I tell you all, some people still left bags on the seats despite the fact there were people standing. I don’t want to see any bags on the seats when I walk through the train!”
Genius. Sometimes I think the larger the crowd of people the more the authority figures need to treat them like itinerant children… at the very least, it makes for a few guilty looks and a selection of wry smiles…!
*not quite, but… y’know.
I ran a training session just before I went on sabbatical on various social media bits and pieces, showing people how to use search engines to find key phrases – amongst many other things.
Over the course of the session, which I tried to keep jargon free, I somehow managed to tell people that they should "concatenate their search terms" and use "Boolean search." I was also talking about influence and sentiment analysis, so there was a lot of jargon floating around that I couldn’t seem to avoid.
I think us social media-y types (oh, god, is that what I am?) should have our own translation engines, like the Bank of England. Check it out :
Inflation is likely to pick up to between 4% and 5% in the near term, and to remain well above the 2% target throughout 2011, boosted by the increase in VAT, higher energy and import prices, and some rebuilding of companies’ margins.
Which means:
You will continue to be squeezed in the next couple of months by the government, overseas governments and companies.
Otherwise we might as well just be doing this.
(As an aside – I love that the CItyWire piece, in addition to clever writing, included a bit of clever coding. That principle – of creative storytelling in new ways, whether through interpretation or presentation of information and analysis – is one of the key things that will keep people passionate about traditional media venues, IMHO).
I honestly don’t do this, but it is pretty inspired… not sure it’d work on my boss, though…
I’ve never been a fan of chain mail… until my wife got this one from a friend in the village.
Using a sourdough starter, a set of instructions guided Amanda through the process of making a very tasty sourdough fruitcake. And given that Herman is based on a ‘live’ mix, it is designed to be expanded and shared. It was, however, as you’ll see from the recipe, a considerable amount of work for Amanda, so she was a little reticent about spreading its offspring…
It however, was delicious, and is a crazy way of spreading baked goodness amongst your friends, if you happen to know some passionate bakers… According to Lucy it’s good with apple and cinammon and a thing to be expected in the Home Counties.
I’m wondering if my baking colleague at caketakesthebiscuit has experienced this one…