July 2003 Archives
July 31, 2003
The wonders of capitalism – or something
I don't pretend to understand the food manufacturing business at all but this invention – "the first media technology that is put into the mouth" according to its promoters (at the SIGGRAPH 03 conference in San diego) – seems so unlikely and so unsavoury all at once that it must be a pretty good case study for the unending inventiveness of Japanese capitalism. From New Scientist.Deflation – don't sweat it...
Brad DeLong (who is, like, you know, the Dickens of economists or something – at least in terms of output – and, as far as I know, is also the only economist who links to this weblog so is obviously all right by me) has a reassuring, post-Moore's Law take on the 'deflation anxiety' afflicting much of his profession – from Wired MagazineBrands have been wiped out for less
Nike is a big firm and golf is a teeny tiny part of its portfolio but the economic fallout from Tiger Woods' decision to dump his custom-engineered Nike clubs in favour of some old ones he's pretty sure are still in the loft somewhere (if his mum didn't put them on ebay or something) could be immense.Even if you only count the millions spent on the design, engineering and manufacture of the new line and ignore the huge potential damage to the brand from Woods' now essentially useless endorsement ("You'll be wanting a set of these clubs. They set my game back a year-and-a-half") this is a big deal.
More amazing perhaps, is the sacrifice made by Woods in trying to make the endorsement work. According to The San Francisco Chronicle, his game has been kaput for the whole season – and he's fallen to 24th in the rankings – as a direct result of his club trouble. It says a lot about the strange entanglement of mega-brands and sports stars that he should have given up the number 1 spot for the sake of the swoosh.
Holiday diversions, part 1
The Royal Airforce Museum at Hendon is a top day out with the kids – especially now that, like all national museums and galleries – it's free. It's a pretty sobering experience too – war is not glorified here (although the ejector seat display is pretty exciting).
The most striking thing is how flimsy these aeroplanes are – not just the stiffened linen and bent wood of the early warplanes but the dodgy looking riveted aluminium and steel of the modern fighters. I'm sure the pilots and engineers know better but some of these crates bring to mind nothing more solid than the creaking plywood holiday caravans of my youth – only with nuclear missiles hanging under them.
Nothing invulnerable about these machines – and nothing trivial about getting in one and setting out over enemy territory...
July 24, 2003
Biotech overload
Glenn Crocker in New Scientist says that too many biotech firms are started and too few allowed to go bust when it becomes evident that they're not going to work. This unproductive layer of dodgy firms with poor products blocks the creation of the next generation of potentially more successful businesses by soaking up scarce resources.
Quite an interesting ecological angle on business creation. Crocker reckons that the solution is to give scientists development money to take their ideas further before they have to start a firm to exploit them. It's certainly kinder than thinning out the forest of duds once they're up and running.
No. I do not have a Nectar card
Rachel Shabi in The Guardian's Saturday magazine has got herself all worked up about loyalty cards and RFID tags. She's probably right to worry. In the advanced economies we're consumers first, citizens second. We interact with retailers more than with any other institution. What they do with our data is important but they're unaccountable and secretive.
Their increasingly privileged access to personal information implies a matching obligation to increase transparency and choice – they'll need to behave a bit more like civic entities and offer the kind of guarantees we expect from them. The bargains we strike with retailers – coupons for data, for instance – will need to be more explicit, opt-outs easier, tracking chips properly labeled and removable, personal profiles accessible.
As an entrepreneur, of course, I see all this as an opportunity, not an obstacle to the unhindered operation of the free market. Since corporations cannot and should not expect to operate entirely without restraint, they should respect the ecology within which they live and develop commercial responses to a society's constraints.
I wonder if there's any mileage in third party 'kill switches' for RFID tags – a booth in the shopping mall where you can get your RFID tags switched off before they start broadcasting your movements and shopping habits? Would I pay 50p to neutralise all the tags in my shopping? No. Probably not.
July 21, 2003
Berger on Palestine
John Berger is brilliant and infuriating: Bolshevik, poet, monk. The man who gave his Booker Prize money (for G) to the Black Panthers and radicalised a whole generation of art history students through the amazing Ways of Seeing has been a constant witness for the poor and marginalised, especially for peasants and migrants.
Never a Stalinist – always too close to the powerless – he avoided the ideological quagmire the left of his generation got stuck in. Lots of people will hate his LRB piece on Palestine (A Moment in Ramallah, London Review of Books, 24 July – doesn't appear to be online yet) – not least for its classic Berger imagery – soaring and leaden, artful and artless, all at once – like I said: infuriating. But, if you know his work, it's perfectly consistent with his unwavering identification with the dispossessed. Here's some of that infuriating imagery:
“When it came to saying goodbye, the aunt held my hand, and in her eyes, there was the same special attention to the moment. If two people are laying a tablecloth on a table, they glance at one another to check the placing of the cloth. Imagine the table is the world and the cloth the lives of those we have to save. Such was the expression.”
July 17, 2003
A new role for Government: bullying the well-off
James Crabtree and Noah Curthoys from the Work Foundation's iSociety research project have written a report about e-government targets.
They think the current goal of getting 100% of government services online by 2005 is silly and they've found some funny examples from the official literature to back up their assertion ndash; the seed potato classification scheme and burial at sea to name two.
Their analysis is on the money. Indiscriminately shovelling services onto the net is reductive and wasteful. It's the e-gov equivalent of a really dumb marketing plan that attempts to sell everything to everyone – without bothering to segment the market, identify hot prospects or promote profitable top sellers.
I guess their most provocative proposal is that government should consider compelling some of their customers – the most well-off and 'e-literate' – to use online channels. They say that this group is less likely to use the web than the access figures suggest so poor and un-wired service users are effectively subsidising the lazy middle classes.
The press release doesn't say where you can get the report but presumably it'll be here. Click 'more' for the press release:
Continue reading "A new role for Government: bullying the well-off"
Thinking ahead
At the House of Commons event the other day I ran into a futurist called Susan Clayton. I like futurists. They do important work reminding us to remember our descendants. We don't (can't?) think far enough into the future. Our horizons are miserable, collapsed, mean-spirited. Future generations don't really get a look in – one or two electoral terms (half a generation!) is about as far as we can see.
Susan told me that some Government departments have people thinking as far as 80 years ahead – on climate change, for instance. Corporations are probably worse – accounting practice and abbreviated reporting periods keep things short-term.
We certainly have no useful tools for engaging with the far future – 100 years or more – even though doing so could be an effective way of extending our tenure of the planet and improving the lives of those that come after us.
Adapting existing investment instruments to time-shift capital into the future, for instance, would make use of the wonder of compound interest to massively amplify the impact of a small investment made in the present day – but the financial and legal framework for these very long term bets doesn't exist. Ask your accountant to set up a trust to manage a thousand year investment... Go on.
Peter Schwartz, top futurist and grandaddy of the 'scenario planning' discipline (and Stewart Brand's partner in the influential GBN) was interviewed in Tuesday's FT about his new book, Inevitable Surprises. Schwartz, despite his association with the disastrous idea of the 'long boom', keeps the faith:
“Pervasive dense information is like cheap energy. One of the things that drove the 20th century was cheap energy – it expanded the wealth of society enormously. I think the same thing is going to happen relentlessly with information. We had a hiccup because the evolution of the infrastructure got out of phase.”
July 16, 2003
Early retirement, Mr Kaufman?
You don't have to be a Dykista (A Dykie?) to think that DCMS Select Committee Chairman Gerald Kaufman's attack on the corporation yesterday was unprincipled, opportunistic – really a politically disreputable act. I can't be the only one who's getting fed up with Kaufman's unreconstructed, Wilson-era Statism disguised as consumer advocacy or anti-establishment vim or whatever it is.
His latest soapbox is the extra-curricular activities of Messrs Marr, Gilligan, Simpson et al, which he thinks should be curtailed in the interests of balance, impartiality etc.
How stifling a group of the most intelligent, independent, high-minded journalists on the planet can aid accountability at the beeb is entirely beyond me. That these journos can sustain the BBC's high (and rather unusual) editorial standards while writing grown-up opinion for other outlets is a testament to their quality, not their venality.
July 15, 2003
Bloggers in the house
Maybe it was the over-stuffed surroundings – the Grand Comittee Room of the House of Commons – but last night's 'blogging and politics' event, organised by The Work Foundation and Vox Politics felt sort of important. The long-hairs and the suits, the iBook trendies and the wonks (even a few Trots) – and all three of the currently blogging MPs – all in one room (and a room with wi-fi) for the first time?
Tom Watson, MP and heavyweight blogger, explained the simple, day-to-day benefits he and his constituents get from his weblog. A US 'e-democracy expert', Steven Clift, said that weblogs might never have any big democratic effects but will certainly alter politics. Political columnist (and alleged neo-con) Stephen Pollard gave four or five good reasons for journos to blog – not least it seems to be a good way of using up uncommissioned story ideas. Contributors were practical, un-euphoric. Weblogs as tools for connection with constituents, accelerated idea gathering, better accountability.
Chairman James Crabtree from the Work Foundation worked the crowd well – Tom Coates sputtered at the stupidity of 'reputation management' for bloggers. The usual ragged RCP plant from Spiked! limply debunked blogging – clash of ideas, real politics, blah blah...
Sasha told the story about the blogger, the local councillor and the person from Transport for London getting together to actually do something useful in her community. There was some useful to-and-fro about centralising, control-freak pols vs. out-of-control, hyper-accountable bloggers – deserves a proper work-out, that one. Wikis came up – I'll bet that was a first for the house – and Tom Watson (our blogging MP) was encouraged to put up a PolicyWiki. Very good idea, I think.
More from Sasha, Tom, Linkmachinego and The BBC. And Orlowski is good value, of course.
(Click the pic for a handy key)
July 11, 2003
Don't prejudge the Comms Bill
Richard Tait in the FT (subscription required) says we shouldn't be too quick to predict the long term outcomes of the Comms Bill. After all, ten years ago:
“...you could have got eye-watering odds betting that six years after channel Five’s launch it would be a major broadcaster of arts and history programmes; that its first chairman Greg Dyke would be running the BBC; that its first director of programmes Dawn Airey would be in charge of programming at BSkyB; and that her successor Kevin Lygo would be everyone’s favourite to take over as director of television at Channel 4.”
Tait, who used to be Editor in Chief at ITN and is now an academic, is a pretty good reason to buy the FT on a Tuesday when his column appears in the Creative Business section.
Cars, green and not so green...
A genuinely green car is, of course, impossible. Moving a tonne of steel and plastic around could never use no energy at all and even the zero emissions hydrogen fuel cell cars will require prodigious amounts of energy to produce the hydrogen in the first place.
The switch to hydrogen is going to happen sooner than you think, though – the auto and petroleum businesses have seen the writing on the wall for hydrocarbons – but we mustn't be naive enough to mistake the switch for a green initiative. The market is in motion, the economics of hydrogen will become very persuasive very quickly. Your next car may be one of these (from a useful survey of all the real-world green cars in The Guardian)
July 10, 2003
Buy this thing
It looks like a home enema kit but you are definitely going to need this baby for your upcoming fortnight in Suffolk or the Dordogne or wherever you take your 4x4 these days. It's a supremely clever and slightly weird car accessory: an ingenious 12 volt cigarette lighter-powered shower attachment. Go on, wash your feet.
(watch me shoot to the top of the Google rankings for 'home enema kit').
Top media people
I feel obliged to link to The Guardian's MediaGuardian 100, even if only for the old outboard brain, but I also have to link to Russ Taylor's commentary. He's an American so UK media looks pretty weird to him.
July 08, 2003
25% of Anglican vicars are metrosexual
It's not a new term but 'metrosexual' is ready for primetime and is now a fully-fledged market segment. The New York Times profiled an actual specimen a couple of weeks ago:
“Mr. Martinson likes wine bars and enjoys shopping with his gal pals, who have come to trust his eye for color, his knack for seeing when a bag clashes with an outfit, and his understanding of why some women have 47 pairs of black shoes. ("Because they can!" he said.) He said his guy friends have long thought his consumer and grooming habits a little... different. But Mr. Martinson, who lives in Manhattan and works in finance, said he's not that different” (New York Times)
These articles from The Economist and The New York Times are pretty good but you might need a subscription to see one or both. Try Rob Walker's freebie from Slate @ MSNBC:
“marketers have repositioned the term to denote guys who are secure in their need for, say, skin moisturizer or body spray-straight urban men willing, even eager, to embrace their feminine sides”
Platform frenzy
Nigel Walley is a partner at clever iTV consultancy Decipher and the motor behind an intriguing research and viewing facility called iBurbia. Nigel reckons iBurbia is the only set-up in the country where you can put groups of punters in front of all the current TV technology – from Sky Plus to Freeview, networked Playstations, Tivos and all the red button applications currently out there – in authentic-looking living room settings.
His clients bring real customers down to test new apps in something resembling a real home and also send their own staff to get familiar with the dozens of emerging platforms they're going to need to understand as the TV landscape gets weirder and more fragmented. Viewing facilities used to need nothing more complicated than a VCR. Nigel's behind-the-scenes server room looks sufficiently like Mission Control to convince me that the business has changed completely.
OS X wisdom
I've been using Macs since 1985 (I make that 18 years) so I've felt at home there for a long time but OS X is a fascinating and foreign place for me, even a couple of years into the experience. So now I've got a copy of O'Reilly's excellent Mac OS X Hints next to the bed. So far I've learnt how to speed up iPhoto on our very old kitchen Cube (turn off the drop shadow), how to cd by dragging a file into Terminal (is that cool or what?) and how to speed up iMovie rendering (hide the app). This is a useful book.
July 07, 2003
Mailer, Bush and the war
Whatever you think of it, this is one of those articles you're going to want to have read. You'll thank me for linking to it – no, really, you will. Norman Mailer writing beautifully on the unstated hormonal motives for the war in Iraq, from the NYRB.
“Moreover, we had knockout tank echelons, Super-Marines, and – one magical ace in the hole – the best air force that ever existed. If we could not find our machismo anywhere else, we could certainly count on the interface between combat and technology. Let me then advance the offensive suggestion that this may have been one of the covert but real reasons we went looking for war. We knew we were likely to be good at it.”
Boys
As father of two girls and a boy I really enjoyed Jenni 'Woman's Hour' Murray's Ten myths about boys. Our Olly is nearly five and he's sometimes hard work but I think of him as a pioneer, striding out into difficult, masculine territory without a map. Thinking about the very poor popular image of young males these days, I reckon being a boy can only get harder and I hope he has the resources and the love to turn all the ridicule and opprobrium to positive use and to be a successful, happy human being despite it all.
Last week's media news today!
I'm a week behind (blame recent sleep deprivation) but there were some really good articles in last Monday's Media Guardian. David Liddiment, who used to be in charge of programming at ITV, has got public service religion and provides a useful insider's view of the pros and cons of arts programming for mainstream channels. He doesn't have to worry about picking winners any more so he can afford to say things like this:
“For as long as mainstream broadcasting survives, it should not be possible again for the BBC to abandon its cultural responsibilities on its main channel. Charter renewal lobbyists please note. As for ITV, Channel 4 and Five, I believe they will find it increasingly difficult to keep arts programmes worthy of the name as part of a commercially viable schedule. Sooner or later someone will have to look again at the trade-off between a rich and varied TV diet and the bounty that broadcasters pay the treasury for their privileged access to spectrum.”In the same issue, terrifically brainy Tim Gardam looks back over his five years doing the same job at Channel 4. He is most proud of Big Brother:
“He recalls his happiest moment: the last night of the first Big Brother in August 2000. “I thought, 'Whatever happens now, I have done something.'”.
July 06, 2003
The downside
Rosa is nine weeks old. She turns out to be entirely adorable – but then I would say that. Juliet's latest column for Tigerchild (written a couple of weeks ago) is a hymn to the downside.
July 05, 2003
How buildings get smart
Owen Gibson is worrying about the slow arrival of the 'smart home' in The Guardian. Like him, I remember those Sunday Supplement photos of the prototypical wired home back in the Seventies (which always seemed to belong to Stirling Moss).
The problem is that our homes move to a different rhythm than the rest of our lives. They're built to last 100 years or more and we don't often change them (Changing Rooms notwithstanding). Maybe we should look at the way older domestic technologies were added – cooking hearths, window glass, electricity, mains gas, telephones – for clues as to how homes will stretch to wrap around these 'smart' additions?
The archaeologists and anthropologists (maybe the architects) might be more useful here than the techies and marketing people with their stupid adoption curves and demographics and surveys. Stewart Brand wrote about the way we change our dwellings over time in the excellent How Buildings Learn.
July 01, 2003
Do me a favour and read this lot...
If I had time I'd probably be reading things like Edward Sheehan's The Map and the Fence from the NYRB, Edward Said's A Road Map to Where? from the LRB, Gerard Baker's 2,200 words on US nation building in Iraq in the FT, Emily Bell on the ascendance of the BBC in The Guardian, The Economist's Technology Quarterly and The Ecologist's (somewhat hysterical) 5 reasons to keep Britain GM-free.
Sainsbury's arrives
Round here everyone's been talking about the opening of a dinky branch of Sainsbury's in the village. It's one of the firm's tiny convenience stores (no car park, no deli, no Starbucks...). Everyone's happy except the other local retailers, all of whom hate it. The off licenses, supermarkets, butchers and petrol station are all certain it'll kill them off. The insertion of mega-brand convenience stores like these into fragile local business ecologies will be a powerful diagnostic for their health. The weakest could be destabilised and might collapse &ndash: a disaster for diversity and choice. Are planners considering the chilling effect of the big brands when they approve their applications?
Meanwhile, The Economist wonders if the chain can survive as an independent entity under opera buff Peter Davis: "Can a mass-market retailer successfully sell both gourmet olive oil to City analysts in London and white bread north of Watford? For the moment, Tesco is doing it. But Sainsbury fails to deliver a superior offer on any count: not price, not range, not quality" (you'll need a subscription to see this story).
Azeem says crap
Appropriately fogey-ish response to blogging from Damian Whitworth in Britain's least wired broadsheet The Times. He's obviously intrigued but trying hard not to sound too keen in case the other fogeys at the paper send him to Coventry. Oh, and Azeem says 'crap'.