- Blog
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McDonalds and virtual coffee bars
McDonalds are going to roll out a big coffee chain. Good timing. Coffee’s mainstream now. Intra-day refreshment used to be divided sharply down the middle with tea in a styrene cup on one side and a decaf skinny latte in a paper cup with an elaborate lid on the other. Now I stand in the…
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Kindle. Segway for books?
Some people are calling Amazon’s Kindle ‘iTunes for books’. I’m calling it ‘Segway for books’. Not because it’s got two wheels and a giro-stabiliser but because it’s got Jeff Bezos on it. Jeff is a fascinating and clever man (I’d like to meet him one day. I tried to once but a bizarre canapé-related incident…
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Trivial, fabric-of-everyday-life stuff really
Ordinary-sized people riding around in truck-sized 4X4s now look as silly as the fat blokes in bubble cars we used to laugh at in 70s sketch shows. AND I think they should put a ‘thank you’ button on those automated check-outs in supermarkets. I miss saying ‘thank you’ (and I guess the machine could be…
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Speechification improved!
Hey. You should get over to Speechification. We upgraded (actually, Roo upgraded). So we now have comments, links in the navbar, better programme credits. Oh, and comments. Did I mention comments? So now you can comment. Nip over and leave a comment.
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Beating child labour
The Gap (and lots of other Western businesses) have invested a lot of money in systems to monitor supplier labour practices because they don’t like to be thought of as ‘the child labour people’ (at The Gap they employ 90 people for this purpose and fired 23 suppliers last year for failure to comply). It’s…
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WORST. MEETING. EVER
I’ll tell you what; I despise Yahoo! for what they did to poor Shi Tao in China last year – even more because they apparently don’t plan to stop giving up dissidents any time soon (tip to Chinese dissidents: find another email service). But yesterday’s Senate committee meeting: three hours during which founder and CEO…
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Population… again
Bloody population. I know it’s a big deal. I know that kneejerk liberal acceptance of uncontrolled growth is hardly better than kneejerk xenophobic rejection of immigration. I know that Britain’s infrastructure isn’t keeping up with population growth and also that ‘reception communities’ at the sharp-end are suffering (as usual) while the urban elite sips espresso…
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William Robert Bowbrick, B.E.M.
17 February 1921 – 11 October 2007.
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Green ecommerce?
I’m blogging in my professional capacity over at blogs.shave.com/digital (must do something about that picture). I’ve been figuring out what a medium-sized manufacturer with half a dozen well-known brands (like King of Shaves) ought to be doing online. We’ve come up with a cheeky strategy that actually reduces the emphasis on our own ecommerce activities…
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The smug interrogating the incompetent
Is it just me or was there something nauseating about watching a gang of smug, know-nothing MPs with their jackets over their chairs and their hands behind their heads grilling Northern Rock executives about a shocking practice (selling money market-backed mortgages) that they’d almost certainly never heard of six weeks ago? If I’d been one…