From today’s Guardian:
Sir Mark Thatcher has been refused a visa for the US after being given a four-year suspended sentence for his part in helping to bankroll an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea.
Category Archives: General
How to use the dial telephone
Lovely 1920s instructional film made by AT&T which Quentin found. It makes an interesting point which has a contemporary resonance, namely that technologies which once seemed strange can become so commonplace as to be invisible. It’s impossible to imagine a child growing up nowadays in Western society who did not instinctively know how to use a phone. But there was a time when a telco felt it needed to produce a movie to introduce customers to its new-fangled device.
Chinese puzzles
China is the great enigma of our time, riddled with contradictions. It’s clearly an awakening geopolitical giant, and is potentially the only country which might one day challenge the US for global supremacy (a thought which keeps many right-wing US crazies awake at night). Almost every piece of electronics kit I buy (yea, even the sleekest stuff from Apple) has “Made in China” stamped on it somewhere. Microsoft has set up two labs in China — one to do R&D, the other to speed up the transition from R&D lab to product. Bill Gates spends a lot of time wooing the Chinese leadership. Yet the official position of the leadereship is that a special Chinese version of Linux is what will underpin all computing on its territory.
The Chinese (communist) government proclaims its desire to become a fully-fledged member of capitalist society and has even signed up to WIPO. And yet Mark Anderson (who keeps his eye on these things) says that no US company would dream of risking its intellectual property in China. Western companies are happy to have their hardware made there, but wouldn’t risk revealing their software there because of fears of being ripped off.
This has had an interesting side-effect. The Indian government, which hitherto has been one of the few administrations to take a relatively enlightened line on intellectual property at WIPO, seems to be hardening its stance and moving towards the ‘Strong IP’ side of the argument. One explanation for this could be that the Indians (who see China as their major rival) have spotted what’s going on and think that by having a Strong IP regime they can attract the Western investment that eschews China. This might be a shrewd move in the short-term, though in the longer term it may lock the Indians into the unfolding IP catastrophe.
In the course of seeking enlightenment on the Chinese enigma, I came on this elegant lecture, “Peering into the Future of China” by Brad DeLong of Berkeley. I wish more academics were as clear as this.
Those grammar-checking tools…
… are, well, useless. Sandeep Krishnamurthy of the University of Washington has been doing some testing of Microsoft Word’s grammar checking abilities. He ran this text past it…
Marketing Bad
Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying? It is no wondering that advertisings are bad for company in America, Chicago and Germany. Updating of brand image is bad for processes in one company and many companies.
McDonalds is good brand. McDonald’s is good brand. McDonald’s are good brand. McDonalds’ are good brand. McDonald’s and Coca Cola are good brand. McDonald’s and Coca Cola is good brand. MCDONALD’S AND COCA COLA IS GOOD BRAND.
Finance good for marketing. Show me money!
4P’s are marketing mix. Four P’s is marketing mix. 4Ps is marketing mix. Manager use marketing mixes for good marketing. You Know What I Mean? Internets do good job in company name Amazon. Internets help marketing big company like Boeing. Internets make good brand best like Coca Cola.
Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft. Gates do good marketing jobs out Microsoft. Gates build the big brand in Microsoft. The Gates is leader of big company in Washington. Warren buffet do awesome job in marketing. Buffets eat buffets in city and town in country.
… and found that Word passed it without comment. To be fair, other programs fare little better. Still, Krishnamurthy’s verdict is harsh:
My conclusion is that the “Spelling and Grammar Check” feature on Microsoft Word is extraordinarily bad (especially the Grammar check part). It is so bad that I am surprised that it is even being offered and I question the ethics of including a feature that is this bad on a product that is so widely used.
I ran the text past MS Word for Mac. The only thing it objected to was the sentence “4P’s are marketing mix”.
On this day…
… in 1973, the last US troops scuttled from Vietnam, after destroying the country in order to ‘save’ it.
Great lost URLs
Lorcan Dempsey has a lovely one on his Blog.
The BUBL service was hosted at the University of Bath for a while. It gloried in the URL: www.bubl.bath.ac.uk.
Australian school bans iPod
Entertaining rant by Andrew Orlowski spurred by the news that a private school in Australia has banned its pupils from listening to their iPods. The yuppie consumer gadget will not be permitted in class, because it encourages kids to be selfish and lonely, according to the school principal. I wrote a column about the ‘iPod effect’ a while back.
How much does email cost?
The thing about email — and the reason it has become a pest as well as a boon, is that it makes it easy to c.c. messages to many people, thereby transferring cost to the reader. How much cost? Well, suppose you get 50 non-spam messages a day, and you spend an average of three minutes reading and considering each. What’s that in real money?
This very useful piece, “Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload” by Stever Robbins, suggests dividing your annual salary by 120,000 to get the per-minute cost of your time. But this reflects the longer working hours of Americans. For denizens of “old Europe” the rule is: divide by 110,400 (46 weeks, 5-day week, 8-hour day) to find out how much your email costs. The article has lots of really sensible tips — mostly aimed at authors — for making email more efficient. Thanks to Quentin for the link.
Gadget mania
US video game stores opened their doors at midnight yesterday to start selling to Americans a gadget that had been introduced last December in Japan — the Sony PlayStation Portable, hereinafter known as the PSP. The New York Times ponderously surveyed a New Marketing Trend. Sony had, it opined,
engaged in what has become a favorite tactic of marketers in various lines of business: hyping a new product by making it available when most people are in bed, and acting like those slumbering are missing out.
Retailing specialists note that the off-hour shopping extravaganza, at midnight or the crack of dawn, has been used to bring out cultish consumers for films (“Star Wars,” “The Passion of the Christ”), shoes (Air Jordan high-tops), video games (Halo 2) and books (Harry Potter books).
“It’s become a much more utilized marketing tool over the last three or four years,” said Wendy Liebmann, president of WSL Strategic Retail, a marketing consulting firm in New York. The message retailers want to send, she said, is: “This is for aficionados. If you’re serious, we’re serious.”
Sony said it hoped by the end of the weekend to sell the available one million units of the hand-held PSP, which lets people play games, watch movies and listen to music.
The good news is that this is one gadget that neither Quentin nor I are likely to be competitive about. I am still smarting, however, over his Mac Mini.
How the online world affects the offline one
According to Jupiter Research, a market research firm, reported here, for every dollar that US consumers spend online, another five or six dollars are going to offline purchases influenced by online research.