This morning’s Observer column…
One of the more interesting news items of last week was the report that Tiffany and Company, the celebrated New York jeweller, is suing eBay, the online auction company, for ‘facilitating the sale of counterfeit goods’ over the internet. It turns out that undercover agents working for the company secretly bought 200 ‘Tiffany’ items in eBay auctions and found that three out of four were counterfeited. The case will go to trial in the US later this year…
BBC Online is reporting that
Shares of internet search company Google fell 7% on Wednesday after its earnings fell short of Wall Street expectations for the first time.
The firm said late on Tuesday that fourth-quarter profit rose by 82% to $372.2m (£209m), or $1.22 per share. Analysts had expected $1.50 a share.Google’s stock fell $30.88 to $401.78 in New York amid concerns that the tech-industry giant may be overvalued.
Well, well. The ingratitude of Wall Street. And after Google’s capitulation to the Chinese regime, too. There’s no pleasing some capitalists.
A host of Apple patent filings have led to frenzied speculation — e.g. here — that Steve Jobs’s next bombshell will be a tablet computer that really works. I’ll believe it when I see it — not the tablet, but software that makes it do useful work. The computing tablet that’s more helpful than a Moleskine notebook has yet to be invented. But I’d buy one tomorrow if it existed.
Terrific piece by Becky Hogge on openDemocracy.net
Since going public in August 2004, [Google] has released over a dozen products, including Google Maps, Google Web Accelerator, Google Homepage, Google Sitemaps, Google Earth, Google Talk, Google Desktop, Google Base, Google Book Search, Google Video and Google Pack. So what has Google been up to in China during those eighteen months?
One clue might lie in the feature of google.cn that sets it apart from the other global search providers, like MSN and Yahoo!, operating inside China. This feature – much lauded in the official statements given by Google on the day of the launch – is that google.cn tells its customers when their search results have been “filtered”. How Google got that concession from the Chinese authorities might go some way to explaining why it took so long to release google.cn. But the question then has to be, what did Google offer in return?
From David Pogue, writing in the New York Times…
Big changes are in the photographic air. First, there’s the astonishing collapse of the film camera market. By some tallies, 92 percent of all cameras sold are now digital. Big-name camera companies are either exiting the film camera business ( Kodak, Nikon) or exiting the camera business altogether (Konica Minolta). Film photography is rapidly becoming a special-interest niche.
Next, there’s the end of the megapixel race. “In compact cameras, I think that the megapixel race is pretty much over,” says Chuck Westfall, director of media for Canon’s camera marketing group. “Seven- and eight-megapixel cameras seem to be more than adequate. We can easily go up to a 13-by-19 print and see very, very clear detail.”
That’s a shocker. After 10 years of hearing how they need more, more, more megapixels, are consumers really expected to believe that eight megapixels will be the end of the line?
So, what’s next?
In no particular order, Pogue predicts:
This really is the end of an era. Western Union has transmitted its last telegram.
STOP: After 155 years in the telegraph business, Western Union has cabled its final dispatch.
The service that in the mid-1800s displaced pony-borne messengers has been supplanted over the past half-century by inexpensive long-distance telephone service, faxes and e-mail. In a final bit of irony, Western Union informed customers last week in a message on its Web site.
“Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services,” said the notice. “We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage.”
The terse notice, confirmed Wednesday by Victor Chayet, a spokesman for the Greenwood Village, Co., unit of First Data Corp., was in keeping with telegraphese, the language customers devised to hold down costs. Sentences were separated by “STOP,” which was cheaper to send than a period, Chayet said.
Thus ends a comms channel that has given rise to more than its fair share of jokes.
Like the American news reporter who, upon arriving in Venice, cabled: “STREETS FLOODED STOP PLEASE ADVISE”
Or the time when Cary Grant got a telegram from a magazine fact-checker: “HOW OLD CARY GRANT QUERY”. He replied: “OLD CARY GRANT FINE STOP HOW YOU QUERY”.
Tom Standage, Technology Editor of the Economist, wrote a nice book about the telegraph entitled The Victorian Internet.
Pete (who corrected the Venice quote, above) reminds me of Evelyn Waugh’s wonderfully comic use of telegraphese in his novel, Scoop, e.g. this dispatch from the hapless war correspondent, William Boot, in response to a series of urgent demands from Head Office for dispatches from the front:
PLEASE DONT WORRY QUITE SAFE AND WELL IN FACT RATHER ENJOYING THINGS WEATHER IMPROVING WILL CABLE AGAIN IF THERE IS ANY NEWS YOURS BOOT
The Carrowteigue area is notorious for its scenic landscapes.
From the online brochure of a Co. Mayo estate agent.
Update: I’ve had a lovely email from a fastidious reader who points out that ‘notorious’ has several meanings. For example, the Shorter Oxford lists these three:
I of course assumed the first, which is why I hooted with laughter upon reading the estate agent’s blurb. But it is perfectly possible, I concede, that in the recesses of Co. Mayo (where I was born), there dwells an estate agent with a more extensive grasp of the English language than mine and an even more antiquated style!
What a thing it is to have erudite readers. I expect I will now become notorious among them for my ignorance. Sigh.
The first President Bush loved to quote Woody Allen’s saying that half of life is just showing up. Last night, the current President Bush demonstrated the wisdom in those words. He delivered a pedestrian State of the Union speech, and he’ll likely get a brief bounce in the polls just for showing up at an annual ritual designed to make any president look presidential. But by next week, nobody will remember what he said….
David Kusnet, writing in The New Republic. I think he’s wrong. Everyone will remember Dubya saying “America is addicted to oil”. I never thought I’d hear him say something like that.
My colleague Seb’s plane was diverted to Delhi when he was en route to Bangladesh to instal the first Ndiyo Internet cafe using mobile phone technology to provide internet connectivity. To compensate for the disruption, he was put up in a luxury hotel which, among other thoughtful touches provided this ‘To Do’ list. Suggestions include:
Behind the facade of these buildings in St Andrew’s Street in Cambridge, there’s a huge retail development under way with the optimistic name ‘Grand Arcade’. In a smart move to counter public dislike of the disruption caused by a massive building project right in the heart of a medieval city, the developers commissioned Martin Parr, the populist Magnum photographer, to do a series of photographs under the general heading of “The Cambridge Portrait” which will be displayed over coming months on the hoardings round the site. So far the pictures have been quite nice but not really outstanding. But they do provide opportunities for interesting juxtapositions — as, for example, here,
or here.
Note for photography buffs: Looking at the images, I had concluded they must have been shot with a Hasselblad, but a visit to Parr’s web site suggests they were made with a truly recondite instrument, the Plaubel Makina 67. Now there’s a really obscure camera for you.
Parr describes himself, btw, as a “mischievous ironist”.