How the BBC iPlayer came to be

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iPlayer

Fabulous story by Tony Ageh. Long read, but well worth it, and tells you a lot about innovation, serendipity and organisational politics. Also tells you what’s wrong with the iPlayer. Make some coffee, pull up a chair and savour…

So I take this guy out, and I say, ‘We have to go drinking tonight,’ and he says, ‘You’re going to sack me, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Not necessarily, but we are going to go drinking.’ We go down the stairs to the bar at Bush House, which stays open all night, because that’s where the World Service is, and I said, ‘We’re not leaving this bar until we’ve come up with such a great idea that I can’t sack you, because I’m going to have to tell her tomorrow that you can’t be sacked, because you’ve got the greatest idea the BBC has ever had.’

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Commuters

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commuting

Most passengers in UK trains seem to fiddle with their smartphones. But not all. This from a commuter train yesterday. Mind you, they’re all reading the same (free) newspaper, so maybe it’s not as hopeful as I thought.

The “has Apple peaked?” meme is back. Sigh.

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But some horse-sense from Farhad Manjoo :

If Apple is now hitting a plateau, it’s important to remember that it’s one of the loftiest plateaus in the history of business. The $18.4 billion profit that Apple reported on Tuesday is the most ever earned by any company in a single quarter.

Yep. If this is failure, then I’d like some of it, please.

Corporate logic

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Apple has over $200B in cash, and yet it borrows money to fund buy-backs of its shares — to keep its investors happy. How come?

Simple, says the NYT:

Mr. Maestri [Apple’s CFO] said that Apple would continue to raise money in debt markets in the United States and abroad to continue to return money to investors in the form of dividends and stock buybacks. Because Apple houses the majority of its $216 billion in cash overseas, it has borrowed money over the last three years to pay out more than $9 billion to investors.

And why is that $216B housed overseas? Equally simple: if Apple repatriated it to the US, it would have to pay tax.

HMG wakes up to the potential of blockchain technology

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This morning’s Observer column:

There are not many occasions when one can give an unqualified thumbs-up to something the government does, but this is one such occasion. Last week, Sir Mark Walport, the government’s chief scientific adviser, published a report with the forbidding title Distributed Ledger Technology: Beyond Block Chain. The report sets out the findings of an official study that explores how the aforementioned technology “can revolutionise services, both in government and the private sector”. Since this is the kind of talk one normally hears from loopy startup founders pitching to venture capitalists rather than from sober Whitehall mandarins, it made this columnist choke on his muesli – especially given that, in so far as Joe Public thinks about distributed ledgers at all, it is in the context of Bitcoin, money laundering and online drug dealing. So what, one is tempted to ask, has the chief scientific adviser been smoking?

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