Microsoft have just announced their first ever quarterly loss in their corporate history, losing $492 million, albeit with a $6.2 billion write-down after its ill-fated (read: stupid) purchase of online advertising business aQuantive. That write-down is enough to get an asterisk beside this loss, although Microsoft’s ludicrously misjudged Online Services strategy meant something like this was only a matter…
Cities, Dublin, and the future of the metropolis
Urban design shapes lives in fundamental ways, and a recent spate of books, movies and exhibitions have seen a revival of interest in urbanism. Here’s my piece focusing on the Hack the City exhibition that tackles some of these issues. WHAT DO YOU WANT YOUR CITY TO BE? From The Irish Times, July 23rd, 2012…
RIM and Nokia’s grand unravelling
In this month’s Innovation Talk, I look at the startling decline of Nokia and RIM. Once the twin pillars of the mobile industry, they’re flailing now, with no sign of hope. In this week’s Monday Note, former Apple executive and all-round sharp guy Jean-Louis Gassée was even more blunt – “Nokia, once the emperor of mobile…
The Euro Doom Industry Is Booming
The euro is still here, just about, but there’s a lot of people putting their reputations on the line suggesting it won’t be here for much longer. But what’s this, a queue to join the single-currency? Here’s my column on the weird state of the euro. From The Irish Times, Saturday, June 2nd, 2012 IF…
Going for gold
This report in Spiegel is more than a bit bizarre: “Germany has gold reserves of just under 3,400 tons, the second-largest reserves in the world after the United States. Much of that is in the safekeeping of central banks outside Germany, especially in the US Federal Reserve in New York. One would think that…
Facebook floats away…
The reaction to Facebook’s IPO is pretty extraordinary, with coverage akin to a major sporting event. This is what we’ll have to live with, now, this FB ticker watching, an unholy extra element to consider every time there’s another cack-handed redesign or privacy-smashing misstep. I think we’d all do well to ignore the minutia of…
Can magazines go iPad?
This is an illuminating, and rather dispiriting, account of creating iPad versions of print magazines from Jason Pontin, the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, whom you’d think would be pioneers of iPad publishing. The reality is a lot more problematic: We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense…
Minority Report Syndrome: Picturing the future and making it happen
My Innovation Talk column from yesterday, about Google’s smart glasses and the mystery of concept videos. “ROSE-TINTED FANTASIES NOT AT ALL BETTER THAN THE REAL THING” From The Irish Times, May 7th, 2012 Last month, Google gave the world their vision of the future, almost literally. Project Glass was unveiled in a stylish concept…
How did “Europe” became a dirty word?
Watching the Republican primaries from this distance is probably the safest way of coping with the mix of toxicity and stupidity that is the hallmark of the race, but one aspect that seems to be increasingly prevalent is the casual use of “Europe” as a broad pejorative, a lazy symbol for dysfunctional “socialism” that evidently…
The Return of the King
I’ve been religiously watching Wimbledon finals since I was about five, but yesterday’s held a special sort of joy that I haven’t experienced in many years – the joy of seeing greatness revived. Last year, Brian Phillips wrote a touching, perceptive piece about the long autumn of Roger Federer’s career, a prolonged “still” phase –…
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