Posts tagged UK
Apple Designer Knighted by Queen of England (Again)
This year’s Knighthoods are in, and the list is small. Two in fact.
Via the BBC
Raised in Chingford [UK], Mr Ive began working for Apple in 1992 and since then has been the brains behind many of its products…
From the age of 14, he said, he knew he was interested in drawing and making “stuff” and this led him to Northumbria Polytechnic - now Northumbria University - where he studied industrial design.
On graduation he started work as a commercial designer and then, with three friends, founded a design agency called Tangerine.
One of the clients for the agency was Apple which was so impressed with the work he did on a prototype notebook that it offered him a full-time job.
Mr Ive was apparently frustrated during his early years at Apple as the company was then suffering a decline. Everything changed, however, in 1995 when Steve Jobs returned to the company he helped found.
If We’re Turning Off Social Media, I Want News Channels Shut Down, Too
That might be a valid complaint, and even the most synergistic of social media gurus would have to admit — between creating engaging integrated solutions, no doubt — that Twitter wasn’t exactly a paragon of truth and accuracy during the riots, but you can hardly pin the blame solely on social media when rolling news channels like BBC News 24 and Sky News are running looped footage of burning buildings, overlaid with interviews with those who’d lost property and possessions in the looting. It might have been passed through an editorial filter, but continually presenting the worst of the footage creates a very skewed representation of reality.
Winners and Losers In The News Aggregator Copyright Case
Whilst those aggregators had consented to pay for their license, today’s ruling is nevertheless a blow to them, too. End users who don’t wish to pay fees may quit dedicated news monitoring packages to hack together their own solutions using tools like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News. As Meltwater CEO Jorn Lyssegen told me: “It’s just unreasonable that our clients need to pay to read articles they can find online for themselves.”
For the whole article, please see PaidContent
The UK's Fukushima PR Play
Tip of the day: don’t do that.
Via the Guardian:
British government officials approached nuclear companies to draw up a co-ordinated public relations strategy to play down the Fukushima nuclear accident just two days after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and before the extent of the radiation leak was known.
Internal emails seen by the Guardian show how the business and energy departments worked closely behind the scenes with the multinational companies EDF Energy, Areva and Westinghouse to try to ensure the accident did not derail their plans for a new generation of nuclear stations in the UK.
“This has the potential to set the nuclear industry back globally,” wrote one official at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), whose name has been redacted. “We need to ensure the anti-nuclear chaps and chapesses do not gain ground on this. We need to occupy the territory and hold it. We really need to show the safety of nuclear.”
Police buy software to map suspects' digital movements
Consider yourself mapped, tracked and hacked.
Via the Guardian:
Britain’s largest police force is using software that can map nearly every move suspects and their associates make in the digital world, prompting an outcry from civil liberties groups.
The Metropolitan police has bought Geotime, a security programme used by the US military, which shows an individual’s movements and communications with other people on a three-dimensional graphic. It can be used to collate information gathered from social networking sites, satellite navigation equipment, mobile phones, financial transactions and IP network logs.
Police have confirmed its purchase and declined to rule out its use in investigating public order disturbances.
And let’s not forget that these technologies make their way into — let’s call them — less democratic countries.
Legacy Media Strikes Back
We noted the other day that mainstream media now drives Twitter trends. A new report out of the UK expands on that and suggests that legacy media is dominating online discussion.
This makes sense in a way. With so many source options available, Users trend toward the tried and known.
Via MediaWeek:
James Smythe, general manager at UKOM, said: “Over the last seven years, we have seen media owners significantly rise in our Top 50 rankings. Clearly they own the very best content and people are responding to that.
“With hindsight, I’m sure a few media owners probably wish they had charged for their content from the beginning. ”I think the question of ‘trust’ comes into the equation. Brands are used as signposts and online especially there’s way more content than humans can manage so people look for ones they know and trust.”
As a somewhat related aside: Both legacy and new-ish media brands are increasing their absolute content production.
I went to a hyperlocal news panel a few days ago at the New York Times. AOL’s Patch President Warren Webster quite happily announced that the network is now publishing a new piece of content every 15 seconds.
That’s 240 new items an hour, as Kevin Grant noted.
Flood the content ecosystem and you’re bound to get SEO/search results. Tough to compete with that. — Michael.
