Tag Archives: linkedin

This has 'guilt' written all over it…

click for larger view

This gem of corporate advertising stood out to me from the pages of The Times yesterday. (Click for a larger image if you are remotely interested in reading it for yourself or find the longer online version here…)

It’s basically McDonalds, a corporation that has been merrily polluting our bodies and the environment for many decades, proclaiming their health giving properties and ‘eco’ credentials.

While I’m sure they have enough evidence of their claims to avoid action by the Advertising Standards Authority (a pretty toothless body if ever there was one) the way I read this personally was as a list of ‘guilty as charged’ pronouncements.

To me, McDonalds has always been a very ‘reactive’ organisation and the majority of the statements it makes in this advertisement (to investors one presumes) have only come about due to upsurges in public opinion, changes in legislation and profit imperative – plus the fact it feels obliged to have a ‘corporate and social responsibility’ these days.

All the time it could get away with poisoning us, insidiously indoctrinating our children and spreading its detritus across the world at as little cost to itself as possible, it has done so – therefore, this type of pompous corporate bullshit really sticks in my throat – a bit like their double quarter-pounders with cheese 😉

Technology for Marketing and the Holy Grail

Going round in circles. Marketing gets reinvented with the frequency of the seasons...

Looking at the pattern of posts on this blog over the last few years, I would appear to be a bit of a ‘Winter blogger’. I have a couple of theories for this…

The first is that I am a bit SAD – by that I mean being prone to Seasonal Affective Disorder – but other meanings could be equally applicable 😉 – and therefore presumably I feel the need to rant and rave during the winter months and then start to lighten up a bit when the sun finally decides to appear again.

The second is that my rants and raves during the long winter months set the brain cells working furiously and by the spring I have figured out how I wish to spend the rest of the year and remain focused on that until the nights draw in again and the dull winter weather reappears.

Now that the days are getting longer again and the sun is making an occasional appearance, I feel my need for winter ranting subsiding but I can’t let spring arrive without at least another big rant 🙂 … Continue reading →

Information Management and the Theory of Everything

Information Theory was fundamental to NTL's work on digital compression in the early 1990s and also key to me being able to design and produce this industry guide using the early versions of Photoshop and Quark

The first time I became aware of the work of Claude E. Shannon and the landmark paper on Information Theory he published while working at Bell Labs in the 1940s was when I worked for NTL’s Advanced Products Division and had to try to understand the principles of digital video compression to promote the company’s innovations in digital broadcast technologies.

Shannon’s Information Theory was absolutely fundamental to the encoding, transmission and decoding processes used to make digital broadcasting a reality. It also became clearer to me at that time that Information Theory sat at the heart of everything I was involved in following the transition from analogue content creation and publishing processes to digital processes, that had begun, for me, with the desktop publishing revolution in the late 80s/early 90s and continued with the arrival and growth of the web.

Information Theory however is concerned with the mechanics of communication and the quantity and readability of the information transmitted. It is not concerned with the quality of that information, its meaning or its importance. For those processes we have what has become known as Information Management – as defined here by AIIM – a practice that has been going on in shifting forms for many decades now.

Continue reading →

A mobile phone mast in a box

It’s that time of the year again when the great and the good of the world’s mobile technology industry gather in Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress . So far this year, there have been plenty of images of Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer and Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop getting cosy (rather fitting that the first day of this year’s event falls on Valentine’s Day perhaps) as well as the usual parade of the latest and greatest smartphone technologies.

As in previous years however, there are other less glamorous announcements but ones that could make significant differences. In a couple of previous posts going back to 2009, I made comments about the impact of molecular level electronics and how the really useful innovations in energy reduction were happening within the very power-hungry networks themselves. Continue reading →

I predict a riot!

I had an interesting blog debate with an ex-colleague and friend the other day about the role of social media in the events that have been playing out in the Arab countries of North Africa. The debate centred on social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, being a catalyst for these events. My view is that social media’s role is being overstated, as many of us have seen this type of thing happen before in our lives and a long time before social media became prominent. I remember the world watching in amazement as a similar domino effect played out in Eastern Europe in the late 80s and early 90s at a time when the web was just a twinkle in Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. More recently, it has been recognised that social media has been turned against the Iranian people following the Green Revolution a couple of years ago, so I really think we need to assess the catalysts and aftermath of these events with the benefit of hindsight. (note:- here is a very good ‘middle ground’ perspective on this found by John Goode, my sparring partner in this debate and also an interesting BBC piece on ‘How revolutions happen’ )

I get a sense though that even within the next couple of years, the spiritual home of the social media behemoths, like Twitter and Facebook, will experience such a degree of change that the current events in the Arab world will pale in comparison. What will be interesting is how the US people, empowered, as it is believed, by social media, react to the events as they unfold around them.

Continue reading →