The captivating case of Brian MacKinnon

  On a whim, I decided to look up the case of Brian Lachlan MacKinnon, who went back to his high school 15 years after he graduated and posed as a 16-year-old pupil. I saw it on BBC Scotland’s Public Eye at the time (around 1995), though I think I had also heard of the […]

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Nissan, get ready to pay up: Carlos Ghosn’s after US$1 milliard

Good on Carlos Ghosn for filing his lawsuit against Nissan Motor Co. and others, including Hari Nada, as reported in Automotive News. Things you won’t have heard since Ghosn fled to Lebanon: In 2020, a UN panel found that Ghosn’s detention in a Japanese jail for more than 100 days was neither necessary nor reasonable […]

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Company founders, talk about your businesses and the great work they do

When I launched Lucire into print in 2004, it brought with it some unwelcome elements. On the plus side, it raised the company’s profile and no doubt that helped sales. No one had ever taken a website into print before, with the exception of Yahoo Internet Life, as far as I know. Certainly no one […]

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The state of play of the internet

From Zero Janitor on Tumblr (and found as an image on Mastodon):     Sums up the state of play on the internet nicely. I can’t believe how badly the Reddit situation has been handled, but will leave that to others. A lot has already been written about it, and here’s a good piece in […]

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Twenty years ago, Lucire and United Nations Environment Programme teamed up for a first

  Twenty years ago, the United Nations Environment Programme and Lucire announced their partnership. I look back at how the arrangement came about in 2002–3. At the time, it was unheard of for a mainstream fashion title to make this sort of a commitment to sustainability, but I felt we couldn’t afford not to. Even […]

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Andrew Niccol’s Simone: I think we are now there

  Anyone remember Andrew Niccol’s film Simone? It remains one of my favourites—I liked it so much I saw it at the cinema in New Zealand, a country which never gave it a proper release. (I still remember the media going on about how much we supported Kiwi filmmakers around that time. Evidently not all […]

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Business Book Awards on Panos: the official review

  I’m still pinching myself as I realize that Panos and I managed to win an award for our book, Panos: My Life, My Odyssey, on our first go. Ketan Makwana, who has a mutual friend, commented on my Linkedin: ‘congratulations Jack and Panos—your book really grew on us … my fellow judges in the […]

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From a marketing perspective, the coronation was out of sync

Market orientation suggests that you should base your marketing on what the client wants. In basic terms, put yourself in the customer’s shoes. There are plenty of studies that back this up, beginning roughly when the 1970s became the 1980s. So if the British people are going through a cost-of-living crisis, then it would pay […]

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Go for it, Harry

Say what you will about Prince Harry making millions from his book and TV appearances. What if it’s to help fund the destruction of one Keith Rupert Murdoch and News Corp., and save the very fabric of democracy itself in the UK? It’s not going to be cheap, but the dude is out for blood. […]

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Bing Chat doesn’t pull from web page content—according to Bing Chat

I had a bit of fun with Bing Chat last week, during which I got it to admit that when it searches the Bing index, it does not look at the content of the web pages. Bing Chat says it only has access to the snippet, URL and date.     Of course, it lies, […]

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