The Ford Focus Active: by the turn of the decade, this will be the only four-door passenger car Ford will sell in the US and Canada In a surprise move, Ford has announced that it will cease selling passenger cars in the US and Canada by the early 2020s, excepting the Mustang and the […]
Tag: innovation
Being an optimist for a better post-Google, post-Facebook era
Interesting to get this perspective on ‘Big Tech’ from The Guardian, on how it’s become tempting to blame the big Silicon Valley players for some of the problems we have today. The angle Moira Weigel takes is that there needs to be more democracy in the system, where workers need to unite and respecting those […]
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Stefan Engeseth’s Sharkonomics out in China with a new edition
My good friend Stefan Engeseth’s Sharkonomics hit China a year ago, and it’s been so successful that the second edition is now out. It looks smarter, too, with its red cover, and I’m sure Chinese readers will get a decent taste of Stefan’s writing style, humour and thinking. I even hope this will pave […]
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There’s still a place for blogging—in fact, it might be needed more than ever
My friend Richard MacManus commemorated the 14th anniversary of ReadWrite, an online publication he founded as a blog (then called ReadWriteWeb) in 2003, by examining blogging and how the open web has suffered with the rise of Facebook and others. It’s worth a read, and earlier tonight I fed in the following comment. I […]
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Could the fight against phishing be shifted?
I wasn’t able to find anything about this online, and I wonder if anyone was already doing it. If not, maybe someone should. Could the big players, e.g. Amazon and Apple, not provide the public with a fake email address and password (or a series of them) that we can feed in to phishing […]
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Getting inspiration from Douglas Rushkoff
John Nowak/CNN I’ve had a 52 Insights interview with Douglas Rushkoff open in a Firefox tab for nearly half a year. It’s a fascinating piece, and I consider Douglas to be spot on with a lot of his viewpoints. I’ve revisited it from time to time and enjoyed what Douglas has had to say. […]
What a great opportunity for New Zealand that lies before us
Above: When I refer to Hillary in the below blog post, I mean the self-professed ‘ordinary chap’ on our $5 note. As the results of the US presidential election came in, I didn’t sense a panic. I actually sensed a great opportunity for New Zealand. I’ve been critical of the obsession many of […]
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The big difference with the internet of the ’90s: it served the many, not the few
Above: Facebook kept deleting Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph each time it was posted, even when Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten did so, preventing its editor-in-chief from responding. There’s a significant difference between the internet of the 1990s and that of today. As Facebook comes under fire for deleting the “napalm girl” photograph from the Vietnam […]
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FCC rules in favour of ’net neutrality (at least we think it has)
I’ve gone into the reasons I support ’net neutrality elsewhere, but it was nice to hear about this on the wireless: even though we still don’t know the specifics, as the FCC has kept this to itself for now. (We do know that Google has written a letter to the FCC, and that ‘an entire […]
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Polarization in US politics: doesn’t that go against their idea of “rugged individualism”?
There have been a few articles lately on the polarization of politics in the US, where the middle ground—people with views from both Democrat and Republican sides—has been eroded. William Shepherd linked this one on Twitter, from the Pew Research Center. My theory, sent on Twitter, was this: You are correct, and it is […]