The Old (Barrichello), the Pretender (Button) and the Skint (the Brackley team) have pulled off a spectacular one-two in Melbourne to kick off the Formula One season.
Continuing the B fest, they’ve shown: Belief – evidently they kept working hard when a full closure was more than likely. Brains – the clean sheet of ‘09 regulations allowed them to show innovation beyond McLaren’s and Ferrari’s dreams. Bravery – in the management buyout (and subsequent cut backs).
Brawn GP, now a euphemism for ‘Giant Killer,’ really have shown us it all this weekend.
Commentators said the grid was turned on its head. That’s untrue as the back of the pack looked all too familiar. But the midfield have undoubtedly caused the former front runners a major headache. To the victor go the spoils. Well, perhaps a Virgin.
Side quote: The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was the genius (Sid Caesar).
The poor economy is equally affecting both extremes of the working age spectrum.
One in three 16 to 17-year-olds are unemployed in the UK (BBC Today snippet). Ten percent of 16 to 18-year-olds are not in education, employment or training (N.E.E.T.). Considering that’s a Government stat I think it’s fair to say it’ll be on the low side of real.
Generation Y (born 1980 – 1999) look to be at the forefront of the redundancy queue. They are felt to have less experience – therefore less value – and have less service under their belts making the cost and effort of redundancy less.
At the opposite end of the working generations is my father who retires this month. He couldn’t afford to fully retire so was planning to scale right back, working a day or two a week at his current employer. But now he’s had the double whammy of his industry shrinking and his pension paying 40% less than was forecast only six month’s ago. After working diligently for 47 years he has less income than planned and even less of a chance of making up the short fall.
You can see these chains of pain in every town across Europe. Sure, Japan’s shrinking GDP and America’s supersonic unemployment are worrisome, but 2009 will be the year this worldwide fiasco really hits home for the majority of us (if it hasn’t already). Photo credit: Daquella Manera
The New York Times blinked first and opened its 2.8 million articles allowing users to build things with its content via API.
But the Guardian has suddenly become the pie-piper of the newspaper business by opening up its data more fully. The Guardian trumps NYT by allowing for-profit use of the data (opposed to NYT’s non-profit stance) and it allows full data from articles and pieces, as opposed to excerpts.
With the newspaper industry crumbling by the month, this really is a stake in the sand by the Guardian. They’re clearly enthusiasts of the freemium business model and I applaud their bravery. Will it be follow us or die; or is it a case of a freemium too far?
As usual, Mathew Ingram and Greg Stirling have great takes on it but I really want to know what the industry is planning next. This is a modern day equivalent to the steam liners fighting back against the passenger airliners of Howard Hughes et al. We’ve all heard enough whining about Google their ilk eating newspapers’ lunch – what are they cooking for dinner? Photo credit: Terje S. Skjerdal
My local Greggs’ bakery is a massively busy shop. So much so its small car park is log jammed from 11am to 3pm EVERY day. From day one I said they could have designed a drive-through system and probably made themselves even more successful (and certainly more efficient).
Well, it seems fast food won’t have the technique to themselves for long as Sears is the latest retailer in the States to test drive-through shopping. It’s a natural evolution from the reserve online, collect in store system pioneered so well in this country by the likes of Argos.
It appears to make perfect sense but others who’ve tested aren’t reporting positively. Personally, I can see out-of-town Argos extras and Tesco extras testing a drive-through system that would really help them at peak Christmas trading.
7 ultra marathons (31 miles each) on all 7 continents in 7 consecutive days. Ouch.
This is no cakewalk. I’ve done a couple of marathons and know a little of the pain involved, but this is on a different scale altogether. It’s beyond evil. It makes your Land’s End to John O’Groats stuff look like a trip around Marks & Sparks.
The courage, will and stamina of these guys is truly inhumane.
They’re doing it to raise money for several charities and you can support the spectacular here.
Well, that’s my prediction. They’ll stop burning dollars acquiring paper mills and fork out $750+ million for Twitter.
Twitter is the most popular and certainly the most talked about social media tool of the moment, yet there’s no clear indication on how they’ll monetise the whole shebang. They raised another $35 million in venture capital last month but to what end?
If you concede that Google want to know far more about you and your digital habits along with the world at large, this source would make an obvious acquisition. The speed at which trends and news appear on Twitter is unmatched elsewhere on the web. Google could leverage this into their algorithm and gain much more real-time searching (certainly opposed to Google News).
Of course, we’re not privy to the magic that’s being created right now in Mountain View where Google’s rocket scientists wave their wands over the web with reckless talent. Have they got a Twitter-killer waiting in the wings? Personally I doubt it. And if they have, will it be another Google Video which was always the poor cousin to YouTube – remember Google later bought YouTube purely to get that online video foothold?
They’re into harvesting strategies and don’t need to monetise everything immediately. Again, YouTube teaches us that. So the lack of income at Twitter won’t be such a problem; the data is the treasure worth the capital outlay. Although, Twitter wont keep its monopoly forever – when you show the market what’s it’s capable of, it rarely stands and applauds for long. Immitation is immenant.
Then again, others might get to the buy-out first. Facebook is reported to have offered $500 million and Carol Bartz could do with creating some buzz about Yahoo other than dismal reports of staff exoduses. Either of these firms would be salivating at the thought of gaining those 6 million Twitterers and all that live data.
What do you reckon? Do you think Google will crush Twitter, buy Twitter or just look at it like a play-thing in the corner?
The Old (Barrichello), the Pretender (Button) and the Skint (the Brackley team) have pulled off a spectacular one-two in Melbourne to kick off the Formula One season.
The poor economy is equally affecting both extremes of the working age spectrum.
The New York Times blinked first and 
My local Greggs’ bakery is a massively busy shop. So much so its small car park is log jammed from 11am to 3pm EVERY day. From day one I said they could have designed a drive-through system and probably made themselves even more successful (and certainly more efficient).
Well, that’s my prediction. They’ll stop burning dollars