Work: Une affaire très française

Just a link to a piece I wrote on the post-War development of French TV technology for Red Shark that a) I rather enjoyed researching and writing and b) is a lot more interesting than it sounds...honest

http://www.redsharknews.com/business/item/471-france-had-a-national-hd-tv-system-in-1949

Work: Have 3D films had their day?

Probably... A simple link to an interesting BBC News piece on the subject. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21465628 I shall refrain from saying I told you so....but I did.

Life: or iLife to be more accurate

I think my daughter was three months old when I first got an iPad. In other words, she's grown up with the device.

She's only rising two at the moment, but it's fascinating to see her interact with the device. The UI seems completely natural to her, and she's already starting to find areas in her software that I haven't found yet, unlocking as she explores and learns.

Of course, being of an advanced age myself, I believe I came across my first computer at school when I was 14. The school had a computer club too, but you could only join computer club if you had a computer at home, which seemed a little bit counterintuitive even at the time.

Now there are reports in the press that Apple is working on the iWatch and that wearable computing is finally going to come of age (as opposed to simply strapping huge hulking great hard drives to your body as the MIT Media Lab chaps did back in the 90s). Makes me wonder slightly what iLife is going to be like for Freya. Hopefully it will be a good thing, but for that to happen perhaps we need to do more with 24/ connectivity than start flame wars on Twitter and feel compelled to overshare on Facebook. All this technology has to be good for something more than making Californian start-ups money...

Life: Marking time

Strange to think that my mother died 30 years ago today - that's a whole lifetime ago. And sad that I'll be heading off later in the week to help bury my Aunt in the most tragic of circumstances. But I type this with my daughter standing beside me, drinking milk, crayoning on the table (ooops, #parentingfail) and burbling about planets with her ginger hair flying in many directions. Even if the Buddhists are wrong and life is not a cycle of death and rebirth for us individually, it is for us as a species. I see my mum's face in my daughter's sometimes, and that makes me happy. Life goes on in all it's wonderful, chocolate-demanding, crazy cacophony.

Work/Life: Zzub words

Huge respect to Twelve Thirty Eight which has released the latest edition of its annual Buzzword Report - the phrases and slogans used by PRs that annoy us journalistic types the most. Hell, annoy anyone with a brain and a rudimentary grasp of the English language if you ask me.

Here's the Top 20 (oh and I was cheered by its special singling out of the phrase 'reaching out' elsewhere in the piece. Really worth a read)


1. Brits / Hard-working Brits / Hard-up Brits (an attempt to be ‘accessible’)
2. Dynamic (likely not to be)
3. Paradigm (a ‘silk purse’ word)
4. Elite (i.e. the best thing in Scunthorpe on a Thursday at 3pm)
5. Hotly anticipated (i.e. never heard of it)
6. End-user (‘customer’)
7. Influencer (probably not)
8. Evangelist (a tendency to tweet with loads of hashtags)
9. Deliverables (‘tasks’)
10. Icon/iconic (‘use before 01.01.01 or never’)
11. Rocketed (‘made modest progress’)
12. "An astonishing x per cent" (it rarely is astonishing)
13. Marquee event/marquee client (probably ‘very local’)
14. Going forward (‘in the future’)
15. Ongoing (‘a bit behind schedule’)
16. Optimised (‘changed by consultants then changed back’)
17. Horizontal, vertical, etc (two words in lieu of a strategy)
18. Phygital (easy to press or swipe we guess)
19. SoLoMo (no idea)
20. Well-positioned (‘hopeful but a bit scared’)