This month marks the last time a brand new VCR will roll off the conveyor belt of Funai Electric in Japan. It is 12 years since most major shops in the UK and Europe stopped selling VCRs, relegating their bulky tapes to ever-decreasing shelf space at the back of charity shops. Someone, somewhere was still…
“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought” Albert Szent-Gyorgyi Someone recently said to me “the more I read, the less I know”. Profound. In a world where technological advances were supposed to make life simpler, the reverse seems to reflect the truth. The world is more complex, undefined,…
Yesterday I managed to find the time to lunch one of my old journalist pals. Now retired, the wizened old hack knew how to harvest my leads because he cut his teeth in an age when press releases were walked into the newspapers and news desks and journalists needed copious amounts of TLC. In an…
I gave an interview for CIPR website’s recently launched TV strand, which streamed live on the internet yesterday and is now available on demand. Click here to watch it. I spoke with Philip Sheldrake and Stephen Waddington; much was discussed, from the speed of change that technology forces on PR, how advertising is trying to…
I spent a little of last night, as the festive season faded and a whole new year and the return to work hove into view, watching the latest iteration of Celebrity Big Brother wipe it’s arse across my TV screen. As the usual array of desperate people, half-arsed film heroes and one hit blips on…
The Media Guardian published an article of mine in yesterday’s Media comment looking at the rise of Google’s SideWiki and what it will mean for the future of PR. To read the published version, click here. For the unexpurgated version, please keep reading! Given the amount of fear other Google innovations, like their library project,…
So, an über-Cardinal in Rome feels that it’s time for a generation to detox from technology. Forget fasting for lent, the Pope’s publicist has floated a story that we all need to curb our technology obsession and digital addiction. “Thou shalt not text or play games for lent” is the missive from the Vatican. Transformational…
News has come in that Apple are attempting to sell iPhones in Poland by paying actors to queue outside the stores to whoop up interest in the all-singing, all-dancing phone which is released there on Friday. According to Reuters, a spokesman has said: “We have these fake queues at front of 20 stores around the…
The Year in Ideas – The Times 29th December 2007 From Islam-friendly finance to the fall of Z-list celebrity, and from the rise of supercrunching to the return of the bonkbuster, leading commentators and Times writers chart the major cultural, economic and social changes of 2007 and offer their predictions on the shape of the…