I’ve added a Calendar to the website. It currently shows the events I plan to attend, and the says I intend to be in Sydney or other cities, as opposed to the Blue Mountains eyrie.
Visiting Tokyo for Verizon and a personal media plan
[Update 12 September 2013: For a variety of reasons, I’ve cancelled this trip.]
On Monday 16 September I’m heading to Tokyo to attend a lunch presentation by Verizon on the 17 September. Since it’s my first visit to Japan I’ll be staying through to Sunday 22 September and doing something… special.
Yes, I’m going to Tokyo for lunch. Don’t question me. Or rather, don’t question how the internet and media industries work.
It’s actually an opportunity for the Asia Pacific tech journalists to meet Verizon’s president and chief executive officer, Lowell C McAdam, so it’ll be worth it. I’m also presuming they’ll have some announceables.
Wednesday through Sunday will be my exploration days in Tokyo. I’ve decided that I’ll do that as a personal media project, crowdfunding the money to pay for it.
At this stage I think I’ll call it The 9pm Tokyo, but it won’t be “just” a podcast. I’m thinking of setting a “target investigation” as a theme for each of the five days — “Where does the sake come from?” or “Just how weird is the tentacle porn?” — and reporting on that in words and pictures and maybe audio or video. Something like my Unreliable Bangkok series but with many more words.
That then raises the question of what I can actually investigate. Apparently whisky bars are a thing. What else should I see and do in Tokyo?
[Photo: Tokyo, as seen from the Metropolitan Government Building by Harry Vale, used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.]
Nokia Lumia 925 and Windows Phone 8 trial: Day 39
I’ve finally wrapped up my Nokia Lumia 925 / Windows Phone 8 trial. I’m impressed with both the phone and the operating system, but is it too little too late for both Nokia and Microsoft? Who knows? I’ve made a video! You can scroll down for that.
That possible problem with Wi-Fi dropouts that I detailed last time? I couldn’t reproduce it with the replacement handset — or at least not in a way that couldn’t also be explained by the swirling electromagnetic soup in the vicinity of my desk and all the wireless devices thereupon — so let’s just write that off as a false alarm.
So where does that leave us?
Well, to reiterate, the Nokia Lumia 925 is a nice piece of kit, in keeping with the best traditions of the brand. Windows Phone 8 is also a solid forward-looking operating system. I’d been told about Windows 8’s design heritage at TechEd on the Gold Coast last year. Now, having used it for a month, I can see where it’s heading. App developers should be able to do good things with it.
But with both Nokia smartphones and Windows Phone 8 having such a tiny market share, will it all have been in vain? Has the flood of iOS and Android mobile devices taught the business world that, no, they’re not actually shackled to Microsoft’s products after all? That there are other ways of doing things? And that “producing documents” isn’t actually the purpose of business?
Sometimes when I look at Microsoft’s strategy with Nokia, or the previous one when they inserted Yahoo! into Bing, that the two potentially troubled companies are clutching to each other in terror as they plunge, each hoping the other brought a parachute. And maybe they have. But all the talk I’ve heard so far is your common or garden variety corporate waffle. Good luck, guys.
The only other loose end is to post the video I shot. And here it is. Over the fold is the full 16-minute video Strathfield to Central, shot on the Nokia Lumia 925 at full 1080p resolution, and all other video settings on their defaults.
Continue reading “Nokia Lumia 925 and Windows Phone 8 trial: Day 39”
Microsoft has banned me from covering TechEd
TechEd is Microsoft’s annual developer conference, and TechEd Australia 2013 kicks off this coming Tuesday 3 September. ZDNet Australia had commissioned me to cover it, from a room much like the one pictured — just like I did last year — but now it’s all off. Because Microsoft has banned me.
On 1 August, I emailed ZDNet Australia editor Chris Duckett to accept his commission. But on 6 August, he phoned me, pissing himself laughing, to say that the message from Microsoft — I don’t know from who or how it was delivered — was a no-go. I’m banned from TechEd for “being aggressive to speakers”.
Now I, too, was pissing myself laughing. I was nearly in tears!
“Aggressive to speakers”? Let’s be clear. Any problems were about one speaker, singular. And this alleged aggression — which I’d characterise more as ridicule, mockery and outrageously hyperbolic violent imagery, as is my well-worn shtick — happened solely via Twitter.
Now I’ve thought long and hard about whether to tell this story. Personally, I don’t really care. I’m happy to avoid spending most of next week in that hell-hole called the Gold Coast, and I’ve got plenty of other things to get on with. And Microsoft does have the right to decide who they will and won’t allow into their event — especially when they’re paying.
But I’ve decided to go public because I’m a big fan of transparency — as reflected in my blog posts from 2007, Releasing the Black Hawk crash video was A Good Thing, Scaring the shit out of clients and Being Real: more notes on radical transparency.
I think you should know about this ban, because it potentially affects the quality of my coverage and analysis of Microsoft as it faces some interesting challenges — more about that another time. I’d like you to be informed consumers of my work, which is why I list all the corporate largesse I receive in my Weekly Wrap posts.
I was also under the impression that any problems which may have arisen were all sorted out at the time. Certainly no-one at Microsoft has ever mentioned any problem to me since then.
Quite frankly, to bad-mouth me to one of my commissioning editors — in an undocumented phone call, no less! — strikes me as a tad defamatory.
And without any communication with me? From an organisation that wants customers to trust it with our most intimate and confidential data? Does this not represent a glaring absence of due process?
So, in the tradition of another 2007 post, “Let’s just write that down…”, I’m just going to write it all down, and put my name to it. That’s what honest people do, right?
Come with me, boys and girls, as I tell you about TechEd Australia 2012’s keynote speaker, Jason Silva, “futurist, filmmaker, epiphany addict [WTF?], ecstatic truth lover [WTFF?], techno optimist”. Check his Wikipedia entry and personal website.
Continue reading “Microsoft has banned me from covering TechEd”
My tweets from TechEd Australia 2012’s keynote sessions
This is the log of my Twitterstream from the keynote sessions at Microsoft’s TechEd Australia 2012 conference last year. Why? Because on the basis of these tweets, Microsoft has banned me from TechEd Australia 2013.
I’ve highlighted in bold the tweets which I think were most, erm, problematic. I’ve also fixed minor spelling mistakes. To provide more context, I’ve also uploaded a CSV file containing all of my tweets for September 2012.
Continue reading “My tweets from TechEd Australia 2012’s keynote sessions”
Algorithms and the Filter Bubble, Take 2A
As foreshadowed, on Monday I delivered an updated version of my guest lecture at the University of Technology Sydney, “Algorithms and the Filter Bubble”. And here it is.
There’s quite a few changes from the lecture I gave in March, because I wanted to update some key examples.
In fact there’s two versions of the lecture, because I presented it twice — once at 0900 and once at 1300 — and some of the content was improvised around my moderately detailed notes. So I’ll bring you both versions. This is the first, with full audio and the slides.
The repeat of the lecture later in the day was slightly different.
There’s links to all the references over the fold.
As previously, the recording picks up immediately after I was introduced by lecturer, Dr Belinda Middleweek. A transcript may or may not follow at some point in the future.
The audience was primarily first and second year students at the beginning of their media studies degrees. Again, it seems that almost all of this material was brand new to them.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:40 — 32.1MB)
[If a transcript ever becomes available, this is where it will appear.]
This work is made available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. This presentation may be re-used for non-commercial purposes within the terms of the Creative Commons license. The non-commercial and share-alike conditions are required to adhere to the licensing of the imagery used. Please contact me if you require an alternative version. As a minimum, attribution should read: “Source: Stilgherrian.” Online versions must link the word Stilgherrian to the website at stilgherrian.com.
Continue reading “Algorithms and the Filter Bubble, Take 2A”