I’m going on a phone hunt.

I’m going to catch an iPhone.

It costs almost £1000!

I’m not scared.*

In truth, I am scared because I have never bought a Steve Jobs product directly, except things like the movie Toy Story. That doesn’t count because I think it is true to say that Pixar got successful when Jobs was looking the other way trying to recreate Apple at NeXT and only partly succeeding. iTunes is free, so that does not count either, and I would have bought the two album downloads and two individual tracks anyway.

My current MP3 player is in my Windows smartphone, so unfortunately I have to be geeky enough to figure out Media Player and its odd syncing protocol. I am, for now, an iPod-free zone.

For a long time I operated what you might call a “Best Nokia Heuristic”, i.e. just buying the best phone that Nokia makes. This was a business decision that started when I bought the earliest GSM phones to equip my team of reporters at Opec meetings (there goes another Opec reference, folks!).

It had been preceded by another heuristic — the “It Must Work in a Lift Heuristic”. Only Nokias did at that time. Eccentrically, I would also test them by descending into the basement area of the Espree Health Club behind Fleet Street. The staff at Charles Dunstone’s Carphone Warehouse, still in the early days of its emerging success story, was always very obliging with demo product. This particular rule of thumb derived from a most extraordinary moment Continue reading ‘i’m going on a phone hunt’

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Five years ago, I wrote a letter to the bow tie-wearing Bloomberg editor-in-chief Matt Winkler. Finally, today I get an email back from the company. But, you guessed it, through the passage of five years they have managed to entirely miss the point of my original proposal! They want me, the Knackered Hack, holed up in the long-tail of journalism to promote a podcast they have done with Nassim Taleb. If you are me, there is a rich irony in all this. If you are not me, it is Friday afternoon and you have better things to do.

As I recall, the gist of that old letter to Winkler was to say what a good idea it would be for his news organization to be less hierarchical and develop a more networked model of journalistic interaction. My experience had suggested that that was the way large editorial groups needed to operate to have a chance of scaling our ever more complex news environment effectively, by sharing expertise more readily in real-time. Those people who know the Bloomberg news organization would probably tell me that I didn’t have a prayer. Continue reading ‘bloomberg not real-time at all’

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